In the course of a longtime interest in all things Pauline in the New Testament, I became aware of two considerable gaps in the scholarly literature that seemed worth pursuing: Paul’s understanding of the Holy Spirit and his understanding of the person of Christ. Since my personal concerns have always been with a biblical theology that flowed directly out of a careful analysis of the data, the two books that emerged out of those concerns, God’s Empowering Presence and Pauline Christology, ended up at a somewhat forbidding length.1 I have long been concerned about books on biblical theology that give the reader only the final results of an author’s exegesis of the biblical texts without offering a look at how the author came to those conclusions. That concern played itself out in two very heavy tomes (what a New York Times reviewer of such a book once described as “big enough to kill a cockroach in a shag rug”!). But since the ultimate driving force of both projects was to make the results more accessible to any interested reader of Scripture, I decided to cull the theological material from both books and present it in a more accessible format, resulting in what one of my children regularly refers to as my “small Paul” books.
The first “small Paul” book, published as Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God,2 presents Paul’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit in a more accessible way than the longer God’s Empowering Presence. Likewise, the present book presents the theological synthesis of my exegetical work on Paul’s Christology in a way that might be more accessible to a wider readership than the larger Pauline Christology.
The present volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 describes Christ as Savior by offering an overview of what salvation in Christ meant for the Apostle and then examining the christological implications of Paul’s thoroughly christocentric worldview, especially as it emerges in his Christ devotion. That leads to an examination of Paul’s understanding of Christ as preexistent, since it is otherwise nearly impossible to account for such Christ devotion by an avid monotheist unless his understanding of the one God now included the Son of God in the divine identity.
Preexistence as God also means that the Jesus of history must be understood in terms of an incarnation, and such an understanding by Paul must be taken seriously: the divine Son of God lived a truly human life on our planet. So part 2 picks up the question of Christ’s humanity by way of Paul’s use of “Adam” and the crucial word eikōn (“image”) from Genesis 1–2, pointing out that the ultimate concern in this analogy is emphasis both on Christ’s genuine humanity and on his bearing and restoring the divine image lost in the fall.
Parts 3 and 4 pursue the two primary christological emphases that emerge regularly in the corpus and that arguably hold the keys to Paul’s answer to the question of who Christ is. The suggested answer is that Christ is, first of all, the Jewish Messiah and Son of God (part 3), and second, the now exalted “lord” of Psalm 110:1 (part 4), who for Paul has come to be identified with Kyrios (= Yahweh), which was how the Septuagint handled the divine name. Since this exclusive usage of “Lord” for Christ tends to dominate Paul’s understanding of Christ in his present kingly reign, I conclude not only with a rehearsal of the many ways that Paul refers to Christ by way of presupposition, attributing to him activities that a monotheistic Jew would attribute to God alone, but also by considering how Paul perceives the relationship of the Son to the Father, since he never abandons—indeed, he stoutly retains—his historic monotheism. On the one hand, there are those several texts where it appears certain that Paul understands Christ in terms of eternal divinity; on the other hand, and whatever else, there are not thereby two divinities. So in the end, larger theological questions regarding the Trinity must be raised.
A few observations about the present volume are in order. First, readers will notice that the four parts are not even close to being of equal length. This disparity is not intentional but is the result of my attempt to present each aspect of Paul’s Christology in its own part. And since some aspects of Paul’s Christology simply require more headings—each of which I have treated in a separate chapter—some unevenness inevitably results.
Second, readers familiar with Pauline Christology will notice that the present book omits not only the large first part of that volume, which offers my detailed exegetical analysis of each of Paul’s letters, but also the two appendixes there, including the considerable appendix on “Christ and Personified Wisdom.” As I discuss in that appendix, I believe that so-called wisdom Christology was one of the more misguided moments in the history of New Testament scholarship. In my view, wisdom Christology has not an exegetical leg of any kind on which to stand, and fortunately it seems to be waning in Pauline scholarship. In the language of Tennyson, this little system had its day and has now ceased to be. As Paul makes clear in his scathing demolition of the alleged wisdom of the believers in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:18–2:5), the only “wisdom” Paul knew or cared about was what he very deliberately called “God’s foolishness,” having to do with salvation through the ultimate oxymoron of a “crucified Messiah.” God, Paul insists, has chosen to do away with human wisdom by way of this ultimate “divine folly.” Only the eternal God is so “wise” as to demolish human pride in such an unimaginable way. As the gospel songwriter Edward Mote put it nearly two centuries ago, our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and righteousness. Our faith rests altogether on the crucifixion and resurrection of the incarnate one, the one who chose to enter our impoverished human existence and lived and died so that through the risen one we might have true life in the present and eternal life with the redeemer and his redeemed.
Third, as in all academic disciplines, New Testament scholarship has its own set of technical terms that are not always shared by readers outside the discipline. I have therefore included a glossary of technical terms for the sake of nonspecialist readers, in hopes that it will somewhat alleviate what for some could easily become burdensome reading.
Finally, unless noted otherwise, all renderings of the Bible into English are taken from the New International Version (2011), on whose committee I have served with great pleasure since 1988. Aside from adding italics on occasion for emphasis or to highlight various features of the text, there is one point in which I alter this translation—namely, by inserting a comma between “Lord” and “Jesus Christ” in order to distinguish the “title” from the “name,” as I explain in part 4. I have chosen for convenience to present the biblical text at the outset of each discussion and without the verse numbers, which have their way of obstructing good reading. Fully aware that presenting the biblical text will get in the way of some people’s normal reading, I nevertheless thought that making it easier for readers to review the biblical text when I refer to specific passages would be better than forcing them to break up their reading by consulting the Bible on their own at each point. Still I believe it would benefit those who choose—as I could only wish they would—to be as the Berean Jews who “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11). In this case, of course, their examination will help them to determine the truth of the interpretation of Paul set forth in this study!
Gordon D. Fee
1. God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011 [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994]) came to 992 pages, while Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007 [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007]) came to 740 pages.
2. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996).