On several occasions in his letters, Paul either asserts or assumes the preexistence of Christ as the eternal Son of God. For Paul these affirmations are not offered as abstract speculations about Christ’s nature but, in most instances, are expressed in sentences that speak of Christ’s saving activity. In so doing, they combine soteriology and Christology, pointing to the reality that Christ is not simply our Savior but also the divine Savior—crucified, buried, and raised from the dead for the sake of the entire human race! Below we examine these passages in detail, but first we must note the theological significance of the nature of these passages.
The Nature of Paul’s Incarnational Christology
Perhaps the most significant feature of Paul’s incarnational theology is the absence of a single instance in Paul’s letters in which he tries to demonstrate or argue for preexistence and incarnation. Indeed, quite the opposite is true: in every case Paul argues for something else predicated on the affirmations of preexistence and incarnation that he and his readers already hold in common. The cumulative effect of this pattern across Paul’s corpus carries considerable christological weight. Were Paul arguing for an incarnation, then one could pursue him with regard to both what he is arguing and how he is arguing it, as to whether his arguments work or are weighty. But when he simply presupposes these realities and thus repeatedly argues from them, the issue becomes not whether Paul and his churches believed in Christ as the divine, preexistent Savior but rather what the nature and content of the belief they all held in common was.
To be sure, because of the way these various affirmations come to us, it is conceivable to argue (and indeed has been argued) for a nonincarnational reading of any given passage. But such an approach works only for those who set out beforehand to demonstrate such a reading. The conclusions in every case are the result of looking at any one passage in isolation from the others and then arguing that what Paul says in that passage does not necessarily assert or assume preexistence. This is the old divide-and-conquer approach. Instead of reading each of Paul’s affirmations in its original context, as well as in light of the others, one sets out with a prior agenda to demonstrate that no single one of the texts in which the church—and scholars—have historically found preexistence necessarily requires such a view. Then, by showing how a given passage might possibly be understood in another way, one argues that it therefore probably does not affirm or even imply preexistence.
But any interpretation is suspect if its primary goal is to get around what Paul appears plainly to have presupposed, especially when such an interpretation involves an accumulation of otherwise disparate sentences in Paul’s several letters written over a fifteen-year span. It is one thing to look at any one of his sentences in its own context in isolation from the others and then to argue that this particular case does not necessarily require preexistence. Such an interpretation would still require a considerable stretch regarding what the Apostle intended for his own readers, but it might have a certain level of plausibility. But it is another thing to argue against both the cumulative effect of the several passages together and the presuppositional nature of each within the context of the affirmation, for along with the explicit affirmations in each instance, the presuppositional reality behind them forcefully calls into question any interpretation that denies preexistence. To feel the full weight of the cumulative effect of these passages, we examine them below under three headings: Christ as the agent of creation and redemption; Christ as impoverished redeemer; and Christ the Son as the sent one.
Christ as the Agent of Creation and Redemption
Two passages describe Christ as the agent of creation and redemption: 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Colossians 1:15–20. While each passage has its own distinct context—the first passage written quite early and the second written a few years later—what they have in common is language of creation and redemption taking place through Christ. And in each case these observations are offered for pragmatic reasons.
1 CORINTHIANS 8:6
Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
In one of the more striking affirmations in the entire collection of Pauline letters, Paul reshapes the primary affirmation of his own Jewish heritage, the Shema (Deut. 6:4), to embrace both Father and Son. While at the same time emphasizing his inherited monotheism, that there is only “one God,” Paul asserts that the “one Lord” (= Yahweh) of the Shema is now to be identified as the Lord, Jesus Christ. And he does this in a context where he is both agreeing with and deliberately enlarging the perspective of the believers in Corinth.
While still embracing a version of rigorous monotheism, some of the Corinthian believers were arguing for the right to attend the meals with friends in the precincts of the pagan temples, where “deities” of various kinds were honored. Apparently their right to do so was being justified on the basis of that monotheism (since the “god” did not actually exist, how could one forbid it?). Paul is in full agreement with them on the first matter (rigid monotheism), but he will have none of their further argument based on that affirmation. As was noted in our discussion of the Lord’s table in chapter 1, Paul eventually rejects their spurious reasoning on theological grounds, asserting that the “gods” are the habitations of demons (1 Cor. 10:14–22).
But at this earlier moment in the letter, Paul’s use and elaboration of the Shema is for the sake of those in the believing community, the “weak brother or sister,” for whom the divine Son had died and been raised (1 Cor. 8:11). Because of prior associations with these meals in the context of a nonexistent “god,” such believers could not attend these temple meals without being “destroyed.” For them it was a matter of considerable, and understandable, dissonance between the head and the heart, between what could be argued intellectually but not be pushed aside experientially. Paul’s response in this case is a most remarkable moment, and it provides a piece of the raw data that made the church’s eventual articulation of trinitarian theology necessary.
Paul’s assertion that the same Christ who redeems also had the prior role of preexistent creator serves as a backdrop for Paul’s argument two chapters later that the Israelites tested “Christ” in the desert (1 Cor. 10:9). The Corinthian believers, he insists, are in similar danger as were the Israelites, many of whom died in the desert as a result of their immorality. The preexistent Christ, Paul argues, was with Israel as the “rock that accompanied them” and was responsible for many of them being killed by snakes (10:4, 9). The explicit point of Paul’s argument is that, if Christ’s presence did not guarantee Israel’s entrance into the promised land, the Corinthian believers need to take heed regarding the possible consequences of their own flirtation with idolatry.
At the same time—in a more profoundly theological way, by including the preexistent Son as the agent of creation—Paul has included Christ in the divine identity at its most fundamental point: as the one God the Jews regularly identified vis-à-vis all other “gods” as the creator and ruler of all things. It is one thing for Christ to be the means of redemption, but for Paul to likewise declare Christ to be the divine agent of creation is clearly to include Christ within Paul’s new understanding of the “one God” of the Shema. Indeed, Paul’s frequent appellation of God as Father has its origins not with God as our Father but with Yahweh’s newly understood identity as “the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 11:31; Eph. 1:3). Hence, Paul’s identification of the “one God” in this passage with “the Father” presupposes Christ as “the Son.”
That Paul so easily, and in such a matter-of-fact way, enlarges the Shema to embrace Christ would seem to indicate that his view of God’s oneness as including both Father and Son did not begin with this ad hoc statement. Everything about his presuppositional way of communicating this indicates quite the opposite: that this is a theological standpoint already held in common by both Paul and his readers, from which Paul goes on to address various practical matters. This affirmation therefore functions as the theological basis for the behavioral concerns he is now addressing. The Apostle here simply assumes common ground with his readers on this point, which then serves as the basis from which to argue with them about those matters that they do not share in common. Moreover, it is significant that, on one level, this striking christological assertion is unnecessary for Paul to make his argument with the Corinthians, precisely because nothing christological is at stake here. Indeed, in a later letter, in a doxology directed toward God alone (Rom. 11:36), the phrase “from him and through him and for him are all things” appears without this christological modification.
Yet the perfect poetic parallel in 1 Corinthians 8:6 suggests that this is not the first time Paul has found a way to hold together two significant realities: his fundamental and unwavering monotheism and his inclusion of Christ in the divine identity. This is the earliest, and one of the most intriguing, instances of Paul’s clear assertion of Christ as the preexistent Son of God—and its earliest occurrence in the New Testament. But the overt reason for this assertion is not to establish its reality but to address concern for the “weak” believers in Corinth, that they not be abused by the “knowledge” of some others within the community of faith (8:11). Again, it is not something Paul is arguing for but something he is arguing from, as assumed common ground between him and his audience, which suggests that it is a basic theological affirmation held in common by the entire early church. Whereas myths and legends are the product of generations of folklore, we can be fairly confident that the affirmation of Christ’s preexistence was fully in place within the first two decades of the Christian faith.
To be sure, some have tried to get around this plain assertion of Christ’s preexistence by suggesting that the whole passage is merely soteriological and not dealing with ontology (the question of being) or by identifying Christ with personified Wisdom and thus asserting that only Wisdom preexisted. But there is not a hint of personified Wisdom in this passage, and to insert that notion into the picture here borders on absurdity. After all, Paul’s assertion at the very outset of his letter—that a crucified Messiah is God’s power and wisdom vis-à-vis the Corinthians’ own fascination with Greek wisdom—undercuts the idea that Paul identifies Christ with so-called Lady Wisdom, which would have been beyond the original readers’ capacity to understand. Moreover, the argument that these texts are about Lady Wisdom instead of the preexistence of Christ faces enormous exegetical difficulties, since Wisdom is never posited in the Wisdom literature as the actual agent of creation. Indeed, when Wisdom literature personifies Wisdom in such passages, she is envisioned as only present at creation, as evidenced by creation’s wise design (e.g., Prov. 8:22–31). In contrast, Christ is here identified not just as present at creation but as the very agent of creation.
COLOSSIANS 1:15–20
For the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
And he is the head of his body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
In a poem of two stanzas toward the beginning of his letter to the believers in Colossae, which looks very much like an elaboration of the two lines of affirmation in his earlier letter to the Corinthians, Paul once again asserts that the Son of God is the divine agent of both creation and redemption. However, in this case the two lines are now elaborated in such a way as to place Christ at the beginning point of both the old and the new creations.
In this case, Christ is explicitly identified as the beloved Son of the Father (Col. 1:13), who both bears the “image” of the unseen God (v. 15) and is the efficient cause and goal of the whole created order (v. 16). At the same time, as Son he assumes the role of God’s own “firstborn”—with regard to both creation (v. 15) and resurrection (v. 18). This Son, who is thus the “beginning” of the new creation (v. 18) as he was agent of the first, has reconciled all things to himself “by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (v. 20). The net result is that even divine reconciliation was not simply achieved by him but was also reconciliation to him.
So intent is Paul in placing Christ as supreme—and thus above the “powers” (Col. 1:16)—that he elaborates the Son’s role in creation in two ways: first, by using two of the three prepositions that in an earlier letter he had used of God the Father (through, for; Rom. 11:36), and second, by twice using the all-embracing in him, regarding the Son’s role both in creating and sustaining the world. Christ the Son is thus simultaneously both the creator of all things and the sphere in which all created things have their existence.
To state Paul’s affirmations emphatically, it is the Son who is the image of the unseen God; it is the Son who has the rights of the firstborn; it is the Son through whom and in whom all things came to be; and it is the Son who, by virtue of his resurrection, stands as the beginning of the new creation, effected through his reconciling death. Paul’s affirmations are so plain and emphatic here that the only way some have tried to get around them has been to deny Pauline authorship of the letter. But that is the ultimate counsel of despair: to make an underling genius “out-Paul” Paul!
Paul’s christocentric emphasis continues into the stanza regarding redemption, where there is an equal emphasis on incarnation. Using the enlarged expression “all his fullness,” meaning all the divine fullness that is inherent to the one and only God, Paul asserts that this “fullness” likewise dwelt in our Savior so that, as the incarnate one, Christ might reconcile all things to himself—and thus, by implication, to God.
Since Paul did not found the church in Colossae, he spells out in some detail the more condensed assertion in his earlier letter to the believers in Corinth discussed above (1 Cor. 8:6). This creates the interesting phenomenon that, while the passage as a whole has an assumptive ring to it, it provides the closest thing one finds in the Apostle’s letters to a deliberate presentation of Paul’s assumed Christology. Thus both its poetic nature and the insertion of the phrases about the powers (Col. 1:16) indicate that he is still presenting Christ in a way that assumes he and the recipients are on common ground.
COLOSSIANS 2:9
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.
When Paul turns his attention to the Colossian situation itself, he begins with a series of imperatives. First, and positively, the believers are to “live [their] lives in” Christ, whom they have “received” (Col. 2:6). Second, and negatively, they are to beware the “hollow and deceptive philosophy” that is currently threatening them, “which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ” (2:8).
When he then goes on to identify what it means to be dependent on Christ, Paul returns to what he posited earlier (Col. 1:19), but now with special emphasis on the incarnation. “In Christ,” he asserts again, “all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (2:9). Such a condensed phrase seems clearly to assume the emphasis on preexistence expressed in the earlier poetry (1:15–20), which he has now elaborated by emphasizing the genuinely incarnational dimension of Christ as the divine presence while on earth.
How this relates to the Colossian error itself has been a matter of some debate and speculation. But whatever their error may have been, Paul’s addition of the word “bodily” denies any spiritual understanding of Christ that does not embrace an actual incarnation. Although preexistence is not made explicit here, given the preceding passage in the letter, which places the Son as the agent of both creation and redemption, it seems that preexistence is absolutely presuppositional to what Paul is urging throughout the letter.
Christ as Impoverished Redeemer
The second way Paul assumes Christ’s preexistence as a part of his argument comes in two passages where Paul speaks of the incarnation with extraordinarily strong metaphorical language: 2 Corinthians 8:9 and Philippians 2:6–8. In both instances the emphasis of the metaphor is on the impoverishment that Christ experienced by becoming human. In each passage Paul presents Christ as an exemplary paradigm for the conduct being urged on his readers. Here especially the metaphors are too strong, and the language too plain, to allow any interpretation that discounts preexistence and incarnation.
2 CORINTHIANS 8:9
For you know the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.
Paul reminds the Corinthians of the character of Christ as part of his final appeal to them to follow through on their commitment to help provide for the poor in Jerusalem. In trying to avoid any semblance of command or coercion, he asserts that his concern is that their actions will demonstrate the sincerity of their love. Paul’s final coup is to speak in metaphor of Christ’s incarnation and redemption for their sakes: “For you know the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” Here the clause “for your sakes he became poor” is a metaphor for the incarnation, and the clause “so that you through his poverty might become rich” is likewise a metaphor for the crucifixion and its benefits for the Corinthians.
In keeping with the money issue at hand—and as Christ’s own expression of grace—Paul appeals directly to the enormous generosity of the Savior’s incarnation (which in turn leads to his crucifixion). The appearance on earth of the One who was preexistent as God can be expressed only in terms of his becoming poor, an impoverishment that meant untold riches for others (including the Corinthians). But, Paul argues, his aim is not their own impoverishment; rather, it is simply that, given the enormity of Christ’s generosity, they should gladly follow through on their commitment to the poor, which will not impoverish them in any way.
Again, this metaphor works only because Paul and the Corinthians share the same presuppositional understanding of Christ as the preexistent One who became incarnate. This very tight metaphorical sentence (which would break down if elaborated) was written to the same community to whom Paul had formerly written that most remarkable restatement of the Jewish Shema to include both Father and Son (1 Cor. 8:6).
PHILIPPIANS 2:6–8
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!
Paul retells the Christ story in Philippians 2:6–11 primarily to reinforce by way of divine example some attitudinal concerns Paul has regarding internal relationships in the believing community in Philippi. “Do nothing,” he has urged, “out of selfish ambition or vain conceit” (v. 3). Rather, they are to have the opposite mind-set, that which is exemplified by Christ through both his incarnation (vv. 6–7) and his crucifixion (v. 8).
With the imitation of Christ as Paul’s goal, he tells Christ’s story in particularly powerful and telling language. Beginning with the Savior’s prior existence “in very nature God” (Phil. 2:6), Paul urges that this equality with God was not in Christ’s case exemplified by his selfishly grasping or holding on to what was rightly his. To the contrary, and now with an especially strong metaphor, Paul asserts that Christ chose (literally) “to pour himself out” with regard to his equality with God by assuming the “form of a slave” with regard to his incarnation (v. 7). To clarify what this means, Paul then abandons the metaphors regarding Christ’s divine preexistence and says it plainly: “being made in human likeness,” or more literally, “coming to be in human likeness” (v. 7).
Paul then emphasizes the reality of Christ’s incarnation by starting the next sentence with an echo of the preceding one, which repeats the emphasis on the genuineness of Christ’s humanity. It was as the one who was “found in appearance as a man” that Christ humbled himself to the Father in an obedience that led to death on a cross (Phil. 2:8).
These verses have turned out to be some of the more difficult in the New Testament to render into adequate English. Paul’s intention seems clear enough—to use Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion as an exemplary paradigm for the believers in Philippi to emulate—but it is not the details they are to emulate but the attitudinal basis for Christ’s action on their behalf. Just as Christ emptied himself for the sake of those he loves, so too Paul writes the Philippians: “In humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of the others” (Phil. 2:3–4). Any reading of this passage that does not take seriously its implied and expressed emphasis on Christ’s incarnation is a reading of the text apart from the context in which Paul has told the story. Moreover, both the grammar and content of the passage disallow any other reading.
Some scholars have argued that Paul here intends to echo the story of Adam, but such a view makes no sense in light of what the Apostle affirms. It misses the context of the argument and misses, crucially, that Adam was neither said to be in the form of God nor said to be equal with God. By yielding to sin, Adam was not said to have poured himself out into the slavery of his fallenness and thus to have found himself to be a fallen human. If an echo of Eden from Genesis 2–3 is present at all in this passage, it is only conceptual: Christ, who had divine status, chose to become a human, while Eve and Adam, having been created in the divine image, sought for a divine privilege, which became their undoing. But to push the analogy further than that requires considerable ingenuity and the ability to read back into the Genesis narrative what is neither explicit nor implicit in the narrative itself. One who already is only and merely human (Adam) does not become human as our Savior did in his incarnation.
As with the previous passages we have considered, so too here Paul can make use of Christ as the exemplary paradigm precisely because this is a belief he shares with the letter’s recipients. When one considers that the church in Philippi was founded in the late 40s CE (that is, less than two decades after the cross and resurrection), one must further surmise that it was the common stock of shared belief in the much larger Christian community, at a time considerably prior to Paul’s writing of this letter.
2 TIMOTHY 1:9–10
This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
Even though the impoverishment motif does not occur in 2 Timothy 1:9–10, this passage does emphasize Christ’s redeeming work.1 And once more Christ’s preexistence and the genuineness of his incarnation is presupposed. Christ’s preexistence is asserted by the clause “which was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” His incarnation is then expressed by the clause “it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus.” This very Pauline concern thus finds expression in the corpus yet one more time. Christ preexisted with the Father, and at one point in human history he became incarnate in order to redeem.
Christ the Son as the Sent One
It is in light of the previously discussed passages that we should read the two “sending” passages in Galatians and Romans. Although some have argued otherwise, both the grammar and the context of these passages call for an incarnational reading of their extraordinary affirmations. Both are set in contexts where Paul’s concern is that Christ and the Spirit have made Torah observance obsolete, and both are therefore altogether soteriological, since in each case Paul asserts that God sent his Son to free humankind from enslavement to both Torah and death. We consider each of these passages in turn, followed by a brief discussion of related passages in 1 Timothy.
GALATIANS 4:4–7
But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child.
Galatians 4:4–7 offers the christological-soteriological basis for Paul’s singular interest throughout the letter—that because they are in Christ, the Galatian gentiles absolutely do not need to come under Torah. Thus the passage has been shaped with this singular concern in view. As Paul argues in a variety of ways throughout his letter, God’s “time” came with Christ, especially through his redemptive work on the cross, followed by resurrection.
In Galatians 4:4, Paul declares, in language that seems deliberately chosen to tie together the work of Christ and the Spirit, that “God sent his Son.” Two clues indicate that this is an assertion of Christ’s preexistence, that the Son is himself divine and was sent from the Father to effect redemption.
First, although it is true, as some have argued, that the verb Paul uses for “sent” does not necessarily imply the sending forth of a preexistent being, the verb is not used here in isolation. The overall evidence of the passage points in the direction of preexistence. The verb may refer to sending forth a heavenly being, and the overall context and language of this passage, especially the verb’s occurrence in a crucial clause in Galatians 4:6, suggests that it does indeed do so here. This is confirmed by the fact that Paul begins his next sentence by saying exactly the same thing about the Spirit. Using language reminiscent of a significant moment in the Psalter (Ps. 104:30), and in a clause that is both parallel with and intimately related to what he said in his opening two clauses (Gal. 4:4–5), Paul says that “God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts” with the Abba-cry (v. 6).2 In so doing the Apostle thus verifies that our sonship is secured by the Son whom God had previously “sent.” The parallelism between the sending of the Son and the sending of the Spirit—which can refer only to the preexistence of the Spirit of God, now understood equally as the Spirit of the Son—confirms that in the first instance Paul is speaking presuppositionally about Christ’s preexistence. As F. F. Bruce once pointed out, “If the Spirit was the Spirit before God sent him, the Son was presumably the Son before God sent him.”3
Second, in keeping with his whole argument to this point, Paul writes of the work of Christ as an objective, historical reality. At God’s own set time Christ entered our human history (“born of a woman”) within the context of God’s own people (“born under the law”) so as to free people from Torah observance by giving them “adoption to sonship” (Gal. 4:4–5). The otherwise unnecessary phrase “born of a woman” should catch the reader’s attention. How else, one might ask, could a human be brought into the world? Although Paul’s primary concern here lies with the next two phrases—“born under the law, to redeem those under the law”—his mention of Christ as “born of a woman” only makes sense if Christ’s preexistence is the presupposition of the whole sentence. Paul’s point here—made in passing though it seems to be—is that Christ is the incarnate one, the one who thereby stands in stark contrast to the ahistorical, atemporal, “elemental spiritual forces of the world” (v. 3) to which these former pagans had been subject.
ROMANS 8:2–4
Through Jesus Christ the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
In a sentence that at once both picks up the preceding argumentation regarding the relationship of the law and sin (Rom. 7:4–6) and concludes the lengthy digression over the question of whether Torah itself is evil, Paul sets out to elaborate “the law of the Spirit” noted at the end of his opening sentence (8:2; cf. 7:22–23). The reality of the Spirit who gives life is itself predicated on the redemptive work of Christ. Thus, in referring to Christ’s role in making Torah observance obsolete, Paul speaks once more in terms of God sending the Son to redeem, and Paul does so in language reminiscent of his prior affirmation of this reality in Galatians 4:4–5.
But in Romans 8 the Apostle speaks of the work of Christ in terms of God’s having thus “condemned sin in the flesh” (v. 3), which is almost certainly a piece of double entendre: that in Christ’s own death “in the [literal] flesh” God condemned the sin that resides in our “flesh,” that is, our fallen nature. Paul’s explanation of how God did this is provided in the central modifier, “by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering” (v. 3), which can mean only that Christ assumed genuine humanity but did so without yielding to sin.
As we have observed repeatedly on the matter of Christ’s preexistence and incarnation, Paul neither argues for them nor presents them as essential to his present point; instead, these two realities are the natural presupposition of Paul’s language, especially the language of God “sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” These phrases—especially in light of the passages we have already examined—clearly assume that Christ had not experienced “flesh” before he was sent. What should catch the eye in this instance is the unique phrase “his own Son” in which “his own” is in the emphatic middle position in Paul’s Greek phrase. This is hardly the language of “adoption”; to the contrary, it assumes the unique relationship with the Father that is the prerogative only of the Son, while at the same time it anticipates the allusion to Abraham and Isaac that will appear a bit later (Rom. 8:32).
Furthermore, the phrase “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” as with the phrase “in human likeness” in Philippians 2:7, means that Jesus was similar to our “flesh” in some respects but dissimilar in others. Paul’s use of the word “flesh” indicates his intention since if Paul intended a more complete identification with us in our sinfulness itself, he could easily have said simply “in sinfulness,” that is, in our fallen human condition. So in this case not only are Christ’s preexistence and incarnation presupposed by what Paul says but so also is Christ’s sinlessness—even if Paul’s ultimate concern here lies with Christ’s genuine humanity.
1 TIMOTHY 1:15
Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.
For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.
1 TIMOTHY 3:16
He appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels.
In 1 Timothy 1:15 the “trustworthy saying” changes the focus slightly from Christ having been “sent,” though the point remains: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” As with the preceding passages we have discussed, this sentence does not require that preexistence is in view. Nevertheless, this phrase is a strange way of referring to Christ’s redemptive death if it does not presuppose preexistence. A more creedal way to make the point, as Paul does in 1 Corinthians 15:3, would be to say simply that Christ Jesus “died” to save sinners.
The emphasis on Christ’s coming into the world in this passage is reiterated in the two succeeding moments in 1 Timothy (2:5 and 3:16) with specific interest in the reality of the incarnation, which reinforce an incarnational reading of 1:15. The work of the one mediator between God and humanity was accomplished by one who was himself fully human (2:5). Such an assertion implies both preexistence and incarnation. And such a view of these first two affirmations is confirmed by the first line in the poetry of the final passage, that “he appeared [lit., was manifested] in the flesh” (3:16). Indeed, this emphasis is almost certainly in response to a kind of latent Docetism in the negation of the material world that is being refuted in this letter.
Conclusion
So what is one to make of this evidence that Paul and his churches held in common the conviction that their Savior, the Lord, Jesus Christ, had preexisted as God’s Son and had been “sent” into the world to effect redemption? How does this reality affect our overall understanding of Paul’s Christology?
First, Paul clearly understood Christ the Savior to be himself divine and not simply a divine agent. If most of Paul’s christological emphases have to do with Christ’s present postresurrection reign as Lord, the Pauline passages examined above make it clear that in Christ’s coming, “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell” in the human Jesus Christ (Col. 1:19). Thus the full deity of Christ is never something Paul argues for; rather, as we have noted throughout, it is the constant presupposition of everything he says about Christ as Savior. And surely this presupposed reality accounts in large measure for Paul’s Christ devotion, examined in chapter 1. To be sure, Paul only rarely speaks as he does in Galatians 2:20 of “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me,” but the very fact that in this case he purposely identifies Christ as “the Son of God” suggests that what overwhelms Paul about such love is not simply Christ’s death on his behalf. What lies behind such wonder is Paul’s overwhelming sense that the preexistent, and therefore divine, Son of God is the one who through his incarnation and crucifixion “gave himself for me.” The deity of Christ is therefore no small matter for Paul; it is of central significance to his understanding of, and devotion to, his Lord.
Second, there is, especially in Paul’s later letters, a considerable emphasis on Christ’s genuine humanity, which complements Paul’s conviction about Christ’s true identity as the divine Son. The emphasis on Christ’s genuine humanity in Paul’s later letters suggests that by this time—a full generation after the death and resurrection of Christ—Paul already has to fight on a second front, namely, against those whose understanding of Christ’s deity might minimize the reality of Christ’s humanity. While none of these passages is overtly antidocetic, they nonetheless either speak to or anticipate the heresy of Docetism. Paul will have none of such heretical nonsense. By saying that Christ came “in human likeness” or “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” Paul does not mean that Christ’s flesh was not real (bodily) flesh like ours. Rather, his language safeguards both dimensions of a genuine incarnation: that in Christ one who was truly God lived a truly human life.
The twofold emphasis on Christ’s divinity and humanity is the assumed Christology that lies behind Paul’s statements examined in this chapter. At the same time, we must hold these statements of Christ’s divinity together with Paul’s insistence elsewhere that there is only one Lord, one Spirit, and one God (Eph. 4:4–6; cf. 1 Cor. 12:4–6), along with Paul’s repeated emphasis on the divine triad as responsible for our salvation. After all, it is precisely these very early affirmations and emphases that caused the early church to work through how best to express the conviction that there is ever and only but one God but that the one God must be understood to include Father, Son, and Spirit. Indeed, as we examine more closely in the concluding chapter, these passages in Paul—along with similar affirmations in the Johannine corpus and the book of Hebrews—demand that the church try to articulate how the One God was in fact “Three in One.”
1. By bringing this passage into the discussion, I am not attempting to argue for or against Pauline authorship of this letter, although I personally lean strongly in its favor. This letter exists in the New Testament because up through the eighteenth century it was believed by the church to have been written by Paul. And the singular reason for bringing it into this discussion is to note that its Christology, despite being expressed in different ways at times, is fully in keeping with Paul.
2. See chap. 7 below, which discusses the Abba-cry in more detail.
3. F. F. Bruce, Commentary on Galatians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 195.