In this chapter we examine the central matter of the entire Christian faith: that in a context of Jewish messianic expectations, where Israel’s king was occasionally referred to as “God’s son,” the risen Lord, Jesus Christ, had come to be understood by those closest to him as the eternal Son of God. At some point early on they became certain that Jesus was the Son of God incarnate—fully human, both physically and mentally, while at the same time fully divine.1 In Paul’s letters as well as the rest of the New Testament, Jesus’s true humanity is given full expression by way of the Spirit of God, whom early believers came to speak of as the Holy Spirit, who likewise enabled them to recognize the risen one as the incarnate one.
Below we begin with an overview of the data from Paul’s letters and then examine these data under five different but related categories: the Son of God as Savior, as Son of the Father, as redeemer, as God’s image-bearer, and as creator.
Jesus as the Preexistent, Eternal Son of God: The Data
A basic issue for all readers of Paul’s letters is how to understand the Apostle’s designation of Jesus as “the Son of God,” especially with regard to how he perceived the relationship of the Son to the Father. Here at the outset I offer an overview of the extent and nature of the various data to aid the reader.
What emerges from these data is that Christ as “Son of God” occurs in contexts that have to do with his relationship both to believers as their Savior and to God the Father. We turn now to examine in some detail both the affirmations and the assumptions Paul makes regarding these two dimensions of the Son’s relationships.
The Son of God as Savior
When speaking of human redemption, Paul uses “Son of God” language in at least three kinds of settings. First, as noted above—and not surprisingly—Son of God language emerges when Paul reflects on Christ’s present reign as king. This becomes especially clear from a careful reading of two key moments of affirmation, one quite early (1 Cor. 15:22–25) and the other somewhat later (Col. 1:13–15). Although there are not more of these moments in Paul’s letters, the very presuppositional way the affirmations in these passages are expressed (nearly a decade apart) is especially noteworthy. Here again is something Paul is not arguing for but arguing from as a point of departure to stress some other matter. Especially in the earlier passage the Son is assumed presently to reign and to do so until the final enemy, Death, is destroyed and all things are restored to their prefallen, eternal destiny.
Second, Paul often writes of Christ as “Son of God” when he reflects on what it means for the redeemed to be in relationship with the eternal God as Father. This comes out especially in the twin passages in his letters to the Galatians and the Romans (Gal. 4:4–7; Rom. 8:14–18). In writing to the believers in Galatia, he tells them that human redemption is the direct result of God sending forth his Son and that the evidence of that redemption for believers lies with his sending forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts whereby we use the Son’s own language, Abba, thus indicating that we ourselves are God’s children and thus heirs. Here especially the reality of Christ as the messianic and eternal Son of God merges in Paul’s thinking. The Son who was sent into the world to redeem the lost does so in the context of the basic biblical story (born under the law). But the story works precisely because the redeemer is the eternal Son of God and thus a fully divine Savior. In an especially significant moment in his letter of friendship to the believers in Philippi, he puts it plainly. It was the one who was eternally in the form of God, and thus equal with God and fully divine, whose humble obedience to his Father in his incarnation led to his death on a cross (Phil. 2:6–8). As Richard Bauckham rightly recognizes, “Christology may not isolate Jesus’ mission from his being. A purely functional Christology of God’s action in Jesus’ mission is inadequate, for his mission is rooted in his being the Son in his personal intimacy with the Father.”2
This understanding of salvation—that we have become God’s children through redemption by God’s Son—is what lies behind Paul’s utter devotion to Christ the Son, which eventually finds clear expression in Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Here the emphasis is on the Son’s love as demonstrated in his redeeming sacrifice, but it is also reflected in a much more relational way in the four passages where Paul speaks of God as “the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 1:3; 11:31; Col. 1:3; Eph. 1:3). The coming of the Son forever radicalized Paul’s understanding of God, who is now blessed not in the language of Jewish transcendentalism—that is, blessed for his attributes of power and glory and otherness—but rather is blessed as the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the God whom we now know through his Son. And it is this Son who came among us in sacrificial love so as to redeem and re-create us into the divine image in which humanity was originally created.
Third, Paul reflects a Son of God Christology when he considers our redemption in terms of the new creation. The children of Adam, who bear the image of their fallen forebear, are now being transformed back into God’s own image, the image that in humanity has been thoroughly tarnished by the fall. This transformation is effected by the Son, who, on the one hand, himself perfectly bears that image (“the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” [2 Cor. 4:4]), and who, on the other hand, also bears the true, perfect image of our humanity (“those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” [Rom. 8:29]). Through the Son we are ever being transformed into the image of the eternal God as we are being shaped into the image of the Son, the one perfect human, who most truly bore the image of God because he was in fact God living a truly human life among us—but without sin.
Indeed, Son of God Christology frames the whole of a well-known and greatly loved passage in the middle of Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome having to do with every believer’s “life in the Spirit” (Rom. 8). The narrative begins with “God . . . sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” in order to condemn the sin that dwells in us all (Rom. 8:3). It is picked up again at the beginning of the application (vv. 14–17), whereby the Spirit of the Son brings about our adoption as “sons,” the same Spirit who bears witness with our spirits that we are indeed God’s children, and if children then heirs of God as joint heirs with Christ the Son.
Toward the end of this remarkable recital of life in and through the Spirit, the final purpose of God’s redemptive work through Christ is expressed in terms of our being conformed into the Son’s image, “that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (Rom. 8:29). This is then followed with echoes of the story of Abraham and Isaac from the Genesis narrative (cf. Gen. 22), where Paul returns to the theme of God redeeming us through the gift of his Son: “He . . . did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32).
As is seen in these three moments in Paul’s letters, Paul’s Son of God Christology, with its roots deep in Israel’s story, finds its grand expression in human redemption that transforms the redeemed into “sons” (as “children”) and thus heirs of God. No wonder, then, when Paul bursts into doxology, it is expressed in terms of the God who is now known as the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the eternal Son. For Paul, there is neither an attempt to persuade (the Colossians passage, for example, flows out of the thanksgiving) nor a need to call attention to the source of this language and imagery. Rather, this kind of expression simply flows out of Paul, very often as a basic assumption from which to argue for something else. And inherent to his affirmation of Jesus as the Son of God is that Jesus is the kingly Messiah, who redeems his people through a sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection. No human could ever have—or even wanted to have—created such an unlikely story. Surely the eternal God alone is so wise as to do something that on the surface would seem so foolish!
The above discussion has drawn out the christological implications that emerge in Paul’s primarily soteriological concerns. As we’ve noticed before, we learn about Paul’s understanding of the person of Christ primarily in contexts where he is speaking about the work of Christ as our redeemer. Looking more closely at Paul’s language, then, we can see hints of the eternal Son’s relationship to God the Father, an understanding that is embedded in several of these soteriological moments. These in turn account for Paul’s thoroughgoing Christ devotion.
The Abba-cry
GALATIANS 4:6
Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.”
ROMANS 8:15
The Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”
One can scarcely minimize the christological significance of Paul’s appeal to the use of the Abba-cry as evidence that the believers in Galatia and Rome are themselves God’s children through the gift of the Spirit. At issue in both cases is that the believers do not need to observe Torah. But what must not be overlooked is the significance this has for Paul’s understanding of Christ as Son of God—and especially noteworthy is the ungrammatical shift from “you” to “our” or “we” in both of these moments of reminder.
Paul makes a considerable point that the cry comes from human hearts because God the Father sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, thus eliciting the cry. Just as the Son was sent into the world to effect redemption, so the Spirit of the Son was sent into the world to effect redemption, and the Spirit of the Son has been sent into the hearts of believers to effect the experienced realization of that redemption. We will discuss the trinitarian nature of Paul’s theology at greater length in the concluding chapter, but for now we can note that not only is the christological dimension of these twin affirmations considerable, but so also is the inherent triune character of God implied by such bold statements. Along with Paul’s three clearly triadic affirmations (1 Cor. 12:4–6; 2 Cor. 13:14; Rom. 8:14–16), this passage also lies at the roots of all later trinitarian articulations, long before those articulations needed to be thought through, discussed, and finally understood to be basic to all truly Christian faith.3
There can be little question that this Abba-cry was retained in the early believing community—and continued to be used several decades later in the Greek-speaking communities—because Jesus himself prayed thus and so taught his followers to pray. However one might view the significance of this prayer for the earthly Jesus, these two passages in Paul’s letters demonstrate that he understood it as the earthly prayer of the eternal Son of God. They are both Son of God passages, and one does not need to move toward spiritual sentimentality to recognize that such usage by the eternal Son (see Mark 14:36) points to a relational understanding of the Son with the Father.
Thus the very way Paul speaks of the Abba-cry points to an understanding of the risen Jesus as the Son of God that moves well beyond a mere matter of title. What becomes even more explicit in the Gospel of John is inherently present much earlier in Paul. Indeed, Pauline usage is very much in keeping with the Son of God Christology that appears in 1 John, even though the latter’s concern is explicitly related to some who are “denying” the Son of God (1 John 2:22–23), which is later explicated in terms of their denying the reality of the incarnation.
The Echoes of Abraham and Isaac
ROMANS 8:3
For what the law was powerless to do . . . God did by sending his own son . . . to be a sin offering.
ROMANS 8:32
He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all . . .
For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.
GENESIS 22:2
Take your son, your only son, whom you love . . . and . . . sacrifice him there.
GENESIS 22:12
Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.
The relational understanding of Jesus as the eternal Son of God emerges in Paul in his several echoes of the narrative of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis. This echo appears first in the strong affirmations of the believers’ confidence in Romans 8. As noted above, this entire passage is both framed and carried along by a strong Son of God Christology. The frame occurs at the beginning (v. 3) and toward the end (v. 32) of this extraordinary moment in Paul’s letters.
Here only in the corpus Paul emphasizes that God sent his “own” Son to effect redemption. This is then picked up toward the end with language taken directly out of the Genesis narrative, that “God spared not his ‘own’ Son,” just as Abraham had been willing to do with his own son—even though this language is not used in the Genesis narrative. Paul’s use of “own” (both the reflexive pronoun in v. 3 and the intensive in v. 32) is an instance of a rabbinic understanding of the Genesis narrative. For what God was asking Abraham to do was to sacrifice his “own” son in the sense that he was the special son of promise. In a moment of inspired insight Paul recognizes that the Son whom the Father both sent into the world and then offered up as a sacrifice for all was similarly and uniquely God’s own Son.
This same background should be kept in mind when Paul refers to the “Son [God] loves” (Col. 1:13; cf. Eph. 1:6), since this is the language used in the Septuagint to refer to Isaac in Genesis, where the unique position of Isaac is emphasized: “Take your son, the beloved one, whom you love” (Gen. 22:2 LXX). It is not simply theological insight but theological reality that leads Paul in Romans 8 to refer to the Father “sparing not his ‘only’ Son” so as to effect eternal redemption for all others who will become his sons (= children, vv. 14 and 17).
These echoes push us beyond a merely positional understanding of the eternal Son of God to a relational one. It is this Son, the one who is eternally with the Father, the one whom the Father sent “in the likeness of our sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3), the one whom he “gave . . . up for us all” (v. 32). Even though Paul does not emphasize the relational aspect of the Son to the Father, the language itself pushes the reader to think in these terms.
The Son of God as Redeemer
GALATIANS 2:20
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
We turn finally to a very personal—and very rare—expression of Paul’s own relationship to the Son of God in his letter to the Galatians. Here in Galatians 2:20 Paul understands the divine nature and activity between the Father and the Son to be thoroughly interchangeable, for he describes a total transfer of the Father’s activity to the Son. Most often Paul expresses the Savior’s death on our behalf as evidence for, and the outflow of, God the Father’s love for fallen humanity, who are in enmity against God. This is especially true of the Apostle’s more theologically reflective narrative in Romans 5:6–8 and more poignantly later in the same letter when he writes: “[God] . . . did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all” (8:32). But in his earlier letter to the believers in Galatia, in a sudden outburst about Christ’s death, this truth is expressed in an altogether personal way. Thus it is “the Son of God” himself who “loved me”; and likewise it is the Son of God who “gave himself up for me.” It is this same Son whom the Father sent into the world to redeem it (Gal. 4:4). This rare moment is especially personal and relational, and lying behind it is an understanding of the Son and the Father that is likewise personal and relational. This leads us next to those moments in Paul’s letters where he identifies the Son as the one who in his incarnation became the ultimate divine image-bearer.
2 CORINTHIANS 4:4
The light of the gospel . . . displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
ROMANS 8:29
Those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.
COLOSSIANS 1:13, 15
For [God] has . . . brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves . . . [who] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
As was discussed in chapter 2, one of the more remarkable twists in New Testament scholarship was the identification of God’s “image” with personified Wisdom, when Paul himself uses the term primarily of Christ as God’s Son. We return to “image” language here to point out its significance for Paul’s basic understanding of the relationship of the Son with the Father. Paul’s emphasis with regard to this usage goes in both directions: the Son as the perfect divine image-bearer in his humanity and the Son as, first of all, the divine Son of the Father, whose image he perfectly bears. Here is the ultimate expression of the old adage, “Like Father, like Son.” In the two earlier “image” passages (2 Cor. 4:4; Rom. 8:29), the emphasis is on Christ bearing the divine image as such, while in the context of the later passage, Christ is identified as “the Son [the Father] loves” (Col. 1:13).
The Son of God as Creator
Finally, we turn again briefly to the twin christological passages discussed in chapter 2 (1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:15–20) in order to observe how Paul not only presupposes the preexistence of the Son but also emphasizes Christ’s prior role in creation before speaking of his role in redemption. The basic story is expressed in poetic shorthand in the letter to the Corinthians. The one Theos (God) of the Jewish Shema is now identified as “the Father,” who is the source and goal of both creation and redemption. The one Kyrios (Lord) of the Shema is Jesus Christ (the Son of the Father), who is the divine agent of both creation and redemption. Although Christ is not specified as Son in this passage, it is presupposed by Paul’s identification of God as Father. Paul makes clear that the one Lord, Christ the Son, was eternally preexistent with the Father and was his copartner in both creation and redemption. If the Father is the source and goal of all things, the Son is the divine agent of all things, including creation itself.
This picture is described even more explicitly and thoroughly in the Colossians passage. In writing to the believers in Colossae, Paul turns from the story of redemption (Col. 1:12–14) to the story of creation (vv. 15–17)—and in that order. He begins by specifically identifying the Son as the one who in his incarnation bore the Father’s image and holds all the rights of primogeniture. The Son has these rights precisely because he is the one through whom and for whom and by whom all things were created. The expansive nature of this passage can be attributed primarily to Paul’s desire to put “the powers” in their rightful place, as both created by the Son and thus ultimately subservient to him. And as we noted in chapter 5, the Son is the one who is currently re-creating fallen humanity back into the divine image as the beginning of the new creation (v. 18)—an image he alone has perfectly borne (3:10–11).
Paul’s Son of God Christology is his way of expressing not only the relationship of Christ to God the Father but also Christ’s eternal preexistence, including his role in both the original creation and the new creation. As Son of God he bears the image of the Father in his humanity, and as Son of God he is re-creating a people of God into the divine image. As my Pentecostal heritage in me wants to exclaim, praise be to the eternal God!
Conclusion: The Question of Origins
By way of conclusion we turn finally to the question of origins: Where did Paul come by his understanding of Christ as the messianic Son of God who at the same time is the eternal Son? Raising the question of the source of Paul’s understanding is, of course, different than questioning the reality behind that understanding. Moreover, Paul himself indicates that the origin of the language “Son of God” is to be found in a Jewish messianism that traces its roots back to the Davidic covenant, so neither is the question with the terminology itself, which lay ready at hand with Jewish end-time expectations that a greater David would appear and redeem his people from their present bondage. Rather, the question of origins has to do with how the messianic Son came to be identified with the eternal Son, who preexisted in the form of God and is thus equal with God (Phil. 2:6). There are three possible explanations, which we treat in turn.
First, it is possible that its origins for Paul can be traced back to his encounter with the risen and exalted Lord himself. This is the position taken by many based, unfortunately, on the untenable grounds of a mistaken reading of Galatians 1:15–16. There are simply no exegetical grounds—especially within the Pauline corpus—for reading Paul’s plain grammar that the Son was “revealed in me” as though Paul really intended “revealed to me.” As we discussed in chapter 5, Paul intended his own conversion to be a place of revelation for others—that in his own conversion from a Christ hater to a Christ devotee others could see Christ at work in the world. But one does not need this text in order to surmise that Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ may have led him finally to understand Christ to have been the preexistent Son. I tend to agree with this possibility, even though there is no expressed evidence in Paul’s letters for believing it to be so.
Second, some have argued that the answer lies with Jewish Wisdom. But as we argued in chapter 2, there is neither exegetical, linguistic, theological, nor historical grounds for the origins to lie here. This explanation requires either downplaying or denying the Son of God motif in the key passages, especially in the crucial affirmations that get front-page coverage in his letter to the believers in Colossae (Col. 1:13–17). This explanation both misrepresents the Wisdom tradition and reads into Paul something that the Apostle himself could not possibly have understood.
Third, Paul offers a possibility, through his use of the Aramaic Abba as an address to God the Father, that some form of Son of God Christology existed in the Aramaic Christian community before Paul became a believer. In this case, Paul’s understanding of Christ as preexistent Son very likely had its origins in the community that preceded him. Why else would he, in two different letters to Greek-speaking communities of faith, have used this Aramaic near equivalent of our English “Daddy” as basic evidence that the Spirit of God the Father indwells the believer (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:15)?
But in the end it must be admitted that we simply do not know for certain where Paul came by his understanding of Christ as the preexistent eternal Son of God. I am attracted to the suggestion by Martin Hengel, who concludes on the basis of careful analysis of the available evidence, that “this development in christology [including Kyrios Christology] progressed in a very short time.”4 Citing Barnabas 6:13 (“Behold I make the last things as the first things”), Hengel extrapolates the possibility that such a view should also be seen in reverse: that the first things must be viewed in light of the last things. In his words, “the beginning had to be illuminated by the end.”5
However an understanding of the preexistence of the Son of God arose in the earliest communities—whether by revelation, remembrance of Jesus, or thoughtful reflection—the reality exists in Paul in a thoroughly presuppositional way. Together with his Kyrios Christology discussed in part 4, his Son of God Christology both presupposes and expresses the kind of high Christology that finds very open, articulate expression in the Gospel of John. To be sure, their ways of expressing it are somewhat different; nonetheless, Paul and John are on the same christological page in the story, and in Paul’s case he shares this high Christology with the recipients of his letters. As we have seen in part 3, whatever else may be true about Paul’s Christian worldview, Son of God Christology is not peripheral to his theological enterprise. It is a crucially essential part that helps to make sense of the rest.
1. As I would often remind students as a way of helping them get this point, the Son of God wore diapers (or the first-century equivalent thereof).
2. Richard Bauckham, “The Sonship of the Historical Jesus in Christology,” in The Historical Jesus, vol. 3, Jesus’ Mission, Death, and Resurrection, edited by Craig A. Evans (London: Routledge, 2004), 114.
3. Moreover, without trying to do so, Paul at this point spells the death knell to every form of “binitarian” theology, either assumed or articulated explicitly by groups such as the Mormons—whose denial of the Spirit as a “person” puts them outside the historic orthodox Christian faith.
4. Martin Hengel, The Son of God: The Origins of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 77; italics in the original.
5. Ibid., 69; italics in the original.