Already But Not Yet

Without doubt Paul and his disciples were faced with a perplexing quandary. He believed passionately that they were living in the last days of human history. The great transformation heralded by the death and resurrection of Christ was about to occur. Yet the relentless passage of time indicated that the expected moment had not yet come and the promised end of their suffering followed by their eternal glorification had not arrived.

More – or perhaps worse – for Paul and his followers the end time (eskaton) had already begun, but its conclusion had not yet arrived. They were living in two worlds. As Tabor puts it: Paul’s gospel said that the chosen ones were already in the kingdom of God, by being in Christ even while waiting for its arrival…. Since (God’s) reign was a heavenly one, the kingdom of God had already arrived and would shortly be manifested to the surprise of the whole world. (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2012)

This meant that while they were even now living in God’s realm, they would continue to suffer as Christ himself had suffered until “Christ had put all things under his control.” The final result would be Christ’s heavenly exaltation when “every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” (Philippians 2:10-11)

In the interim until that joyous day arrives, Christians would face opposition and persecution. So “the challenge, and the insurmountable problem, was to work out the conflict between the intersection of the old world and the new in the present.” (Tabor, 160) This called for a totally different behaviour than that of the general populace among whom they lived.

The early 20^th century theologian Albert Schweitzer said what they and we are living an “interim ethic.” He meant that Christian ethical behaviour makes sense only if God does bring about justice in the real world. The social justice movement espoused by many of the mainline churches in the 20^th century hoped and worked for this ethic to be applied by all humanity. So did many secular and political institutions.

Paul’s daring exclamation in Galatians 3:27-28 would have made news in any society, not least in the Graeco-Roman society of his time. It set a standard that many countries still struggle to achieve today. Most fail, including our own.

Paul himself neither fully achieved the new standard in his correspondence nor in his own behaviour. He used the Hebrew scriptures to justify some interpersonal activities we regard as unacceptable today: an inferior place for women in the church and society, and the abomination of human slavery.

On the other hand, Paul believed that “the present form of this world is passing away.” (1 Cor. 7:29-31) He was not challenging the present systems such as slavery because he earnestly expected Christ’s return to bring all such evil relationships to an end.

What Paul advocated has raised numerous objections from different sectors of the Christian community as well as societies still coping with their ancient cultural heritage. Evangelism among some cultures has been very difficult if not legally banned by political authorities.

Mystical Union With Christ

If Paul had a favourite term, it was “in Christ.” The term appears more than fifty times in his authentic letters and twenty-seven times in other letters attributed to him. Elsewhere in the NT it occurs no more than four times and never in the four gospels or words attributed to Jesus. But what did the apostle mean when he used the term? James Tabor says:

Paul’s Christianity can be understood only against the worlds of mysticism, magic, miracles, prophecy, and supernatural manifestations of the spiritual worlds – both angelic and demonic – so alien to our modern scientific worldview. At the very core of these religious experiences of Paul and his followers were his two great innovations, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which he introduced in a wholly new form to his wing of the Jesus movement. (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2012)

The importance of this new expression of spirituality is best expressed in 2 Corinthians 5:16-17. Paul made no mention of the life of Jesus and little of what he taught. Instead he wrote of what Jesus had become and what we too are in process of becoming: the first-born and the later-born members of a new spiritual family.  This is also what he meant in calling Jesus the Second Adam.

As the context of this passage in 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 expresses, this was the special insight Paul received by revelation from God. (Cf. 1 Corinthians 2:2; Philippians 2:5-11.) Tabor puts it clearly in this way: What Jesus represents to Paul is one thing and one thing only – the cosmic, pre-existent Christ being ‘born of woman’, as a flesh-and-blood mortal human being transformed to a life-giving Spirit.

Tabor also claims that Paul changed the meaning of baptism from that which had been practiced by John the Baptist and Jesus’ early Palestinian disciples. That rite had been a “a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.” For Paul, baptism was not a symbolic cleansing or sign of repentance for past sin, but the initiation into an entirely new and spiritual life. (1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:26-27; Romans 6:3-4.)

The gift of the Spirit in baptism was equally important to Paul. The Spirit enabled living in Christ and was a guarantee, like a first installment, of continued growth and transformation in spiritual living as children of God. (2 Corinthians 1:21-22; 2 Corinthians 5:5.)

To sustain this growth in spiritual living, Paul also introduced to his churches the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. He insisted that this too was part of his revelation from Christ himself. (1 Corinthians 11:23-25 Galatians 1:11-12.) He strongly condemned those who participated but did not recognize its significance. Mark, then Matthew and Luke, also derived their renditions of the same community fellowship meal from Paul.

Writing to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 10:16) ca. 54 CE, Paul went so far as to assert that the two sacraments were not mere symbols or a memorial of Jesus’ death but actual participation in his death. This has led to centuries of dispute between the Catholic and the Protestant traditions. On the other hand, regarding the Lord’s Supper as a memorial implied not merely remembering a past event but participating in something very much present as well, and indeed with awesome future spiritual benefits – sustenance for living “in Christ” forever.

A Cosmic Family and Kingdom

Through the ages many scholars have deemed that Paul’s primary concern was justification by faith, i.e. those with faith in Jesus have their sin forgiven and are set right with God. This is what salvation through faith in Christ still means to many (most ?) people.

In contrast James D. Tabor (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2012) asserts that God’s purpose revealed in Christ was something far greater – he called it “a mystery.” He mentioned it in passing only six times in his authentic letters. The only place where he gave an explanation of this “mystery” is found in Romans 8. Tabor puts it in these words:

The mystery Paul reveals is God’s secret plan to bring to birth a new heavenly family of his own offspring. God is reproducing himself. These children of God will represent a new genus of Spirit-beings in the cosmos, exalted in glory, power, and position far above even the highest angels.

In Romans 8:29-30 where Paul set out the complete process of what this “secret plan” is, he summarily described it by the single word glorification: (We are) …those who are known, chosen, called, and justified, finally to be glorified.  All this depends on “Jesus’ resurrection … his transformation to a life-giving Spirit-being, with a glorious spiritual body.” (Cf. 1 Corinthians 2:7; Philippians 3:20-21; 1 Corinthians 15:51-53.)

According to Paul this is what awaits us beyond death. But he did not stop there. The process of our glorification is already taking place. In 2 Corinthians 3:18 (cf. 4:16) he made it clear that day by day we are being spiritually transformed into those future spiritual beings.

Writing as long as a generation later, the author of Colossians 1:15-17 showed how much he depended on Paul’s thinking, possibly even to making use of some earlier material by Paul himself.

But what is glorification? The British edition of The Good News Bible may have given us the best definition in Romans 8:30. God … shared his glory with them. That is to say, we shall be like God because God has shared with us God’s own spiritual life as he already did with Jesus.

If one searches the term The Glory of God in art one gets a remarkable number of nature scenes – sunset, sunrises, flowers, forests, sunlight shining through clouds and so on and on. The Jews had a word for it – kabod which was manifested in theophanies, often associated with earthquakes, fire and storms (Ps. 18:7-15; Job 38). Brilliant gold is the colour most often used to depict divine glory. Revelation 21:22-27 describes a vision of the New Jerusalem as a city of light without sun or moon because the light comes from the glory of God. Rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures referred to the glory of God resident in the temple as shekinah from the word meaning “to dwell.”  

Paul was not very specific about the exact nature of coming kingdom of God. Yet he believed in universal salvation following a final judgment. Those dead or alive who already believed at Christ’s return would enter the kingdom first followed later by all others. (Rom. 2:9-10; 1 Cor. 4:5; 1 Cor. 15:20-28.)

Paul's Literary Victory

We read the New Testament beginning with the four Gospels. On the other hand, if we were to read it chronologically, we would start with the letters of Paul. By no means can all of those attributed to him and bearing his name be regarded as from his hand or dictated by him to scribes.

Scholars generally, with some notable dissensions, regard only seven of the letters authentically from Paul: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians and Philemon. The latest scholarly view is that they all date from about 50 to the early 60s CE.

A second set of three letters bearing his name – Colossians, Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians – are believed to have been composed between 80 and 100 CE by unknown disciples of Paul. British scholar N.T. Wright holds that these three were also probably from Paul but in a different style than the previous seven.

The three letters known as “pastorals” – 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus are generally regarded a pseudonymous and from the early decades of the 2^nd century CE when the church was much more organized than in Paul’s time.

In his book, Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity, (Simon & Schuster, 2012) James D. Tabor cites the narratives of the resurrection of Jesus in Mark and Matthew in particular as the basis for his conviction that Paul influenced the report in those gospels of the Christian community’s earliest tradition.

By examining reports of all of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, Tabor discovered that only Mark and Matthew provide truly credible details, few as they are. He concluded that these appearances occurred only in Galilee, not in Jerusalem, as the Luke and John state. They were of “a visionary nature” especially in Matthew. This is confirmed, Tabor believes, by a late 2^nd century text in the pseudonymous Gospel of Peter and the appendix to John’s Gospel (ch. 21). He finds the reports in the other gospels of post-resurrection sightings of Jesus in Jerusalem as a resuscitated human corpse from a later tradition and much less credible.

Tabor also points out that if Paul’s report of his own call to be an apostle is valid, he was the first apostle, not the last. He bases this claim on Galatians 1:15-17 where Paul claims to have been “set apart before I was born.” Later in this same passage Paul also stated that he had spent three years in Arabia. Tabor speculates that this was a time of retreat, possibly in the region where Mount Sinai was traditionally located. As Tabor writes: “Like the Twelve he had his own ‘three years’ with Jesus.”

Tabor further reminds us that in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Paul speaks of a mystical experience where he “presumably saw both the glory of God as well as Jesus in his glorified state.” Paul also spoke of his physical limitation, “a thorn in the flesh,” that kept him humble despite this remarkable experience. Of this whole episode Tabor comments: “Paul had tasted in a proleptic way the glorification that would be revealed at the second coming of Jesus in the clouds of heaven.”

Thus Paul’s literary victory and the fundamental theme of the whole New Testament is based on the perceptions of the resurrection and the anticipation of Christ’s return at some unstated but imminent time in the near future.