[Dialogue] 2/11/10, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part XV: Who Is Christ for Paul? The Gospel in Romans

[elliestock at aol.com]

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Thursday February 11, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament
Part XV: Who Is Christ for Paul? The Gospel in Romans

It was Paul's experience-based conviction that somehow and in some way everything that he meant by the word "God" had been met and was present in the life of the one he called Christ Jesus. "God was in Christ" was the way he referred to it rather ecstatically in one of his earlier epistles. Of course, as a citizen of the first century, Paul believed that God was a supernatural, external being who had by some means been met in human history in the person of Jesus. Part of what this Christ experience meant to Paul was that "in Christ" all human boundaries disappeared. As Paul wrote to the Galatians several years earlier, "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free." That was for Paul "a new creation" that had overcome the deep-seated human sense of being separated, alone, broken and in need of restoration or healing. In Paul's mind only God could do this act of healing or be the healer to bring about this sense of a new wholeness. Because he believed that he found this healing in Jesus he was driven to the obvious conclusion that through some means or by some process God must be uniquely present in this Christ. This was in a nutshell Paul's thinking process. 
How did the holy God become present in Jesus so that this gift of salvation in Jesus could be offered? That was not so clear in Paul. He gives no evidence that he had ever heard of the late-developing (9th decade) tradition introduced by Matthew that Jesus was miraculously born of a virgin, who had conceived by the Holy Spirit. Of Jesus' origins Paul says only that "he was born of a woman," like every human being is born, and that he "was born under the law" like every other Jew. The word Paul used in this reference had absolutely no connotation of "virgin" in it. Paul also appears to have no knowledge that Jesus was a miracle worker. He never mentions a miracle attributed to Jesus in the entire Pauline corpus. Miracles appear to be an 8th decade addition to the developing Jesus story introduced primarily by Mark, then copied by Matthew before being developed in more detail in both Luke and John. For Paul, Jesus was not a deity masquerading as a human being or a divine visitor to Earth; he was rather a human life in whom God had been experienced as present. As I mentioned earlier in this series, Paul seems to say in the first four verses of Romans that God actually incorporated Jesus into God at the time of the resurrection. Whenever Paul talks about the resurrection, he describes it as an act of God, not an act of Jesus. God raised Jesus from the dead for Paul; Jesus never rises from the dead by his own power. Paul did speak in Philippians, in a passage that I will get to soon, about God somehow emptying the divine presence into Jesus of Nazareth, but the words there do not mean preexistence as they are so often interpreted to suggest. There was, however, a God presence that was in Christ of which Paul was certain, and in that God presence he rested his claim for the salvation that he was certain Jesus came to bring. Can we translate Paul's experience of being made whole in Christ Jesus into an explanation that is appropriate to our time, when to speak about God as dwelling above the sky violates everything we have learned since the days of Galileo in the 17th century? Can we speak of God as intervening in life and history in a supernatural way without violating everything we have learned about how the universe operates since the days of Isaac Newton? Can we still speak of the original perfection of human life and its subsequent fall into sin without violating everything we have learned about human origins from the time of Charles Darwin? That is our task in this column. 
We begin by turning the religious question around. What was there about Jesus that caused the people who had experienced his presence to explain it in supernatural terms? What was there about him that caused people to assert that human life alone could never have produced what it was they met in Jesus? That was what virgin birth traditions were designed to do. What was there about Jesus' life that caused them to attribute miracles to him – nature miracles, healing miracles, raising of the dead miracles? In the climax of the Jesus story, what was there about Jesus' life that caused them to believe that death itself, what Paul called the last enemy, was overcome by him? Paul was certain that wholeness was the gift of Christ, that in this Jesus the world that had long been separated from God was now reconciled, that in Jesus God and human life had come together and that humanity and divinity had entered one another. The eternal and the temporal had in the life of Jesus touched each other. 
In seeking to understand how the disciples of Jesus tried to communicate this truth we have to look at the way the Jesus experience was described in the later gospel tradition. First, tribal boundaries were transcended. The call of Christ was to a new humanity in which tribal identity mattered not at all. We see this all over Mark's Gospel, as he has Jesus heal the daughter of a Syrophoenician Gentile woman and then raise back to life the daughter of a Gentile named Jairus. It is Mark who has Jesus feed a Jewish crowd of 5000 people with five loaves on the Jewish side of the lake and then feed a Gentile crowd of 4000 with seven loaves on the Gentile side of the lake. It is Mark who puts a Gentile soldier underneath the cross to watch Jesus draw his final breath and then to pronounce that truly God was present in this life. "Surely this man was the Son of God," he is quoted as saying. This soldier was not engaged in a 4th century Christological debate, as he is so often interpreted to be doing. He was rather describing the new God-filled humanity found in the human ability to give life away, to escape the survival-oriented reality of humanity. It was Matthew who has Jesus' final words be the divine commission to carry the meaning of Jesus, the life-giving love of God, beyond the boundaries of our tribal security by going into all the world — to those who are different, unbaptized, uncircumcised, unclean, but still not beyond the love of God as this Jesus revealed. It was Luke who suggested that the story of Jesus was not complete until it had rolled from Galilee, where it began; to Samaria, the home of those who were the objects of the deepest Jewish prejudice in the first century; to Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish world; and finally to Rome, which was then the center of the world itself. 
The Jesus experience that would ultimately dominate the gospels would set aside human prejudice against Samaritans, against lepers, against women, because human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another. The Jesus of the gospels would transcend the boundaries of religion in the name of humanity, best symbolized in the words attributed to him that all religious rules are finally in the service of expanded humanity. Even the Sabbath day laws must always be set aside if they ever diminish human life. 
These were the things that seemed to flow from the life of this Jesus, bearing witness to the fact that his humanity was full, complete and free. He did not need the sweet narcotic of human praise in order to be whole. He did not have to build himself up by tearing down another or even lording it over another. He embraced everyone just as they were, from the rich young ruler to the woman caught in the act of adultery. He loved them into being all that they could be. 
This quality of the life of Jesus is more profoundly recorded in the story of his crucifixion than anywhere else. Jesus was betrayed and he loved his betrayer. Jesus was denied and he loved his denier. Jesus was forsaken and he loved his forsakers. Jesus was judged worthy of being condemned, mocked, persecuted and murdered and he loved those who condemned, mocked, persecuted and killed him. That is not the picture of a broken human life, but of a whole life, a complete life, one free to give life away because that one possesses life so fully. 
The quintessential essence of his life comes in the portrait of his dying. Jesus is not pictured as grasping at life or seeking to extend it another minute; rather as his life is draining away, he is still portrayed as giving life and love to others. As he dies, he is pictured as speaking a word of forgiveness to the soldiers, a word of hope to the penitent and words of consolation to a grieving mother. That is a life power in him that death cannot overcome. Those who do not know how to live cling to life with a desperation born out of fear, but those who possess life are free to lay it down because death no longer has dominion over them. That is what people saw in Jesus. 
These were also the things about Jesus of Nazareth that grasped at the heart of the fragile, self-denigrating Paul, the Paul who felt fragmented, who experienced a war between the law that governed his body and the law that governed his mind, the Paul who cried out in anguish, "O, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?" In and through Jesus, as Jesus had been presented to him, Paul experienced the healing presence of the love of God, a love that accepted him as he was and called him into being all that he could be. That was the meaning of salvation for Paul and since only God could bring that salvation, so Jesus must be of God. Paul opened himself to that experience and lived into it. That is why he claimed that he lived in the glorious liberty of the children of God. That is why he could write that nothing could separate him from the love of God. It was out of Paul's sense of having found wholeness, reconciliation and atonement in Jesus that he wanted to bear the Jesus message to the world. All human life, he believed, quite accurately, must find a way to be lifted beyond its survival mentality into the ability to live for another, to give life away to another. Paul found that power in Jesus. 
The Christian Church lives today but for one reason: To make people aware of the love of God that accepts us as we are and then calls us to life fully and to be all that each of us can be. Then we give that gift away to all. That is what it means to say God was in Christ.

– John Shelby Spong
 








Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Barry Street from Brantford, Ontario, writes: 
Would it not have been difficult for the gospel writers to discuss Christ in the synagogue, or had Jewish animosity towards him subsided by then?
Barry Street from Brantford, Ontario, writes: 
Would it not have been difficult for the gospel writers to discuss Christ in the synagogue, or had Jewish animosity towards him subsided by then?



Dear Barry, 
I don't think you grasp the first century synagogue picture accurately. The Christian movement was part of the synagogue until they were expelled from it about 88 C.E. The picture most of us have about that time in history comes from Paul, who visited synagogues located in the Gentile Mediterranean world to which he came to do his missionary work. Most of Paul's converts were not the Jews of the synagogue but the Gentiles attracted to Paul's message, which seemed to offer them Judaism without the ritual acts of circumcision and the cultic acts of Kosher diet and Sabbath day observance. Please recall that Jesus was a Jew who regularly participated in synagogue life as were his disciples, Paul, Mary Magdalene and the community of believers who stand behind the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. The real negativity toward the Jews on the part of the disciples of Jesus did not begin to grow until the Jewish/Roman war from 66-73 C.E. The excessive theological claims for Jesus were also not developed until a much later time. For example, Matthew portrays him as a new Moses, Luke as a new Elijah. The synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) all reflect life in the synagogue. I think John does too, but that takes more time to develop than I have in a question and answer format. 
Thanks for your question,
John Shelby Spong








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