Nt Wright Paul Quotes

True freedom is the gift of the Spirit, the result of grace: but, precisely because it is freedom FOR as well as freedom FROM, it isn't simply a matter of being forced now to be good, against our wills and without our cooperation, but a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the Spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing.

We can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom…goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always – as Paul puts it in one of his letters – bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.

Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins.

What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.

Salvation, then, is not “going to heaven” but “being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth.” But as soon as we put it like this we realize that the New Testament is full of hints, indications, and downright assertions that this salvation isn’t just something we have to wait for in the long-distance future. We can enjoy it here and now (always partially, of course, since we all still have to die), genuinely anticipating in the present what is to come in the future. “We were saved,” says Paul in Romans 8:24, “in hope.” The verb “we were saved” indicates a past action, something that has already taken place, referring obviously to the complex of faith and baptism of which Paul has been speaking in the letter so far. But this remains “in hope” because we still look forward to the ultimate future salvation of which he speaks in (for instance) Romans 5:9, 10.

Election is a matter of vocation, not specifically salvation.

So what does Paul mean here? Doing it declares it: breaking the bread and sharing the cup in Jesus’s name declares his victory to the principalities and powers.

As Wright has repeated so often, “We must stop giving nineteenth-century answers to sixteenth-century questions and try to give twenty-first-century answers to first-century questions.

Saul of Tarsus, in other words, had found a new vocation. It would demand all the energy, all the zeal, that he had devoted to his former way of life. He was now to be a herald of the king.

The power of the bleeding love of God is stronger than the power of Caesar, of the law, of Mars, Mammon, Aphrodite and the rest. This is the point that Paul grasped. And that is the reason for the Colossians' gratitude. The battle has been won.

once again, just because I prefer Guinness to lemonade that doesn’t mean I am not particular about the temperature at which the Guinness is served; and I believe Paul would have told Calvin to take his dark Irish beer out of the fridge, to let it come up to room temperature and taste its full flavour.

As St. Paul says, what matters isn't so much our knowledge of God as God's knowledge of us; not, as it were, the god we want but the God who wants us. God help us, we don't understand ourselves; how can we expect to understand that Self which stands beside our selves like Niagara beside a trickling tap?

Once people grasp that the events of the Messiah’s death and resurrection have transformed everything and that they are now living between that initial explosive event and God’s final setting right of the world (when God is “all in all”), then everything will change: belief, behavior, attitudes, expectations, and not least a new love, a real sense of belonging, which springs up among those who share all this. That is what so much of Paul’s writing is about.

Sometimes people have come to a crisis of conscience, perhaps having lived much of their lives without any time for God, and have then tried to twist God’s arm to be nice to them after all. That’s a poor substitute for genuine worship and love of God – though God remains gracious and merciful, and ready to welcome people however muddled they may be.

The line between good and evil runs, not between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but down the middle of each of us.

There are five language-sets in particular which they employed for this purpose. Briefly, they are as follows: Wisdom, Torah, Spirit, Word and Shekinah

Note, though, something else of great significance about the whole Christian theology of resurrection, ascension, second coming, and hope. This theology was born out of confrontation with the political authorities, out of the conviction that Jesus was already the true Lord of the world who would one day be manifested as such. The rapture theology avoids this confrontation because it suggests that Christians will miraculously be removed from this wicked world. Perhaps that is why such theology is often Gnostic in its tendency towards a private dualistic spirituality and towards a political laissez-faire quietism. And perhaps that is partly why such theology with its dreams of Armageddon, has quietly supported the political status quo in a way that Paul would never have done.

But the fact remains that Paul had, to this point, made a career out of telling people things he knew they would find either mad or blasphemous or both. He had grown used to it. This was what he did.

United worship here and now, rather than disunited church life in the present and a distant “heaven” after death, was always, as far as Paul was concerned, the divinely intended goal of the Messiah’s death.

Paul believed, in fact, that Jesus had gone through death and out the other side. Jesus had gone into a new mode of physicality, for which there was no precedent and of which there was, as yet, no other example.

The reason history is fascinating is because people in other times and places are so like us. The reason history is difficult is because people in other times and places are so different from us. History is, to that extent, like marriage,

First, Paul is anxious that everyone who professes Christian faith should allow the gospel to transform the whole of their lives, so that the outward signs of the faith express a living reality that comes from the deepest parts of the personality. Second, he is also anxious that each Christian, and especially every teacher of the faith, should know how to build up the community in mutual love and support, rather than, by the wrong sort of teaching or behaviour, tearing it apart.

The wrath of God is simply the shadow side of the love of God for his wonderful creation and his amazing human creatures. Like a great artist appalled at the way his paintings have been defaced by the very people who were supposed to be looking after them, God’s implacable rejection of evil is the natural outflowing of his creative love. God’s anger against evil is itself the determination to put things right, to get rid of the corrupt attitudes and behaviors that have spoiled his world and his human creatures. It is because God loves the glorious world he has made and is utterly determined to put everything right that he is utterly opposed to everything that spoils or destroys that creation, especially the human creatures who were supposed to be the linchpins of his plan for how that creation would flourish. That’s why, as Paul’s argument progresses in this same letter, he frames its central passage not with God’s anger but with his powerful, rescuing love (Rom. 5:1–11; 8:31–39).

It isn’t that God basically wants to condemn and then finds a way to rescue some from that disaster. It is that God longs to bless, to bless lavishly, and so to rescue and bless those in danger of tragedy—and therefore must curse everything that thwarts and destroys the blessing of his world and his people.

Paul does not quote the Psalms or Isaiah, but we can see the influence of their double vision of the One God all the way through: the sovereign God, high above and beyond the earth so that its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, yet gently at hand, gathering the lambs in his arms and leading the mother sheep.

At the heart of Galatians 2 is not an abstract individualized salvation, but a common meal. Paul does not want the Galatians to wait until they have agreed on all doctrinal arguments before they can sit down and eat together. Not to eat together is already to get the answer wrong. The whole point of his argument is that all those who belong to Christ belong at the same table with one another. The relevance of this today should be obvious. The differences between us, as twentieth-century Christians, all too often reflect cultural, philosophical and tribal divides, rather than anything that should keep us apart from full and glad eucharistic fellowship. I believe the church should recognize, as a matter of biblical and Christian obedience, that it is time to put the horse back before the cart, and that we are far, far more likely to reach doctrinal agreement between our different churches if we do so within the context of that common meal which belongs equally to us all because it is the meal of the Lord whom we all worship. Intercommunion, in other words, is not something we should regard as the prize to be gained at the end of the ecumenical road; it is the very paving of the road itself. If we wonder why we haven't been travelling very fast down the road of late, maybe it's because, without the proper paving, we've got stuck in the mud.

When people in churches today discuss Paul and his letters, they often think only of the man of ideas who dealt with lofty and difficult concepts, implying a world of libraries, seminar rooms, or at least the minister’s study for quiet sermon preparation. We easily forget that the author of these letters spent most of his waking hours with his sleeves rolled up, doing hard physical work in a hot climate, and that perhaps two-thirds of the conversations he had with people about Jesus and the gospel were conducted not in a place of worship or study, not even in a private home, but in a small, cramped workshop. Saul had his feet on the ground, and his hands were hardened with labor. But his head still buzzed with scripture and the news about Jesus.

Romans 4 is all about the covenant that God made with Abraham in Genesis 15. It is not a detached statement about someone in the ancient scriptures who was “justified by faith.” It is not simply a “proof from scripture” of the “doctrine” that Paul has stated in Romans 3. Abraham is not simply an “example” of either the way God’s grace operates or the way some humans have faith.

Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: “science” deals only with “hard facts,” while the “arts” are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings. Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (“ discovering who you really are” or “going with your heart”) are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward “identities.

Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian. And the total context of this doctrine, here in Philippians 3, is that of the expectation - not of a final salvation in which the individual is abstracted from the present world, but of the final new heavens and new earth, as the Lord comes from the heavenly realm to transform the earthly

We sometimes speak of someone who’s been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one—or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.

BIOGRAPHY, AS WE said before, involves thinking into the minds of people who did not think the same way we do. And history often involves trying to think into the minds of various individuals and groups who, though living at the same time, thought in very different ways from one another as well as from ourselves. Trying to keep track of the swirling currents of thought and action in Paul’s world is that kind of exercise.

Paul the Jew, whose controlling story had always included the narrative whereby the living God overthrew the tyrant of Egypt and freed his slave-people, had come to believe that this great story had reached its God-ordained climax in the arrival of Israel’s Messiah, who according to multiple ancient traditions would be the true Lord of the entire world. In being faithful to his people, God had been faithful to the whole creation.

He is saying, as he says extensively in Romans 8, that the whole creation is longing for its exodus, and that when God is all in all even the division between heaven and earth, God's space and human space, will be done away with (as we see also in Revelation 21). Paul's message to the pagan world is the fulfilled-Israel message: the one creator God is, through the fulfilment of his covenant with Israel, reconciling the world to himself.

the Platonized eschatology so popular over many centuries (how will my soul get to heaven?) has played host to a moralized anthropology (what’s to be done about my sin?), generating a quasi-pagan soteriology (God killed Jesus instead of punishing me).11 This has been assumed to be what Paul was saying in these letters. More specifically, when people express “faith” in this line of thought, they are assured that they are therefore forgiven and heaven-bound. This, it has been assumed, is what Paul meant by “justification.” One can see a low-grade version of this when young persons, moved by a sermon or perhaps by an apologetic argument, say a prayer of Christian commitment and are thereupon informed that they are now “justified by faith,” that they are therefore going to heaven, and that they must not try to supplement this pure, justifying “faith” either with moral effort or with religious ritual.

If you are to shape your world in following Christ, you are called, prayerfully, to discern where in your discipline the human project is showing signs of exile and humbly and boldly to act symbolically in ways that declare that the powers have been defeated, that the kingdom has come in Jesus the Jewish Messiah, that the new way of being human has been unveiled, and to be prepared to tell the story that explains what these symbols are all about. And in all this you are to declare, in symbol and practice, in story and articulate answers to questions, that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and Marx, Freud and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and neither modernity nor postmodernity is. When Paul spoke of the gospel, he was not talking primarily about a system of salvation but about the announcement, in symbol and word, that Jesus is the true Lord of the world, the true light of the world.

We too are easily fooled into allowing distinctions of ethnic origin to determine the boundaries of our fellowship in the Messiah. We are easily fooled into supposing that because we believe in faith, not works, in grace, not law, the absolute moral challenge of the gospel can be quietly set aside. Paul’s message of the cross leaves us no choice. Unity and holiness and the suffering that will accompany both are rooted in the Messiah’s death. To regard them as inessential is to pretend that the Messiah did not need to die.

Part of Paul’s point in that same chapter, Romans 6, is that those who have come into the Messiah’s family must constantly make it real, in thought and deed: “Calculate yourselves as being dead to sin, and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus,” and “Don’t allow sin to rule in your mortal body” (6:11, 12). A similar warning is given in 1 Corinthians 10:12: “Anyone who reckons they are standing upright should watch out in case they fall over”! Like the Israelites leaving Egypt, just because you have escaped the life of total slavery, that doesn’t mean you won’t have to work hard to translate your newfound freedom into actual life.

You can’t get on with the rest of your life if you are forever taking your spectacles off and inspecting them; indeed, one of the problems with spectacles is that if you break them you may not be able to see properly in order to mend them yourself. So it is with worldviews: when you are questioned about some or all of your worldview, and you have (as it were) to take it off and look at it in order to see what’s going on, you may not be able to examine it very closely because it is itself the thing through which you normally examine everything else. The resulting sense of disorientation can be distressing. It can lead to radical change. It shakes the very foundation of persons and societies. Sometimes, it seems, it can turn persecutors into apostles …

The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place where the world is in pain, and as we embrace that vocation, we discover it to be the way of following Christ, shaped according to his messianic vocation to the cross, with arms outstretched, holding on simultaneously to the pain of the world an to the love of God. Paul, we should note carefully, is quite clear about one thing: as we embrace this vocation, the prayer is likely to be inarticulate. It does not have to be a thought-out analysis of the problem and the solution. It is likely to be simply a groan, a groan in which the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ, groans within us, so that the achievement of the cross might be implemented afresh at that place of pain...

People who believe that their ruler is in some sense “son of a god” are less likely to rise in revolt than people who see their rulers merely as ordinary muddled human beings. And when the good news of Jesus called its hearers to turn from “idols,” some of those idols, in towns and cities across Paul’s world, would have been statues of Caesar or members of his family. It begins to look as though Paul’s geographical strategy had a quiet but definite political undertone. Many of the key places on his journeys—Pisidian Antioch, where we will join him presently, but also such places as Ephesus, Philippi, and Corinth—were key centers of Roman rule and of Roman cult in the eastern Mediterranean. And of course he was then heading for Rome itself, and for Spain, a major center of Roman culture and influence.

As we have seen, the phrase “in accordance with the Bible” has little to do with isolated proof-texts and everything to do with the meaning of the long, dark, puzzling narrative of Israel ending with the question mark at the end of the books of Malachi and Chronicles. “Exile” was still in operation. The first Christians saw the message and accomplishment of Jesus as the long-awaited arrival of God’s kingdom, the final dealing-with-sin that would undo the powers of darkness and break through to the “age to come.” The whole point, as in Galatians 3, was that Israel’s long and sad story was not just a rambling muddle, an accumulation of irrelevant but damaging mistakes of generations that had more or less lost the plot. Paul never saw Israel’s past history like that, though many readers of Paul have assumed that he did.

Many Christians grew up reading the Bible in the light of this or that version, often without realizing that these traditions of reading scripture were themselves shaped by cultural forces that distorted some elements of biblical teaching and screened out others altogether. None of us can escape that problem. But what I have tried to do in this book is to outline a way of understanding the New Testament’s vision of Jesus’s death, particularly that in the gospels and Paul, a vision that, by giving attention to various strands often ignored and by sketching a way of combining things that have often been played off against one another, will relaunch something more like the first movement than the second. Such a missional vision will need serious reshaping. There were problems (to put it mildly) with that earlier optimism

So what was the hidden divine purpose in this seemingly strange story? As we saw, from Romans 5:12 on Paul has referred to “Sin” in the singular, “Sin” as a force or power that is let loose in the world and that ultimately rules the world (“Sin reigned in death,” 5:21). “Sin” here seems to be the accumulation not just of human wrongdoings, but of the powers unleashed by idolatry and wickedness—the powers that humans were supposed to have, but that, through idolatry, they had handed over to nongods. Paul then uses the word “Sin” as a personification for all this. Sometimes it seems as though, in 7:7–12 at least, Paul says “Sin” where he might have said “the satan,” or at least the serpent in Genesis 3. In any case, in Romans 7 Paul is telling two stories, the story of Adam and the story of Israel, weaving them together to show—as in much Jewish tradition—just how closely that they resonated with one another. His main point is that, through the Torah, Israel recapitulated the sin of Adam.

If Thomas represents an epistemology of faith, which transcends but also includes historical and scientific knowing, we might suggest that Paul represents at this point an epistemology of hope. In 1 Corinthians 15 he sketches his argument that there will be a future resurrection as part of God’s new creation, the redemption of the entire cosmos as in Romans 8. Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen. There is more to be said about this, but not here. All of which brings us to Peter. Epistemologies of faith and hope, both transcending and including historical and scientific knowing, point on to an epistemology of love—an idea I first met in Bernard Lonergan but that was hardly new with him. The story of John 21 sharpens it up. Peter, famously, has denied Jesus. He has chosen to live within the normal world, where the tyrants win in the end and where it’s better to dissociate yourself from people who get on the wrong side of them. But now, with Easter, Peter is called to live in a new and different world. Where Thomas is called to a new kind of faith and Paul to a radically renewed hope, Peter is called to a new kind of love.15 Here

Of course, historical scholarship on the New Testament is open to all, whether Jewish or Christian, atheist or agnostic. But the present debate about Paul and justification is taking place between people most of whom declare their allegiance to Scripture in general, and perhaps to Paul in particular, as the place where and the means by which the living God has spoken, and still speaks, with life-changing authority. This ought to mean, but does not always mean, that exegesis-close attention to the actual flow of the text, to the questions that it raises in itself and the answers it gives in and of itself-should remain the beginning and the end of the process. Systematize all you want in between-we all do it; there is nothing wrong with it and much to be said for it, particularly when it involves careful comparing of different treatments of similar topics in different contexts. But start with exegesis, and remind yourself that the end in view is not a tidy system, sitting in hard covers on a shelf where one may look up "correct answers," but the sermon, or the shared pastoral reading, or the scriptural word to a Synod or other formal church gathering, or indeed the life of witness to the love of God, through all of which the church is built up and energized for mission, the Christian is challenged, transformed and nurtured in the faith, and the unbeliever is confronted with the shocking but joyful news that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. That is letting Scripture be Scripture. Scripture, in other words, does not exist to give authoritative answers to questions other than those it addresses-not even to the questions which emerged from especially turbulent years such as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is not to say that one cannot deduce from Scripture appropriate answers to such later questions, only that you have to be careful and recognize that that is indeed what you are doing.

The radical insight of St. Paul into what it means to be human, and what it means to have the overwhelming love of God take hold of you, corresponds in quite an obvious way to what most people know about what makes someone more or less livable-with. And livable-with-ness, though of course it contains a large subjective element, is not a bad rule of thumb for what it might mean to be truly human.

But hope, at least as conceived within the Jewish and then the early Christian world, was quite different. Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God. This God had made the world. This God had called Israel to be his people. The scriptures, not least the Psalms, had made it clear that this God could be trusted to sort things out in the end, to be true to his promises, to vindicate his people at last, even if it had to be on the other side of terrible suffering. “Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer,

Because of God's call and promise, Abraham is the beginning of the truly human people. He is the one who, in a faith which Paul sees as the true antecedent of Christian faith, allows his thinking and believing to be determined, not by the way the world is, and not by the way his own body is, but by the promises and actions of God.

A great transition, a great transformation, is on the way, which for us will be like the transformation from childhood to mature adult life, the transition from peering into a smoky mirror to seeing someone face to face, the shift from glimpsing parts of a jigsaw puzzle but having no idea how they fit together to seeing the whole thing, complete, at a single glance - or, to match more exactly what Paul says, from glimpsing parts of the puzzle to realizing that the Puzzle is not only complete but is looking back at us.

It is true that faith and hope do at present seem to us to be looking forward to the new age, so that we might assume that when that new age comes they will be redundant. But Paul is seeing much deeper than that. Faith is the settled, unwavering trust in the one true God whom we have come to know in Jesus Christ. When we see him face to face we shall not abandon that trust, but deepen it. Hope is the settled, unwavering confidence that this God will not leave us or forsake us, but will always have more in store for us than we could ask or think.

Saul grew up within a world of story and symbol: a single story, awaiting its divinely ordered fulfillment, and a set of symbols that brought that story into focus and enabled Jews to inhabit it. If we are going to understand him, to see who he really was, we have to grasp this and to realize that for him it wasn’t just a set of ideas. It was as basic to his whole existence as the great musical story from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms is to a classically trained musician today. Only more so.

The world he had known was full of dark powers. Or, to be more precise, the created order was good, as Genesis had said, but humans had worshipped nongods, pseudogods, “forces” within the natural order, and had thereby handed over to those shadowy beings a power not rightfully theirs. The “forces” had usurped the proper human authority over the world. Evidence was all around. Tarsus, like every ancient non-Jewish city, was full of shrines, full of strange worship, full of human lives misshapen by dehumanizing practices. And Paul believed that on the cross Jesus of Nazareth had defeated the ultimate force of evil. The resurrection proved it. If he had overcome death, it could only be because he had overcome the forces that lead to death, the corrosive power of idolatry and human wickedness.

Love and grief are very close, especially in warm, passionate hearts. Saul shrank from neither. He wrote constantly of love—divine love, human love, “the Messiah’s love.” And he constantly suffered the grief that went with

in the ancient Near East the idea of a single community across the traditional boundaries of culture, gender, and ethnic and social groupings was unheard of. Unthinkable, in fact. But there it was. A new kind of “family” had come into existence. Its focus of identity was Jesus; its manner of life was shaped by Jesus; its characteristic mark was believing allegiance to Jesus.

For Saul, with the vision of Genesis, the Psalms, and Isaiah close to his heart, there would be no question of retreat from the world. If the Stoics had a big integrated vision of a united world, so did he. If the Roman Empire was hoping to create a single society in which everyone would give allegiance to a single Lord, so was he. Paul believed that this had already been accomplished through Israel’s Messiah. If the Platonists were speaking of possible commerce between “heaven” and “earth,” so was he—though his vision was of heaven coming to earth, not of souls escaping earth and going to heaven. As a Jew, he believed that the whole created order was the work of the One God; as a “Messiah man,” he believed that the crucified and risen Jesus had dealt with the evil that corrupts the world and the human race and that he had begun the long-awaited project of new creation, of which the communities of baptized and believing Jesus-followers were the pilot project.

These parallel lines are central to his mature thinking and foundational for what would later become Christian theology. First, there was Israel’s own story. According to the prophets, Israel’s story (from Abraham all the way through to exile and beyond) would narrow down to a remnant, but would also focus on a coming king, so that the king himself would be Israel personified. But second, there was God’s story—the story of what the One God had done, was doing, and had promised to do. (The idea of God having a story, making plans, and putting them into operation seems to be part of what Jews and early Christians meant by speaking of this God as being “alive.”) And this story too would likewise narrow down to one point. Israel’s God would return, visibly and powerfully, to rescue his people from their ultimate enemies and to set up a kingdom that could not be shaken. “All God’s promises,” Paul would later write, “find their yes in him.” 14 Saul came to see that these two stories, Israel’s story and God’s story, had, shockingly, merged together. I think this conviction must date to the silent decade in Tarsus, if not earlier. Both narratives were fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person. The great biblical stories of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, Temple and new Temple all came rushing together at the same point. This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised, the new world for which Israel had prayed night and day.

Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.

Far too much modern Christian prayer has insisted on words, on logic, on getting everything clear and out into the open. This is of course important and indeed vital--as one aspect of the whole. But prayer, if it is to be Christian prayer, cannot be a grasping at control. It is precisely a relinquishing of control--to the one who is capable of doing far, far more than we can ask or imagine. It is saying 'Thy will be done.' It is therefore appropriate that, at some times and in some ways, that prayer should pass beyond the merely rational and wordy and engage with God, as Paul says in Romans 8, at a level too deep for words.

The inauthenticity of an entire stream of twentieth-century New Testament scholarship is thus laid bare; if Paul really allowed himself, in so serious and sober an introduction to a carefully crafted chapter expressing the central point that underlay an entire letter, to say something as drastically misleading as Bultmann imagined, he is hardly a thinker worth wrestling with in the first place. But in fact Bultmann was simply wrong: the resurrection of Jesus was a real event as far as Paul was concerned, and it underlay the future real event of the resurrection of all God’s people. 10

The introduction is formal, solemn, complex and controversial. It stands as a fifth witness to the original Easter events, alongside the accounts in the four gospels, and is thus of extraordinary importance for our present study. Bultmann, famously, criticized Paul for citing witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, as though he considered it an actual event, instead of being merely a graphic, ‘mythological’ way of referring to the conviction of the early Christians that Jesus’ death had been a good thing, not a bad thing.

Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

But pistis could also point to the personal commitment that accompanies any genuine belief, in this case that Jesus was now “Lord,” the world’s rightful sovereign. Hence the term means “loyalty” or “allegiance.” This was what Caesar demanded from his subjects.

This is why too for every theologian who puzzles over abstract definitions of “atonement,” there are thousands who will say, with Paul, “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me”—and who will then get on with the job of radiating that same love out into the world.

Then in the second half of the book, Paul is always traveling, confronting Caesar’s empire with news of its new Lord, and he ends up in Rome, under Caesar’s nose, proclaiming God’s kingdom, says Luke, and teaching about King Jesus as Lord, openly and without hindrance. 13 There could not be a much clearer statement of intent: the kingdoms of the world are now claimed as the kingdom of Israel’s God, and of his Messiah. And the basis of this announcement is the resurrection of Jesus: not his parables, not his healings, not even his atoning death, important though all of those are and remain. It is the resurrection of Jesus that means he is now enthroned as Lord.

Humans are worshipping creatures, and even when they don’t consciously or even unconsciously worship any kind of god they are all involved in the adoring pursuit of something greater than themselves. Worship transforms humans, all of us, all the time, since you become like what you worship: those who worship money, power or sex have their characters formed by those strange powers, so that little by little the money-worshipper sees and experiences the world in terms of financial opportunities or dangers, the power-hungry person sees and experiences the world and other humans in terms of chances to gain power or threats to existing power, and the sex-worshipper sees the world in terms of possible conquests (that word is interesting in itself) or rivals. Those who consciously and deliberately choose not to worship those gods still have a range of others to select from, each of which will be character-forming in various ways.

Jesus was innocent, yet he died the death of the guilty. But notice what overall narrative frames this statement. It is not the quasi-pagan narrative of an angry or capricious divinity and an accidental victim. It is the story of love, covenant love, faithful love, reconciling love. Messianic love. It is the story of the victory of that love, because that self-giving love turns out to have a power of a totally different sort from any other power known in the world (which is why Paul is happy to say that he is strong when he is weak).

Paul’s preaching challenged pagan people with a new and different life made possible by Jesus the crucified and risen Jewish Messiah.

The central symbol of Paul’s newly formed world, the ekklesia, the Messiah’s body, is nothing short of a new version of the human race.

Yes, that resurrection does indeed give us a sure and certain hope. If that’s not the case, we are of all people, as Paul says, most to be pitied.3 But when the New Testament strikes the great Easter bell, the main resonances it sets up are not simply about ourselves and about whatever future world God is ultimately going to make, when heaven and earth are joined together and renewed at last from top to bottom. Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now. This

Paul is talking about the present body, which is animated by the normal human psychē (the life force we all possess here and now, which gets us through the present life but is ultimately powerless against illness, injury, decay, and death), and the future body, which is animated by God’s pneuma, God’s breath of new life, the energizing power of God’s new creation. This

We might already have figured this out from the careful placing of Philippians 2.8b, thanatou de staurou, “even the death of the cross,” at the dead center of the poem that some think antedates Paul himself. As we shall see later, the first half of that poem is a downward journey, down to the lowest place to which a human being could sink with regard to pain or shame, personal fate or public perception. This was precisely the point. Those who crucified people did so because it was the sharpest and nastiest way of asserting their own absolute power and guaranteeing their victim’s absolute degradation.

For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not “saved souls” being rescued from the world and taken to a distant “heaven,” but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world. (When Paul says, “We are citizens of heaven,” he goes on at once to say that Jesus will come from heaven not to take us back there, but to transform the present world and us with it.) And this hope for “resurrection,” for new bodies within a newly reconstituted creation, doesn’t just mean rethinking the ultimate “destination,” the eventual future hope. It changes everything on the way as well.

What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul’s perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new “otherworldly” hope.

Paul does not say what precisely had happened, but he tells the Corinthians the effect that it had on him (in a deliberate and completely justifiable plea for personal sympathy): he was so utterly overwhelmed, beyond any capacity to cope, that he despaired of life itself (1:8). He felt as though he had received the sentence of death in himself (1:9). This language—internalizing a death-sentence—sounds close to what we might call a nervous breakdown, and certainly indicates severe depression.

Part of the reason for Paul’s anxiety about shared table-fellowship, and shared worship, in Galatians 2 and Romans 14 and 15, was that Christian meals, not least but not only the eucharist, constituted a central part of what he meant by celebrate, rejoice. The word celebration has become almost a technical term, certainly in my own church and perhaps elsewhere, for ‘holding a eucharist’. We must guard against that becoming a dead metaphor.

Did Paul think that Jesus was the Messiah? Of course. Did recognizing someone as Messiah imply that God’s people were regrouped around him? Naturally. Was that a non-Jewish or even anti-Jewish thing to suggest? Of course not. The point, anyway, is that for Paul the Messiah’s people are both a ‘new creation’ and the fulfilment of the divine intention for Israel.

The divine intention, as Paul saw it unveiled in the messianic events concerning Jesus, was to create a single worldwide family; and therefore any practices that functioned as symbols dividing different ethnic groups could not be maintained as absolutes within this single family.

We are his poiēma’, his ‘poem’, his ‘workmanship’, wrote Paul (Ephesians 2.10), ‘created . . . in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared’ – not simply ‘good works’ of moral behaviour, but the fresh creativity whose rich variety reflects the lavish creativity of God himself, thereby offering a sign to the powers of the world that Jesus is lord and they are not (Ephesians 3.10–11).

We may only be reading from the New Testament one paragraph of Paul, but as we get close to that reading and look not only at it but through it we can see the entire sweep of Paul’s vision, of the biblical narrative focused now on Jesus and his messianic death and resurrection.

Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.

Israel believed (so Paul tells us, and he should know) that the purposes of the creator God all came down to this question: how is God going to rescue Israel? What the gospel of Jesus revealed, however, was that the purposes of God were reaching out to a different question: how is God going to rescue the world through Israel and thereby rescue Israel itself as part of the process but not as the point of it all? Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.

It is, in other words, inviting those who read it or pray it to imagine a different world from the one they see all around them—a world with a different Lord, a world in which the One God rules and rescues, a world in which a new sort of wisdom has been unveiled, a world in which there is a different way to be human. “Wisdom” is in fact the subtext of much of Colossians.

One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.

This might be, after all, a way of smuggling in ‘works’ by the back door, into Paul’s soteriology (something we Paulinists are trained to watch out for, like sniffer dogs at an airport ready to detect the slightest whiff of hard drugs).

He does not here ask the different groups to give up their practices; merely not to judge one another where differences exist. As Paul well knew (though we sometimes forget), this is actually just as large a step, if not larger, than a change in practice itself. The move from regarding something as mandatory to regarding it as optional is vast, just as vast in fact as the move from regarding something as forbidden to regarding it as available.

But to call that statement ‘dualistic’ (or to regard a belief in the existence of hostile powers as ‘dualistic’) can mislead us into forgetting that most Jews, Paul included, regarded the present world as, none the less, the good creation of the good creator, and the present time as under the creator’s sovereign providence. Part of the point of many actual apocalypses is to affirm this very point, in the teeth of apparently contradictory evidence.

Unlike those in Philippi (perhaps including some of the Christians) whose citizenship is in Rome, the true citizenship of Jesus’ followers is in heaven. This does not mean that Paul is here talking about their ‘going to heaven’ one day, any more than the Roman citizens in Philippi would expect to go to live in Rome one day (as people sometimes mistakenly suppose). Rather, they are part of the extended empire of ‘heaven’.

God’s kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul’s mission.

It would mean that the One God was acting at last to fulfill his ancient promises, and the mode of that action would be to set up a new regime, a new authoritative rule.

But if you use the word “political” to refer to a new state of affairs in which people give their ultimate and wholehearted allegiance to someone other than the ordinary local ruler or someone other than Caesar on the throne in Rome—and if you call “political” the establishment of cells of people loyal to this new ruler, celebrating his rescuing rule and living in new kinds of communities as a result—then what Paul was doing was inescapably “political.” It had to do with the foundation of a new polis, a new city or community, right at the heart of the existing system. Paul’s “missionary” journeys were not simply aimed at telling people about Jesus in order to generate inner personal transformation and a new sense of ultimate hope, though both of these mattered vitally as well. They were aimed at the establishment of a new kind of kingdom on earth as in heaven. A kingdom with Jesus as king. The kingdom—Paul was quite emphatic about this—that Israel’s God had always intended to set up.

A transforming, healing, disturbing, and challenging presence. A presence that at one level was the kind of thing that would be associated with a divine power and at another level seemed personal—human, in fact. This then became the focal point of what we said before: people turned away from the idols they had been serving and discovered, in Jesus, a God who was alive, who did things, who changed people’s lives from the inside out. (The fact that skeptics at the time, like skeptics today, could and did give different explanations of what was taking place does not alter the fact that this is what people said was happening to them, that this is what Paul understood to be going on, and that the consequences, whether they were all deluded or speaking a dangerous truth, were long lasting.)

Connecting the dots of Paul’s journeys, actual and planned, is like mapping a royal procession through Caesar’s heartlands.

And, since the exile was the result of Israel’s idolatry (no devout Jew would have contested the point, since the great prophets had made it so clear), what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.

Jews too, have assumed otherwise (suggesting, for instance, that Paul the Apostle was a traitor to the Jewish world or that he had never really understood it in the first place), the point is worth stressing before we even approach the main work of Paul’s life.

What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel’s God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel’s scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.

Paul had always believed that the One God would at the last put the whole world right. The Psalms had said it; the prophets had predicted it; Jesus had announced that it was happening (though in a way nobody had seen coming). Paul declared that it had happened in Jesus-and that it would happen at his return. In between those two, the accomplishment of the putting-right project first in cross and resurrection and then in the final fulfillment at Jesus's return, God had given his own spirit in the powerful and life-transforming word of the gospel. The gospel, incomprehensibly foolish to Greeks and blasphemously scandalous to Jews, nevertheless worked powerfully in hearts and minds.

Humans are designed to worship God and exercise responsibility in his world. But when humans worship idols instead, so that their image-bearing humanness corrupts itself into sin, missing the mark of the human vocation, they hand over their power to those same idols. The idols then use this power to tyrannize and ultimately to destroy their devotees and the wider world. But when sins are forgiven, the idols lose their power. The reason Paul can be so triumphantly certain that by six o’clock on Good Friday the “rulers and authorities” had lost their power was that he knew, because of the resurrection of Jesus, that sin itself had been defeated. And one of the ways in which he knew in practice that this had happened was because, when he announced Jesus as Lord around the non-Jewish world, people believed it and gladly gave their allegiance to this new Master. The liberating power of the gospel was itself a demonstration of the truth it proclaimed.

The Creator works in a thousand ways, but one central way is through people—people who think, who pray, who make difficult decisions, who work hard, especially in prayer. That is part of what it means to be image-bearers. The question of divine action and human action is seldom a zero-sum game. If the worlds of heaven and earth have rushed together in Jesus and the spirit, one should expect different layers of explanation to reside together, to reinforce one another.

Learning how to think as the Messiah had thought, Paul insisted, was the only way to radical unity in the church, and it was also the secret of how to live as “pure and spotless children of God in the middle of a twisted and depraved generation