Читать книгу Meditations on the Letters of Paul - Herold Weiss - Страница 8

I: My Gospel

It is difficult to know how the disciples of Jesus, immediately after the crucifixion and the appearances of the Risen Lord, understood what had taken place among them during the last year and a half. Our first documents are the letters of Paul and the first among them is usually dated around the year 50 CE. The oral traditions that circulated during the twenty years between the crucifixion and the first letter of Paul eventually found their way into the written gospels. Since each one of them gives a peculiar voice and agenda to the teachings of Jesus it is not easy to distinguish what Jesus actually taught and what the Christians made of his teachings by the time the gospels were written. In any case, it is quite clear that the Gospel preached by Paul was a very radical interpretation of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Most notable in this regard is that Paul hardly refers to the teachings of Jesus. To Paul what counts is that God had revealed His righteousness. That is to say, God had achieved a significant part of the purpose for which He had created the human family. Of course, the only way to know about God’s efforts to achieve the purpose of creation is by knowing the Scriptures that tell of the dealings of God with the Israelites. They tell of the many ways in which in the past God’s purposes had been frustrated by the rebellions and the intransigence of the Israelites. They also record, however, the promises God made and the praises with which the people glorified their God on account of His fulfillment of the promises.

To come to terms with Paul’s Gospel it is essential to recognize that Paul is concerned with an existential problem. Anyone who looks at what takes place in the affairs of men and women in the world has great difficulty finding manifestations of the righteousness of God. This was already the case at the time of the exile of the Jews in Babylon. The prophets had been proclaiming the gospel of God’s retributive justice. Those who do good are rewarded for their goodness and those who do evil are punished on account of their evil deeds. Looking at what was happening when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and the Israelites were in exile in Mesopotamia, the prophet Habakkuk understandably found the situation confusing. That the Israelites should be punished for their sins was taken for granted. Their exile was, therefore, quite understandable. That the Babylonians, a people who were famous for their cruelty, were being rewarded by giving them the spoils of Jerusalem and its wealth was totally incomprehensible. Habakkuk was therefore quite confused and asked the obvious question. Where is God’s justice to be seen?

The atmosphere that gave rise to Habakkuk’s question was the incubator that gave birth to a new understanding of history. The Hebrew prophets were the first to find meaning in life by looking at it in terms of its development in time, rather than its moorings in nature. This gives them the honor of having been the ones who discovered that history, rather than nature, provides the scenario where human life is to be understood. According to the prophets, God guides the affairs not only of the people with whom He had made a covenant but also of the other nations. For Israel to be prosperous and happy it had to demonstrate covenant loyalty. As long as experience confirmed that the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer, life in God’s world made sense. If, on the other hand, the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer, life ceased to make sense. The fact that history contained ample evidence that the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper gave rise to new developments in theology.

Among the Israelites these developments took two basic forms. One was the Wisdom movement among the cosmopolitan elites who were quite aware of the cultural currents of the Mediterranean world. It answered Habakkuk’s question by establishing a great gulf separating God from humankind. This was informed by the philosophical awakening taking place in Greece. Notions of God as if he were a man with the same desires, passions and virtues were thoroughly critiqued and abandoned by the emerging Hellenistic intellectuals. Among them it could no longer be argued that human beings were capable of understanding God’s ways. Thus, the wise men of Israel distanced themselves from the prophetic understanding that human history is God’s handiwork. God’s activity is beyond any human capacity to understand. That is the message of the books of Job and Ecclesiastes.

The other attempt to answer Habakkuk’s question brought about the development of a new way to understand history, that is, by the apocalyptic twist to the prophetic movement. The transformation of the prophetic view of history into its apocalyptic step child took some time developing. The prophetic conception of history took the cyclical view of time, prevalent in societies bound to the celebration of feasts attached to a yearly routine, and opened it into a linear time-line extending to an open future. This had been a radical departure from the understanding of time as an unending annual return to the beginning accompanied by the repetition of the human labors that pertain to the seasons that are marked by the solar and lunar movements. The prophets pointed to the future Day of the Lord, when God’s retributive justice would have its ultimate manifestation. According to them, the Day of the Lord would be a day in history. In that future day God would gather all the nations and establish Himself as King in Jerusalem.

The apocalypticists, on the other hand, bent the prophetic time line back to the beginning, and conceived the Day of the Lord as the day in which history came to an end, making room for a new beginning. Instead of a yearly cycle, the apocalypticists made a cycle of the whole of human history. The destruction of historical time was necessitated, they asserted, by the enormity of present evil. History could not be repaired by the establishment of God’s throne in Jerusalem as the prophets had predicted. It required a more radical solution, a return to a totally new beginning.

Apocalypticism answered Habakkuk’s question relying on the doctrine of the resurrection with which the Israelites had become acquainted during their contact with Zoroastrianism in Babylon. God’s retributive justice is not in evidence in this life. It will be operative in the life to come. It is possible to maintain that God’s retributive justice works when rewards and punishments are given in an afterlife, after the dead are raised from their tombs. Thus, in spite of the fact that in this life the just may unjustly suffer, they will receive their just reward at their resurrection when God establishes a new beginning.

In the process of finding an answer to Habakkuk’s question which affirmed God’s retributive justice, apocalyptic visionaries came to a new understanding of the world in which humans live. Instead of the world created by God which, according to Genesis 1, God had declared good in every way, and which, as the prophets said, was under God’s direct control, apocalypticists saw the world corrupted and no longer under God’s direct control. They introduced the doctrine of the Fall of creation. On account of the sin of Adam and Eve, the whole of creation has fallen into corruption and is under the power of “the rulers of this world,” Satan and his evil angels. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden was not just a historical event in the life of the first couple. It was a cosmic event with universal consequences. It placed the whole of creation under the power of Satan, “the god of this world.”

This new theology developed at a time when the conquests of Alexander the Great propagated Greek culture in the Near East. Greek philosophers had questioned anthropomorphic understandings of the gods and had relegated the order of the divine to regions that were beyond human reach. These developments also influenced the Wisdom movement in Israel, as noted above. The separation of the human and the divine that had been developed within Hellenism, and which was used differently within different thought currents, was conceived by apocalypticism as the space occupied by the fallen angels and their leader. From the heavenly spheres they exercised their evil influence on humanity. This made it possible to affirm that the evil amply evident in the world is due to the fallen state in which God’s creation is now found. Under Satan’s direct control, creation has been corrupted. The world is under the power of evil.

The preponderance of evil in the world is what necessitates the destruction of the present fallen world before humans may live in a good world. On the Day of the Lord not even God will be able to repair the damage caused by Satan and his angels. God will destroy His creation and start all over with a New Heaven and a New Earth. This new beginning gave the apocalyptic visionaries the opportunity to retrieve the language of the ancient myths of creation in which battles between heavenly beings are waged in order to destroy the forces of evil and make possible the creation of a good world for humans to inhabit. Descriptions of the Day of the Lord in which goodness triumphs over evil and God’s justice is vindicated gave apocalyptic visionaries ample room to expand their theological imaginations. The descriptions that have come down to us are quite varied and testify to their appeal. Still, most of them have at their core the notion of the Two Ages: This Present Evil Age and The Age to Come.

The difference between the two ages is like night and day. Contrasting them became a major undertaking in Pharisaism and in Rabbinic Judaism. Such a radical transformation of reality could not possibly be accomplished in one day. As a consequence, the Age of Messiah was introduced into this scheme, a time in which the details of this transition could be accomplished. One of the main events in the Age of Messiah would be the resurrection of the just so that they could receive their reward, and demonstrate that God’s retributive justice works. The conception of Messiah, however, was not firmly established. Messiah means “anointed,” and in Israel persons had been anointed for different functions. Judges were anointed with the spirit to become military liberators from oppressive neighbors (Philistines, Canaanites, Ammonites, etc.). Kings were anointed to rule over Jerusalem. Priests were anointed to serve at the Tabernacle in the desert or the temple in Jerusalem, Prophets were given “a word of the Lord.” All these figures provided models for the descriptions of the coming Messiah who would establish the Age to Come, a totally new reality for the just to live in. At the time of Jesus and Paul, Pharisees, Covenanters of Qumran (the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls), Zealots and others shared apocalyptic visions of the future Age to Come where God’s retributive justice would ultimately be revealed.

Whether Jesus shared the apocalyptic world view of many of his contemporaries is a matter much debated by modern scholars. Most scholars today think that Paul lived in an apocalyptic symbolic universe, and I share this opinion. The only way to understand him is by recognizing the apocalyptic framework of his exposition of the Gospel. In this connection it is important to bear in mind that there was no standard apocalyptic vision maintained by a recognized theological authority. On account of this, some scholars refrain from using the noun apocalypticism and use only the adjective apocalyptic. I will use both the noun and the adjective to refer to the broad theological movement that is characterized by solving the problem of God’s justice in the world by means of the doctrines of the Fall, the resurrection, and the Two Ages.

Paul found meaning for the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ in the basic apocalyptic framework of the Fallen Creation, the Age of Messiah and the Age to Come. For him the Good News was that the crucifixion of Jesus had put an end to the dominion of Satan on the Fallen Creation, and the resurrection of Christ had established the Age of Messiah as the New Creation. Any day soon the Age to Come would displace the Age of Messiah. The Gospel is that God has revealed his justice by establishing the order of life in the Spirit, or life in Christ, by raising the crucified Jesus by the power of the Spirit, thereby breaking the power of Satan within the Present Age. In other words, the Gospel announces that it is possible to be free from the powers that rule the Fallen Creation, even while living in bodies of flesh, that is to say, in the natural world. Paul’s Gospel affirms that God’s justice has been revealed in the death and the resurrection of His Son. The Day of the Lord, when God acts on behalf of the just and makes all things right, has come.

The establishment of a new creation by raising the Lord Jesus from the dead is the powerful demonstration of the justice of God. As Paul sees it, the Gospel is not primarily concerned with Jesus, his life, his activities, his teachings. The Gospel is, rather, the demonstration of the power and justice of God. Proclamation or announcement by itself is not quite Gospel. What makes the proclamation Gospel is what God accomplishes in people. The Gospel is the power of the Spirit at work in the resurrection of Christ and in the giving of life to those who believe in the God who raised Christ, thus making it possible for them to live “in the Spirit,” that is, by the power of the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead.

Paul refers to the Gospel he preaches as “God’s gospel” (2 Co. 11:7) and as “the gospel of Christ” (2 Cor. 2:12), or the “gospel of his [God’s] Son” (Rom. 1:9). He also characterizes it as “my gospel” (Rom. 2:16; 16:25), or, since he is very aware of his co-workers, as “our gospel” (2 Cor. 4:3; 1 Th. 1:5). As an apostle sent to preach the Gospel Paul often found himself defending his mission from various charges (2 Cor. 3:1; 7:2; 11:5 – 7; Gal. 1:10). Doing so at times he wonders whether he is inappropriately boasting, making too high a claim for himself. On these occasions he always makes the point that the high claims are for the Gospel, not for himself as a minister of the Gospel. Probably the most extensive of these asides is found in chapters 3 and 4 of To the Corinthians II.

His argument gets a bit confusing at times, but as a whole it is quite effective. Recognizing that his understanding of the Gospel is not that of most other preachers of Christ, he refers to other gospels (Gal. 1:6, 9, 11; 2 Cor. 11:4) which he considers not to be gospels at all. To highlight his Gospel, he contrasts his function as an agent of the Gospel with that of Moses as the agent of the law given at Sinai. He begins his de minoris ad maiorem argument recognizing that the ministry, or service (diakonía) of Moses was accompanied with a glory that reflected itself with splendor in his face. Then he characterizes the content of Moses’ ministry. His was a “dispensation of death.” Paul consistently points out that the function of the law is to express the wrath of God that brings about condemnation and issues in death (Rom. 4:15). Having established this foundation, he brings about the logical conclusion: ”if the dispensation of death. . . came with such splendor . . . will not the dispensation of the Spirit be attended with greater splendor?” The question is purely rhetorical. Paul then affirms the obvious: “For if there was splendor in the dispensation of condemnation, the dispensation of righteousness must far exceed it in splendor.”

Having established the superior splendor of the dispensation of righteousness, Paul elaborates on the fact that the splendor in the face of Moses slowly faded away after he came down from Mt. Sinai. Since the splendor in Moses’ face went away already during his lifetime, it follows that “what once had splendor has come to have no splendor at all, because of the splendor that surpasses it.” That is to say, the splendor of the resurrection of Christ totally outshines whatever splendor was exhibited at Sinai. This gives rise to another observation: what once had splendor and now has no splendor at all was temporary. The splendor that now surpasses it is permanent. In other words, while the dispensation of death introduced by Moses’ giving of the law was temporary, the dispensation of righteousness introduced by the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead is permanent.

Paul is now ready to make a point about another one of the elements in the story of the giving of the law at Mt. Sinai. He does it by elaborating creatively on the report that the splendor in Moses’ face faded away. According to the story in Exodus 34:29 – 35, Moses put a veil on his face because the splendor in his face put fear in the hearts of the people. Eventually, once the splendor had faded away, the veil was no longer needed. Paul, however, says that Moses put a veil on his face in order to hide the fact that the splendor of his face was fading away. Then, he gives the story a surprising contemporary application. The veil in Moses’ face, placed in order to hide its fading splendor, is now in the face of Paul’s contemporaries who read “the old covenant” with hardened minds. Their veils prevent them “from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God.” In this way Paul explains why the gospel of the power of the Spirit that gives life to those who believe is not at work in those who preach a gospel based on the law.

Having pointed out its superior splendor and permanence, Paul establishes the authenticity of the Gospel of “the dispensation of the Spirit” of which he is a minister. It is the Gospel of “a new covenant” which brings about “righteousness.” In other words, it establishes the righteousness of God since it manifests the purpose of creation. The law may have served to condemn and to bring about death. The righteousness of God is about life. The dispensation of the Spirit that gives life is then given its ultimate definition: “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” The contrasts have reached their intended goal. The glory in the face of Moses was transitory. The veil in the face of Moses is now in the face of the people who read the Old Testament with hardened minds. The veil, however, can be taken away by Christ. In the dispensation of the Spirit the glory of the Risen Christ is permanent, and is seen by those whose faces have been unveiled. His glory is being reflected in the faces of those who have the freedom to see it. Those from whose faces Christ has taken away the veil and read the “old covenant” correctly not only can behold the glory in Christ’s face. They are being changed by participating in Christ’s glory into ever higher degrees of glory until they finally receive their spiritual, glorious bodies at the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. 15:44).

Ultimately, the truth of the Gospel, according to Paul, is its power to bring about the unveiling of the mind and the freedom to see the Gospel of the glory of the Risen Christ and be changed from one degree of glory to another. Paul concludes his argument with the clarification. “We have this treasure [the Gospel] in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” Thus, even though he has audaciously compared his role as an apostle of the Gospel of the Risen Christ with the role of Moses as the agent of the law at Sinai, Paul ends up clarifying that what is at stake is not his ministry. It is the righteousness of God. The transcendent power that brought the crucified and buried Jesus to a new glorious life by the Spirit is at the center of his Gospel. “The word of the cross” which most consider nonsense, Paul confesses that to the believers “who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18). Paul then encapsulates his view in an epigram: the Gospel of “the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power” (1 Cor. 4:20). The same is true of the Gospel.

As said above, Paul understands the significance of the Gospel within an apocalyptic framework. It serves to reveal that, after all, retributive justice works. People will receive what they deserve. On that account, Paul points out that “our gospel is veiled . . . to those who are perishing.” In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. The preaching of the Gospel may bring about “the freedom to see” to those who with unveiled faces see the glory of the Risen Lord, but it may also bring about “perishing” to those who, on account of the blindness of their minds, with veiled faces fail to experience the transcendent power of the Gospel.

As an apocalyptic thinker Paul does not elaborate the power of God in cosmic battles with the forces of the god of this world. He does not give descriptions of the stages in the war between good and evil popular in apocalyptic writings. The power of God that reveals His righteousness has already been demonstrated at the resurrection of Christ. Now in his spirit body the glory of Christ is permanent, and the power that brought about that glorious resurrection is actively bringing about changes from glory to glory in those who with unveiled faces have the freedom to behold the glory of the Lord. To those who thought that Paul, as a well-trained Pharisee, should be ashamed of preaching a gospel that viewed the revelation of God at Sinai as one which, even though resplendent with glory at the time, was temporary and had now been superseded by the revelation of the power of the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead, Paul replied, “I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith” (Rom. 1:16). Reminding the Thessalonians of the time when he first preached to them, Paul writes, “our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and in full conviction” (1Th. 1:5). The power of the Holy Spirit that brings about the full conviction that changes lives is what really counts.

The gospel is not primarily concerned with a message. It is about the power of God that gives freedom and changes lives even now, and into the future. Writing to the Corinthians, who apparently were having second thoughts about the Gospel he had preached to them, Paul challenges their argument that the Gospel of the cross lacks wisdom. He reminds them of the time when he had been with them, saying “my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstrations of the Spirit and power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4 – 5). Paul understands that true faith cannot rest in the words of a human agent. Essentially, the Gospel is not wisdom as it is commonly understood. The faith that counts rests on the power of God to be righteous. The changes in the lives of those who have experienced the power of God are then reflected in the way in which believers conduct themselves in society. Writing to the Philippians, Paul advices them, “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Phil. 1:27). They are not being asked to give a worthy intellectual account of the gospel with cogent arguments and valid biblical foundations. The power of the gospel changes lives. Christians are expected to have a manner of life in society that reflects the splendor of the Risen Christ. That is the triumph of righteousness over sin that Paul, the peculiar apocalypticist, is primarily concerned with.

The author of To the Hebrews gives a magnificent description of the glory and the power demonstrated by God at Sinai — glory that brightened the skies with lightning and power that made the mountain shake. He finds in that event the precedent of what will take place at the future manifestation of glory and power when the present shakable creation is to be dismantled and the unshakable, eternal world is established with the heavenly Jerusalem on Mt. Zion (Heb. 12:18 – 28). Like the author of To the Hebrews, Paul refers to the glory and the power accompanying the giving of the law at Sinai. For him, however, the ultimate manifestation of God’s “transcendent power” (2 Cor. 4:7) has already taken place at the resurrection of Christ. The light shining on the face of the Risen Christ is the light that drove away the darkness “at the beginning.” The glory and the power that brought about the life of both the First Adam and the Last Adam now gives life to humans still living in the flesh and changes them from glory to glory till they attain to the glorious spiritual body at their resurrection from the dead. That is Paul’s Gospel.