Book Review: The Pre-existent Son 1

I'm basically through the first two chapters of Simon Gathercole's new book. I've met Simon casually but I wasn't exactly sure what scholarly flavor he had. This book has helped me locate him within my categories.

Some impressions:
1. Simon is well read, including good interaction with German literature. With this book he is venturing into new territory that was not really his focus previously, so I sympathize with some material that reminds me of me when I'm writing in areas that aren't my specialty.

2. Simon has an apologist flare. He would fit in the N. T. Wright, Richard Bauckham vein, although perhaps a little more conservative in flavor even than them (with a Reformed bent?). Occasionally I feel hints of the conservative vanquishing the perverse liberal (especially in his Jude section).

3. I found his aquaintance with Tom Schreiner particularly interesting (vii). Schreiner to me is a good example of a recent hard core Calvinist resurgence that I might dubb, "it is hard for you to kick against the pricks of recent developments in Pauline studies." To be fair, Simon's first book on boasting in Romans seems pretty good (ironically written with Dunn as an advisor). I would categorize it as part of the current wave of backlash from the new perspective on Paul.

So much for personal impressions... now for discussion of chapter 2, "Pre-existence in Earliest Christianity."

I personally believe that Simon's second chapter takes too much for granted. He rides on the near consensus that Philippians 2:6 and 1 Corinthians 8:6 are about the pre-existent Christ and then sees pre-existence everywhere in Paul. By the end of the chapter he concludes that "references to preexistence would have been frequent in Paul's teaching" (42).

I found this movement staggering. Largely on the basis of two passages he assumes other marginal passages are about pre-existence and then finally extrapolates to conclude that Paul must have talked about Christ's preexistence all the time wherever he went! And so an idea that rarely pops up in Paul's letters (in fact I would argue only in somewhat poetic contexts) becomes something that was a major part of Paul's oral teaching!

Now I certainly believe that Christ was pre-existent, but I've worked real hard to try to let the text say what it says and not read later theology into it. This is one of my big things--let the text be the text and then work out any problems in your theology, not in your exegesis. I studied with Dunn because he seems to me a model of this sort of attempt at objectivity. That's not to say that I always agree with him--I actually disagree with him on a number of things. And no one is completely objective to be sure. But to me he is one of the best models of someone who lets the text say what he thinks it's saying come what may.

So what is particularly nerve racking to me is the fact that the "educated middle" will absolutely eat Simon's stuff up. By this I mean the hoards of intelligent non-Bibleheads, pastors, and "middle scholars" like me who really want Simon to be right. We are the ones who have made Tom Wright and Ben Witherington wealthy. We're groupies of a sort.

But to me, there is at times in these authors a tinge of special pleading, while to me Dunn is more Spock-like, more "follow the evidence wherever it seems to lead."

Let me give you an example where I think Dunn's exegesis is far superior to Simon's: 1 Corinthians 15:47--"the first man was from the earth; the second man from heaven." Simon reads this as a straightforward instance of Paul referring to Christ's pre-existence, of Christ "having come down from heaven." He dismisses the opposition with the simple phrase, "Despite attempts to argue to the contrary" (26). Later in the paragraph he dismisses without argument two suggestions for what he says the verse is not saying. Since the loyal following he will develop want to hear this, he is able to say such things without hardly any justification.

Now consider Dunn's more scrupulous argument on this verse in Christology in the Making. He notes the order of Paul's argument: "the spiritual is not first, but the natural (psychikos) then the spiritual" (1 Cor. 15:46). Adam first, then Christ. The natural first, then the spiritual. So far so good for either case really. For Dunn it's Adam, then the resurrected Christ. For Gathercole it would have to be Adam, then the incarnated Christ (although I'm making his argument for him here).

"The first man was of dust from the earth, the second man from heaven" (15:27). At this point Gathercole brings his later Christian ears to the text and hears overtones of John and the incarnation. The second man came down from heaven (in the incarnation).

But is this what Paul was really thinking?

What has Paul been talking about in this chapter? "The first man Adam became a living soul (psyche), the last Adam became a life-giving spirit" (15:45). But when, in this line of thought, did Jesus become a life-giving spirit? What is 1 Corinthians 15 about after all????? RESURRECTION!!! Paul has been talking about what the resurrection body will be like and saying it will be of a spiritual sort, a heavenly sort, just like Christ's resurrection body which was spiritual and "from heaven" (cf. Phil. 3:21).

So the context strongly pushes us to think of the "second man from heaven" as a reference to the resurrected Christ, with not a mention of the pre-existent, let alone incarnated Christ! The train of thought thus becomes seamless when we get to 15:48, "Of the same sort as the man of dust, so also are those of dust, and of the same sort as the heavenly (resurrected) man, so also are those of heaven." That is, so are we who will be resurrected one day.

You can see this is a matter of great frustration to me. The precision and correctness of Dunn's interpretation here is exemplary, yet Gathercole's interpretation will be eaten up quickly by the willful. Those like me who dare question the exegesis will be considered perverse for disagreeing even though, in my opinion, we are the ones actually listening to the text rather than shoving later theology down its throat.

In the rest of the chapter Simon deals with Hebrews and Jude, both of which he dates to the time before the destruction of Jerusalem. While I am prone to disagree with him on the dating of both, his thoughts on Jude were particularly interesting. He makes a good case that Jude 5 should read that Jesus destroyed those who left Egypt who did not believe. Very interesting. I haven't decided whether I agree on this but I was impressed with his knowledge of the issue.

More to come. Simon's argument in the overall book is a good one. If Paul believes that Jesus is pre-existent and if the gospels all come later, then wouldn't we be surprised if the gospel writers didn't know Jesus was pre-existent?

Simon is definitely an up and coming and someone to watch!