The State of Pauline Studies: Paul and the Messiah

I am in my late fifties. It is interesting to locate myself among those scholars I observed when I was in my late twenties. I would read articles and books they had written and wonder where they were now. Some hadn't seemed to have written much for a while, and I wondered if they were still alive. Some sat in the back of the room at SBL while the young people presented. Some didn't bother going to SBL anymore.

I still buy the books. Some of my purchases these last months have of course included James McGrath's two books on John the Baptist (started). I bought the landmark New Testament in Color. You'll find Vanhoozer's Mere Christian Hermeneutics on my shelf as well as Brant Pitre's Jesus and Divine Christology among several others outside of biblical studies.

One I may persist through is The State of Pauline Studies. I'm grateful to Nijay Gupta and Scot McKnight for doing these volumes. They help me know how out of touch I may or may not be. It doesn't matter much to the church. In the current hyper-populism of America, expertise is a sign of evilness.

I've made it through the first chapter, whoop-tee-do. It's by one of the youngin's, Josh Jipp, on "Paul and the Messiah." I didn't feel too out of date. Here is a very brief run down.

1. Christos as a Title
Jipp sets out well the transition in consensus that has happened over the last hundred years from a generation that largely saw Christ as almost a proper name to a growing new consensus that it does indeed invoke a sense of the title Messiah. He presents the sharpest pivot taking place in the 2012 work of Matthew Novenson, Christ Among the Messiahs. Novenson argued that Christos would have been recognized as an honorific -- thus having a clear content without having to spell it out.

I should also note references throughout this chapter to Jipp's own work, chiefly Christ is King (2015) and The Messianic Theology of the New Testament (2020).

2. Messianic Exegesis
I'm not sure if this section had much of a debate point. Jipp catalogs various works of recent years that have explored one or another way in which Paul read the Old Testament with Jesus glasses on. This seems to be beyond question. He starts the section going back to Don Juel's classic on Messianic Exegesis. 

A key resource for me here was an old chapter by Richard Hays in a Festscrift titled, "Christ Prays the Psalms." Since Hays is now an old guy, Jipp cites instead another youngin', Matthew Bates, in his The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation (2012). While I'm on the subject, another key recent work in the footnotes is Bates' Salvation by Allegiance Alone (2017).

3. Romans 1:3-4
Here Jipp pits an older reading of these two verses as a "two-step," "exaltation Christology" with adoptionist overtones with more recent readings that see Jesus' human messianic identity in full concert with his divine messianic identity. The trend of the last twenty-five years has clearly been toward a reading of Paul that is closer to the later creeds than the earlier Dunn generation that saw a longer development of Christology in the first century. At the moment, Hurtado and Bauckham have won the day among the younger generation of scholars.

4. Royal Christology
This section explores some suggested overtones for Jesus' kingship. Is it primarily Jewish messianism (Horbury)? To what extent does Paul present Jesus in contrast to Caesar (Wright)? Jipp himself sees some influence of ancient royal ideology.

I do think that there are overtones of Christ as a king in contrast to Caesar. I've generally thought however that Paul was careful not to be too explicit about these overtones for obvious reasons. But I do indeed see Paul's royal Christology as the very center of his Christology.

The Essence of Jesus' Earthly Mission

Over the last couple weeks, I've been posting through the early mission of Jesus on social media. Here is the whole series in one place:

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1. Jesus' earthly ministry started out of the ministry of John the Baptist. God's kingdom was coming. Repent. Give your allegiance to God. Wash away your sins both individual and corporate.

This is a re-orientation away from ourselves to God, a greater than ourselves. It is a surrender to a kingdom with its command and control in heaven. It is in preparation for the restoration of God's people.

This is the earthly context of Jesus' mission.

2. Before Jesus took over where John the Baptist left off, he underwent a time of turmoil in a deserted place. Matthew and Luke tell us he was tempted to exploit his power, to exploit his privilege, and to take his authority before its time. Rather, it was God's will for him to wait, to serve, and to put others first.

3. After John the Baptist was arrested, Jesus publicly began to preach the message John had started. The time had come for the kingdom of God to arrive on earth. The proper response of Israel was individual and corporate repentance as well as faith in this good news of the kingdom's arrival. But while John preached in the south near Jerusalem, Jesus focused his preaching in the north, in Galilee.

4. Jesus did not focus on everyone in his earthly ministry. He focused on the north, on Galilee. He did not focus on the "healthy," those who were allegedly keeping the covenant and who were socially on track. He focused on the "lost sheep," those off track and unwell on every level.

In his "inaugural address" in Luke 4, he reads Isaiah 61 to single out the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed as those on whom his mission was focusing.

John the Baptist had preached to the mainstream of Israel. Jesus was filling in the edges in the restoration of God's people.

5. One group of Israelites on the edges were the sick and the disabled. One major feature of Jesus' restoration ministry involved healing. This is something John the Baptist didn't do. Jesus had compassion on the sick, the lame, the blind, the deaf, and he healed them according to their faith.

He came not into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might have life more abundant.

6. Another group on the edges of Israel were the demon possessed. They were a concrete reminder of Satan's temporary sway over the earth. But Jesus restored these afflicted individuals to wholeness by.casting the demons out.

Every demon Jesus expelled was the arrival of the kingdom of God to the earth, the restoration of God's kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

7. Jesus' mission brought conflict. Some of it was jealousy. Why do you have this power, authority, and popularity and we don't? Why are you hanging around *those* people (and not pandering to us)?

Some was fear of the kingdom. Why are you stirring up the people?

Jesus also made the pretenders look bad. Hey, you're calling our motives into question! You're not following the rules we hide our motives behind!

8. Matthew gives us a glimpse of Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. It has perhaps three key themes. One seems the coming reversal of the kingdom. Blessed are you who mourn now because the day of comfort is coming. Remember they persecuted the prophets too.

Don't worry about clothing or food. God will take care of you. Those who are pure of heart now, those who make peace now, those who are meek now will inherit the earth soon enough. The kingdom is coming.

The wise person builds their house upon the rock. As for those who are comforted now, God will scatter the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.

9. A second theme of the Sermon on the Mount set the record straight on Jesus and Scripture. They accused him of being loose on the Law -- meaning their traditions of interpretation. Jesus makes it clear that he did not come to nullify the Scriptures (like the Sabbath).

Rather the sum of the Law is to love one's neighbor. It's not just not murdering. Hatred breaks the Law. It's not just adultery. It's lust and divorce to commit adultery legally. It's not just keeping oaths. It's truthfulness in general. God calls for full love that goes beyond the ones we like. It's loving completely, loving everyone, including our enemies (Matt. 5:48). Love is the fulfillment of Scripture (Matt. 22).

That leads to the third theme of the Sermon. Those who might criticize Jesus for not keeping the details of the Law are guilty of not keeping the heart of the Law. They are pretenders. They keep the letter of the Law for show. But they don't keep the Law truly because they do not love their neighbors. They project their own guilt on others.

10. Jesus did not shun those with power or wealth who might repent too and long for the kingdom like his other followers. He was glad to eat at the house of a Zacchaeus or meet a Nicodemus at night. He had some wealthy wives who supported his mission.

But most of the Jerusalem leaders were against him. Luke especially highlights Jesus' condemnation of the rich who do nothing with the vast resources they have. The rich man in the parable does little to help those like the beggar Lazarus at their gate.

He has little time for the religious scholars and teachers of the Law, although he is glad to eat with them too. He indicts their pretense and goes about his mission without giving them much thought.

These all would be part of the reversal coming. "Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry."

11. Jesus did not engage the Romans. Famously, when asked about taxes, he asked for a Roman coin. After pointing out that Caesar's image was on the coin, he suggested it be given back to Caesar. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." In other words, the kingdom of this world is a different kingdom from our God's. Pay your taxes.

This is a "Christ against culture" approach. It is a separatist mindset, and the early church would follow. The gospel was for Roman governors like Sergius Paulus and Theophilus too, but Jesus did not engage the Roman world directly in his earthly ministry -- until it came to him.

Here we should point out two phases of Jesus' ministry. When he was on earth, he taught loving the enemy. "If [a Roman soldier] compels you to carry something one mile, carry it two." (Walter Wink has suggested this was a shaming technique of non-violent resistance.) Turn the other cheek (Wink would say shaming the other by forcing them to backhand you).

But God would bring justice to the Romans soon enough. God himself would do it. It was not for Jesus' disciples to do it. But Babylon would fall soon enough. God would do it. We remember that John of Patmos had been with Jesus, and his message of judgment for Rome was apocalyptic.

12. It was not until the very end of Jesus' earthly mission that he finally broached the question that had no doubt long been on his disciples' mind. "Who are people saying I am?" While people have been saying various things, Peter has the right answer: "You are the Messiah."

Jesus has kept such views quiet because the contemporary expectations of the Messiah would be counterproductive. They expect a conquering hero who will restore the kingdom to Israel then. That is rather the agenda for Christ's second coming.

No, at that time he was headed to Jerusalem to die. He rebukes Peter for only knowing half of the equation. Judas possibly tries to force God's hand, thinking God won't let Jesus lose to the leaders and the Romans. But unwittingly, he advances God's own plan.

Jesus dies on the cross for the sins of Israel and not only Israel. He dies for the sins of the whole world. It is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. All the sacrifices before were not truly able to take away sins, and no sacrifice since is meaningful.

This was the one sacrifice for all time that did the deed for all time.

13. The disciples weren't expecting Jesus to die. Then when he had died, they weren't expecting him to come back to life. Their expectations were all off in their timing because, for them, it was all about the political restoration of Israel in their time (Acts 1:6).

Instead, Jesus is installed as Son of God in power with his resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1:3). God "superexalts" him as LORD after he humbled himself unto death (Phil. 2:9). God enthrones him as Lord and Messiah (Acts 2:36).

Now his disciples must take the good news of the kingdom to every people (Matt. 28:19). He has been training them throughout his earthly ministry. They have been his apprentices as fishers of people. He singled out twelve in particular to symbolize the restoration of Israel. He even sent them out on practice mission.

Now his followers must take the good news to the whole earth. It is natural that at first they thought the message was only for Jews. But the book of Acts shows the good news crossing boundary after unexpected boundary. First, it jumped language. Then, it broke barriers of purity. Then it fully expanded to the Gentiles.

And the Jesus who ascended to the skies will one day reappear and descend in the same way.

The Week in Review (12/7/24)

1. I went to the funeral of Herbert Mohler this week. He was probably my Dad's closest cousin, at least in the last decades of my Dad's life. I remember my Dad being very fond of his German Baptist cousin Mary Louise as well. I seem to remember "favorite cousin" being said of her at one point.

Herbert was just a good guy. Witty like my Dad's Miller cousins in general. Faithful. Calm. Accepting of his lot and fate. An unsung hero. Wild secretary skills -- again, like many of the Millers and my father and grandmother Esther included. I met Herbert for coffee at Richard's several times when I was working at IWU.

The funeral was well-attended for a 96-year-old man. Good old Indiana folk.

2. Anderson University was downgraded by Fitch to a B- last week. Sharply declining enrollment. Very significant deficits. Probably dramatic moves are in order. Rough days are ahead as we hit the demographic cliff of 2026 we've been talking about now for several years.

Campus Edu is a potential Hail Mary for institutions like these. They could effectively "insource" their gen eds through us. I don't know enough about their situation to do precise math, but I figure we could save Anderson over 2 million dollars a year.

3. I was thinking this week about the brief South Korean attempt to invoke martial law. I'm sure that was scary for the South Koreans. It reminded me of some ideas I remember floating around in my teens and early 20s.

After my mother died a couple months ago, we went through her library, and I was reminded of some of the books that were hot in certain circles in the late 80s/early 90s. The Unseen Hand in 1985. Constance Cumbey's, A Planned Deception in 1985. A little earlier in 1971, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. These books were a bit scary to me back in the day.

The idea was that there were elite groups secretly meeting behind the scenes plotting to take-over the country and the world. For example, I remember the idea of creating a crisis so they could call a new Constitutional convention to rewrite the Constitution. I remember hearing the concept of "change agents." You manufacture a crisis and then use the crisis to bring in your solution (that your cabal had preplanned).

Of course this wasn't a new concept. Hitler may have set fire to the Reichstag so he would have an excuse to accuse and arrest his opponents. Not too long thereafter, he effectively dismissed the Parliament. South Korean's failed move by the president this week reminded me of the conspiracy literature I grew up with.

Anyway, I'm glad none of those things actually happened so many decades ago. 

4. The CEO of United Health was assassinated this week. One theory is that he hired his own killer. The response has been intriguing. Let's just say there wasn't a lot of public sadness or sympathy.

The state of American culture is a matter of great sadness to me. We are being swept away by a river of hate, misinformation, and genuine malintent, and there seems like nothing a person like me can do about it. It feels like we are self-destructing from within. God will let us self-destruct.

8. Is the Big Bang theory compatible with Scripture and Christian faith?

When I went to Houghton, I revived an old Carl Schultz course called Science and Scripture and offered it online. The idea was to open it up to the public for auditing and possibly attract some students. Plus it was a Bible option for online students among a faculty that didn't really like online (what else is new). Since then, I've wanted to write a book on Science and Scripture that roughly covers the topics of the course. I floated a proposal a few years back but didn't get a bite.

In the meantime, especially in the light of AI developments, I've been thinking about self-publishing an intermediate work that could lead up to that ultimate goal. In training AI, you create snippet answers it seems. I've jotted down about 50 questions so far that might make for something like "Science and Scripture: Questions and Answers." Here's question 8: Is the Big Bang theory compatible with Scripture and Christian faith?

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Yes -- it is potentially compatible as long as one believes God is the one who caused the Big Bang.

The reason so many Christians assume the concept of a Big Bang conflicts with Christian faith and Scripture is because they assume it is atheistic. However, if one believes that God caused the Big Bang, then the theory actually supports faith in God. The Big Bang Theory itself says nothing about its cause. It simply says the universe started with a "bang." It is only about the how. It says nothing about the why. The only bone of contention, then, is how long ago it happened.

1. In the mid-1900s, the Big Bang Theory was the idea that the universe began in a hot dense state and then expanded rapidly from there to the vast cosmos we know today. As early as 1922, a Russian physicist named Alexander Friedmann recognized that Einstein's equations for general relativity could support an expanding rather than a static universe. In 1927, the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) also suggested independently the idea of a "cosmic egg" or cosmic atom as a possible solution to Einstein's equations. Einstein disdained this possibility so much that he added a constant to his equation.

It is important to consider that many mid-twentieth-century cosmologists did not like this option precisely because it played so well into the idea of a Creator. After all, Lemaître himself was a Roman Catholic priest. One millennia-old argument for the existence of God was the cosmological argument, which argues that the universe must have had a cause. In the 300s BC, Aristotle suggested that the cosmos needed a "prime mover" to give it a first push. In the 1200s, Aquinas expanded this argument. 

The idea that the universe had a beginning raised the question, "Why did it begin? What was the cause?" And the cosmological argument stood ready to say that the best answer was a Creator, an intelligent Designer.

2. The very term "Big Bang Theory" was coined by Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) in the 1949 to make fun of the proposal. Hoyle favored an alternative known as the "Steady-State Theory." This was the idea that the universe may be constantly generating matter in some way somewhere as well as losing matter somewhere. Since it required no beginning to the universe, many cosmologists found it attractive.

Hoyle would have to swallow his mockery in 1964 with the discovery of a cosmic background radiation that confirmed that the universe had a beginning. Since this radiation was steadily in decline all over the universe, it served as a kind of timer since an early cosmic event. If the universe were infinitely old, it would have already dissipated.

Further, Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) had shown in 1927 that the universe was expanding. If you are acquainted with the Doppler effect, wavelengths stretch out if an object emitting them is moving away from you. With light, this effect produces a "red shift." Hubble observed this shift everywhere in the universe. Everything is moving away from everything else.

All these data points and more have led to the current sense that the universe began in a singularity -- a point of the smallest possible dimensions. It then rapidly expanded some 13.8 billion years ago into the massive space we now know. [1] The Big Bang that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered in 1964 is now thought to be a "cosmic microwave background" (CMB) that emerged as the early universe cooled enough to release photons all over the universe when the universe was about 380,000 years after the universe began.

3. An alternative proposal was the so-called "Oscillating Big Bang Theory." In this proposal, the universe explodes from a singularity but then collapses again into a singularity because of the gravitational pull of the universe's mass. Like the Steady State Theory, this approach would allow for a universe that was infinitely old and did not require a Creator.

However, there does not seem to be enough mass in the universe for this theory to work. The so-called "critical density parameter" (Ω) would seem to be less than 1. This observation suggests that the universe will expand forever. Once again, we are left with a unique beginning event, which leads to the question, "Why did the universe begin? What was the cause?" 

The existence of a Creator God remains a perfectly coherent answer. We might add that the frequent retort, "Then where did God come from?" is a non sequitur. It does not follow. It actually is circular because it assumes that God is part of the creation. We observe that events within the universe require a cause. We have no point of reference to say whether entities outside the universe need a cause.

4. The main bone of contention is then the length of time. Many Christians would consider 13.8 million years ago to be too long ago to fit with the Bible. We will explore the age of the earth and the universe in another chapter. There are however varying interpretations. For example, some would see Genesis 1 specifically in relation to the creation of the earth, not the universe. Some might suggest an apparent age theory where God created the universe to look like it's 13.8 billion years old. Some might view the days of Genesis 1 as ages rather than 24 hour periods.

In the end, however, the notion that the universe started with a bang supports rather than conflicts with the notion of God as Creator.

[1] Some key aspects of the current understanding emerged from the work of Alan Guth in 1980.