Oneself in Another: Participation and Personhood in Pauline Theology

Oneself in Another

Participation and Personhood in Pauline Theology

Susan Grove Eastman

foreword by Grant Macaskill

ONESELF IN ANOTHER

Participation and Personhood in Pauline Theology

Cascade Library of Pauline Studies

Copyright ©

2023

Susan Grove Eastman. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-9262-8

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-9263-5

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-9264-2

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Eastman, Susan Grove,

1952–

[author]. | Macaskill, Grant [foreword writer].

Title: Oneself in another : participation and personhood in Pauline theology / Susan Grove Eastman.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

2023

| Series: Cascade Library of Pauline Studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-5326-9262-8 (

paperback

) | isbn 978-1-5326-9263-5 (

hardcover

) | isbn 978-1-5326-9264-2 (

ebook

)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible—Epistles of Paul—Theology. | Bible.—Epistles of Paul—Critiscism, interpretation, etc. | Theological anthropology—Christianity. | Paul, the Apostle, Saint—Teachings.

Classification:

BS2655.A58 E26 2023 (

print

) | BS2655.A58 (

ebook

)

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments and Original Publications

Part One: Exegetical and Theological Investigations

Chapter 1: Apocalypse and Incarnation

Chapter 2: Incarnation as Mimetic Participation in Philippians 2:6–11

Chapter 3: Strengthening the Ego for Service

Chapter 4: Oneself in Another

Chapter 5: Love’s Folly

Chapter 6: Unveiling Death in 2 Corinthians

Chapter 7: The Custody of Hope

Part Two: Pauline Theology in Theory and Practice

Chapter 8: The Empire of Illusion

Chapter 9: Imitating Christ Imitating Us

Chapter 10: Bodies, Agency, and the Relational Self

Chapter 11: Autism, Communication, and Connection, in Light of Paul’s Anthropology

Chapter 12: Christian Experience and Paul’s Logic of Solidarity

Bibliography

Cascade Library of Pauline Studies

The aim of the series is to advance Pauline theology by publishing monographs that make original scholarly proposals in conversation with existing scholarly debates, and which have the potential to shape future trajectories in research.

As both the title of the series and the list of categories above suggests, it is their contribution to critical discussion of Pauline theology that will be the hallmark of books published in CLPS. However, the nature and scope of Pauline theology is intended to be understood in a somewhat expansive manner, with an openness to the use of methodologies (e.g., social-scientific or post-colonial approaches) that have sometimes been regarded as standing in opposition to theological modes of Pauline interpretation. The criterion by which the suitability of a study for inclusion in the series will be assessed is its theological interest. This judgment will be made on the basis of the potential benefits of a particular approach or methodology for our understanding of Pauline theology rather than on the basis of conformity to preconceived ideas of what constitutes an appropriately theological approach to Pauline interpretation. As such, CLPS will also be open both to studies that are broadly confessional in tone and to those that are more critical of perspectives expressed in the Pauline texts.

Series Editors:

Stephen Chester, Wycliffe College, Toronto

Dorothea H. Bertschmann, Abbey House Palace Green, Durham University

Editorial Board:

John M. G. Barclay, Durham University

Lisa Mary Bowens, Princeton Theological Seminary

Martinus C. de Boer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Andreas Dettwiler, Universite de Geneve

Susan Eastman, Duke Divinity School

Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Baylor University

David G. Horrell, University of Exeter

Jonathan Linebaugh, Beesen Divinity School, Samford University

Grand Macaskill, University of Aberdeen

Volker Rabens, Friedrich Schiller University Jena

For Elladan

Foreword

When the distinctively modern self was invented, its invention required not only a largely new social setting, but one defined by a variety of not always coherent beliefs and concepts. What was then invented was the individual . . .

¹

We often hear people lamenting the problem of modern individualism. Typically, what this language labels for them is a matter of attitude and practice: it is the selfish pursuing of one’s own interests before considering the needs of the wider community, or the neglecting of one’s social responsibilities. Such attitudes are often recognized to be characteristic of modern western culture and are sometimes contrasted with traditional or non-Western values, which are oriented instead toward the community. Biblical scholars and pastors alike will recognize that those of us who are products of this modern culture need to develop some self-awareness, to recognize that our reading of the New Testament will be colored by this pervasive individualism unless we actively identify it. Only by doing so can we allow the contrastive values of the early church to emerge from the texts that we read, undistorted by the values that we have imbibed from our culture.

To focus on attitudes and practices is a dangerously superficial way of thinking about the problem of modern individualism. It is superficial because it does not recognize that these cultural values emerge from an underlying way of thinking about what the individual essentially is, as a discrete, buffered thing, isolable from its environment while remaining itself. It is dangerously so, because when the modern concept of the individual remains unexamined, it quietly but essentially redefines every other concept with which it comes into contact. This is the distinctive way of thinking about the self that Alasdair MacIntyre, in the quotation above, presents as a modern invention; he, and others whose work is engaged in this book, have considered the phenomenon in detail and traced its comprehensive effects on modern values and discourse. Here is the rub: without their realizing it, many of those who express concern about the compromising effects of modern individualism are, in their philosophical and anthropological presumptions about the nature of human being and identity, modern individualists.

This has shaped the interpretation of the Bible throughout the modern period, in the academy and in the church. The problem of sin is seen as a matter of the action and culpability of the individual; salvation is correspondingly understood as something done by one individual for others, to deliver them from the consequences of this culpability. The notion that both sin and salvation must be understood in terms of participation, of selves that are permeated, constituted through their involvement with, and saturation by, realities beyond themselves, is foreign to this way of thinking.

This book is a work of sustained reflection on Paul’s theological anthropology and its place in his understanding of sin and salvation. It is developed in careful dialogue with the scholarship that has probed the problem of modern individualism and through attentiveness to the details of Paul’s letters. Susan Eastman has spent her career thinking carefully and reading patiently, taking seriously the elements in Paul’s writings that invite or compel a participatory account of the gospel, which must also be described as apocalyptic. For while many of these participatory elements are shared with other ancient thinkers, including other Jews, all are radically reconceived as a result of what Paul understands to have been disclosed (apocalypsed) to him and in him, which is not just a message but an identity, the unique person of Jesus. That unique selfhood reconstitutes all others through their participation in him and his reality, and, in doing so, reveals the permeating powers that constitute humans as sinners. Sin and salvation are matters of dual participation. That is not a uniquely Pauline or even a uniquely Christian notion in antiquity. But the unveiling of the identity of Jesus, and the implications for the identification of God that Paul associates with this, entirely reframes this dual participation.

In her approach to the apocalyptic quality of the gospel, as Paul understands it, Susan’s work is openly indebted to the legacy of J. Louis Martyn, but it draws his work in fresh new directions. This is particularly a result of her commitment to drawing other voices and even other disciplines into a conversation that is determinedly constructive. Attempts at interdisciplinarity of this kind often fail: sometimes they attain merely juxtaposition rather than integration, and sometimes the agenda of one discipline simply overwhelms the concerns of the other. Successful and true interdisciplinarity takes time and it takes a certain relational disposition, a willingness to open oneself to the wisdom of another and to share oneself in the process. Susan embodies such a disposition and if the language I use here is suggestive of the central themes of the book as already outlined, that is simply fitting: she does indeed embody the gospel of grace.

The title of this book is reminiscent of the influential Gifford Lectures by Paul Ricœur, published as Oneself as Another.

²

His voice is like those of others who have developed phenomenological accounts of personhood and moral identity in response to the identified deficiencies of modern thought. The title of the present volume alters just one word, swapping as for in, but that little change takes Ricœur’s study of relational selfhood and identity in general human terms and particularizes it in terms of the one significant Other who is the subject (in every sense of that word) of Paul’s apocalyptic gospel. As a title, it is truly illustrative of the qualities of this book, reflecting as they do the qualities that have characterized Susan’s whole career: a commitment to engaging generously and constructively with scholars outside the usual circles of Pauline studies and, ultimately, to ensuring that the details of Paul’s writings are taken seriously. The result is a treatment of the gospel alert to the truly compromising effects of modern individualism, which go far deeper than many appreciate, into the very concept of what a person is. Only once that is taken seriously can we understand what it means for persons to be saved and why that salvation turns, not just on what the savior does, but on the entirety of his identity.

Grant Macaskill, University of Aberdeen

February 2023

1

. MacIntyre, After Virtue,

61

.

2. Ricœur, Oneself as Another.

Preface

All I know about Paul is his bad press.

Such was the response from a fellow participant in a conference on science and the humanities, when I told her I write about Paul’s letters in interdisciplinary perspective. She was not hostile or rude, simply genuinely perplexed. Her statement was an honest response to my project, a worthwhile invitation to answer Paul’s bad press with its polar opposite, his good news. In retrospect, the essays in this volume attempt such an answer, in a variety of registers and topics. Along the way, they explore my own questions about Paul. Why is it that in all of Scripture it is Paul’s letters that have captivated me so strongly, in the basic sense of the word? They have taken me captive, captured my attention, enthralled me, engrossed me, and laid claim to me, with an urgency that exceeds mere academic curiosity. Finding myself a castaway on the island of human delusions of self-sufficiency, I hear Paul’s gospel as news from across the sea, news that rightly names my condition and addresses it, and that compels a response.

³

In other words, Paul’s gospel is not simply island news, a kind of information system that can be analyzed, dissected, accepted, or rejected, from an objective, disinterested stance. Rather Paul announces the divine visitation of God in Christ, the event in and through which God has acted to set all the islanders free, not only from their delusions of self-sufficiency, but from the forces that divide and enslave them, and ultimately from death itself. For those to whom island news is the only news worth considering, Paul’s good news will simply be another piece of general knowledge to analyze, discuss, or simply ignore. But for those who by the grace of God know their predicament, news of the astounding gift of God’s solidarity with Adam’s heirs through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and humanity’s deliverance from both condemnation and bondage, is the only message that will do. I am captivated by Paul’s letters because in them I encounter Christ "as the divine Other who presses in upon Paul—and Paul’s audience—reminding, renewing, unsettling, interrupting, and transforming."

⁴

The central claim of this collection of essays is that Christ’s participation in the realm of human affairs is the theological heartbeat of Paul’s gospel, and the person of Christ is the source of human participation and personhood. It is in Christ—through Christ’s own self-donation and presence and held in Christ’s hands—that human beings discover what it means to be a person in solidarity with others.

⁵

To be oneself in another is first and foremost to be one’s self in relationship to Christ, and therein to discover one’s calling and telos in relationship to other people and to one’s self. But in view of the distorting and enmeshing power of sin, and the complexities of human relationships, such a claim leads inevitably to further questions: How do people change, or do they? Specifically, how does God’s action in Christ take shape in humdrum human lives? How do persons navigate the interplay between past, present, and future? How do believers negotiate the gap between victorious pictures of life in the Spirit and continued sin and suffering, not only across all human experience, but also among those who trust, or attempt to trust, in Christ? These are the questions that have animated my engagement with Paul.

There are also questions about language: how is it that words on a page can literally quicken one’s pulse and take one’s breath away? Such questions lead to hermeneutical issues regarding the modes and methods of scholarly interpretation; my hermeneutical goal is interpretation that hones and deepens the reader’s capacity to hear Paul’s words afresh, rather than distancing his letters so that they are interpreted as addressed only to his first-century listeners and not possibly to his twenty-first-century readers as well.

In line with my questions about language and human experience, the following chapters seek to attune us to his message in two ways: first, by attending to the effects of his rhetoric, not simply the content of his arguments, and secondly, by hearing him in conversation with others, whether that be ancient social contexts, current issues, or theologians and poets. In the first place, Paul’s rhetoric includes not only persuasive argumentation, but also audience-involving performative speech. Paul is not simply passing on information; he is eliciting and evoking his listeners’ experiences, both of their own failures and yearnings, and of the love and grace of God. He is announcing news that speaks to his hearers’ condition, not imparting general knowledge. For example, in chapter 3, I read Rom 7:7–25 as performing the plight of the self under sin and the law, such that Paul’s listeners are caught up into that experience and prepared to hear on ever deeper levels the good news that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1). In the final chapter of this volume, I ask how the spiral structure of Rom 1–8 evokes and generates a corresponding pattern of experience for those who find their life in Christ Jesus. I argue that Paul depicts a repetitive yet forward-moving pattern of experience that is inseparable from the logic of solidarity implicit in Christ’s participation in the suffering of all humanity.

A second way to gain a fresh hearing for Paul’s thought is to put it in conversation with new interlocutors beyond the guild of New Testament scholarship, interlocutors such as the scientist who only knew Paul’s bad press. Such conversations can be pursued both historically, by situating Paul in the social realities of his first-century context, and through contemporary interdisciplinary work. So, for example, chapter 6 explores the social implications of male veiling in the first century, with a view to understanding Paul’s comparison between Moses’s veil and his own unveiled and open ministry in 2 Cor 3–4. In chapters 2 and 9, essays on Phil 2:6–11 situate Paul’s mimetic description of Christ taking on the form of human beings in two first-century social contexts: the pervasive theatrical imagery and metaphors of Roman society, and the place of imitation in Greco-Roman education. Putting Paul in conversation with theologians and poets, such as Karl Barth and T. S. Eliot (ch. 7), opens up insights into how Paul speaks to the reality of hope in the face of the destruction of all false hopes. Turning to contemporary issues, chapter 8 returns to the exegesis of Rom 7, but connects Paul’s treatment of sin and evil with examples of egregious evil in the modern world, ranging from the banality of American culture to the horrors of the Shoah and the Rwandan genocide. Chapter 10 asks how Paul’s anthropology might inform the methods and goals of using psychiatric drugs for treating mental illness and pathologies, while chapter 11 engages with assumptions implicit in debates about communication methods for people with autism. These two chapters demonstrate the potential for bringing Paul’s voice to bear on current issues in the suffering and flourishing of human beings, particularly those whom society often treats as marginal. Paul himself lived on the margins of his own social world, not least because he served a crucified lord.

Any organization of a collection of essays is bound to be somewhat arbitrary, and this collection is no exception. Part 1 sets forth in-depth exegetical and theological investigations of key texts, which may be of particular interest to readers who want in the weeds analyses of Paul’s grammar and his social context, and/or deep theological engagement with his interpreters. The essays in part 2 ask how Paul’s letters speak to contemporary issues, whether that be the persistence of evil in global affairs, or the plight of those marginalized by inadequate notions of personhood in contemporary society. Obviously, the division between the two parts of the volume is not hard and fast; for example, my analysis of Rom 7 in chapter 3 leads me to see it as having pastoral effects. Furthermore, all the chapters are unified by two foundational convictions: the priority of God’s redeeming work in Christ, not only catalyzing but sustaining human transformation, and the complex, infinitely varied, and wondrous interface between God’s gracious redemption and real human lives. Throughout this volume, my working assumption is that historical exegetical work is also theological work and may indeed be pastoral work as well, precisely because Paul expected his letters to inform and transform his listeners’ lives. The theological claim that powers such effects is God’s participation in human affairs, through Christ’s mimetic assimilation to the condition of Adam’s heirs; human lives are transformed because God has come on the scene in Jesus Christ, and through the Spirit continues to indwell those who belong to Christ.

Friendship is one of the great signs of the interface between God’s redemption and personal experience, and I am grateful beyond words for friends and conversation partners who have sharpened my thinking and encouraged me along the way, including John Barclay, Dorothea Bertschmann, Alexandra Brown, Douglas Campbell, Ellen Davis, Beverly Gaventa, Richard and Judy Hays, Ann Jervis, Jono Linebaugh, Grant Macaskill, Marcia Pally, Volker Rabens, Fleming Rutledge, Liz Dowling-Sendor, John Swinton, Ross Wagner, Brittany Wilson, and Philip Ziegler.

Michael Thomson first suggested such a publication of essays and has been unfailingly helpful in the process of bringing them to print. The editorial team of the Cascade Library of Pauline Studies, under the able leadership of Stephen Chester and Dorothea Bertschmann, has provided a further community of discourse, and I am honored that they have seen fit to include this book in the series. I am honored and delighted by Grant Macaskill’s gracious foreword. Once again, the inimitable Judith Heyhoe brought her considerable skills to bear in the complex process of formatting all these essays and massaging them into a book, with limitless good humor and priceless precision.

The phrase friends and family is so easily trivialized, but in fact, the riches of these relationships are beyond measure. My son, Daniel An, has become a colleague and partner in crime as we have worked on our respective writing projects and shared our thoughts, often sharing the same office. His wife, Lia, and son, Elladan, bring joy to my life and remind me of the wide, wonderful world beyond the bounds of academia. My daughter, Angela, is a gifted artist, a treasured friend, a wise conversation partner, and a companion on many adventures. I am delighted that a picture of her work graces the cover of this book. It is a close-up of the base of a basket, in a design called a double cross, which epitomizes the thesis of Oneself in Another: Christ’s cruciform union with humanity generates connections which radiate out from the cross and weave together into beautiful vessels for our shared personhood. Finally, although it does not have pictures of trucks, tractors, or other things that go, this book is dedicated to little Elladan, who keeps his Nana focused on the love and connections that really matter.

3

. In a classic essay, The Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy imagines a castaway on an island sorting through messages in bottles that wash up on the beach; he categorizes some messages as knowledge, which can be discovered by anyone, anywhere, at any time, and some messages as news, which announce an event specific to the predicament of the castaway (Message,

119

–

49

).

4

. This is the concluding sentence of the last essay in this volume, "Christian Experience and Paul’s Logic of Solidarity: The Spiral Structure of Romans

1

–

8

."

5

. Morgan, Being in Christ.

Acknowledgments and Original Publications

I gratefully acknowledge, where required, permission to reprint the previously published articles in this volume. Full bibliographical information, including original titles, is included in the following list:

Chapter 1: Apocalypse and Incarnation: The Participatory Logic of Paul’s Gospel. In Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology, edited by Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harink, 165–82. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012.

Chapter 2: Incarnation as Mimetic Participation in Philippians 2:6–11. Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 1 (2010) 1–22. Used by permission of Pennsylvania State University Press.

Chapter 3: Strengthening the Ego for Service: The Pastoral Purpose of Romans 7:7–25. In Dying with Christ—New Life in Hope: Romans 5,12—8,39, edited by John M. G. Barclay, 137–64. Louvain: Peeters, 2021. Used by permission of Peeters.

Chapter 4: Oneself in Another: Participation and the Spirit in Romans 8. In In Christ in Paul: Explorations in Paul’s Theology of Union and Participation, edited by Kevin Vanhoozer et al., 103–25. WUNT/II. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014 / Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018. Used by permission of Mohr Siebeck Tübingen and Eerdmans and the editors.

Chapter 5: Love’s Folly: Love and Knowledge in 1 Corinthians. Interpretation 72 (2018) 7–16.

Chapter 6: Unveiling Death in 2 Corinthians. In The Ways That Often Parted: Essays in Honor of Joel Marcus, edited by Lori Baron et al., 79–101. Early Christianity and Its Literature 24. Atlanta: SBL, 2018. Used by permission of SBL.

Chapter 7: "‘The Custody of Hope’: The Resurrection of the Dead and Christian Existence." In The Finality of the Gospel: Karl Barth and the Tasks of Eschatology, edited by Kaitlyn Dugan and Philip Ziegler, 45–66. Studies in Reformed Theology 43. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Used by permission of Koningklijke Brill NV.

Chapter 8: The Empire of Illusion: Sin, Evil, and Good News in Romans. In Comfortable Words: Essays in Honor of Paul F. M. Zahl, edited by John D. Koch and Todd Brewer, 3–21. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013.

Chapter 9: Imitating Christ Imitating Us: Paul’s Educational Project in Philippians. In The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays, edited by J. Ross Wagner et al., 427–51. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. Used by permission of Eerdmans and the editors.

Chapter 10: Bodies, Agency, and the Relational Self: A Pauline Approach to Psychiatric Drugs. Journal of Christian Bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality 24 (2018) 288–301. Used by permission of Oxford University Press.

Chapter 11: Autism, Communication, and Connection in Light of Paul’s Anthropology. This is a slightly revised version of Communication, Agency, and the Relational Self in ASD and the Letters of Paul. Journal of Disability and Religion 25 (2021) 427–50. Used by permission of Taylor and Frances.

Chapter 12: Christian Experience and Paul’s Logic of Solidarity: The Spiral Structure of Romans 5–8. First published in Biblical Annals 12 (2022) 233–53; reprinted in Biblical Anthropology: A Message for Contemporary People, edited by Marcin Kowalski. Krakow, Poland: Wydawnictwo WAM, 2023. Used by permission of Wydawnictwo WAM.

Excerpts from Beloved One by Craig Romkema are reprinted by permission of Jessica Kingsley Publishers Limited.

I Was One of Them, by Tito Mukhopadhay, is reprinted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.

PART ONE

Exegetical and Theological Investigations

chapter 1

Apocalypse and Incarnation

The Participatory Logic of Paul’s Gospel

As appropriate in a collection of essays that circle around the topics of Paul’s apocalyptic theology and its implications for human flourishing, this opening chapter begins by engaging with the work of J. Louis Martyn, who was at the forefront of apocalyptic interpretations of Paul. Like very many others, I owe an incalculable debt to Martyn, who would no doubt have scoffed at such a statement, because, as he repeatedly reminded us, there is no quid pro quo in the arena of God’s grace in Christ; everything is gift, and therein lies the power of the good news. Nonetheless, there may yet be a happy overflow of gratitude returned to God for the gifts bestowed through God’s servants.

¹

Martyn insistently proclaimed Paul’s gospel, in which the uncontingent, prevenient, invading nature of God’s grace shows God to be the powerful and victorious Advocate who is intent on the liberation of the entire race of human beings.

²

That brief statement encapsulates in a nutshell Martyn’s understanding of the apocalyptic character of Paul’s gospel. God’s invading grace is the power that Paul saw in the cross, the event in which the name Immanuel was enacted: ‘God with us.’

³

Martyn’s own work invites us to think theologically about Paul’s letters, and to do so in the sovereign presence of this crucified God.

This opening chapter extends just such an invitation as well, inviting us to explore the theological implications of the claim that the cross is the enactment of God with us, which in turn sets the stage for subsequent considerations of Paul’s presumption that human beings are constituted in relationship with God who dwells among them. Martyn consistently identifies the cross as the singular, punctiliar apocalypse in which God invaded the enslaved cosmos with liberating power. For example, he writes, In the thoroughly real event of Christ’s crucifixion, God’s war of liberation was commenced and decisively settled, making the cross the foundation of Paul’s apocalyptic theology.

⁴

Here even the commencement of God’s redemptive war is located at the cross. Yet, as hinted by the reference to Immanuel, implicit in that apocalyptic event is the incarnate identity of the Crucified One. This presumption shows in Martyn’s own language of divine invasion and even more tellingly in his emphasis on the direction of the line of movement that always extends first from God to humanity, and only reciprocally as a divinely instigated and sustained movement from humanity to God.

⁵

Following these cues, in this chapter I will argue that Martyn’s depiction of apocalypse as divine invasion illuminates the incarnational logic implicit in Paul’s message of the cross. That logic in turn discloses the Pauline theme of participation in Christ as the good news of God’s full, paradoxical, and transforming solidarity with Adamic humanity, with important implications for Christology, soteriology, and ecclesiology. My argument will proceed as follows. First, the motif of divine invasion needs to be pressed further in its christological implications, to recover the centrality in Paul’s thought of Christ’s humanity as well as his divinity. This recovery, in turn, unites Paul’s language of righteousness (dikaioō, dikaiosynē) and the theme of participation within the action of God in Christ: Christ’s death on the cross is effectively for the human race, on our behalf, because it is essentially with and even in humanity, in the matrices that constrain and construct our present reality. Finally, through union with Christ who participates fully with and for the entire human race, even as it labors under the bondage of sin, the church discovers its mission as the vanguard of Christ’s apocalyptic redemption of the cosmos.

Participatory Christology

Martyn’s construal of Paul’s gospel is drawn from Galatians, a text that he reads as decisive testimony to the apostle’s distinctive apocalyptic outlook. Galatians discloses this outlook through the temporal markers that thread through the letter, from the present evil age (1:4) to the fullness of time (4:4) to new creation (6:15). Paul provides further evidence of his apocalyptic thinking by framing the situation inaugurated in Christ as one of cosmic conflict between the Spirit of God, given through Christ, and the flesh, which is associated with both the present evil age in general, and specifically with circumcision (5:16–26; 6:7–8, 13).

In particular Martyn notes Paul’s use of the verb apocalyptō in 1:16 and 3:23, and its cognate noun, apocalypsis, in 1:12 and 2:2. These are key texts for his interpretation of Pauline apocalyptic motifs in terms of God’s liberating invasion of the old age in which humanity is held captive. In 1:12 Paul insists on the divine initiative that broke into his life with the gospel, apart from human teaching. Indeed, the content of this gospel is not simply a set of teachings about Christ, because it is the apocalypse of God’s own Son in and through his own life (en emoi; 1:16). This divine break-in changed not only the course of Paul’s life, but Paul himself, as testified by his former victims: He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy! (1:23). Hereafter Paul’s actions will be guided by apocalypse and implicitly, therefore, not by human guidance, including direction from the church in Jerusalem. Thus, when he does go to Jerusalem to visit the church leaders there, it is not because they summoned him, but because God sent him according to apocalypse (2:2). Finally, in 3:23 Paul depicts the time before Christ as a time of confinement under the Law awaiting "the coming faith to be apocalypsed; the two parallel clauses that immediately follow explicate this coming of faith as the coming of Christ (3:24, 25). Shortly thereafter, Paul repeats and amplifies this announcement of Christ’s arrival on the human scene in terms of God’s sending of his Son: When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons" (4:4–5). As Martyn argues, in these passages there is a tight relationship between apokalyptō, the verb erchomai (to come on the scene), and the verb exapostellō (to send): From 2:16, 3:22–25, and 4:4–6, we see that Paul is referring interchangeably to the coming of Christ, to the coming of Christ’s Spirit, and to the coming both of Christ’s faith and of the faith kindled by Christ’s faith.

⁶

Taken together, these instances of apocalyptic language in Galatians set forth a picture of God’s initiative and dynamic presence through the advent of Christ, who dramatically comes on the scene with liberating power. In light of Martyn’s emphasis on the cross as the singular apocalyptic event, however, it is significant that none of these verses is explicitly about the crucifixion of Christ as the punctiliar apocalyptic event. This is not to say that the crucifixion of God’s Son is not central to Paul’s proclamation of the gospel—mē genoito! Yet, particularly in 4:4–6, Paul’s focus is on Christ’s human characteristics: Christ is the one whom God sent to be born of a woman, born under the law. This suggests that the redemptive power of that crucifixion is bound up in the human as well as the divine identity of the Crucified One.

Other verses where Paul speaks of God sending Christ display a similar emphasis on Christ’s incarnation as well as his crucifixion. In Romans 8:3, Paul proclaims: For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh. The condemnation of Sin in the flesh implies the crucifixion, but in the likeness of the flesh of sin—that is, fleshly existence in the realm dominated by sin—implies incarnation; as Morna Hooker notes, however we interpret these words, they are surely a reference to the incarnation, and an attempt to affirm that Christ shared fully in human experience.

⁷

Robert Tannehill further expands on the idea of incarnation in Rom 8:3, which

reveals an important presupposition of Paul’s gospel about Jesus’ saving death. God has sent God’s Son to participate in the human plight. The Son is sent in likeness of flesh of sin, which makes possible effective action against sin and a new kind of life for believers. In other words, atonement for sin presupposes the prior divine action of sending God’s Son to participate in the human situation, an act in which the Son identifies with humanity in its need.

⁸

Philippians 2:5–11 also discloses this Pauline presupposition through its extensive depiction of Christ’s humanity in the form of a slave and in the likeness of human beings. Operative here is the participatory logic in Paul’s thinking: God in Christ enters into the human condition at its most desperate point, under the dominion of Sin as a suprahuman power, and subject to condemnation and death. This divine movement in turn instigates and enacts a reciprocal human entrance into fellowship with Christ. Christ came among us in full partnership, suffering the depredations of sin and the judgment of death, so that in and with Christ we might be united with God in a life-giving fellowship.

Paul goes to rhetorical extremes to get this point across: For our sake God made him who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21); Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree’—that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith (Gal 3:13–14). As in Gal 4:4–5 and Rom 8:3, these statements begin with a clause depicting Christ’s immersion in the human condition, followed by a purpose clause in which the attributes or benefits of Christ are transferred to human beings. Calvin called this the wondrous exchange; Hooker calls it interchange in Christ; Tannehill speaks of an exchange of attributes and a reciprocal identification between Christ and humanity.

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The picture is not simply one of trading places, because Christ remains divine as well as human, and human beings do not take Christ’s place in the Godhead. So, for example, in 1 Cor 1:30 Paul names Christ as our righteousness and sanctification and redemption; in 2 Cor 5:21 we become the righteousness of God in Christ even as, paradoxically, this transformation takes place because Christ was made to be sin. Hence the interaction between Christ and humanity is one of full, mutual involvement in which neither party becomes completely absorbed by or identified with the other. At the same time, the liberating effects of Christ’s actions do presume a relationship of exchange or even substitution: because Christ becomes a curse, human beings are delivered from the curse; because Christ is made to be sin, although being without sin, human beings are delivered from Sin; because God condemned Sin in the flesh of Christ, they are liberated from its power so as to fulfil the just requirement of the Law (Rom 8:3–4). Christ both joins himself to humanity and stands in its place.

Participatory Redemption

In all these passages we see a participatory Christology that entails Christ’s full immersion into human, bodily existence such that human beings in turn find life in Christ. Yet another aspect of Paul’s participatory thinking is implicit in this Christology. He presumes that human identity is already and always constructed and constrained through being joined with and subjected to external powers. In Ernst Käsemann’s formulation, We are always what we are in the mode of belongingness and participation, whether as friend or foe, whether in thinking, acting, or suffering.

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Such belongingness entails vulnerability and the unavoidable qualification of one’s actions through the network of human and supra-human forces that permeates the cosmos. Belonging to the body of Christ connects one with the power of God, mediated through a moving and expanding network of saving relationship.

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But apart from the redemption accomplished through Christ, humanity belongs to what Paul calls the present evil age (Gal 1:4) and the body of death (Rom 7:24).

This anthropology is thoroughly participatory and