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If you were uplifted by the essay we pointed you to yesterday by Dr Jerome Murphy-O'Connor on Paul the Pastor, you will more than probably find this first of Dr Ian Elmer's 2009 commentaries on St Paul equally interesting and uplifting. What Dr Elmer is essentially looking at today is the Christology of St Paul — what did Jesus mean to St Paul and what was the picture of Jesus that St Paul was endeavouring to communicate through his writing and his missionary activities?

Who was Christ for St Paul?

We finished our commentaries last year with a brief discussion of Paul's doctrine of "justification by faith". Having examined this crucial concept, we might ask why Paul felt that one is justified by faith in Christ; or, put otherwise, who was Christ for Paul?

Paul draws on numerous allusions and titles for Jesus, the most obvious of which is Christ (Gk Christos) or Messiah. As a Jew this would seem to be an understandable development; but Paul's primary mission fields was among the Gentiles, or "the nations" as they were traditionally known. For such peoples, with no knowledge of Jewish eschatology, the term Christos would have been relatively meaningless and, even, perhaps too exclusive. After all, Paul's opponents were preaching a Jewish Messianic message that demanded that Gentiles become Jews and follow the Law.

Paul, therefore, says very little directly about Jesus' messianic status and chooses, rather, to speak of Jesus in much more Universalist terms. This does not mean, of course, that he completely deserts his Jewish heritage or to deny the ethnicity of Jesus. Contrary to what some scholars, like Rudolph Bultmann would claim, Paul's Jesus is not some pagan God-man. For Paul, Jesus is the "new Adam" — a designation that probably owes much to Jesus' own self-understanding.

Jesus, Son of Adam…

Of all the titles attributed to Jesus in the New Testament, the one title that Jesus himself seems to have embraced was "son of Adam" — or usually rendered "son of Man". Although the references in the Gospels to "son of Adam" are many, the most significant one is that found in Mark's "Apocalyptic Discourse" (Mk 13:1-37; cf. Matt 24:1-51; Lk 20:41-47), where Jesus speaks of himself as the "son of Adam", a messianic figure found in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel (7:13; cf. Mk 13:24-27; Ezk 12:1-20).

The potency of this imagery is all-the-more obvious when we consider that the reference to the "son of Adam coming on the clouds" (Mk 13:16) recalls Exodus (34:5; cf. Lev 16:1; Nm 11:25) where clouds indicate the presence of divinity. Thus, it seems that Jesus saw himself as an agent of God who would, in the endtime (eschaton), be invested with power and glory to establish God's reign of earth.

Driving the terminology back even further, we see the inclusiveness in the term "son of Adam" — it is no mere claim to be simply a Jewish Messiah; and it tells us something about the earliest Christian anthropology.

In the story of the Man and Woman in the Garden (Genesis 2:4-3:24), the original "being" created by God is a primal, genderless "everyone" (ha adam) who is born of the earth (ha adama) and the breath or wind (ruarch) of God.

The human person, the ha adam, in the creation narrative is perceived as a living nephesh — a word that is often translated as "soul". However, nephesh originally meant "throat", which not only signified human desire, thirst and hunger, but also that which distinguished humans from animals, the ability to speak and communicate.

A "human" in Jewish (and early Christian) thinking was literally a "living voice". Hence in our creation stories, humans were made in the imago dei — the image of the divine being whose "word" had brought forth all creation. After all, the breath of humans that plays on the vocal strings is borrowed from the ruarch of God.

From these insights flow the fundamentals of our concern with issues of social justice, redemption and salvation. To stifle the voice of any person or group of persons is to dehumanise them. To dismiss the voice of the marginalised, silence the dissenter, ignore the cries of the poor or muzzle the refugee is to deny them their birthright as images of God.

Herein lies the power of the original eschatological message of Jesus, the "Son of Adam" and the "incarnate Word of God". In Jesus' vision, salvation is worked out here in the material world, and is not simply a personal matter, but effects all of our relationships with others and with the world itself. Hence, Jesus' moral and ethical principles are not simply an "add on" to the salvific events of Easter. Indeed, we should probably reverse that understanding and see Christ's death as the result of his revolutionary program and Christ's resurrection as a vindication of his teachings. This is where a fresh appreciation of Original Sin, salvation and Pauline Christology all meet.

Pauline Christology…

Deriving from this early stratum of the Gospel traditions, Paul's "Kenosis" (emptying) hymn (alternatively the Carmen Christi) in Philippians (2:6-11) similarly suggests a connection between Jesus and Adam.

The first line of the hymn should read in translation: "…though he was in the form of God, he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped at…" (Phil 2:6). Here we find that Greek philosophy and Jewish theology are probably at play. The "form" of God bespeaks the Greek (Platonic) notion of a template that exists in the mind of the divine, the perfect "form" or model of any object that exists on the temporal plain. Thus Christ is being presented here as an "image" or a "reproduction" of the perfect, original model from which God intends to re-form humankind and human society. The question is: does Paul mean the model of God, or the model of some other "form" that exists in the mind of God?

The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (which Paul knew and used) may help us here. The Septuagint (LXX) uses similar language in Genesis (1:26) to describe God's creation of men and women as in the "form of God" — what we traditionally call in Latin the imago dei. Paul favours the motif of Adam as a foil for his understanding of Jesus as the "new man" (Rom 5:17) and the new "image of God" (Col 1:15) through whom life and righteousness was restored to a fallen world (1 Cor 15:22; cf. Rom 5:12-21).

This similarity in language suggests that in the Kenosis hymn Paul, as he does elsewhere, presents Jesus as the new Adam (the new template for the perfect human). And unlike the first template (Adam), the New Adam does not attempt to grasp at divinity — as the man and woman in the Garden did by eating of the fruit of knowledge (cf. Gen 3:2). Consequently, this New Adam was raised from the dead and exalted (Phil 2:9-11); while the original Adam was condemned to die.

Jesus as Template…

Returning to the story of the Man and Woman in the Garden, we find ourselves confronted with a very ancient anecdote that is meant to "explain" human suffering and limitation. It is not meant to be read literally — that God punished our first parents for their sin. Rather, this story "explains" that when relationships break down (i.e. relationships between god and humans, men and women, humans and nature) things go awry. Humans try to be "like gods", men dominate women, humans misuse and destroy the earth; and, as a result, we have societies that are beset by crime, immorality, and manmade disasters (like global warming).

In this view, the doctrine of original sin retains a strong mythic quality that continues to speak to human inadequacy and limitation — inadequacies and limitations that can, if unchecked by recourse to God, lead to sin, depravity and tragedy. The concept of original sin evolved out of our shared experience of being limited humans as well as our shared experience of being totally dependent upon God for redemption and salvation from those limitations.

Following this perspective, Jesus did not die for our sins, or because we had to be ransomed back from Satan, he died because sinful, inadequate and limited people could not or would not accept his teachings.

God raised Jesus from the dead as a divine vindication, or we might call it an imprimatur, on the Jesus' message – which presents us with a program to bring about a new earth that is not simply a matter of following concrete rules or merely attending to "spiritual" disciplines, but of embracing a new vision or "new mind" (metanoia) that turns all present relationships on their heads — hence, as Paul would say, bringing forth a new creation wrought by the New Adam.

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Photo Credits:
The headline image of St Paul has been sourced from an icon which you will find at: www.airmaria.com. Clicking on the other images will take you to the original source.

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©2009 Ian Elmer

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