The Glory of God in Paul’s Letters The great unmentioned subject at the heart of much of Pauline theology is God himself. Paul most fully celebrates the glory of God when he presents his gospel, not simply as a message of how individuals get saved from sin and death, but how God has brought Jew and Gentile together into one body. Romans 15:1–13 states this great aim: that Jew and Gentile alike “may with one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 15:6). Mutual welcome is mandatory within the body of Christ—Christians coming together across the boundaries of race, class, gender, and culture. Predicted in the Old Testament, Paul states that this has now been accomplished as people from across the world place their hope in the Root of Jesse who rises to rule the nations. Every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, he shouts in exultation in Phil 2:11: “to the glory of God the Father.” A theologian rooted in the early chapters of Genesis, Paul sees God glorified when human beings become truly themselves through the grace and power of the gospel. God created humans to bear His image in the world, and when that image is restored through the Image Himself—Jesus Christ—and through the work of the Spirit, the living God is glorified as He is reflected into the world. The sin of humans, whereby they lost the glory of God, is reversed when Abraham believes God and trusts that He can do what He has promised (Rom 1:18–25; 3:23; 4:18–21). That is part of the larger logic of Rom 1–4 as a whole, and why we must read the section in its entirety. This is the theme of God’s overarching plan of salvation for the whole cosmos, within which the saving plan for human beings is one—albeit vital—part. Through salvation of human beings in the present time, the larger plan is taken forward: just as it is through Israel that God intends to save the rest of the human race, it is through Jesus the Messiah that this Israel-purpose has been fulfilled. God called Abraham in order that through his family he might undo the sin of Adam. This is what the covenant is all about and why—as Moses rightly saw—God’s own glory is at stake when the covenant appears to have failed. After the golden calf incident, Moses asks God, “If you let us die in the wilderness, the Egyptians will hear of it; and then what will you do for your great name?” (Exod 32:11–13). The covenant God made with Abraham, within which subsequent covenants with Moses and with David are subsumed, is the vital missing piece. The covenant was there to deal with the evil in the world; in other words, to advance the glory of God the Creator. God’s covenantal action has a central, non-negotiable juridical aspect in two ways. It is part of God’s plan of salvation that He should judge and condemn idolatry, sin, and death. This is vital if God is to be glorified for creation and new creation, rather than being vilified because creation itself seems to have been a gigantic blunder. This is part of the Jewish and Pauline doctrine of the tsedaqah elohim—the dikaiosyne theou, God’s righteousness, or God’s being-in-the-right. Additionally, it is part of the covenant that through the gospel He should call men, women, and children to confess that Jesus is Lord and to believe that God raised Him from the dead. And they are called to declare, forensically, as though in a lawcourt, that they are in the right, that their sins have been forgiven, and that they are part of his true, single, worldwide family. This status will be reaffirmed at the final judgment. Embrace Paul’s covenantal theology and you get the juridical theme highlighted so that all can see it clearly. This is the means by which God will bring glory to his own name. Equally, the covenant plan has what may loosely be called a “participationist” aspect, and this too is part of the glorification of God. Abraham’s true family, the single seed God promised him, is summed up in the Messiah, whose role is to draw together the identity of the whole of God’s people. Here we arrive at one of the great truths of the gospel: the accomplishment of Jesus Christ is reckoned to all those who are “in Him.” This has been expressed within the Reformed tradition in terms of “imputed righteousness”—that Jesus Christ, having fulfilled the moral law and accumulated a righteous status, shares this status with all His people. I regard this as saying a substantially right thing in a substantially wrong way. Much post-reformation theology has sought to achieve by another route, what Paul describes in Rom 6. The Messiah died to sin; we are in the Messiah through baptism and faith, and therefore we have died to sin. The Messiah rose again and is now alive to God; we are in the Messiah through baptism and faith, and therefore we have risen again and are now alive to God. This is what Paul means in Gal 3 when he says that as many as have been baptized in to the Messiah have put on the Messiah, and that if we belong to the Messiah, we are Abraham’s seed: heirs according to the promise. There is a status reckoned to all God’s people, that is, all those in Christ: dikaiosyne—“righteousness,” or “covenant membership.” This covenant membership must be one in which the members have died and been raised. Until that has happened, they are still in their sins: “I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God; I have been crucified with the Messiah; nevertheless I live; and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:19–20). If this is what “imputed righteousness” means, then I not only have no quarrel with the substance of it, but insist on it as a vital part of Paul’s theology. I object, however, to the connotation that Jesus has earned something called “righteousness,” and that He then reckons this to be true of His people. Instead, the “righteousness” of Jesus is that which results from God’s vindication of Him as Messiah in the resurrection. His complete act of faithful obedience to death and His resurrection unveil the truth of what Paul means when he speaks of “God’s righteousness.” This phrase everywhere else, from the Psalms and Isaiah onwards, refers to God’s own righteousness as the Creator and covenant God. But when people misread key Pauline texts, the result is the marginalization of themes which have major importance for Paul. The mistake arises from the combination of the following: the Reformers’ proper sense of something being accomplished in Christ Jesus which is then reckoned to us, an overemphasis on the mediaeval category of iustitia, an underemphasis on Paul’s frequently repeated theology of our participation in the Messiah’s death and resurrection, and a failure to locate Paul’s soteriology on the larger map of God’s plan for the whole creation. Paul insists, with his view of “God’s Righteousness,” that the Creator of the world, who has established His covenant with Abraham and has now fulfilled that covenant in Christ, is Himself in the right—something He demonstrated decisively in Jesus’ death and resurrection. He will demonstrate it finally when He gives resurrection life to His people, rescuing the whole cosmos from bondage and decay to share the freedom of their glory. “We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God,” Paul says in Rom 5:5; and by the end of Rom 8 we know what he means. Soli Deo Gloria is the cry that arises from a fully creational and fully covenantal exposition of Paul. Paul’s view of God’s covenant plan focuses on Jesus as the Messiah in whom God’s people are summed up, and through whom, in their unity, they give glory and praise to the Creator God. He has made the whole human race of one blood, so that this view of the covenant and of God’s glory revealed through it, holds juridical and participationist theology together. In 1 Cor 15:20–28, as in Rom 8, Paul allows the argument to mount higher and higher, with Jesus already reigning as Messiah and Lord until He has put all his enemies under His feet, in fulfillment of Pss 8 and 110. When the task is complete, and death itself is destroyed, He hands over the kingdom to the Father, becoming subject to the Father, so that God may be all in all. For Paul, the sole glory of God is intimately bound up with the healing and restoration of the whole of creation, and with the rescue of human beings from sin and death so that they may be restored as God’s image-bearers. N.T. WRIGHT Barry, J. D., Heiser, M. S., Custis, M., Mangum, D., & Whitehead, M. M. (2012). Faithlife Study Bible. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 03:27:56 +0000
Trending Topics
© 2015