idiom foreign to the grammar of Paul’s texts. Specifying intra-divine relations may have been an eventual theological necessity, given the development of Christian thought and the
challenges posed to it by various detractors, but such a specification should not, simply for that reason, be allowed to determine the shape of Pauline exegesis. Others, however, have suggested that the trinitarian category of ‘relations’ may be just the sort of conceptual resource that is needed to rejuvenate a subfield (Pauline christology) long dominated by perspectives which seem unable to assimilate certain texts within their explanatory matrices.3
It is the purpose of this chapter to advocate for the latter position.
Toward that end, this chapter will explore a few select Pauline texts which appear to resist assimilation to the dominant paradigms of Pauline christology and to allow those texts, consequently, to pose some questions about ways in which the paradigms themselves might be reconfigured. The argument here will function as the first step in a reconfiguration that will not be complete without the next three chapters. In this chapter, a preponderance of texts, drawn from the undisputed Pauline letters, which demonstrate one half of a double
movement—from Jesus to God; from God to Jesus—will be discussed and their various
resonances with trinitarian theologies observed along the way. The half under consideration here will be those texts that move from Jesus to God, which is to say, those texts that interpret God’s being and action by way of ‘the Christ-event’. This will set the stage for the next two chapters, in which the primary texts which have been employed to create the dominant paradigms of Pauline christology—Philippians 2.6-11; 1 Corinthians 8.6; 1 Corinthians 15.20- 28—will be reassessed in light of the discussion here. If the exploration of texts in this chapter does, in fact, prove able to offer a genuinely new angle on familiar problems in Pauline
interpretation, then we should expect that that hermeneutical vantage point will open up fresh perspectives on other Pauline texts whose interpretation seems consistently to end in a standoff between ‘low’ and ‘high’ christologies.
1. Establishing Textual Parameters
3 Cf., e.g., the suggestions offered in Leander E. Keck, ‘Toward the Renewal of New Testament
Christology’, NTS 32 (1986): 362-77, although Keck makes use of ‘relational’ categories without recourse to trinitarian theologies.
The complex textual dynamics which this chapter will explore are generated by the way in which Paul’s God-language4 interacts and is intertwined with Christ-language.5 This
feature of Paul’s letters is well known, and it is not my purpose simply to rehearse this data.6
Neil Richardson helpfully classifies the range of this material under several headings, noting especially linguistic patterns that occur beneath, as it were, the level of the sentence: texts in which θεός and Χριστός share the same preposition (e.g., χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη ἀπὸ θεοῦ πατρὸς ἡμῶν καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, Gal 1.3); texts in which Jesus/Christ is the object of a verb governed by θεός (e.g., ἐξαπέστειλεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ, Gal 4.4); texts in which Χριστός in a prepositional phrase accompanies a reference or implied reference to God (e.g., ἡ χάρις τοῦ θεοῦ τῇ δοθείσῃ ὑμῖν ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, 1 Cor 1.4); texts in which θεός, usually in a prepositional phrase or in the dative case, follows or expands on a reference to Christ (e.g., Χρίστος… ὁ δοῦς ἑαυτὸν ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν… κατὰ τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ πατρὸς ἡμῶν, Gal 1.4); and what Richardson calls ‘other’ juxtapositions, a miscellaneous category that he uses to collect occurrences that fall outside his other categories.7
Taking this material (the texts in which Paul’s God-language becomes intertwined with Christ-language and is determined by that intertwining) as read, this chapter will seek to uncover and better explain the theological import of the texts that Richardson has highlighted.8
Two overarching questions will guide this effort: 1) Do the conceptual categories of ‘high’ versus ‘low’ christologies—and, by implication, the wider christological discussions in critical
4 The formal features of Pauline God-talk are well known. The word θεός occurs 430 times in the
undisputed letters and 118 times in the so-called contested letters. Such a figure, of course, leaves out other references to ‘God’, such as personal pronouns and the implied subjects of certain passive verbs. In addition, θεός must be located among other titles: for example, κύριος, πατήρ, and various participial constructions (e.g., ὁ δικαιῶν τὸν ἀσεβῆ, Rom 4.5). For concise summaries of the data, see Halvor Moxnes, Theology in Conflict: Studies in
Paul’s Understanding of God in Romans (NovTSup LIII; Leiden: Brill, 1980), 15-16; Paul-Gerhard Klumbies, Die Rede von
Gott bei Paulus in ihrem zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 11; Gordon D. Fee,
Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), 25-7.
5 E.g., κύριος, ᾽Ιησοῦς, Χριστός, υἱος, etc.
6 See Fee, Pauline Christology, 25-7. Wilhelm Thüsing, Per Christum in Deum: Das Verhältnis der Christozentrik
zur Theozentrik (vol. 1; Münster: Aschendorff, 1965) locates the most prominent texts in which this interaction is visible, although his exegesis will be challenged at various points throughout this chapter.
7 Neil Richardson, Paul’s Language About God (JSNTSup 99; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 256-
73. I have chosen to omit mention here of Richardson’s sixth heading, ‘God is Defined by Reference to Christ, and Christ is Defined by Reference to God’, a category Richardson describes as dealing with ‘relational words’ (his emphasis). Since a certain definition of ‘relations’ and ‘relational’ is precisely what the present chapter seeks to articulate, I will not take Richardson’s definition as straightforward or uncontestable.
8 This delimiting aim will determine which of the myriad exegetical issues will receive sustained
treatment. Since trinitarian theologies will serve as our exegetical ‘prompts’ and interlocutors, not all exegetical debates will be entered into or even touched on.
NT theologies that make use of these conceptual categories and give them their force—enable a penetrating grasp of this material?; and 2) Does the conceptual category of ‘relations’ in trinitarian theologies—and the wider matrix of trinitarian reflection within which that category of ‘relations’ finds its rationale—offer hermeneutical assistance in the attempt to explain the dynamics found in these texts?
2. Texts in which God is Identified by Actions Done by/to/in Jesus