A Pauline Philosophical Theology

Basic assumptions 

1. Jesus’s key teaching is that both of the following are true and they effectively amount to the same thing: we should love and trust in God, and we should actively and gratuitously love one another.

a. All the other key teachings flow from the great commandment:

i. We should not judge one another. 

ii. It is permissible and even good/necessary to transgress social boundaries and norms in some cases.

iii. Concerns about purity and piety are often misplaced.

iv. We should care not for wealth or power.

v. We should anticipate and prepare for a time when the love of God will reign on earth as it does in heaven—and let it reign within us now.

2. The disciples of Jesus recognized that through his teachings and his behavior – or their experiences of them – they were renewed and felt hopeful. 

a. They felt this way even though they did not know, understand, or in some cases even anticipate that he was “the savior of the world,” as later Christ-followers would put it. 

The existential-legal problem of sin

3. This (2) suggests that there was a lived, existential problem in the lives of the people who would become his disciples, which Jesus addressed, at least in part, in his life and ministry. 

4. The lived, existential problem that characterized Israel at the time and is endemic to humanity as such is that death and condemnation constitute the horizon of our being. 

5. Death and condemnation constituted the horizon of a people’s being insofar as: 

a. they conceive of themselves as sinful (as “missing the mark,” lacking, or failing);

b. their being justified or worthy under the law is conditional on not being sinful;

c. the law demands atonement when violated;

d. there are innumerable ways in which a people can sin or fail, so much so that no people can claim to be perfectly justified; 

e. therefore, every people stands in need of atonement; no people will ever fully secure its own justification or sanctification.

6. Rationale for (5.a.): To be aware of our sinfulness we must be cognizant of being subject to a law.

a. To be consciously aware that one has sinned by doing some action x, one must be aware of a prohibition against doing x.

i. Prior to receiving or understanding a prohibition, one cannot sin in the fullest sense of the term.

b. A set of obligatory prohibitions against doing various actions is called a law.

i. The Torah or Mosaic law refers to the prohibitions and commandments put forth in the Pentateuch. Many of the precepts of this law can only be understood by having been revealed and taught, though the Mosaic law also reinforced precepts of natural law.

ii. The precepts of “natural” law are the prohibitions revealed by reflecting on our very nature.

c. Everyone (both Jew and gentile) of ordinary reflective capacity is aware of the demand of law. 

i. Jews have special access to the Torah.

ii. Everyone has access to natural law.

iii. Anyone living within a structured community has access to that community’s posited law.

7. Anyone who conceives of natural law as a subspecies of the divine law ipso facto recognizes themselves to be subject to an  infinite demand. This is doubly true if one thinks that laws that go beyond the natural law have been divinely revealed.

a. This would have included just about everyone, except perhaps people like the Sophists who thought laws were simply social constructions.

b. It was acutely true of the Jews and Samaritans, as well as those gentiles who, though not Jewish, congregated with rabbis and learned the Torah. 

8. So, drawing together (5)-(7), in relation to the infinite demand of the law, Israelites ought to conceive of themselves as in a persistent state of sinfulness and they should concede that tribulation and death is warranted for their failure. 

9. The only thing that could appease the infinite demand of the law (whether actual or perceived) is a sacrifice of equal or greater magnitude.

Jesus

10. Jesus was the incarnation of divine love.

a. Over time, as they followed and learned from Jesus, his disciples increasingly understood that Jesus was “of God” in some sense: a new Elijah, a prophet, a messenger, a messiah, etc.

b. This provided an increasingly more specific object of their hope: namely, he would reform and set right Israel as a savior or messiah in the manner of David (understood in a political, social, and religious sense, not a cosmic sense). 

c. The incarnation  later became formalized in this fashion: (i) Jesus was the logos of God made flesh; (ii) the logos of God (i.e., the creative, ordering wisdom of God) is of God and is God. Hence, (iii) Jesus is God and of God.

11. Jesus was unjustly executed under the auspices of both civil and religious law for being the king of the Jews and a prophet of God the Father  (illegitimately claimed and laughable titles, in the eyes of his accusers).

a. i.e., He was crucified under the law – namely, the law of the Roman Empire (gentiles) – with the consent of and at the request of “Israel,” i.e., the Jewish people and especially its religious leaders. 

b. It’s important to underscore that Jesus truly died on the cross. 

c. At the time of and immediately after his execution, the disciples of Jesus understood his death under the law as having thwarted their expectations and hope for a life of renewal. This seemed to undermine their hope that there was to be a social, political, and religious messiah.

d. Following the resurrection event, this messiahship becomes understood in more cosmic terms. 

12. If both (10) and (11) are true, then God incarnate had offered Godself up as a sacrificial atonement for violation of the law. 

a. This was a gratuitous (unjustified) act of love, or mercy.

13. From (9) and (12), it follows that the infinite demand of the law had been decisively fulfilled, bringing an end to the institution of legalistic atonement through sacrifice. 

a. In taking on everything human, even death, the infinite God had given himself over as a sacrificial lamb, to use the Jewish imagery associated with sacrificial atonement. But precisely because he was not literally a lamb, but rather Emmanuel (God Among Us), there is no further need for the law to be satiated or satisfied through blood sacrifice. 

14. There is thus a form of justification that is non-legalistic and is not achieved through human effort, but rather by the direct action of God in history. 

Resurrection and discipleship

15. Some of those among Jesus’s disciples came to sense that although Jesus died, he was recreated, in some sense, taking a new form. 

15.a. When they gathered together, the disciples who had previously (following Jesus’s death) been dispersed and in a state of despair had an experience that God was not with them in the physical way Jesus was, but was with them as them, present in spirit (life-giving breath of the community itself). As such, they no longer despaired but felt their original hope radically transformed, taking on a new dimension and object. 

16. This new body is truly a body (corpus); specifically, it was the (now) real, spiritual body of Christ. 

17. This resurrected body of Christ is constituted by God of the beloved community, i.e., the disciples united as one. 

a. Within this corporate body, the individuals are united in such a way that they are transformed into members (metaphor to limbs, hands, legs, etc.) and Christ was their head, i.e., the logos: the creative, ordering wisdom. 

18. Membership in the body of Christ is achieved by God through the sacrament of Baptism, by which one participates in Christ’s death and resurrection.

a. The people of the body of Christ participate in Christ’s death – they die to their previous lives, which are existentially marked by despair and the death-drive – and they now participate in Christ’s resurrection (recreation). Literally, they are now living members of the corporate, living body that is God in the world. 

19. Membership is not achieved via human action per se: neither obedience to the law nor the ritualistic mortification of human flesh. 

a. Cutting of the body/flesh as an act of initiation is no longer necessary. It is also not sufficient to make one a member of the beloved community.

b. Disciplining the individual body/flesh by obeying the law is not the means by which one becomes a member of this new body.

20. Willingly becoming living members of the living God was reflective of a conscious trust that the demand of the law had been decisively fulfilled on the cross, and it amounted to consciously entering into and sharing in the vitality of the resurrected Christ.  

21. Hence, the Christ-followers were freed from the law in a very specific sense: they did not (and should not) obey the law out of fear, despair, or as a means of appeasing God or entering into communion with God.

a. God does not need appeasing. God’s giving of Godself to satisfy the demand of the law was demonstrative of this fact. 

22. Rather, the Christ-followers should be chiefly animated by the Holy Spirit that bound them together as living members of the living God. Acting in accordance with the law is to be a faithful response to God’s love, not the means of obtaining God’s love.

23. This holy spirit is agape. Indeed, agape is the very nature of God. This was what was finally revealed in and through the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.

a. God is simultaneously and in all respects three persons (from persona, which means mask, or the way in which one faces or presents oneself). That is, what might be understood as three ways in which God has been present to humans and the rest of creation are not actually three different modes of God, but all one and the same infinite God (one divine substance):

i. the transcendent, fundamentally unapproachable Father, which was chiefly how God was understood within Jewish religious consciousness and which was common to the pagan philosophers: e.g., the Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, etc. (Paul says of the Stoics that they worship the same “unknown God.”)

ii. the immanent, fleshy, and approachable Jesus (the person of God that comes to be referred to as the “Son”); and

iii. the spirit that is agape, which unites the members of the resurrected body of Christ. (This will come to be understood as the third person of God, which proceeds from the Father and Son as a “breath,” that is, something that animates and enlivens.)

24. While the fleshy Jesus had, in a sense, joined “the Father” in being transcendently removed from the earth, in a more important and profound way, Jesus/God remained present as a person who is open and accepting of all who come to and enter into him. (See the passage from Pope Benedict.)

24.a. Symbolically, Jesus’s “ascension” or transition into transcendent absence like/with the Father undercuts the traditional myths according to which the Accuser (the sultan, i.e., Satan) sat at the right hand of the Father. There was now a redeemer within the Divine who had displaced the voice of the accuser. 

25. Entering into communion with God is thus literally possible: one can undergo the death and rebirth associated with entering into the life of Christ. 

25.a. One can begin and pursue this life of divine communion and reasonably hope it will eventually become consummate (fulfilled).

26. Upon entering into the life of God, the appropriate response is to embody and enact agape to whatever extent is possible and always with an eye on trying to do so in new and better ways. 

26.a. The members of the resurrected body should seek to “outcompete one another in love.”

26.b. This is the point of all of Paul’s exhortations: he is seeking to shape the community/body into what it both is and ought to be: namely, an agapeic community. 

27. Proper religio (i.e., dispositional relation to the divine) consists in making of oneself a living sacrifice (or, more positively, a living gift) to others by gratuitously and without condition loving them (meeting them where they are at, being with them, rendering and receiving aid, mutually growing and developing, mutually reassuring each other of one's goodnes, etc.).