Paul’s notion of creation’s groaning for its own deliverance (Rom 8:22) is part of his sarcophobia, or fear of the physical realm. In Paul’s view, it has lost its divinely blessed status and has become “subjected to futility” and the “bondage to decay” (Rom 8:20–21). It has slipped into the darkness of fallen powers. The biblical fall, however, clearly contests this assessment. In the Genesis story, the fall pertains to human beings, not to nature. It is human beings whose distaff must bear their children in pain, whose fields challenge humankind with briars and stone and fertile soil that fallen humanity must now plow in sweat. Why? Because of human obstinacy, not because the adamah, or soil—which God created and from which YHWH fashioned human life—has suddenly lost its virility or become demon-possessed. The fault is purely due to humankind’s pride, doubt, and arrogant spirit. Pride and arrogance despoil the human attempt to live transcendentally, because pride and arrogance are foreign to transcendence. The earth itself is good; it remains wholly tov. Any harsh qualities associated with it redound to humankind’s opportunity to take them in stride while seeking to advance God’s kingdom on earth.
Again, to Paul’s credit, he acknowledges life’s crushing reach. Nonetheless, in his mind, “neither hardship, nor distress, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor sword can separate one from the love of God in Christ” (Rom 8:28). Embracing the Transcendent enables one to endure as well as conquer these hardships, whether of opposing spirits or of nature. Unity with Christ makes all this possible, while Christ’s intercession with God secures one’s deliverance from the incongruities of existence. This is all welcome and heartfelt news; nevertheless, it clearly reveals a focus different from the simpler summons of Jesus’ inaugural sermon. “The time [kairos] is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15). Jesus’ proclaimed kairos is a time for gratitude and action, for joy and progress, and for personal accountability, however helpful asceticism and religious quiescence are to the human spirit and no matter how distant or near the kingdom of God might be. Human beings are still who they are: existential selves whose past and present consciousness is enfolded into the heart of God even while upholding their unique individuality.
Luther captured this when he rightfully concluded that Christians are simultaneously sinful and justified. Their sinfulness is forgiven and their brokenness mended by the wounds of Christ, but they remain uniquely who they are, which leads to the following question: Was Paul too eager for a transformation that would lift one out of this morass? Is that why the ascetic world of Platonic forms—whether he knew of them directly or indirectly—appealed to Paul as applicable to the efficacy of Jesus’ cross and resurrection? Is it possible—though Pauline scholarship is swift to reject it—that in his cultural subconscious, Paul thought of Christ as the biblical equivalent of a Prometheus or a Dionysus and thus the embodiment of that Universal Spirit or élan that saves humankind, even as Paul found Christ’s lordship superior to Augustus’, whom the Senate of Rome had designated as the Empire’s savior (soter) only four decades earlier? One cannot help but ask this question. Paul’s Christ comes to us as both human and divine (Phil 2:6–8), as a descendent of the house of David, yet as one who emptied himself of his divinity in order to become human. He is no longer just Israel’s long-awaited Messiah, but also the Savior of the world. Thus Paul’s ontological identity becomes inseparable from his spiritual union with the divine Christ, who, appearing in a particular human life, redeems and empowers Paul’s own life, though he remains captive to the flesh. However indebted Paul might have been to later Judaism’s apocalyptical understanding of the kingdom of God and its Son of Man, or Ancient One, a divine-human Christ makes sense only in a world that had already appropriated this concept and all its possibilities into its myths of dying and rising divine heroes. This is the ingredient that is so often denied by opponents of this position.
Life’s powers of darkness, however, did not end with the ascendancy of Christ’s triumph of the world. The end time had yet to come. The powers of evil that tempt human minds are not so easily toppled. Today we know them as facets of human choice, mirrored in the limits of human finitude, our DNA, belief systems, and habituation. One thinks of the late medieval period and the fact that Martin Luther’s famous hymn of Ps 46 is beset by the fear of the demonic: “For still our ancient foe dost seek to work us woe, his craft and power are great, and armed with cruel hate, on earth is not his equal.”
Nor did Calvin’s Geneva fare better. Few historians have cut through its darker legacy as powerfully as Paul Kriwaczek in his Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation. After describing the brutality and backwardness of the age, he writes:
That is not to say that John Calvin was at heart in any way a man of gentle disposition. He was not. In the first four years of the theocratic totalitarian tyranny he founded in Geneva, he had fifty-eight heretics consigned to the stake and seventy-six exiled: in one single year he had forty-three women burned as witches; during a three-month outbreak of plague he executed thirty-four unfortunates for “sowing the pest.” In 1553 he unforgivably sent to the pyre the brilliant Michael Servetus . . . though it is said that Calvin would have preferred a less brutal form of execution.13
Not to mention the hanging of witches in Salem during the reign of the Puritans in New England.
Luther, Calvin, and the founders of the Plymouth Colony were avid followers of Paul’s theology. Their love of Christ need not be doubted, nor need a more “enlightened” age condemn their Christian views. The point is that we humans are flesh and spirit, ru’ah and adamah, pneuma and sarx. Our existential complexity is inseparable from our past, our struggles of the present, and our anticipations of the future. It is very much one’s existential self that motivates one to embody the spirit of Jesus’ love, though confined in an “earthen vessel,” as Paul himself was forced to acknowledge in his moments of stark lucidity and self-reflection (2 Cor 4:7).
Transcendence has its healing balm with power to mend all ailing hearts. To deny this would betray the very power and comfort, direction and enlightenment that all religions seek. It would also neutralize the human heart’s own experience of the reality of the nearness of God that speaks to one’s deepest self. More than anything, this awareness captures the essence of Paul’s love of Christ, whose death and resurrection transformed his sense of God’s nearness into a reality and not just a hope or facet of Hellenistic idealism. In truth, Paul rightfully gave the world this vision of historical attainment in spite of the Weltanschauung that shaped his understanding of the phenomenon of transcendence. Celebrating Paul’s Christ Jesus and Paul himself as historical exemplars of the appropriation of the highest and holiest reality the mind can conceive is relevant to all time.
By way of critique, however, Günter Bornkamm took exception with much of the above. In his book entitled Paul, Bornkamm rejected any attempts to assess Paul’s Christ Jesus as a “concept of God” or the “idea of God” imposed upon the figure of Jesus.14 We have noted that Albert Schweitzer rejected the same temptation, observing that any direct appropriation of the divine was foreign to Paul’s thought and could only be achieved through a Mediator. Bornkamm’s work, however, was generated in the late 1960s as a culmination of the quest for the historical Jesus in Bornkamm’s day. Since Bornkamm’s period, the latest quest of the historical Jesus—as represented in the works of the Jesus Society and the scholars of the Five Gospels, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library as well as the Qumran scrolls, and in Crossan’s probing analyses of Jesus as sage and revolutionary—has brought new “evidence” to light in the role that gnostic, Platonic, and Roman imperialism played in shaping Christianity’s first-century views. Factors other than eschatology, on which Schweitzer launched his Pauline masterpiece, were at play. To these factors we must return, but there are philosophical considerations of Paul’s identity with Christ that deserve review and can enrich our personal search for fulfillment.