The gospel is not primarily concerned with a message. It is about the power of God that gives freedom and changes lives even now, and into the future. Writing to the Corinthians, who apparently were having second thoughts about the Gospel he had preached to them, Paul challenges their argument that the Gospel of the cross lacks wisdom. He reminds them of the time when he had been with them, saying “my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstrations of the Spirit and power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4 – 5). Paul understands that true faith cannot rest in the words of a human agent. Essentially, the Gospel is not wisdom as it is commonly understood. The faith that counts rests on the power of God to be righteous. The changes in the lives of those who have experienced the power of God are then reflected in the way in which believers conduct themselves in society. Writing to the Philippians, Paul advices them, “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Phil. 1:27). They are not being asked to give a worthy intellectual account of the gospel with cogent arguments and valid biblical foundations. The power of the gospel changes lives. Christians are expected to have a manner of life in society that reflects the splendor of the Risen Christ. That is the triumph of righteousness over sin that Paul, the peculiar apocalypticist, is primarily concerned with.
The author of To the Hebrews gives a magnificent description of the glory and the power demonstrated by God at Sinai — glory that brightened the skies with lightning and power that made the mountain shake. He finds in that event the precedent of what will take place at the future manifestation of glory and power when the present shakable creation is to be dismantled and the unshakable, eternal world is established with the heavenly Jerusalem on Mt. Zion (Heb. 12:18 – 28). Like the author of To the Hebrews, Paul refers to the glory and the power accompanying the giving of the law at Sinai. For him, however, the ultimate manifestation of God’s “transcendent power” (2 Cor. 4:7) has already taken place at the resurrection of Christ. The light shining on the face of the Risen Christ is the light that drove away the darkness “at the beginning.” The glory and the power that brought about the life of both the First Adam and the Last Adam now gives life to humans still living in the flesh and changes them from glory to glory till they attain to the glorious spiritual body at their resurrection from the dead. That is Paul’s Gospel.
II: Faith, Hope and Love
Modern scholarship has been debating for some time whether Paul was primarily a theologian or an ethicist. What was his primary interest when he wrote his letters? Was it to announce what God had done, or to point out how Christians should live? His letters usually begin with theological expositions and end with ethical admonitions. Did he write the first to establish the basis for the second, or did he write the second as corollaries of the first? When he paced about the room dictating to a scribe, was he trying to argue or to advise? In some significant ways the answers to these questions determine how one interprets Paul.
It seems to me that these questions are poorly framed because for Paul it was not a matter of either/or, but of both/and. That is why he considered faith, hope and love a trilogy (1 Cor. 13:13). When he wrote about them in To the Corinthians I, for example, he was both arguing and advising. Faith and hope may be thought to be exercises of the mind, while love may seem to be more a matter of the heart. Paul regularly thinks of the three as an indivisible whole. He does not give priority to faith, but ends by saying that the greatest of the three is love. Love takes its place as a crowning or a fulfillment of the other two. Faith and hope, moreover, should not be considered separately, as having their fulfillment in themselves. Faith has been reduced at times to the ability to affirm a proposition. This is the case, for example, in the Letter of James. If faith is to affirm that “God is one,” then the devils also have faith (Jas. 2:19). Hope, has been understood as expecting something without warrants. For Paul, Christian faith, hope and love are interlaced in a wonderful spiritual knot.
Since Paul’s time, Christianity has been conceived by some as an idea, as a theological construct, as a system of doctrines, as something to be considered and approved intellectually, as a way of thinking with which one is in agreement and one has adopted as a guide. Paul insisted that Christianity is a way of being and living. For him, human beings are an integrated spirit, soul and body (1 Th. 5:23). These aspects of being cannot be separated. Humans are integrated wholes. Any one of these three words, spirit, soul, body, can be used to refer to the whole person.
The mind does not operate in a vacuum. As it operates it expresses itself in a concrete environment through the body. Faith and hope may be thought as purely intellectual activities — but Paul says “Not quite!” Christian faith and hope cannot be apart from love because in such case they would lack accountability. Indeed, faith and hope are possible on account of God’s love, and are effective when they manifest themselves as Christian love, which can only be a concrete expression of faith and hope. According to Paul, Christian faith, hope and love abide together. Thus, Christians don’t live in the past affirming their faith in what God did in Christ, neither do they live daydreaming about the future final triumph of God’s righteousness. They live in the present, loving the world by being engaged with it.
The crucifixion of Jesus in Judea under Roman imperial rule was an execution, and, if the accounts in the gospels are to be believed, all those who witnessed it saw it as such. The resurrection of Christ did not have witnesses. All we have to go by are the reports of people who saw him alive three days later and afterward. As a matter of fact, life in this world has not changed much on account of what some Roman soldiers did in the environs of Jerusalem, and historians have not considered the action of those soldiers worthy of mention in their accounts of the Roman Empire. Faith and hope, however, are built on what happened then, and they have changed the lives of believers since.
Only faith may affirm that God acted in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Only faith can affirm that Jesus died “for our sins,” as the earliest Christian confession declares (1 Cor. 15:3). For Paul, to have faith is to appropriate God’s action in the past and make it one’s own. Only then the purpose of Christ’s incarnation becomes a reality in a human being. On the basis of faith a Christian can hope. The future offers hope to those who have internalized the cross and the resurrection of Christ. For Paul, hope presupposes faith. Faith has its object in the past. Hope has its object in the future. What one says about the future, if it is not going to prove a chimera, can only be affirmed with certainty on the basis of what the past has demonstrated about the one who promised what is hoped for. The Christian hope for life in the Age to Come can only be based on God’s past action. Christians live on the basis of their faith in what God has done and their hope in what God promised to do. As far as Paul is concerned, what God did at the cross and the resurrection was the fulfillment of his promise to Abraham. A promise is always a past event. One may expect a promise, but one does not have a promise until one has faith in the one who promised. Faith sees the execution of Jesus and the encounters with the Risen Christ as the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. That is the basis on which a Christian hopes for the fulfillment of the promise of the Day of Christ.
It is neither necessary nor healthy to live in the past or the future. Therefore, faith and hope by themselves are not enough. Life must be lived in the present. Faith, as said above, grasps God’s action in the crucifixion and the resurrection, things that happened in the past. Hope, anticipates the future triumph of God at the appearance of Christ in glory to be seen by all. Christians, however, must live in the present. Here is where love comes in.
The word “love” has become an abused concept. One hears of the love of wisdom, the love of sexual passion and the love of chocolate. Paul views love quite differently; for him, the love of God is the energy source for all divine action. Christian love is the power that transposes faith and hope into objective acts with consequences in the concreteness of the present. A melody that has been transposed to a different key remains the same but carries its message in a different