Transformation

The Heart of Paul's Gospel

David A. deSilva, Michael F. Bird

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781577995609
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

The gospel is often presented as little more than a "get out of hell free" pass. But is that all there is to it? What made it so compelling that the Apostle Paul would give up everything, enduring hardships and deprivation to preach good news? David deSilva argues that some Christians have unintentionally reduced the gospel to a message Paul would hardly recognize. The "gift of righteousness" is far richer than many of us have dared to imagine!In Transformation: The Heart of Paul's Gospel, deSilva examines the gospel message as presented in Paul's letters. He demonstrates that Paul had nothing less than in mind than the means to transform and renew all of creation--including ourselves. Prepare to let Paul's message of change and renewal transform your own thinking.

CHAPTER 1

Foundations for a Broader Understanding of Paul’s Gospel of Transformation

An important development in reflection on Paul’s theology was the formulation of “justification” and “sanctification” as two distinct categories for understanding Paul’s thought. In many systematic theologies, “justification” refers to the process of being made right with God, often specifically in the sense of receiving a verdict of “not guilty” (that is, being accounted as “righteous”) at the judgment, a verdict that is anticipated now on the basis of trusting in Jesus. “Sanctification” refers to the process by which we become holy (or begin to live out the holiness also imputed to us in our conversion). These can be helpful heuristic categories, and they also have the benefit of reflecting language that Paul himself uses in his own exposition of the gospel. These categories, however, can take on a life of their own, constraining our understanding of Paul’s writings rather than facilitating our encounter with Paul’s own conceptualization of the gospel. In the tradition of the Reformation, however, Scripture must always weigh more heavily than theological tradition. If the latter becomes the controlling force in interpreting the former, we have moved back into the dynamic from which the classic Reformers sought to free the Western church.

One of the less helpful results of the formulation of “justification” and “sanctification” as distinct categories is a tendency to regard the former as the more important when thinking about “salvation” and the latter as more important for thinking about “Christian living.” This is not always the case in theological traditions springing from the Reformation. The Anglican bishop J. C. Ryle, for example, makes the bold claim:

Both [justification and sanctification] are alike necessary to salvation. No one ever reached heaven without a renewed heart as well as forgiveness, without the Spirit’s grace as well as the blood of Christ, without a meetness for eternal glory as well as a title. The one is just as necessary as the other.1

When Paul himself speaks about “what counted” in God’s sight, he speaks about “being a new creation,” which Klyne Snodgrass says “for Paul meant a life of faith working through love [Gal 5:6], and outside the context of the debate over ‘works righteousness,’ this could even be described as a life of keeping the commandments of God [1 Cor 7:19].”2 In the eyes of Ryle and Snodgrass, what normally falls under the heading of “sanctification” remains very much in the center of the salvation that God seeks to bring about.

Some traditions are less insistent about the essential nature of sanctification, though they still affirm its importance as a demonstration of the quality of the faith that the believer possesses, i.e., as an indication that his or her “faith” is indeed “faith.” In the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion that form the historic confession of the Church of England, for example, “justification” and “good works” are treated as separate articles, with the latter contributing to the former only the demonstration of the quality of one’s faith as “true and lively.” The twelfth article (“On Good Works”) stresses the importance of such demonstration but not its necessity. The practical result is that “justification” can be too easily conceptualized apart from the idea of the transformation of the person.3 This is by no means the necessary result, but it is all too often the actual result, to which (as we saw in the introduction to this book) many “Romans Road” websites bear witness in their focus on justification (and that in a very limited sense!). At best this leaves sanctification entirely to follow-up and at worst neglects it completely.

I am increasingly of the opinion that Paul himself would have been troubled by the creation of these two categories as discrete stages in an “order of salvation” in the first place, especially where what falls under the heading of “justification” is privileged as the one necessary step in this progression. I suspect that a tendency like that of Martin Luther to speak of a more integrated whole would have been preferable for the apostle. According to Mark Seifrid, “because [Luther] regards justification as effecting the new creation, he is able to encompass the whole of the Christian life within its scope.… In contrast to later Protestant thought, in which salvation was divided up into an ordo salutis, it remains for Luther a single divine act.”4 The existence of justification and sanctification as distinct categories threatens to rend asunder what Paul joins together in his vision of a single, great process of God’s intervention in the lives of human beings.

Several observations, each based on multiple and often extensive passages from the writings of Paul, lead me in this direction. First, Paul speaks of our transformation as the goal of his preaching and of God’s intervention, not merely about our acquittal (whether initial, final, or both). Second, such transformation is essential, because God will not show favoritism in the judgment. Third, Paul clearly attaches conditions to our attaining God’s goal for us beyond settling upon a certain belief and making a certain confession, which has bearing on what “faith” means for Paul in such formulations as “justified by faith.” Fourth, Paul talks about “justification” as the result of having been brought in line with God’s righteousness and as a future experience of being acquitted at the Last Judgment on the basis of a life lived as well as an accomplished event of being reconciled to God after our estrangement in sin. Any assessment of Paul’s gospel must account for the connection between initial and final justification. Fifth, Paul also speaks of “salvation” as something we will enjoy or experience in the future, not merely as something already accomplished. Again, any assessment of Paul’s gospel has to take this whole range of usage into account. Sixth and finally, God expects us not just to “receive” his gifts but to make the use of and response to his gifts that show an appropriate assessment of their value—in this case, a life for a life! If these are indeed correct observations, as the following sections will seek to establish, then Paul understood God to be seeking to accomplish far more than many Christians realize and, as a possible consequence, allow to take place in their own lives.

TRANSFORMATION IN PAUL’S PROCLAMATION OF GOOD NEWS

As Paul reflects on God’s saving intervention in his own life, on the results of his having trusted in Jesus, and on his quest to be justified before God through the way opened up by Jesus, he writes:

I died to the Torah through the Torah in order that I might live to God. I was crucified together with Christ; it’s no longer me living, but Christ living in me. The life I’m living now in the flesh, I live in faith toward the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me. (Gal 2:19–20)

Paul speaks of a dramatic and real change in his life. As he looks upon his life, he sees that the person he was is no longer driving or shaping his being or his practice. Instead Jesus Christ himself has taken on flesh in a new way in Paul, making Paul into a new person—a Christ-directed person, an extension of Christ’s own willing, being, and doing. This, I would propose, is Paul’s description of the justified life. Indeed, the verses preceding these, namely Gal 2:15–18, provide one of Paul’s densest discussions of justification through trusting Jesus as opposed to shaping one’s life after Torah-prescribed practices.5 This description of the justified life is a description of a transformed life. The person brought in line with God’s righteousness is the person whose flesh Christ himself has taken on.

In a second passage where Paul speaks very personally about his desire for the righteousness found through attachment to Jesus as opposed to the Torah, he uses language even more closely reflective of transformation:

On account of Christ I have written off everything as a loss and consider it all to be sewage in order that I may win Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness attained on the basis of the Torah but attained through trusting Jesus—God’s righteousness attained on the basis of trust—in order to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being reshaped in connection with him (symmorphizomenos) into the likeness of his death, if somehow I might arrive at the resurrection from the dead. (Phil 3:8–11)

Two points are of special importance in this passage. First, becoming like Jesus, and especially being morphed into the self-giving obedience Jesus displayed in his own obedience unto death (see Phil 2:5–11), is a process integral and essential to knowing Jesus (that is, having any kind of relationship with him) and to being found righteous “in him.” Second, it is a process integral and essential to sharing in his resurrection (hence, entering into eternal life). This is fully in keeping with other statements by Paul suggesting that dying with Christ is a prerequisite to rising with Christ, language that Paul always uses with ethical implications—that is, that such dying means the transformation of our lives and practice (most notably in Rom 6:1–23).

Paul applies this language of transformation to his converts either as his own goal for them or as God’s overarching purpose for them in no fewer than four of his letters. In Galatians he is particularly exercised as he finds his converts succumbing to the arguments of rival teachers that perhaps Gentile believers really do need to become Jews through circumcision and other Torah-prescribed practices if they want to line up with God’s righteousness.6 At one point he exclaims, “My little children, with whom I am in labor again until Christ is formed (morphōthē) within you!” (Gal 4:19). This image, expressed when Paul is at a raw and emotional point because of what he believes to be at stake, suggests again that the most essential thing for Paul is that Christ take shape within his disciples, just as Christ had taken shape and taken on fresh life in Paul (Gal 2:19–20). In this moment, Paul reveals that his mission is not essentially about “winning souls” or “getting people off the hook at the Last Judgment.” It is primarily about working with people to surrender themselves to this work of God, this deep and fundamental transformation whereby their lives cease to be what they were and begin to be an extension of Christ’s own willing, being, and doing.

A similar image of God’s work in the new covenant emerges in Paul’s second surviving letter to the churches in Corinth.7 At the climax of an argument concerning the superiority of the new covenant to the covenant mediated through Moses—an argument that interestingly never uses the terminology of justification or works or even faith—Paul declares that “we all, gazing at the Lord’s glory with unveiled face [i.e., seeing his glory without a veil over his face], are being transformed (metamorphoumetha) into the same image from glory to glory as [something coming about] from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18). The Greek word translated as “we are being transformed” survives as a loan word in English as “metamorphosis,” and this very much captures Paul’s vision for what God seeks to bring about through the new covenant. When we trust Jesus as our deliverer and look to his death and resurrection as the means of our own forgiveness and welcome into a good eternity...