Paul

by N. T. Wright

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  Timothy’s arrival brought news from Thessalonica, and this resulted at once in the outpouring of relief and affection that we know as 1 Thessalonians. The letter is famous for many reasons, and those who date Galatians much later than I do see it as the first of Paul’s letters, or at least the first to survive. In any case, the tone is completely different from the frantic alarm of Galatians. Nothing has gone wrong in the Thessalonian church; they are holding fast in the face of persecution; and Paul is proud of them, pleased with them, mightily relieved that they have not given in to the pressure of violent opposition. He reminds them of how it all began, with his visit, the sheer power of the gospel itself, which transformed their lives, and the strange combination of suffering and joy that they saw in him and then experienced for themselves. Timothy and Silas (or Silvanus, as he calls him in the letters) have reported that news of the Thessalonians’ newfound faith in the One God and loyalty to Kyrios Iēsous has radiated out into the whole of Greece, into both Macedonia in the north and Achaea in the south.

  Paul’s summary of the rumors that had gone around the country are telling. They include the way the Thessalonians had welcomed him personally and received his message and the way they readily “turned”—Paul uses the word we would think of as “convert,” “turn around”—from idols “to serve a living and true God.”5 Clearly the heart of it was the Jewish message over against the practices of the pagan world. The results would be visible on the street. People would notice (“You know that family three doors down? They haven’t been to a single festival all month!”). But the reason this ancient Jewish message now had power to change pagan hearts and lives is because of what had happened through Jesus: the power of the idols had been broken. If we ask Paul the question historians always want to ask, taking the long view, as to why this unlikely message achieved such remarkable success, his own answer would undoubtedly include this point.

  Through this victory, Jesus had established the new world order, and he would return to complete the work. Paul reminded his hearers that, as part of his message, he had explained that the One God would do what scripture had long promised and indeed what Paul had said to the surprised judges on the Areopagus: this God would sort the whole world out once and for all. On that day, when all human corruption and wickedness would face “anger and fury” and “trouble and distress,”6 those who had turned away from idols would be rescued by Jesus himself.

  Paul then ruminates on the deep relationship that had begun in those early days and that continued in the all-too-short time he was with them. It had been time enough, though, for him to be both a pastor and a teacher, a model of the new way of life both in his manual labor to provide for his own needs and in his own personal life:

  You are witnesses, and so is God, of our holy, upright and blameless behavior toward you believers. You know how, like a father to his own children, we encouraged each of you, and strengthened you, and made it clear to you that you should behave in a manner worthy of the God who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.7

  This reminds us, as Paul is writing from Corinth, just what a challenge he faced in city after city. It is hard for any Christian worker today in all but the newest mission fields to imagine this. After two thousand years, most people in most cultures have at least a sketchy idea of what a Christian way of life might be, at least in theory and allowing for cynicism about actual Christian practice. But when Paul arrived in a new town, there was no expectation. Nobody had the slightest idea that there was a new way of life suddenly available, let alone what it might look like. Paul had to model it from scratch. He had done so, and he was naturally overjoyed that it had worked; they were copying him, not least in facing up to suffering. He was overflowing with joy and clearly regarded the Thessalonian church as a pinnacle of his life’s work so far:

  When our Lord Jesus is present once more, what is our hope, our joy, the crown of our boasting before him? It’s you! Yes: you are our glory and our joy.8

  One wonders what the people in the Corinthian church, among whom Paul was writing this, might have thought of it. Were they coming a poor second in his favors? But perhaps—and this may be an important insight into Paul’s understanding of his own work—the Thessalonian church was particularly special to him precisely because he had been there so briefly. He had not had time to settle down and manage its growth in faith. It had all happened so fast that he really couldn’t claim any credit for it all, even had he wanted to; the gospel did its own powerful work, since it was after all God’s own word at work in people’s hearts.9 So when he looks back, he sees the church in Thessalonica, thriving now in the midst of suffering, as the great sign that the true and living God is indeed at work through the word of the gospel. It is one thing to believe that this happens, as Paul obviously had already believed for a long time by this time. It is another thing, out in strange territory, to discover it so obviously happening despite adverse circumstances. This letter, written in the early days in Corinth, resonates with faith reaffirmed and hope strengthened.

  There are three matters about which Paul is eager to say more. Each of these will be important—and more than important—in Corinth, and here we get an early taste of them. It looks as though these are issues that were bound to come up precisely because the early Christian worldview was so radically different from anything people had imagined before.

  If we make a list of three topics beginning with “sex” and “money,” we might expect the third to be “power,” but in this case it is the parousia, the “appearing” of Jesus. The first two are obvious, but need to be stressed. Sexual holiness is mandatory, not optional, for followers of Jesus.10 What that means in practice Paul will later spell out in his first letter to Corinth. But already the reason for this rule is made clear. Unbridled, crazy, and inflamed lust is a sign that one does not know God. Sexual holiness isn’t just a “rule,” an arbitrary commandment. It is part of what it means to turn from idols and serve the true and living God. It is part of being a genuine, image-bearing human being. Paul will emphasize the same point again in the later letters Ephesians and Colossians, but it is already crystal clear in this passage, however briefly stated. Clearly Paul often had his work cut out to give pastoral help to people who heard what he said, but found themselves still stuck in long-lasting habits of life. But at the end of the day a clean break had to be made.

  Money was part of Christian discipleship from the start. Paul had agreed with the “pillars” in Jerusalem that he would go on “remembering the poor”; that was one of the signs of the new community that would carry forward as an identifying mark for centuries to come. For Paul this was simply the outworking of “love,” agapē. That was never simply about feelings, but about mutual support, first of all within the family of Jesus-followers 11 and then, as far as ability allowed, to the larger world (note the repeated emphasis on “good works” in the wider community in the letter to Titus). It is noticeable that here and then particularly in the second letter to Thessalonica, Paul is already dealing with the second-order problems that arise in any community known to make generosity a way of life: there must be no freeloading, no sponging. Jesus-followers must “behave in a way which outsiders will respect, and so that none . . . may be in financial difficulties.”12 Sex and money are important, but they are not to be worshipped. Sexual purity and financial generosity were to be built into the Christian DNA from the start.

  An altogether more complicated issue concerns the parousia, or “royal presence” or “manifestation,” of Jesus. Clearly it was always part of Paul’s message that the kingdom, on earth as in heaven, had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection, but it needed to be completed, and that would happen at Jesus’s return. But what language could he use to get this point across to people in different cultures, with different worldviews and metaphysical assumptions? Paul was heir to the long Jewish tradition of richly metaphorical language to speak of the ways in which the li
fe and power of God’s realm (“heaven”) would impinge on the life and reality of the human sphere (“earth”). His hearers may not have been so familiar with it, just as many people today find this language alien or incomprehensible (or, perhaps worse, assume they do understand it when clearly they do not). And Paul was not just writing about a theoretical question. There was a pressing pastoral need.

  The presenting problem in Thessalonica was Paul’s teaching that Jesus, who had already defeated death, would return to complete the job. At least some of his hearers had gained the impression that none of them, having come to faith, would die before that time. So now that some of them had indeed died, they wondered if the whole thing was a mistake.

  This draws out of Paul something he obviously hadn’t said when he was with them, though it builds on things that he had believed long before. His ways of expressing things develops over time, no doubt partly as he discovers which lines of exposition his hearers can grasp easily and which ones they tend to misunderstand. But at the heart of it he is teaching non-Jews to think Jewishly and teaching both non-Jews and Jews to think in the Jewish way as radically modified by Jesus. This is a difficult double task. It involves nothing short of that hardest conversion of all, the conversion of the imagination. But that is what is required if people are to understand where they are and who they are as the family of God.

  As I said when discussing the Epicureans and Stoics, the ancient non-Jewish world did not have much of an “eschatology,” a sense of time going somewhere, a sense of history having an ultimate purpose that would eventually be realized. The Stoic idea of a once-in-a-millennium conflagration is not the same thing, since that is part of a cycle. The only other serious “eschatology” in Paul’s world was, tellingly, the one offered by the new imperial ideology, which had revived a much older idea about a sequence of “ages,” starting with gold and working down to base metals. (A variation on this is found in the sequence of four metals in the statue dreamed of by Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2.) Now at last, sang the Augustan court poets, the golden age has returned! The imperial propaganda machine, featuring some of the greatest poets and architects of the day, relentlessly put out the word that with Augustus Caesar history had reached a surprising but joyful new day.

  That was, no doubt, an exciting message for those who could glimpse, as many could not, the possibility that they might benefit from the rule of Rome. It was certainly a new idea for many who had lived in a world largely without hope except on the lowest personal levels. But for Paul all this was simply a parody of the truth. The real “golden age”—not that he called it that—had begun when the Messiah had defeated death and been raised from the dead. So—back to the Thessalonians’ question—what should one think about believers who had died before the Lord’s return?

  It is significant that Paul is writing about this while in Corinth, because it is in the two letters to Corinth later on that he gives the fullest account of these important matters. But here in 1 Thessalonians he makes a start. Speaking pastorally, Paul distinguishes between two different types of grief.13 He tells the Thessalonians that they do not have the hopeless kind of grief, the bleak, dark horror of loss with no mitigating circumstances or beliefs, but rather a hopeful grief, which, although there is still the tearing, wrenching sense of loss, has within it the strong and clear hope of reunion. Paul doesn’t say exactly when the reunion will occur, because that’s not where he wants the focus to be. The point is that all will in the end be together “with the Lord.”

  To make this point he uses three quite different images. First, he recalls Moses coming down the mountain accompanied by the sound of a trumpet, suggesting that Jesus will appear in like manner coming down from heaven. We should not make the mistake of supposing that Paul thought “heaven” was literally “up there,” a place within our space-time continuum. Ancient Jews were quite capable of using the language of a “three-decker universe” without supposing it was to be taken literally. Heaven (we might say) is a different dimension of reality, not a location within our dimension. Second, he recalls the image from Daniel 7 of “one like a son of man coming with the clouds” from earth to heaven, vindicated at last after suffering, exalted to the place of sovereign rule and kingdom. Even so, he says, those who belong to the Lord will be exalted like that, vindicated, sharing the Lord’s throne. Third, he recalls what happens when an emperor or grand official pays a state visit to a city or province. The leading citizens, seeing him coming, go out to meet him in the open country in order then to escort him royally into the city. Like that, those “who are alive,” he says, will “meet the Lord in the air.” How else can he describe the coming together of heaven and earth? The point is not that people will be snatched away from earth and end up in “heaven.” As we see frequently in his letters, that is never Paul’s view. The point is that heaven and earth will come together14 and those who belong to the Messiah will be part of it.

  The one “literal” statement in this text is the central and important one—the Messiah’s people who have already died will rise first.15 Those who have died while believing in Jesus are safe in his presence, and they will be raised when he appears. Then all these other things will happen too. Each time Paul returns to this topic, he says it a little differently. But once we grasp how the imagery works, the underlying sense is always the same.

  A different image, though, challenges the Thessalonians with another echo of imperial propaganda. The Lord will come like a midnight robber, just when people are saying “peace and security.”16 Who in that world was claiming to offer “peace and security”? The Roman Empire, of course; it proclaimed, on coins and other symbols, that with the rise of the empire the whole world was now “safe.” It was a lie, of course, a classic piece of political propaganda, comparable to the lies exposed by the prophet Jeremiah.17 The sequence of awful emperors—Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero—was bad enough, but then there came “the year of the four emperors” (AD 69), when the whole Roman world seemed to go into prolonged convulsions once more. No “peace and security” there. Paul’s answer to the Roman boast is once more to teach the converts to think Christianly about time itself:

  You are not in darkness. That day won’t surprise you like a robber. You are all children of light, children of the day! We don’t belong to the night, or to darkness. . . . We daytime people should be self-controlled. . . . The Messiah . . . died for us, so that whether we stay awake or go to sleep we should live together with him.18

  Followers of Jesus, then, must get used to living with a form of theological jet lag. The world all around is still in darkness, but they have set their clocks for a different time zone. It is already daytime on their worldview clock, and they must live as daytime people. This is one of the greatest challenges Paul faced: how to teach people who had never thought eschatologically that time is going somewhere and they must learn how to reset their watches; how to teach Jews who had thought the ultimate kingdom was going to come all at once that the kingdom had already broken in to world history with Jesus, but that it was not yet consummated and wouldn’t be until his return and the renewal of all things.

  This is a more familiar challenge to us in the modern West, though it isn’t always thought of in this way. From time to time politicians and philosophers proclaim that the world entered a great new day with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This, they say, is a new saeculum, a different “age” of world history, and the world must learn to live in the light of it. But, they often complain, things aren’t working out as well as they should. Not everyone has woken up to the brave new world we thought was arriving. This is a particular problem for those who saw the French and American Revolutions of the 1770s and 1780s or the Russian Revolution of 1917 as ushering in some kind of new time. What happens then? How do you live between the supposed arrival of the new day and its actual implementation? That is a good question, and it only arises, we may suppose, because the ideals of revolutionary Europe, not least those associated with Kar
l Marx, were themselves echoes or even parodies of Jewish and Christian eschatology.

  That is a story for another time. But we note that Paul, writing to Thessalonica while living in Corinth, would have been very much aware that one of his prime tasks was to teach his churches to think of God’s coming kingdom in this two-stage way. Knowing what time it was would be crucial for how they would then live. In fact, though the question of the Lord’s “royal appearing” (parousia) might seem to be quite unrelated to the earlier questions of sex and money, they are all of a piece. If you are already living in the new world, there are new ways of behaving.

  The question of when Jesus would return and what that event would look like is the main focus of the second letter to Thessalonica, probably written from Corinth not long after the first one. Since Paul in effect includes Silas (Silvanus) and Timothy as coauthors, the probability is that it dates from later on in this first visit to Corinth, perhaps sometime in 51. Suffering and judgment dominate, the present suffering of the church and the coming judgment in which God will sort everything out at last.