Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination

by Ben C Blackwell

  For δύναμις, see how the LXX translates יהוה צבאות (Yahweh of Hosts) with some variation of κύριε/-ος (ὁ θεὸς) τῶν δυνάμεων (2 Kgdms. 6:2, 18; 3 Kgdms. 17:1; 18:15; 4 Kgdms. 3:14; 19:20, 31; Ps. 23:10; 45:8, 12; 47:9; 58:6; 68:7; 79:5, 8, 20; 83:2, 4, 9, 13; 88:9; 148:2; Isa. 42:13; Jer. 40:12; Zeph. 2:9; Zech. 7:4; cf. LXX Ps. 32:6; 67:35; 102:21). See also 1 En. 20:1; 3 Bar. 1:8; Philo, Con. 171–72; Spec. leg. 2.45; Plant. 14; T. Levi 3:3. For ἐξουσία, see 2 Macc. 3:24; T. Levi 3:8. For ἀρχή/ἄρχων, see 1 En. 6:2–3, 7–8; cf. ἄρχειν, 9:7. ↵

  The juxtaposition of ἀρχαί (and perhaps δυνάμεις) with ἄγγελοι in Rom. 8:38 probably suggests all those entities are celestial beings. Cf. Eph. 1:21; 2:2; 3:10; 6:12; Col. 1:16; 2:10, 15. The probably-early-Christian Testament of Solomon makes mention of ἄρχων τῶν δαιμόνων (2:9; 3:5; 6:1; 16:5) and includes a striking reference to “the rules, authority, and powers” who “fly above” (αἱ γὰρ ἀρχαὶ καὶ ἐξουσία καὶ δυνάμεις ἄνω ἵπτανται, 20:15) and are identified as δαίμονες (20:14, 16). ↵

  Archibald Robertson and Alfred Plummer, The First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1911), 355; Hays, First Corinthians, 265; Ciampa and Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, 769–70. Wink (Naming the Powers, 50–51) and Thiselton (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 1232) believe these personal powers include impersonal structures as well. ↵

  This may even be how πᾶς functions in Eph. 1:21, where Christ is said to be seated ὑπεράνω πάσης ἀρχῆς καὶ ἐξουσίας καὶ δυνάμεως καὶ κυριότητος. While these and related terms refer to spiritual powers in Eph. 3:10 and 6:12, this is clear mainly because of τὰ πνευματικά and the modifier ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις, which are not appended to πάσης ἀρχῆς καὶ ἐξουσίας καὶ δυνάμεως in Eph. 1:21. Cf. Nijay K. Gupta and Fredrick J. Long, “The Politics of Ephesians and the Empire: Accommodation or Resistance?,” JGRChJ 7 (2010): 112–36. ↵

  See, e.g., Black, “Πᾶσαι ἐξουσίαι αὐτῷ ὑποταγήσονται,” 74; Martin Hengel, “‘Sit at My Right Hand!,’” in Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 119–226, at 164; Ciampa and Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, 768–69. This does not, however, preclude the influence of other texts or communal traditions, such as those suggested by de Boer, Defeat of Death, 114–20. ↵

  Lewis, So That God May Be All in All, 217. ↵

  Portier-Young’s model is indebted to Vincent Gabrielsen, “Provincial Challenges to the Imperial Centre in Achaemenid and Seleucid Asia Minor,” in The Province Strikes Back: Imperial Dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean, eds. Björn Forsén and Giovanni Salmeri (Helsinki: Foundation of the Finnish Institute at Athens, 2008), 15–44. ↵

  Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 192. ↵

  I am aware that the invasive nature of death’s reign (i.e., that it emerges from without) departs from the analogy. Still, I believe the similarities are instructive. ↵

  “[T]he new creation emerges from the old world through the Christian proclamation. Spirits, powers and dominions part eschatologically at the crossroads of the gospel.” Ernst Käsemann, “Justification and Salvation History in the Epistle to the Romans,” in Perspectives on Paul (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 60–78, at 67. ↵

  Käsemann, “On Paul’s Anthropology,” 25. ↵

  Cf. Stephen D. Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament, The Bible in the Modern World 12 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006), 122–23; Harrill, Paul the Apostle, 90. ↵

  No doubt Paul suffered as a result of his imprisonments (Phil. 1:18–26; 3:10; perhaps 1 Thess. 2:2), but it is striking that he focuses not on the inflictions he faces as a result of Roman rulers and guards, but on those coming from false teachers (Phil. 1:17). ↵

  Richard A. Horsley, “General Introduction,” in Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. R. A. Horsley (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997), 1–8, at 7. Cf. Edward Adams, Constructing the World: A Study in Paul's Cosmological Language, SNTW (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 241. ↵

  Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2:1311: “when Paul looked at the Roman empire he glimpsed the face of the Monster.” Wright is more confident about the influence of Daniel 7 on 1 Cor. 15:20-28 in idem, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 335-36, than in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1063–65, 1293n63. See also Joel White, “Anti-Imperial Subtexts in Paul: An Attempt at Building a Firmer Foundation,” Biblica 90, no. 3 (2009): 305–33, at 326–27. Christoph Heilig critiques this reading, arguing that Paul interpreted the fourth beast as the power of death, the “last” of God’s enemies (Hidden Criticism, 114–21). ↵

  Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2:1311. ↵

  Judgment of course will not extend, however, to believing rulers and magistrates (e.g., Erastus, Rom. 16:23). ↵

  “‘Who Hopes for What is Seen?’: Political Theology through Romans,” in The Unrelenting God: Essays on God’s Action in Scripture in Honor of Beverly Roberts Gaventa, eds. D. J. Downs and M. Skinner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 150–71, at 156. ↵

  15

  Plight and Solution in Paul’s Apocalyptic Perspective

  A Study of 2 Corinthians 5:18–21

  Jason Maston

  As many scholars recognize, 2 Cor. 5:11–21 is teeming with apocalyptic elements.[1] The passage is eschatologically driven: the death of Christ has initiated a new era, a new creation that is set over against the old creation (v.17). One key way in which these two eras are different is the epistemological criterion. The old age viewed things according to the flesh, while the new creation sees all things in Christ (v.16). The soteriological aspect centers on union with Christ, particularly in his death (v.15). Paul stresses in a variety of ways that God has initiated this new salvation.

  Yet, vv.18–21 have received little attention in the formation of apocalyptic readings. J. L. Martyn’s important essay, “Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages,” makes no mention of them, and in his book The Deliverance of God, Douglas Campbell devotes a mere page to this passage when he discusses the meaning of the righteousness of God in v.21.[2] Similarly, J. Christiaan Beker cites these verses a handful of times as cross-references, but has no discussion of them.[3] Why these verses have not received much attention is unclear, but one may venture a guess: their central theological claims sit in tension with the central ideas of what many consider to be an apocalyptic reading of Paul.[4] This, at least, was Käsemann’s conclusion.

  According to Käsemann, 2 Cor. 5:18–21 is a pre-Pauline tradition that Paul incorporates, but does not fully embrace. For example, he asserts that the idea that God does not reckon transgression (v.19), which he claims “makes the saving event evident in the forgiveness of the accumulated guilt of sin,” is foreign to Paul. He contends instead that Paul “lays the entire emphasis on liberation from the power of sin.”[5] Käsemann also questions whether Paul could have written that Christ “became sin”: “We must give careful thought to the question of whether on the basis of his conception of sin as a power he could say that Jesus was made sin for us, i.e., made the bearer of all earthly guilt.”[6] These reasons, among others, lead Käsemann to downplay the value of this text for formulating Paul’s theology.

  These reasons point to a particular understanding of the human plight that has become ubiquitous in the convention of reading Paul “apocalyptically.” According to this stream, the human plight is particularly enslavement to the cosmic powers of Sin, the Flesh, and Death. The corresponding solution, then, is not forgiveness, but a shift in lordship and the destruction of the Powers through God’s act in Christ. As Käsemann explains elsewhere, “for Paul, salvation does not primarily mean the end of past disaster and the forgiving cancell
ation of former guilt. It is, according to Rom. 5.9f.; 8.2, freedom from the power of sin, death and the divine wrath; that is to say, it is the possibility of new life.”[7] Importantly, for Käsemann, this account of the plight and solution (i.e., enslavement to and liberation from the Powers) is set against alternative configurations wherein the plight is linked closely with guilt and disobedience, and the solution is forgiveness.

  In more recent scholarship, this account of the plight has been developed most consistently and strongly by Martyn. Simply put, Martyn writes, “The human plight consists fundamentally of enslavement to supra-human powers; and God’s redemptive act is his deed of liberation.”[8] Like Käsemann, Martyn’s account of the plight is set in direct contrast with alternative claims that the plight is guilt and disobedience. He writes,

  God has invaded the world in order to bring it under his liberating control. From that deed of God a conclusion is to be drawn, and the conclusion is decidedly apocalyptic: God would not have to carry out an invasion in order merely to forgive erring human beings. The root trouble lies deeper than human guilt, and it is more sinister. The whole of humanity—indeed, the whole of creation ([Gal.] 3:22)—is, in fact, trapped, enslaved under the power of the present evil age.[9]

  This view can be seen clearly in Martyn’s interpretation of Gal. 1:4. Martyn contends that Paul takes up a traditional expression of Christ’s death (“[Christ] ‘who gave up his very life for our sins’”), but significantly modifies it with the explanatory gloss “so that he might snatch us out of the grasp of the present evil age.”[10] The tradition “identifies discrete sins as humanity’s (in the first instances Israel’s) fundamental liability; and it sees forgiveness of sins as the remedy provided by God.”[11] These ideas are “to a significant degree foreign to Paul’s own theology,” thus the significance of Paul’s gloss.[12] Here, Paul introduces a different plight, which is expressed succinctly in the phrase “present evil age.” “The present evil age” is this world ruled by the power of Sin. For Martyn, “sin” is not a reference to wrongdoing; rather, as Paul uses the term in the singular, it “is precisely a powerful, cosmic enemy of God, and an enemy of every human being.”[13] As a cosmic power, Sin wreaks havoc in its destructive reign over humanity and reduces humanity to enslaved victims.[14]

  The resolution to this problem of enslavement is not a renewed attempt by humans to live more morally acceptable lives. As enslaved victims/captives, they are incapable of enacting their own escape. Thus, similarly to Käsemann, Martyn insists that God initiates the liberation of humanity from the enslaving Powers when he invades the world in the event of the cross and the sending of the Spirit.[15]

  This vision of the plight as enslavement—and its corresponding opposition to the idea that the plight is directly about guilt and disobedience—has been powerfully defended by Douglas Campbell in his The Deliverance of God. Like Martyn, Campbell maintains that humans are enslaved to Sin and Death, which reveals itself in “an oppressed and somewhat agonized condition.”[16] This condition prevents humanity from being able both to act appropriately and even to diagnose its own condition, which then invalidates the suggestion that the plight is fundamentally about guilt and disobedience.[17] Rather, Campbell maintains, God takes the initiative to redeem humanity through an act of deliverance.[18] Campbell writes, “Having grasped both the incapacity of the human condition in Adam and the basis for that claim in the event of salvation (i.e., that it is a retrospective claim), we can recognize that the only appropriate solution to this sort of problem is one of deliverance, or rescue.”[19] The solution to his plight is, as for Käsemann and Martyn, not an act of divine forgiveness, but rather, an act of deliverance.

  Despite exegetical differences and points of emphasis, there is a consistency in the presentation of plight and solution across these accounts. All three authors make the following points:

  The human plight is fundamentally enslavement to the Powers. Guilt and disobedience are given, at best, secondary roles in the conception of the plight.

  Because of humanity’s enslaved condition, humans are incompetent agents incapable of securing their own deliverance. God, therefore, must (and does) take the initiative to redeem humanity (and the world).

  Salvation consists, then, in deliverance from the Powers, not in forgiveness of individual acts of disobedience.

  On the surface, then, Käsemann’s contention that 2 Cor. 5:18–21 does not fit Paul’s soteriological outlook (as perceived in this tradition) seems accurate. Yet, given how in the previous verses, Paul has utilized so many apocalyptic features and how he does not offer any explicit corrective to the tradition, the question I pose for this chapter is how an apocalyptic reading can accommodate them. That is, rather than sidelining them as a piece of pre-Pauline tradition (as Käsemann did), I contend that they express an account of the plight and its solution that not only fits well within Paul’s soteriological structure, but it does so while accommodating (most of) the main concerns of this apocalyptic reading of Paul. These verses exhibit a stress on divine initiative and human inability—two features that are crucial to the apocalyptic reading. Moreover, when read from the light of Paul’s claim in v.16 about the epistemological change, one sees that his account of the plight and its solution is indeed altered by the Christ-event.

  Paul’s New Way of Knowing

  Throughout the opening chapters of 2 Corinthians, Paul articulates a vision of the world seen from his position in Christ. Reality as it is perceived from the vantage point of the flesh is presented as a false alternative to how Paul sees it and wants his readers to see it. He, for example, contrasts Moses’ glory with that of the gospel and its messengers so that the gospel, although built on the death of Christ, is viewed as more glorious (3:1–18). Similarly, he insists that his sufferings are not indications of a failed mission, but paradoxically, expressions of the success of his work (2:12–17; 4:7–18; 6:3–10). The same for the body: although the present body is wasting away, and it appears then that Paul’s gospel cannot bring life, it is actually through wasting away that the glorious promises of resurrection are already being made evident (5:1–10). On what basis, though, does Paul make these claims for a re-envisioned world?

  At the heart of this new outlook lies a shift in time. As Martyn has shown, “Paul’s statements establish an inextricable connexion between eschatology and epistemology.”[20] Because of the Christ-event, the times have shifted, and with the change of time arises a new and different way to understand. Second Corinthians 5:16 provides the foundation for this alternative claim about how to understand. There are two ways to know. The first is “according to the flesh” and is associated with the old age that has now passed away. The second way is not spelled out precisely by Paul, but given how Paul’s portrayal of the new way of viewing has centered on the Christ-event, it is probably best characterized as “according to the Christ-event.”[21]

  This alternative way of seeing causes Paul to re-envision everything around him, and his previous comments have given examples of this. But in what way has it caused him to rethink the plight of humanity and God’s solution?

  Reconciliation according to the Old Way of Knowing

  Paul’s account of divine deliverance in 2 Cor. 5:18-21 centers on the concept of reconciliation. Although not extremely common in Jewish circles, the idea of divine reconciliation was known and there was a fairly consistent way of formulating it. Second Maccabees functions well as a representative text.[22]

  As is repeated on several occasions, the breakdown in the divine-human relationship is a result of the people’s sins. The people suffer and the temple can be desecrated “because of the sins of those who live in the city” (2 Macc. 5:17). The resolution to this problem is an action performed by humans. In his opening greeting, the writer expresses his hope that God “may hear your prayers and be reconciled to you (καταλλαγείη ὑμῖν) and not abandon you in the time of evil” (1:5). In these verses, there seems to be a sequential progres
sion and a causal relationship between the prayers heard and God’s decision to be reconciled to his people. This idea that prayer is linked with reconciliation comes out also in 8:29, where the people implore God “to be wholly reconciled” (εἰς τέλος καταλλαγῆναι). In the account of the seven martyred sons, the final son defies the king by announcing that while “we are suffering for our sins,” God’s anger will not last forever and “he will again be reconciled to his servants” (πάλιν καταλλαγήσεται τοῖς ἑαυτοῦ δούλοις, 7:32–33). It is precisely through the action of the brothers that God’s wrath will come to an end (ἐν ἐμοὶ δὲ καὶ τοῖς ἀδελφοῖς μου στῆσαι τὴν τοῦ παντοκράτορος ὀργὴν τὴν ἐπὶ τὸ σύμπαν ἡμῶν γένος δικαίως ἐπηγμένην, 7:38). Indeed, their martyrdom has an atoning affect and removes the cause of God’s wrath against the people. It is because of acts such as this and the prayers of the people that the author can remark, “what was forsaken in the wrath of the Almighty was restored again in all its glory when the great Lord became reconciled” (5:20). Moreover, in these texts, it is the human who initiates the process of reconciliation, and God responds accordingly. While the author acknowledges the disobedience of the people, this in itself presents no significant problem. He conceives of the people as morally competent agents who are able through acts of prayer or martyrdom to secure God’s favor.