Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination

by Ben C Blackwell

  With Tom Wright and others, I contend that Paul is both an apocalyptic theologian and a covenant theologian—and specifically, a new-covenant theologian. What is revealed is the radically unexpected and new way in which the new covenant has come to fruition.[4]

  Borrowing Wright’s language, we need to recognize how Paul has reworked his theology of the new covenant in light of God’s apocalyptic incursion into human history and life in the Messiah and the Spirit—and specifically, Paul’s experience of the Messiah and the Spirit.

  A critical aspect of the content of Paul’s revelation is that the gracious “invasion” of God’s Spirit (Ezekiel) and Law (Jeremiah) into the hearts of God’s people that was associated with the promised new covenant has, in fact, occurred, but in a shocking, cruciform mode. This fulfillment is expressed in the language of the faithful and loving Messiah who now indwells Paul (and, implicitly, all believers; Gal. 2:19–20), the presence of the Spirit of the Son in believers’ hearts (Gal. 4:6), and believers’ fulfilling the “Law of the Messiah” (Gal. 6:2).[5]

  Thus, to return to the conjunction of Gal. 1:12 and 1:16, the revelation to Paul and the revelation in Paul are inseparable—a claim that is developed most fully in 2 Corinthians, but also in Galatians itself. By means of the invading and indwelling Messiah/Spirit/Law of the Messiah, Paul becomes his gospel, and he expects others to do so similarly—to live out the new covenant of faithfulness and love, the beginning of the new creation.

  That is to say, the in-breaking of God into human history in Jesus’ new-covenant-inaugurating death and in the gift of the Spirit contains inseparably with it a divine in-breaking into the lives of individual human beings to create a community of the new covenant that embodies the character of that divine invasion. The result is both shockingly new and surprisingly continuous with the prophetic promises in Scripture.[6]

  The Promise of the New Covenant

  Promises of a renewed or new covenant are associated with the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel as well as Deuteronomy. Jeremiah and Ezekiel addressed similar situations with similar, though not identical, promises. Both employ the idiom of the covenant: YHWH being the people’s God, and the people being YHWH’s people. Yet Jeremiah actually uses the term “new covenant” and speaks of the Law being put within God’s people, specifically in their hearts, while Ezekiel does not use the term “new covenant” (though he does speak of a “covenant of peace” and “an everlasting covenant”[7]) and talks about God’s own Spirit being put within the people.[8]

  Moreover, both prophets speak metaphorically but realistically of something happening to the people’s heart(s), though precisely what that is varies: the inscription of God’s Law (Jer. 31:33)[9]; a transplant (Jer. 24:7; Ezek. 18:31; 36:26), involving a softening or “fleshification” (Ezek. 11:19; 36:26); circumcision (Jer. 4:4; cf. Ezek. 44:7, 9)[10]; and unification (Jer. 32:39; Ezek. 11:19). For both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, then, the heart is the heart of the problem.[11] The purpose of the divine activity on and in the people’s hearts is clearly indicated by Ezekiel: “so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them,” and thus “they shall be my people, and I will be their God” (Ezek. 11:20; cf. 36:27). This is the language of both covenant fulfillment and the covenant “formula”—the idiom of a unified people in proper relation to God.[12] Similarly, Deut. 30:6–10 promises a covenant renewal that will consist of heart-circumcision followed by love of God and observation of the commandments (cf. 10:16–22).

  Jeremiah’s “I will write it [my Law] on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33) is more or less equivalent to Ezekiel’s “I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them” (Ezek. 11:19–20). Furthermore, Ezekiel’s parallel phrases “A new heart I will give you” and “a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezek. 36:26; cf. 11:19; 18:31), which is in fact “my [God’s] Spirit” (Ezek. 36:27), suggest that his understanding of what God will do to the heart with the Spirit is fundamentally synonymous with Jeremiah’s vision of the inscription of the Law on the people’s hearts. The new covenant will be a powerful act of divine grace entailing the people’s receipt of the Law or the Spirit within, their inner transformation, and their consequent faithfulness to the covenant. Clearly, for both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as well as Deuteronomy, there is no disjunction between internalization of the covenant and external adherence to its stipulations, between the heart and obedience. Taking the two prophets together, we must also deny any disjunction between the Spirit and the Law—a subject to which we will have to return in considering Paul.

  Indeed, it is likely that Paul, like certain other scriptural interpreters of his era, read these key texts from Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Deuteronomy together, as a collective witness to God’s anticipated activity among and within the people of God.[13] Moreover, this coming divine action was envisioned not only as a new (or renewed) covenant, but also as the restoration of Israel and as a new creation—and more.[14] This merger of metaphors is especially potent in Ezekiel 36–37, where images of forgiveness and cleansing, a new heart, a new spirit (the indwelling of God’s Spirit), restoration to the land, and abundant living (Ezek. 36:25ff) are then graphically displayed as resurrection, as new creation, in the famous vision of dry bones in Ezekiel 37.

  It is difficult, then, not to think about this promised new-covenant activity of divine heart surgery as a sort of divine incursion—in other words, as an apocalyptic event. Paul appears to have been thinking similarly. As J. Louis Martyn said, Paul’s “divine invasion . . . has a highly illuminating theological analogue in Ezek. 11:19.”[15] If Ezekiel is any indication, Paul himself could also blend images of covenant renewal and new creation, resulting in what we are calling an “apocalyptic new covenant.” We find the phrases “new covenant” and “new creation” (the latter generally understood in an apocalyptic sense), of course, in 2 Corinthians (3:6; 5:17), but only “new creation” in Galatians (6:15). Yet Martyn’s insightful observation, together with the merger of metaphors in both Ezekiel and 2 Corinthians, suggests that we should anticipate both apocalyptic and new-covenant language in Galatians.

  The Apocalypse “in” Paul

  In Gal. 1:15–16a, Paul claims that God was pleased “to reveal his Son to me [ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐμοί],” as many translations render it.[16] But what does Paul mean when he states that God was pleased to reveal the Son ἐνἐμοί? To consider this question, we turn to the recent work of one of the self-identified apocalyptic interpreters of Paul, Martin de Boer. De Boer summarizes the scholarly debate about ἐν ἐμοί in 1:16 as offering three main interpretations, to which he adds his own (no. 4):[17]

  “to me” (equivalent to a simple dative);

  “through me” (through Paul’s preaching);

  “within me” (an inner, subjective experience); and

  “in my former manner of life.”

  While each of the first two interpretations is possible, the strength of the last two is that each recognizes the “locative” semantic value of ἐν, implying that Paul would have used a simple dative or a preposition such as διά had he intended to signify either mere receipt of the revelation (1) or kerygmatic instrumentality (2). The translation “within me” (3), referring primarily to an inner, subjective experience, does not, however, correspond to the way Paul elsewhere narrates his encounter with the risen Christ as the Lord’s appearing to him (cf. 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8).

  De Boer’s proposal (4) is therefore helpful because it retains the locative sense of the subjective interpretation (3) while foregrounding the apocalyptic and public character of the experience. That is, “God entered into the life of Paul, the persecutor of God’s church . . . in order to bring that manner of life to a complete and irrevocable end.”[18] In other words, “Paul personifies the radical discontinuity between the two ages (this one and the one
to come) of all apocalyptic eschatology.”[19] What God has done apocalyptically in Christ to and for the world, God has also done apocalyptically to and for Paul.

  What Paul is referring to in Gal. 1:16, therefore, according to de Boer, is Paul’s “conversion” (de Boer’s term).[20] Moreover, argues de Boer, Paul continues this apocalyptic interpretation of his conversion and its after-effects in Gal. 2:15–21, especially in 2:19–20, where (de Boer contends) Paul re-narrates the “Damascus road” experience in which he was crucified with Christ and died to the Law as his nomistically determined self was ended and a new life begun.[21] The crucifixion of the old self, says de Boer, is another way of interpreting the death of Paul’s old, Pharisaical self. Not only Paul, however, but everyone who believes in Christ (2:16) “participates in, is joined to or taken up into, this all-embracing, cosmic, apocalyptic event that spells the end of the old age.”[22]

  De Boer rightly notes Paul’s re-use of the phrase ἐν ἐμοί from 1:16 in 2:20—Christ lives ἐν ἐμοί. The difference between the uses of the two phrases, he avers, is that the earlier one refers to Paul’s former life and the later one to Paul’s apostolic life.[23] Although de Boer does not “exclude the notion of Christ’s dwelling inside Paul (or the believer) in some sense”—he points to Gal. 4:6—Paul’s emphasis, according to de Boer, is on the public domain of human affairs and interpersonal relationships.[24]

  Although de Boer moves us in the right direction by interpreting the revelation “in” Paul as a reference to a public reality and connecting it (strongly) to Gal. 2:15–21 and (less strongly) to Gal. 4:6, de Boer also unnecessarily limits the referent of ἐν ἐμοί to Paul’s conversion and misses Paul’s allusions to the new covenant. What I propose, then, is that Paul’s self-portrayal as the apocalyptically “invaded” persecutor, crucified (and raised) with the Messiah, is simultaneously a self-portrayal as the recipient of the surprising Spirit of the new covenant that enables him, and all believers, to embody the cruciform pattern of the Messiah’s self-giving love: the “Law of the Messiah” (Gal. 6:2, my translation). This is the case, I suggest, even though the term new covenant does not appear in Galatians and the Spirit is explicitly associated with the fulfillment of the “old” (that is, the original) covenant with Abraham.[25]

  Rereading Galatians as Witness

  to the Apocalyptic New Covenant

  De Boer rightly sees three key passages in Galatians as interconnected texts: 1:15–16; 2:20; and 4:4–6. We will consider them in reverse order.

  Galatians 4:4–6

  The first thing to note about Gal. 4:4–6 is its apocalyptic flavor. The phrase about “the fullness of time” is, among other things, “an apocalyptic assertion.”[26] But this apocalyptic event of benign invasion, of liberation and redemption, occurs in two steps: (1) the sending forth of the Son followed by (2) the sending forth of the Spirit. The cosmic divine event in Christ becomes existentially real for human beings through the work of the Spirit. What takes place “out there” must, and does, also take place “in here,” in the intimate space of knowledge and imagination (the heart) that issues in corresponding activity in the world. Paul will later speak about this activity as walking “by,” or better “in,” the Spirit (πνεύματι; 5:16) and being led by the Spirit (5:18) in order to bear the fruit of the Spirit (5:22–23).[27]

  The next thing to note about Gal. 4:4–6, then, is the phrase “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts [ἐξαπέστειλεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ εἰς τὰς καρδίας ἡμῶν]” (4:6). The divine action is described, by its use of “Spirit” and “hearts” (cf. Rom. 5:5), in language echoing the prophetic promises of a new covenant in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, though it is not a direct quote from either prophet. The focus on the heart as the object of divine action appears also in Rom. 2:25–29, where the image of heart-circumcision is reminiscent of both prophets as well as Deuteronomy. Paul sees the prophetic promise of a new covenant fulfilled in the gift of the Spirit’s being sent into people’s hearts. Curiously, although de Boer correctly notes the echo of Ezek. 36:26 and Jer. 31:33–34 in Gal. 4:4–6, he does not mention the phrase “new covenant.”[28] Similarly, in his commentary, Martyn notes the allusion to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and he speaks vividly and apocalyptically of the divine “invasion” of the heart/the human being, but he does not call this the inauguration of the new covenant.[29]

  It seems clear, however, if we put our first two observations about this passage together, that what Paul is talking about is an apocalyptic new covenant. There are elements of both continuity and discontinuity with the specific prophetic promises. We should not be surprised if there is something unexpected about the fulfillment of these promises, especially since the promised Spirit arrives with a significant qualifier—as the messianic Spirit.

  The third thing to note about Gal. 4:4–6, then, is that this Spirit is specifically the Spirit of the Son.[30] The identity of the promised Spirit, now the present Spirit, has been reconfigured in terms of God’s Son, the Messiah Jesus. In other words, this is the apocalyptic Spirit, and that in two senses: the Spirit of the Jesus who has been apocalypsed, and the Spirit who participates in the divine apocalyptic activity of liberating people from this age and giving them a share in the life of the age to come that was inaugurated by God’s action in Christ. Thus, Paul is continuing here (cf. 3:1–5) to forge an inseparable bond between the Spirit and the Messiah Jesus, which of course means the crucified Messiah, now raised by the Father.

  Although Paul’s main point in using the language of sonship and adoption is the connection between Jesus’ sonship and ours, the language of knowing God as “Abba, Father” also continues the new-covenant theme. In Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant and similar texts, we see the covenant formula about the intimate bond between God and the people: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33).[31] The “Abba, Father” relationship described in Gal. 4:4–6 (cf. Rom. 8:15–16) is, in part, the restatement of that covenant formula in light of the apocalypse of Jesus as God’s Son, and the corollary reconfiguration of the Spirit as the one who relates people covenantally to both God the Father and Jesus the Son. This covenantal, Father–Son relationship now extends, surprisingly, beyond Israel to include the gentiles. In the giving of the Messiah and the Spirit of the Messiah, God is speaking the language of (new) covenant, saying, “I am your Father, and you are my children.”[32] God’s people/children, both Jew and gentile, respond, “Abba.”

  So what we have, finally, is an apocalyptic new covenant in which, at the initiative of God the Father, Christ effects humanity’s liberation and redemption, and the Spirit establishes and maintains a residential, new-covenant relationship between God the Father and God’s adopted children. It is nearly impossible to resist a Trinitarian conclusion regarding Paul’s theology and spirituality. His explicit language elsewhere, in one breath, of the Spirit being the Spirit of both the Son and the Father (Rom. 8:9) makes this conclusion even more inevitable. In any case, the identification of the indwelling Spirit as the Spirit of the Son drives us back to Gal. 2:15–21.

  Galatians 2:15–21

  I have argued elsewhere that the one and only subject of Gal. 2:15–21 is justification.[33] Co-crucifixion with Christ and being inhabited by Christ are not separate or additional topics, but key elements in Paul’s reconfiguration of justification around a crucified and resurrected Messiah. Justification is both participatory and transformative. It is transformative as an experience of death and resurrection, of co-crucifixion and new life. It is participatory as an event that occurs “in Christ” (δικαιωθῆναι ἐν Χριστῷ; 2:17) and results in having Christ within (ζῇ δὲ ἐν ἐμοὶ Χριστός; 2:20). The phrase ἐν ἐμοί in 2:20 is of particular interest.

  Galatians 2:20 can be translated “And I no longer live; rather, the Messiah lives in me. But the life I do live in the flesh I live by the faithfulness o
f the Son of God, who loved me by giving himself for me” (my translation).[34] I contend that Paul is also here speaking about the apocalyptic new covenant, and specifically, of the existential impact of God’s incursion into Paul’s life, and indeed, the life of all believers. Paul’s first-person language is meant to be representative.

  Although explicit covenant or new-covenant language does not appear in this passage, it has been widely and rightly advocated by the “new perspective” on Paul that justification is about membership in the covenant, even if the new perspective occasionally over-emphasized ecclesiology (or, more precisely the corporate dimension of justification) at the expense of the individual. What has completely reshaped the terms of justification for Paul, and thus also of covenant membership, is the apocalyptic event of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Covenant membership, or the right relations with God that effect or demonstrate covenant membership, is by death and resurrection with the Messiah. The crucified person, whether Jew or gentile, rises to new life, a new life characterized most fundamentally by the presence of the indwelling Messiah/Son of God. This means, according to most interpreters, that the Spirit inhabits believers. As suggested above, this interpretation is implicitly confirmed by the following passage, 3:1–5, in which Paul associates the coming of the Spirit with the preaching of the crucified Messiah, and it is explicitly confirmed in 4:6 when Paul writes about God’s sending “the Spirit of his son into our hearts.”[35]

  It is thus absolutely critical for Paul that Christ (or, better, the Messiah) is the indwelling one, that this Spirit is specifically the Spirit of the Son (4:6). The apocalyptic event that has made justification, liberation, and redemption a reality is the concrete faithful and loving activity of the Son in his death. Galatians 2:20 picks up from Gal. 1:4 that the death of Jesus was his self-sacrificial activity, telling us now not only that it was apocalyptically liberating (“who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age,” 1:4), but also covenantally faithful to God and loving toward us: “I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me by giving himself for me” (my translation). Paul is describing the Son’s apocalyptic death as the fulfillment of the covenantal requirements of love for God (meaning faithfulness to God) and love for others. It is the crucified and now resurrected Son who embodies, indeed who is, this apocalyptic-covenantal reality that “invades” human beings. The implication is that to be inhabited by this Messiah, to receive the Spirit of this Son in fulfillment of the prophetic promises about the new-covenant gift of the Spirit within, is to die and rise to a new self, to a new, apocalyptically shaped form of covenant existence characterized by cruciform faithfulness and love. The identity marker of covenant membership is now the presence of the (lovingly) invading, indwelling Messiah/Son of God, i.e., the Spirit of the Son, who enables covenant-fulfillment.[36]