Covenant and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Mark S. Kinzer

By Pickwick Publications

Covenant and the People of God gathers twenty-four essays from friends and colleagues of Messianic Jewish theologian and New Testament scholar Mark S. Kinzer, in honor of his seventieth birthday. The essays are organized around two central themes that have animated Kinzer's work: the nature of the covenant and what it means to be the people of God. The volume includes fascinating discussions of some of the most sensitive areas related to Jewish-Christian dialogue, post-supersessionist interpretation of Scripture, and the theological shape of Messianic Judaism. Among the contributors are scholars working in North America, Europe, and Israel. They include: Gabriele Boccaccini, Douglas A. Campbell, Holly Taylor Coolman, Gavin D'Costa, Jean-Miguel Garrigues, Douglas Harink, Richard Harvey, Vered Hillel, Jonathan Kaplan, Daniel Keating, Amy-Jill Levine, Antoine Levy, Gerald McDermott, Michael C. Mulder, David M. Neuhaus, Isaac W. Oliver, Ephraim Radner, Jennifer M. Rosner, David J. Rudolph, Thomas Schumacher, Faydra L. Shapiro, R. Kendall Soulen, Lee B. Spitzer, and Etienne Veto.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666726169

Book preview

Introduction

Jonathan Kaplan, Jennifer M. Rosner, and David J. Rudolph

Mark S. Kinzer, a leading Messianic Jewish theologian and biblical scholar, has worked to define the theological shape of Messianic Judaism, engage the wider Jewish and Christian worlds in theological dialogue, and contribute to the post-supersessionist interpretation of Scripture. His first volume, Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People (Baker Academic, 2005), advanced a case for non-supersessionist Christianity and offered a new vision for Messianic Judaism that is grounded in the ongoing election of Israel, committed to the covenantal obligations of Jewish followers of Jesus, and appreciative of Rabbinic Judaism as the movement through which God has preserved the distinctive calling of the Jewish people. He followed up his initial work with three well-received and influential volumes: Israel’s Messiah and the People of God: A Vision for Messianic Jewish Covenant Fidelity (Cascade, 2011), Searching Her Own Mystery: Nostra Aetate, the Jewish People, and the Identity of the Church (Cascade, 2015; translated into French), and Jerusalem Crucified, Jerusalem Risen: The Resurrected Messiah, the Jewish People, and the Land of Promise (Cascade, 2018; translated into Spanish).

In addition to his scholarly writings, Mark has been an influential figure within the Messianic Jewish community through his founding leadership of Congregation Zera Avraham in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is now Rabbi Emeritus, his active involvement in the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations and the Messianic Jewish Rabbinical Council, and his founding presidency of Messianic Jewish Theological Institute. He has also been deeply committed to his work in various ecumenical and theological endeavors, including serving as a member of the Messianic Jewish-Roman Catholic Dialogue Group (established in 2000 by Georges Cardinal Cottier, the then theologian of the Papal Household), as one of the founders and a board member of the Society for Post-Supersessionist Theology, and as founding moderator of a new association for Jewish disciples of Jesus known as Yachad BeYeshua.

This volume, Covenant and the People of God, was prepared in honor of Mark’s seventieth birthday and comprises twenty-four contributions by his friends and colleagues. These essays are organized around two central themes that have animated Mark’s work: the nature of the covenant and what it means to be the people of God. The contributors to this volume include scholars in Biblical Studies, Early Judaism, and Theology, the three disciplines of scholarly inquiry in which Kinzer works. Among the contributors to this volume are scholars working in North America, Europe, and Israel as well as in a diverse range of institutional and ecclesial contexts. The essays in this volume engage Mark’s work directly or employ the volume’s thematic frame of covenant and the people of God to orient their own engagement with subjects in their fields of research. Together our hope is that these essays not only serve as a fitting tribute to Mark’s impact on our lives and the scholarly fields in which he continues to work but also make important contributions to the scholarly conversation of which they are a part.

One final note: shortly after this volume had begun to be conceptualized and was under contract, Professor William Abraham (Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University) passed away suddenly. Billy was a dear friend and collaborator of Mark and had looked forward to contributing an essay to this volume. While this volume is lessened by the absence of his proposed contribution to this volume, The Ecclesial Integrity of Messianic Judaism, the world and our lives are lessened even more by Billy’s passing. We share with him our hope in the resurrection. May his memory be for a blessing.

1

Paul’s Non-Supersessionist Theology

Gabriele Boccaccini

Paul is finally at the center of the Jewish-Christian dialogue. For a long time—let’s face it frankly—he was excluded as too embarrassing a presence, too cumbersome an obstacle to remove. The traditional Christian view made him something other than Judaism¹: a convert and therefore an apostate of Judaism, if not the sworn enemy of the Torah. As such he was treated (and ignored) by the Jewish tradition (at least until very recent times with the first attempts at a Jewish reinterpretation of his figure). Rubenstein’s cry: Jesus, yes; Paul never! still resonates loudly in Jewish circles.²

But Paul never converted. It took only one sentence for Pinchas Lapide to reveal the naked truth: Paul did not become a Christian since there were no Christians in those times.³ Like Jesus, Paul was born, lived, and died as a Jew, for the simple reason that in the first century Christianity did not yet exist as an autonomous religion distinct from Judaism, but presented itself as an apocalyptic and messianic movement within Judaism. What Paul rejected on the road to Damascus was not Judaism but a certain zealous vision of Judaism that led him to persecute the followers of Jesus. Paul’s experience (however singular) belongs to the internal dialectic of the many groups and movements present in the Judaism of his time. Paul was not unlike a Christian of today moving from one Christian denomination to another or a Jew of today moving from one Jewish denomination to another. We can at best speak of Paul as a former Pharisee, but this does not make him a former Jew. In the diverse world of the Second Temple, being a follower of Jesus simply was Paul’s way of being a Jew.

There is no anti-Judaism in Paul. Paul had his own distinctive agenda and certainly it would be reductive to dismiss him as a Jew like everybody else, or just an ordinary Jew.⁴ To say that Paul was anti-Jewish would be like saying that Martin Luther was anti-Christian. Luther was anti-Catholic; he even referred to the Pope as the anti-Christ. But Luther was not anti-Christian. He was against a certain view of Christianity, not against Christianity; he did not view his theology as the replacement of Christianity.

What is it, then, that still prevents us from looking at Paul as a sort of Jewish Luther, who argued vividly against other Jews but never had any intention of deserting Judaism? Why all this controversy around Paul? Let’s go straight to the heart of the problem which is that of salvation. According to a certain traditional Christian interpretation, Paul would have presented baptism and adherence to Christ as the only and exclusive way of salvation for all humans (including Jews), replacing circumcision and the Torah whose end he would have preached.⁵

But when we reread Paul and his letters in the original historical context of first-century Judaism, the situation is much more complex, and surprises are not lacking. For a first-century Jew, the Torah is a gift of salvation given by God exclusively to Jews, capable of offering salvation and forgiveness to those who observe it. Non-Jews were not required to observe it nor were they expected to do so. However, a particularistic religion is not necessarily an exclusivist religion.⁶ There were certainly Jews (even in Paul’s time) who believed that non-Jews were doomed to perdition. Others believed that the only hope was for some of them to become Jewish, by becoming proselytes, or accepting some of the fundamental principles of Judaism, living at least as sympathizers, God-fearing, even without circumcision. But the majority of Jews would not have ruled out that there could be righteous even among the non-converted gentiles and that they would find salvation in the last judgment that all agreed would take place according to each one’s works. God as creator had in fact instilled in the hearts and conscience of every man and woman a sense of right, a natural law which, if observed, also had the power to lead them to salvation. The rabbis from the third century onwards will call this natural law the seven laws of Noah (or Noachian laws) stating that they were given to all humanity after the flood, but the concept of a natural law (which has its foundation in creation) is a much older concept that we find already widely affirmed in Second Temple Judaism, especially in Jewish-Hellenistic authors.

For the Jews of the Second Temple there are therefore two ways of salvation: the written Torah for the Jews and the natural law (unwritten but instilled in the heart of every man or woman) for non-Jews. Eventually God will judge everyone according to their own works but not according to the same law: Jews will be judged according to the Torah, non-Jews according to the natural law.

Both the Torah and the natural law are gifts of God, therefore salvation is always by grace while being obtained through the observance of works. In this sense—as E. P. Sanders already noted in Paul and Palestinian Judaism—the old Lutheran controversy that opposed the legalism of the Jews to salvation by Christian grace has no basis (and should once and for all be relegated to a past of intolerance and prejudice). Even those Protestant theologians who most strongly emphasize the centrality of grace, would today warn against opposing grace and works. Echoing the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nachfolge (1937), John Barclay firmly denounces any interpretation of Paul’s gospel that would lead to downplaying human responsibility: [God’s] grace is free (unconditioned) but not cheap (without expectations or obligations).⁷

So, what was Paul’s problem? The problem was that many Jews of the Second Temple saw in evil not only the result of transgression but a corrupting cosmic force that made the observance of every rule difficult and complex, be it the Torah or the natural law. The rabbis would try to rationalize the problem by developing the concept of the yetser hara (the inclination to evil) and also discussing the positive implications that it could have for the exercise of free will in relation to the yetser hatov (the inclination to good). Both inclinations were considered of divine origin and were therefore functional to the divine plan.⁸ But other Jews, referring to the ancient Jewish apocalyptic tradition that we find expressed primarily in the books of Enoch, had a much more pessimistic view of the power of evil. They saw in it a dark force opposed to God and not dominable by human will, the consequence of a cosmic rebellion that they traced back to the presence of demonic forces and to Adam’s sin.⁹

While not denying the effectiveness of the Torah and natural law as ways of salvation, the Jews who followed these apocalyptic ideas were in search of a remedy that could counterbalance the force of evil. Some (the Essenes) saw this remedy in a particular and more rigid form of halakah, the one they followed, which in their opinion offered better protection to the forces of evil. This led them to live separately from other members of the Jewish people, whom they considered more exposed to evil due to their insufficient observance of the true precepts. Rather, other Jews trusted in God’s merciful intervention at the end of time. At the turn of the Common Era, the Book of Parables (1 En. 50) stated that at the very moment of the last judgment sinners will be given the opportunity to repent and that only the unrepentant will be damned:¹⁰

And in those days a change shall take place for the holy and chosen, and the light of days will dwell upon them, and glory and honor will return to the holy. On the day of distress, evil will be stored up against the sinners. And the righteous will be victorious in the name of the Lord of Spirits: and He will cause the others to witness [this], so that they may repent and abandon the works of their hands. They will have no honor in the presence of the Lord of Spirits, yet through His name they will be saved, and the Lord of Spirits will have mercy on them, for great is His mercy. And He is righteous in His judgement, and in the presence of His glory unrighteousness will not stand: at His judgement the unrepentant will perish in His presence. And hereafter I will have no mercy on them, says the Lord of Spirits. (

1

En.

50

:

1–4

)

In the context of the Enochic tradition, the passage is extremely important as for the first time it introduces the idea that repentance at the time of the last judgment will cause God to forgive some sinners by mercy. The righteous have honor (merit, good deeds) and are saved in the name of God, while the sinners have no honor (no good deeds) and are not saved in the name of God. But besides the righteous and the sinners, there is now a third group (the others), a subgroup of the sinners who will repent and abandon the works of their hands. Like the sinners (and unlike the righteous), the others have no honor (no merit or good works) before God, but because of their repentance they will be justified and saved in the name of God, like the righteous (and unlike the sinners). The end of time will be not only a time of wrath and punishment but also a time of mercy for those who repent.

Along these lines, John the Baptist invited sinners to repentance and penance by proclaiming that the advent of the kingdom of God and the last judgment were now imminent. So with Jesus of Nazareth, but the situation will get more complicated because his disciples will see in him not merely the announcer of God’s forgiveness but also an agent of God’s forgiveness, the messiah Son of Man who has authority on earth to forgive sins (Mark 2:10). After his death, his followers (all circumcised Jews observing the law) will make this their main mission by offering forgiveness through baptism in the name of Christ.¹¹

In the beginning, baptism was seen as a gift offered by the merciful God only to the children of his people (the lost sheep of the house of Israel, Matt 10:5–6), but soon—as already happened to Jesus in meeting with the Canaanite woman—exceptions were found: Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs (Mark 7:28).

With the passing of the years, every hesitation was overcome, and baptism was offered indiscriminately to Jews and non-Jews, to the Samaritans and to the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:28) as well as to the centurion Cornelius (10:47). The conclusion reached was that God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life (chs. 11, 18). Some continued to wonder if baptism should be considered only as the first step towards a complete insertion of baptized non-Jews into the chosen people as proselytes, but this perspective—we are told—was rejected in the so-called Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15).

It is in this context that we should read the letter to the Galatians in which Paul, with extreme force and precision, opposes the idea that baptized gentiles should be required to be circumcised and therefore to adhere to the Torah. Paul does not speak to the baptized Jews who as circumcised Jews live according to the Torah; Paul speaks to the baptized gentiles who live according to the natural law. Paul’s point is that the forgiveness (justification) offered through baptism is a gift entirely independent of the Torah and offered to all—Jews and non-Jews—without any distinction. I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. . . . Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name (Acts 10:34–35, 43).

Paul does not at all question the sanctity and goodness of the Torah and the natural law and their effectiveness for salvation. He only reiterates that Christ’s death is an offer of forgiveness completely independent of them. If baptized gentiles were circumcised, they would affirm that the justifying efficacy of the death of Christ is in some way subordinated or linked to obedience to the Torah, while in his opinion it is not so at all: A person is justified not by the works of law but through faith in Jesus Christ. . . . If justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing (Gal 2:15–21).

The problem is that the Christian tradition has equated justification and salvation, while in Paul we are dealing with two related but distinct concepts. Justification describes what occurs at the beginning of one’s Christian existence, not at the end . . . it describes the person forgiven of his or her sins and freed from the power of sins through baptism; salvation is what awaits every righteous person as the end of times, the verdict of acquittal . . . at the last judgment.¹²

Justification in Paul is the way of salvation for sinners (Jews and non-Jews), but it is not synonymous with salvation. Through baptism (by participating in the death of Christ), Jewish and gentile sinners see their past sins forgiven and are then reborn to new life, fully reintegrated into their free will, filled with the Spirit and therefore able to observe the Torah (if Jews) or the natural law (if non-Jews). But like every man and woman, they will be subject to the last judgment according to works and therefore will have to remain blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor 1:4, 8), a day that Paul believed was imminent. Justification therefore is by faith while the last judgment will take place through works.

The paradox is that every time Paul, considered the herald of salvation by faith, speaks of the last judgment, he makes explicit reference to works, when God will repay according to each one’s deeds (Rom 2:6). All—Jews and non-Jews—then must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil (2 Cor 5:10). Once again, it is reiterated that in this God will show no partiality, that is anguish and distress on everyone who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek (Rom 2, 9–11).

In Paul’s vision, therefore, Christ does not replace the Torah or the natural law but joins them as an additional way to salvation, offering justification by faith, that is, a possibility of forgiveness to sinners that reintegrates them into their freedom as children of God and in their capacity for good. Just as the law was added because of transgressions (Gal 3:19), so the justification in Christ was added because of the spread of evil as a result of Adam’s sin.

Paul has indeed a very dramatic and pessimistic view of the force of evil. He even goes so far as to describe the status of humanity as slaves of sin living under the dominion of sin, and in need of being redeemed at a high price through the blood of Christ. To prove his point, Paul cites a series of biblical passages, or better crafts a composite quotation made of different biblical verses (from Psalms to Isaiah), which show widespread evil (Rom 3:10–18). For instance, he writes, All, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, as it is written: ‘There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God’ (Rom 3:9–10).

This passage has traditionally been interpreted not as a simple recognition that all people commit sins but as a general statement asserting the human inability to do good. As a result, the apostle thought along the same lines as Augustine, Luther and Calvin . . . sinners, incapable of doing good, can be justified only by God’s grace, through faith in Jesus Christ.¹³ In so doing, the Christian interpretation has reversed the order of the discourse. The quotation has become the center of Paul’s argument, while in the text the emphasis is not on the quotation (Rom 3:10–18) but on the statement that the quotation intends to prove (3:9). The point of Paul is not that all people are sinners as it is proved by the fact that they are all under the power of sin, but that both Jews and gentiles alike are affected by evil (under the power of sin) as it is proved by the fact that everybody sins. The goal is to show that sin is a common experience of Jews and non-Jews, and no one can claim to be spared from evil.

Contrary to what has been affirmed through the interpretation of Augustine and Luther, Paul does not go so far as to decree the impossibility for sinful man to do good. He sees a perfect parallel between Adam (the disobedient son of God) and Jesus (the obedient son of God): just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous (Rom 5:18–19). The Adam/Jesus analogy implies a perfect parallelism between sin and grace as well as between the sinners and the righteous. Because of the fall of Adam, all have been exposed to the power of evil, and, as a result, many (not all) have succumbed to sin. Through the sacrifice of Christ, the grace of forgiveness is now offered to all, and many (not "all) are those who will be saved through it.

From here also derives the different destiny of the two sons of God, Adam and Jesus. Adam, created in the image of God, was not satisfied with this equality with the creator but wanted to become God. Thus disobeying the divine law, he lost his dignity as a son, while Jesus, who made himself a slave through obedience to death on the cross, was exalted by God as his beloved son (Phil 2:5–11).

Obviously, the whole Pauline construction only makes sense as long as its premises are accepted (the destructive and rebellious power of evil and therefore the need for a compensatory action on the part of the messiah sent by God in the imminence of the end of times). Paul the Christ-follower was the leader of a Jewish messianic group incandescent with apocalyptic hopes.¹⁴ Rabbinic Judaism will take a totally different path from the apocalyptic one (denying the angelic rebellion and therefore the need for such an extreme act on the part of the Messiah). It is not a question of reconciling differences (Christianity and rabbinic Judaism will be built and separated on the basis of different premises). Rather, it is a question of understanding and relativizing these differences within a non-supersessionist framework, as different emphases in a debate in which each should look to the other side with equal understanding and respect. This is what Mark Kinzer has done in his constant search for a Postmissionary Messianic Judaism. And this what I also have tried to do in my book Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation,¹⁵ showing how contemporary historical research on Paul within Judaism can restore the image of the apostle as a Jew among Jews, offering common ground and some useful indications also to today’s Jewish-Christian dialogue.¹⁶

By identifying justification and salvation (the eschatological gift of forgiveness offered by Christ and the ultimate outcome of the last judgment), a certain Christian theology tended to exclude from salvation those who did not have faith in Christ, ignoring the fact that Paul also argues that faith (which is requested to obtain forgiveness) has no part in the last judgment in which God will repay according to each one’s deeds (Rom 2:6). For Paul, the forgiveness offered by Christ to sinners does not replace the Torah and the natural law which remain the primary paths to salvation, but is added to them: the righteous Jews have the Torah; the righteous among the peoples have their conscience; and sinners, the lost sheep of the house of Israel and among the nations that have fallen hopelessly under the dominion of evil, have Christ to whose forgiveness they can confidently entrust.

1

. Fredriksen, Pagans’ Apostle, xii.

2

. Rubenstein, My Brother Paul,

114

; see also Langton, Jewish Imagination.

3

. Lapide and Stuhlmacher, Rabbi and Apostle,

47

; see also Eisenbaum, Misunderstood Apostle.

4

. Larsson, Ordinary Jew,

3–16

.

5

. This view is still commonly affirmed in Christian theology; see Westerholm, Justification Reconsidered.

6

. As early as

1991

I expressed my view that Paul belongs to Judaism and denounced the idea of a universalistic Christianity emerging from a particularistic Judaism as one of the worst stereotypes of the Christian theological tradition; see Boccaccini, Middle Judaism.

7

. Barclay, Power of Grace,

149

.

8

. Rosen-Zvi‚ Demonic Desires.

9

. Stokes, Satan.

10

. Boccaccini, Forgiveness of Sins,

153–67

.

11

. Boccaccini, Enochic Traditions,

157–72

.

12

. VanLandingham, Judgment & Justification,

17

.

13

. Westerholm, Justification Reconsidered,

48–49

.

14

. Fredriksen, Pagans’ Apostle, xii.

15

. See also Boccaccini and Segovia, Paul the Jew; Oliver and Boccaccini, Early Reception.

16

. Once marginalized and quickly dismissed, the Paul-within-Judaism Perspective has established itself in the last decade as one of the most dynamic trends in Pauline scholarship; see Nanos and Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism; Boccaccini and Segovia, Paul the Jew; Abel, Message of Paul.

2

What God Has Joined Together . . .

Paul’s Commitments to Apocalyptic, the Covenant, and the Jews

¹⁷

Douglas A. Campbell

Introduction

The apocalyptic approach to Paul’s theology is often viewed as foreclosing on the presence within his thinking of salvation history. While its leading advocates do urge extreme caution about certain approaches to salvation history,¹⁸ I will suggest in what follows that this is probably more a case of clever marketing by the paradigm’s detractors than an accurate description of the apocalyptic reading itself. An appropriate apocalyptic account of Paul is entirely compatible, I suggest, with a retrospectively-informed narration of the origins and history of the Jewish people leading up to and through the Christ event. Indeed, such a narration is mandated! Far from undermining the integrity of historical Israel, the apocalyptic reading of Paul—correctly understood—both establishes and affirms historical Israel.

But we need to say more than this. An apocalyptic account of the ethical significance of the resurrected Christ for his followers also entails an inclusive description of the church itself, as a body comprising both Christians and Jews. So, the first Jesus followers diversified from an original network of Torah-observant Messianic Jews into various Christian networks adapted to different pagan locations—a diversification underpinned by Paul’s apocalyptic gospel, meaning in this relation by an eschatologically-derived structure-relationality distinction. In the light of this distinction and its associated ethical dynamics, grounded in apocalyptic, we can see that no erasure of the original, Torah-observant community was envisaged or even permitted, just as Paul did not allow a fully Torah-observant ethic to erase many of the acceptable cultural markers that his new converts from paganism were embedded within as Christians. An apocalyptic account of the church is then, by way of its distinctive ethic, an inclusive account, stretching its arms around both Christians and Jews. Indeed, perhaps it is, at least in part, the loss of this apocalyptic account of church ethics that has led to the disappearance of fully Torah-observant Jews from the center of the church—an awful loss that has had almost unimaginably tragic results for church-Jew relations in general, and that also betokens a fundamental misunderstanding of Paul’s gospel.

These two radical theological entailments—in terms of salvation-history and of ethics—are not usually associated with apocalyptic readings of Paul. But I argue here that they should be as we continue to try to address the deeply painful and vastly important questions in relation to the nature and significance of both the Jewish people, messianic and otherwise, and the role of the Torah within the church’s ethics. Indeed, readings of Paul have so often provided fundamentally vicious answers to these questions that it can almost be hard to believe that an accurate, apocalyptic recovery of the apostle’s thinking leads directly to some profoundly constructive, and perhaps even restorative, answers.¹⁹ But I hope to show here, even if only gesturally, that this is the case.

Apocalyptic Dimensions in Paul

Let me begin my more detailed discussion with the thesis that the basis of Paul’s epistemology is apocalyptic in the specific sense that all his thinking rests on a revelation, recalling that the Greek equivalent for the Latin revelatio is apokalupsis.²⁰ This suggests that the foundation for all Paul’s God-talk is a God who has actively revealed himself²¹ through his Son, Jesus, by way of his Spirit.²² The causality for this truth claim’s presence in Paul’s life is therefore not his own; it is divine.²³ Moreover, this particular truth claim is, from the point of its disclosure onward, the truth claim above all others. Jesus is Lord in both meaning and mode. All other truth claims about God must now be evaluated by this supreme truth claim or, as Paul puts it at one point, every thought must be brought captive, in submission to Christ.²⁴

But we come here immediately to a second, related but distinguishable, use of the signifier apocalyptic. When we ask what God acting through Jesus and the Spirit has effected—what revelation has been set in motion—apocalyptic readers of Paul respond in a chorus²⁵ with the word eschatology.²⁶

Paul knows that the long-awaited age to come has been inaugurated,²⁷ and not just in relation to Jesus, who experiences it comprehensively so to speak, but within his followers, who experience it partially. (Note, there are problems with putting things in this quantitative fashion, but it will have to do for now.)²⁸ Jesus’s followers participate in his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection,²⁹ as enacted by baptism,³⁰ and now possess, at the least, a resurrected mind—a new phronêsis³¹—which has been liberated from the irresistible seductions of the sinful passions.³² If anyone is in Christ, then he is a new creation: the old has gone; all things have become new!³³ There are acute challenges in terms of intelligibility here that need to be squarely faced. I try to do so in chapter 7 of my Pauline Dogmatics. But for now, it must suffice to grasp that this present transformation, imaged by the risen Christ, and hence stepping in some sense into the age to come, is quite real—quite concrete—for Paul. And it is the basis for two key lines of entailment.

First, this inaugurated eschatology is the basis for a highly sophisticated ethic that explains coherently the emergence of a fundamentally diverse network of Jesus followers, which was composed of Torah-observant Messianic Jews and converts from paganism whom Acts 11:26 correctly denotes as Christians.³⁴ It follows from this that any Christian erasure of Torah-observant Judaism within the church (or outside of the church for that matter) is to be strongly rejected.

Second, this revealed eschatology is the basis for a retrospective account of historical Israel, which supplies positive explanations of its nature and role. Paul’s interpretation is thereby freed from any intrinsically supersessionist construal of Israel that inevitably arises when its story is told within a prospective, forward-moving, plight-to-solution manner.³⁵

We need now to look closer at these two interpretative entailments, beginning with Paul’s flexible eschatological ethic.

Paul’s Eschatological Ethic

Paul asserts repeatedly that Jesus’s followers are to live wholeheartedly out of the new eschatological reality that has been opened up for them by his resurrection, into which they have been immersed. The contours of the new age press down decisively on all behavior, where the Spirit’s role is also apparent,³⁶ and it follows that the shape of this new eschatological reality is ethically determinative. But what is it?

Cutting a long story short, I suggest that Jesus and his followers participate in a radically interpersonal reality best explicated by metaphors of friendship and family, suitably expurgated: those whom God foreknew he also appointed to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many siblings.³⁷ This eschatological communion is the destiny of creation. But we learn at this moment not only that the personal is central to the future age but also that people themselves are fundamentally relational. God the father is the father because he has a son; the son is the son because of his father; these relationships defining the heart of their identities as persons.³⁸ And it follows from this that the eschatological reality Jesus’s followers indwell is fundamentally relational—hence they are now called, above all, to be, as Paul puts it famously on one occasion, loving, which is to say, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.³⁹ A community of virtue is the destiny of the cosmos, and this explains the bulk of Paul’s ethical instructions.

The realization concerning the eschatological primacy of the relational allowed Paul to grasp a further key ethical insight. We must now make a distinction within our present locations between the relational and what we can call the structural.⁴⁰

Paul knows well that we still live in bodies of flesh, and within all the associated structures that make their existence possible. We eat, drink, and reproduce; and we build up pyramids of practices that make those basic activities possible. So we make and wear clothes; we arrange buildings and farms and cities; we bathe; we agree on a communal regulation of time; and so on. This is obviously where many Jewish practices as instructed by Torah are located, although everyone indwells these complex arrangements that are oriented in multiple subtle ways to their particular environments and histories.

However, these structures and arrangements all belong to the age everyone lives in presently—to the age of the flesh—and so all of them are being decisively transcended by the coming age, now inaugurated, that ultimately resolves all of this age’s problems dramatically. In the age to come we will no longer die. And so we will no longer eat or drink or reproduce, or do anything ancillary to those basic activities like planting, building, and managing our present form of time. We will also no longer sin. We will be embodied, but our bodies will be spiritual and immortal.⁴¹

So Jesus-followers as Paul understands them currently inhabit a place of some tension. They presently live in the age of the flesh, although they do not now live out of it. They also live in the Spirit. The two ages overlap then, sometimes to a profoundly challenging degree. But the visible, with all its structures, is secondary, passing, and inferior; the age that is unseen is decisive⁴²—as superior to what it is displacing as glory is to excrement.⁴³ And it is this asymmetry that generates a distinctive Pauline flexibility vis-à-vis the embodied structures that humanity currently indwells. The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking, but of righteousness, joy, and peace, in the Holy Spirit.⁴⁴ Indeed, we come now to the crucial application.

In the light of the primacy of eschatological relationality, present embodied structures operative in the current cosmos function as the vehicles of that relationality, and now matter only to that degree. They still matter insofar as correct relationality is currently impossible without them. What relational activity can we undertake without a body and its associated networks? But they only matter this much, as relational vehicles. Hence, they are not sacred or inviolable in their own right, which means that they must not be reified or universalized. (Neither should they be erased, that is, unless they get in the way of appropriate relating, which is to say that Paul, unlike some of his later followers, is too sensible to be a Gnostic.) They remain important, enmeshed within the cultures and identities of their practitioners. Everyone still needs their bodies and their attendant structures for the moment, no matter how limited they might be. But they are emphatically secondary in ethical terms. The relating through them is what counts.

If this sounds rather esoteric, it is actually very simple—at least in theoretical terms—and it is also very practical.

Take an act of kindness, kindness being an important relational virtue. I might get free beverages for some colleagues at work just to show them that I value them. It doesn’t really matter if I buy them coffee, tea, or hot chocolate—unless my colleagues have strong preferences, in which case part of my act of kindness should involve finding out just which beverage to buy. But the nature of the beverage still doesn’t matter here beyond its existence as a preference. It is not the right thing to buy coffee or the wrong thing to buy cocoa. The structure is irrelevant, except as a vehicle for the relationality, here kindness, which does matter. So, I buy some nice cappuccinos, and hand them out, and everyone feels just a little bit better—measurably happier in fact—because of my act of kindness.⁴⁵ (This was an actual study carried out in the Spanish headquarters of Coca-Cola.)

Now I am aware that many questions have just been raised that need to be answered, and I try to do this in the fourth and longest part of my Pauline Dogmatics. It must suffice for now to suggest that if we no longer have to worry so much about the structural, then we can concentrate on the relational, and this makes us both highly ethical and highly flexible. Sophisticated Messianic Jewish missionaries like Paul can now navigate into local pagan contexts in a delightfully post-colonial way. The relationality introduced by the gospel is mandatory—a Jewish relationality it should be noted, complete with covenantal faithfulness—the interpersonal communion of the age to come is now pressing down upon (for example) Paul’s Galatians converts, challenging them to live more lovingly and faithfully. But the Jewish structures freighting those virtues within Paul’s parent church do not have to be introduced to the new pagan situation, and neither do Jewish missionaries have to observe these as they are engaging with this new group; local structures may do just as well—structures into which Paul has thoroughly immersed himself.⁴⁶ Some modifications will undoubtedly ensue, but not of everything, and those changes will unfold on strictly relational grounds. Thus, Galatian practices of drinking, eating, dressing, marking the body, building, washing, and calculating time, can remain in place. In short, a missional navigation into a new local expression of church can take place, a distinctively Galatian Christianity can emerge, and the church in toto can experience a creative diversification.

If this is clear, it is nevertheless critical to appreciate at this moment how structural erasures running in both directions are now profoundly inappropriate. Any such erasures necessarily involve the reification of patterns within the old cosmos, and so deny the underlying eschatological validity of the entire navigation; erasures deny the present primacy and efficacy of the resurrection, of the communion it establishes, and of the presence of the age to come. Jesus’s work is thereby dismissed—or, at least, radically undervalued.⁴⁷ Rather unfortunately, we grasp this critical dimension within Paul’s ethic as he resists an inappropriate imposition of Jewish practices on his pagan converts by some over-zealous messianic missionaries, and this opens up the possibility of a tragic misreading of his arguments.⁴⁸ But the eschatological ethic undergirding Paul’s resistance, properly understood, applies equally in reverse. Jewish structures within the church’s parent body must not be abandoned either (except voluntarily, in missional situations)⁴⁹ simply because Paul’s new pagan converts do not adopt them—an erasure working in the other direction. The very eschatological logic that led Paul to resist the imposition of Jewish structures on his pagan converts in Galatia⁵⁰ should lead us to vigilantly resist, in his name, the imposition of Christian structures on Jews and the resulting erasure of their treasured practices. Any such erasure, except in the name of relational reformation, is to be vigilantly opposed—although here especially given the privileged, original, and originating nature of those structures.⁵¹

It follows from all this that Torah-observant Messianic Judaism is entirely valid, as the original node within a steady missional diversification into different Christian (although presumably also occasionally Jewish) networks, the entire process being guided and justified by Paul’s apocalyptic gospel and its eschatological ethic throughout. Furthermore, to supersede Torah-observant Jews in this network is to demonstrate at that very moment that Paul’s gospel has been abandoned, and another gospel, unworthy of that name, has been inserted in its stead.⁵² We might say then—putting things bluntly—that the early church comprised Messianic Jews and Christian converts from paganism, and if you don’t see that or understand that that was the case then you don’t understand the gospel, at least as Paul understood it.

With this set of realizations in place, we need now to consider very briefly the second principal avenue of Jewish erasure in Paul’s interpretation that an apocalyptic reading will resist.

Paul’s Retrospective and Positive Account of Past Israel

An apocalyptic account of Paul’s thinking, which departs from a revelation of and by Jesus Christ, facilitates a retrospective account of Israel.⁵³ An account of the past must still be written—Paul was no Marcionite (and neither are his apocalyptic readers, their frequent scholarly description notwithstanding)—but it must be written in this way, from this viewpoint. And in fact it seems that only this retrospective procedure can avoid the supersessionism generated when Paul’s interpreters work forwards, from plight to solution, thereby necessarily explaining present Christian difference in terms of past Jewish inadequacy.⁵⁴ Au contraire, just as the writer of a memoir looks back on her past and grasps the meaning of her unfolding life clearly only in retrospect, so Paul looks back from the disclosure of God’s son and sees Israel as leading towards this moment. And, as a result of this, Israel can now be seen to play a fundamentally positive, not to mention, non-negotiable, role. Paul writes the story of his people’s past as a narrative building up to what he now knows is its extraordinary eschatological climax.⁵⁵

The story begins with the great Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs, who were called into being by God’s word and then promised land and offspring in perpetuity—the first great covenantal promises. But these promises were expanded eschatologically by many Jews in Paul’s day to the promise of eternal life in a glorious future age.⁵⁶ So Paul, from his new vantage point, now simply claims that Jesus has brought this coming age very close indeed, thereby fulfilling Israel’s eschatological destiny. Jesus himself has been fully resurrected and lives enthroned on high as messiah and lord; his followers, with their presently transformed hearts and minds, await the age’s comprehensive arrival, necks craning forward;⁵⁷ and the triumphant return of Jesus to gather his followers to himself and to eliminate all remaining wrongdoing is imminent. Israel’s role prior to the coming of Jesus is consequently one of concrete eschatological anticipation; in Pauline language, it is promissory.⁵⁸ But Israel is also the historical womb within which the all-important seed through whom the promises are realized is born.⁵⁹ Israel is therefore, above all, the place where God meets and saves the cosmos through his Jewish son—not an insignificant role. And the rest of the church, now including pagan converts, is, as Paul quite rightly says, grafted into Israel at this eschatological juncture, and exists because of Israel, as guests, by way of Jesus the Messiah, and within that distinctive unfolding lineage.⁶⁰

Hence there is in fact no ethnic history in this broken cosmos more important or positive than the history of Israel. Israel is the bearer of the promise and the place where the all-important promises were eventually fulfilled. I would even go so far as to say that the only history in this cosmos that really matters is the history of the Jews; it is the one history that has decisive significance for every other people as they indwell all their own complex histories, none of which—while remaining important in part—offers a way beyond death.⁶¹ Only Jewish history promises and then realizes life from the dead through its Messiah, now enthroned in heaven, for every other history. But these critical—and rather glorious—salvation-historical truths are difficult to glimpse other than from an apocalyptic starting point, with its dazzling retrospective purview.

Conclusion

In conclusion may I simply say that I hope, going forward, that we will all realize a little more clearly than perhaps we did before that the apocalyptic Paul, suitably understood, as a covenantal Paul, is an emphatically non-supersessionist Paul and an inclusive Paul, and this really matters. The erasure of Jews by constructions of Paul is a ghastly problem that the Holocaust (amongst other things)⁶² has taught us simply must be addressed and eliminated,⁶³ although all the while maintaining our exegetical, historical, and theological integrity. But I would suggest that the apocalyptic reading can do this—provided, of course, that it is suitably understood, both as linking its hands backwards with the covenant and thereby with the people whom God calls into being and never abandons, and as affirming the identity of the Jews qua Jews, in fully Torah-observant terms, within the church today.

17

. I am delighted to be able to honor here the life and work of Mark Kinzer, a much-respected fellow-student of Paul. I have learned much from him.

18

. Certainly, I do (see, e.g., Campbell, Quest,

56

­­

–68

). Martyn, read accurately, is also basically urging caution, not abandonment, although he is frequently presented as endorsing the latter position (see e.g., Martyn, Galatians,

343–52

["Comment #

37

. Covenant, Christ, Church, and Israel"]). His actual position is in fact exquisitely nuanced. So too Harink, while hostile to some Pauline scholars strongly associated with salvation history, offers his own nuanced account (see Harink, Resurrecting Justice,

133–55

).

19

. Space constraints will force me to be brief as I describe these arguments here. But further details can be found especially in my Pauline Dogmatics.

20

. The signifier apocalyptic, like most important signifiers, can activate subtly different referents and references. Not much turns on this; it is unsurprising, and the observation is of little explanatory value. But different usages do need to be distinguished if confusion is to be avoided.

21

. English pronouns are notoriously unhelpful when describing divine identities that are personal but also transcend created categories like gender. It must suffice here for me to say that no implications for gender construction are present in my use of the male pronoun; it is used to align with Paul’s designation of God (theos) as father, and Jesus as son, with the further caveat that in my view the apostle’s use of these descriptors is not ultimately gendered either. They are narrative references principally to divine activity, and especially when that is being mapped by the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis

22

. See my Story of Jesus.

22

. Alluding here directly both to Gal

1

:

15–16

(and

1

:

11–12

), and

1

Cor

2

:

1–10

, esp. vv.

10

and

12

. I elaborate the nature of this revelational starting point, and some of its immediate critical implications, in chs.

1

and

2

of my Pauline Dogmatics.

23

. We do not need to interpret this causality clumsily, and arguably in essentially modern Liberal terms, as exclusive of Paul’s own agency; Paul was fully and appropriately involved in this event. See esp. chs.

7

,

8

, and

9

in my Pauline Dogmatics, and further references listed there.

24

.

2

Cor

11

:

4

.

25

. So Martyn and his great teacher Käsemann, along with those whom Martyn and Käsemann have strongly influenced—i.a., Gaventa, Keck, Brown, Cousar, de Boer, Harink, Eastman, Rutledge, Tilling, and me. For a useful although not entirely accurate guide to this academic stemma, see Congdon, Eschatologizing Apocalyptic, building on a seminal genealogy by Fleming Rutledge. (Beker is a thoroughgoing futurist and so does not align exactly.) A key early figure is Schweitzer, and he himself points to important antecedents for this paradigm in the nineteenth century. (These connections have been recently illuminated in part by Longarino, Pauline Theology and the Problem of Death). Although he is not usually directly associated with apocalyptic readers of Paul, Sanders advocated for the importance of Schweitzer, and of the centrality of what he called participationist eschatology to Paul. He is followed closely here by, i.a., Tatum. See my Participationist Eschatological Account of Justification.

26

. Describing Jewish views of resurrection in Paul’s period is important but difficult: see, i.a., Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God; Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel; Levenson and Madigan, Resurrection; Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead. Critical now is McGlothlin, Resurrection as Salvation. The topic is much discussed by the Jewish