Pauline Dogmatics (1)

I really enjoyed reading the first four chapters of Pauline Dogmatics by Douglas Campbell that came in the free Kindle sample that I downloaded. They were really helpful. These days most Kindle sample of books from Christian authors are full of recommendations from people whose opinion I do not really care about. So, I get to the end of the sample before I am out of the preface, which is frustrating. Pauline Dogmatics is quite different, because I got four complete chapters, and no recommendations. Well done Eerdmans.

The chapters that I have read are very accessible and quite easy to read. The footnotes are hidden at the end of the chapter.

The first chapter asks the question: “How do we know what God is like.” This is the most important question anyone can ask, as the answer changes the nature of life. Paul’s answer is that we know what God is like through his revelation in Jesus.

It is clear that Jesus will reveal God definitively and decisively as God. He is God—a momentous assertion! So to look at Jesus and to see what he is like is to look at God and to see what he is like.

There is a gap here that we just can’t bridge unless God Has graciously bridged it from His side of the divide and become one of us and lived among us. What a gift!

God is definitively known only in Jesus. This is where God is present with us fully, and nowhere else—not in a book, a tradition, a piece of land, a building, or even in a particular people (unless, that is, he has taken up residence in one of them fully). We worship and pray to none of these things; we worship and pray to Jesus because Jesus is God, and so we know God fully and completely only as we know Jesus.

I labor this point a little because it is so central, so simple, so quickly introduced and understood, and so easily and rapidly abandoned (note Gal 1:6). We must affirm the insight that Jesus is Lord, along with all its entailments, and protect it, viligantly resisting all other candidates for this status. (People, and especially Christians, seem to love to avoid, to marginalize, and to obscure God’s gift of God’s very being to us in Jesus for all sorts of odd reasons).

Accurate God-talk is Jesus-talk. And God-talk that is not in some very direct sense Jesus-talk is probably not God-talk. Jesus is the key piece of information concerning God, in the light of which all other God-talk must be evaluated, which includes everything in this book and everything that Paul wrote.

Paul attributes the cause of the conviction about the lordship of Jesus to the call of God the Father and the activity of the divine Spirit, and here we see a third divine actor taking the stage in addition to the Father and the Son.

Paul has made some dramatic claims concerning divine activity. Spurning the contributions of the intellectuals and academics of his day, he has attributed certain important events within visible history—here the conversion of the Corinthians—to the hidden workings of God. They learned about God, he says, because God somehow spoke to them, and in so doing they became convinced of God’s presence in Jesus.

This describes my experience when I became a Christian. When I gained a revelation of Jesus, everything changed. I could not look at the world without seeing God’s handiwork. I could not think about the way the world functions without seeing God at work.

God is at work revealing his nature and purpose, and that this nature and purpose are so definitively revealed in the figure of Jesus that we must acknowledge the truth that this crucified figure was and is God and hence God in person, although, as we have just seen, Paul spoke in biblical language here of Jesus as Lord. This truth then lies at the heart of everything else because God lies at the heart of everything else, and we now know just what God is like. And we know this truth about God because it has been revealed to us by God. The truth has revealed the truth.

With God’s shockingly unexpected identity revealed to us in Jesus, we see that we have no accurate notion of God in ourselves with which to measure a claim about God and God’s nature and thereby to determine whether it speaks of God. God is foreign to our limited creaturely and sinfully distorted nature.

To affirm a revelation of the truth that Jesus is Lord as a revelation of God to us is consequently and necessarily to affirm a threefold activity by God in three different places: the Father sending Jesus into the world (i.e., sending him here from some other place); Jesus being sent the world, specifically to Galilee and Samaria and Judea; and the Spirit revealing this to us wherever are.

And we have learned that Jesus is God the only way we could—because God has told us that.

The chapter on knowing the truth really explained my experience clearly. I will summarise it in my next post.