Pauline Dogmatics (4) Story

In his fourth chapter Pauline Dogmatics, Douglas Campbell talks about how to testify to Jesus in a clear way.

Jesus arrives in our story somewhat unexpectedly. He is a revelation, and we learn about him by way of revelation. He is a gift. So he simply arrives, suddenly, unannounced. He is a surprise. Before the arrival of God in person in Jesus, we did not possess this truth about the universe in all its fullness, and so we could not tell our story properly. It was his arrival that told us where our story needed to go.

If we want to tell a true story about Jesus, whose truth has been revealed to us, then we need to begin with Jesus. We have to begin our story in the middle. I don’t see any other alternatives. Jesus is the truth. We must therefore begin with his arrival as a fact and with our initial response this arrival in confession and adoration, which is why this book began where it did, with the truth that is Jesus. The story about Jesus must begin with Jesus having already arrived.

This is really a really important point. To understand the problem that Jesus resolved, we must look at what he did and what he achieved. If we come to Jesus assuming that we already understand the human problem, we will get it wrong.

If we read Gen 1-3, without Jesus’ revelation, we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that the human problem is mostly a problem with God and that we need to appease his anger with us, but that is misleading. When I read Ephesians and Colossians, I find that human have a far greater problem with the spiritual powers of evil.

When you were dead in trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive with him and forgave us all our trespasses. He erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations, that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly; he triumphed over them in him (Col 2:3-15).

He made us alive. He destroyed the power of the spiritual powers of evil and paid the ransom that they demanded for our freedom. There is nothing here about us needing to appease God first.

Douglas Campbell also deals with the history question.

The resurrected Jesus was still present within our human experience in some way, appearing, for a time, to these figures of and blood. In short, these events are said here to have been real. They really took place. And since they took place in the past, they were history in the broad sense of that word, which raises an additional truth question for us.

Such events leave marks that creatures of flesh and blood both produce and process. But we evaluate lingering evidence from the past as confessing Jews and Christians, rooted in the truth that God was fully present in Jesus and that Jesus is related, inseparably, to his Father and Spirit. And this location creates a presumption about reality—about the very nature of history. From this location, we do not expect past events to be limited to what we see and hear and touch, or to the material and textual remainders of those events. The past as people have lived experienced it is not all that is. God can work there, and we believe he did work there. In fact, God made the entire situation in the first place. So we should not evaluate the past the way that many modern historians do, when they bring a different, fundamentally secular account of broader reality to bear on it, and go on to pronounce certain things possible or impossible (such judgments are often not, strictly speaking, historical at all, but are philosophical and even religious claims; they are claims built on various foundational projects.)

But we do nevertheless expect any material and textual remainders to attest to the truths of the gospel insofar as those intersected with the lived experiences of those who see, hear, feel, and touch. So the question still arises whether this attestation exists, as we expect it to. As God enters our situation, one of the results his graceful condescension is a vulnerability to this sort of procedure. As God enters history, however gently, we expect an impact on history, however slight.

Campbell says that from the evidence in Paul, we can confirm that these events did in indeed take place.

I really like this approach. I read a lot of history, but I am struck that historians often struggle to agree on what happened as recently as a hundred years ago. They can tell us about what happened in the past, but given the lack of certainty their method produces, it is foolish to say that the resurrection did not occur due to failure to comply with their standards. Jesus is confirming his resurrection every day.

For those who want to more, Douglas Campbell has been going through his book online, chapter by chapter, during the shutdown. This series makes the message of the book really clear. The talks are listed under the heading "Lectures" at this link.