Life and Faith 4.2

Part One

We are now shifting gears from the narrative portions of the New Testament to the prose discourse section. Specifically, we will be looking at Paul’s letters, which are sometimes called “epistles.” There are 13 of these. They come after Acts in the order of the New Testament, which also makes sense because Acts provides a good amount of historical background for understanding them. Also, remember that Paul’s letters are typically named after their recipients. Paul’s letters are usually put into three groups:

1. The Pillar Epistles: Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, and Galatians—These are longer letters that develop Paul’s message more fully.

2. The Prison Epistles: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon—Paul wrote these while in prison.

3. The Pastoral Epistles: 1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus—Paul wrote these to his associates who were leading new churches

That leaves 1 & 2 Thessalonians that don’t fall nicely into a category. They were probably some of the earliest letters, and they address a specific situation in Thessalonica.

On that note, it is good to keep in mind that most of Paul’s letters were written to address specific situations in churches. Thus, we tend to find details and issues relevant to a particular church in most of Paul’s letters. While letter writing is a bit of a lost art in our day, most of us have been trained to emulate the proper form of a business or application letter. There were letter writing conventions in Paul’s day as well. We find this outline present in most of Paul’s letters:

1. An opening greeting from Paul to the recipients (just a couple verses)

2. A prayer of thanks or blessing for the recipients (5-10 verses)

3. A long letter body that deals with key theological and practical issues in that church (sometimes several chapters)

4. A closing that often contains additional greetings, a closing prayer, and a farewell.

There are other collections of letters in the ancient world (like from Cicero to Atticus). These show some similarities to Paul’s letters, but some of Paul’s letters are much longer than a normal letter. If we think about the fact that there was no postal service and that many people could not read, we can then recognize that most of Paul’s letters were probably hand delivered and then read by a selected courier (see Colossians 4:16 and 1 Thessalonians 5:27). This courier also served as a personal emissary from Paul to the church and could explain and continue any communication in the letter.

Now that we’ve talked a bit about Paul’s letters, we should mention a few details about Paul. As you have read in Acts, Paul was initially an opponent of the Christian movement. He describes himself as a very zealous adherent of the Jewish faith (Philippians 3:4-6). He probably viewed the followers of Jesus as dangerous heretics who threatened his Jewish faith and people. However, after a dramatic encounter with Christ on the way to Damascus, Paul does a 180 and begins to proclaim Jesus as the messiah. Paul gives his own account of some of this in the first chapter of the letter to the Galatians—saying that the gospel he is preaching was revealed to him by God. Paul viewed himself as the apostle to the Gentiles (Ephesians 3:1, Galatians 2:9, Romans 11:13). Acts even says that Paul was a Roman citizen (Acts 22:25-26), but Paul makes no mention of this in his letters. Paul seems to have been well-suited to serve as a link between the Jewish and Hellenistic-Roman worlds. We don’t know much about the first ten or so years after Paul’s conversion, but after that Paul began to travel with some associates to cities across the Mediterranean world—first in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and then on to regions in modern day Greece. Paul’s letters are a way that he kept in touch and continued to pastor these churches. This is the time of Galatians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, and Romans. Later, Paul was imprisoned and eventually transported to Rome. The Prison Epistles and Pastoral Epistles may come from this time. We aren’t sure what happened after Paul’s trial in Rome, but some traditions say that he was released, later traveled to preach in Spain, but was finally brought back to Rome and executed there.

Part Two

Paul’s letters have quite a bit of diversity in them. They were written over the course of 10-15 years to churches (and individuals) in different places with varying backgrounds and issues. Paul appears to have had problems seeing and writing (Galatians 6:11), and he used secretaries to write his letters and emissaries to deliver and explain them. It is impossible for us to explore all the contours of Paul’s theology and ethics, so we will focus on a couple of samples—Romans (from the Pillar epistles) and Ephesians (from the Prison Epistles).

Ephesians is one of the more general of Paul’s letters. It may have been written to a number of churches in the area of Ephesus, which was the capital of the Roman province of Asia. Some date this letter to late in Paul’s life while he was imprisoned in Rome (around 60 AD). Others think that the letter was compiled or written a few decades later by a disciple of Paul. It is reported that Paul spent more time in Ephesus than in any other city on his missionary journeys (Acts 19:10). The main theme of Ephesians is God’s gracious act of saving both Jews and Gentiles through Jesus and bringing them together in one new community called the church. As he says in 3:6: “The Gentiles have become fellow heirs [with the Jews], members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” Ephesians has a crisp and balanced organization that illustrates one of the elements of Paul’s message. The first three chapters of Ephesians deal primarily with a theological explanation of what God has done for us in Christ. The last three chapters of Ephesians address how that is to be lived out in the church, at home, and in public. Paul frequently uses this movement from theology to ethics, or in English grammar terms, from indicative (statements of what has been done) to imperative (statements of what we ought to do). In chs. 1-3, Paul unpacks what God has done for us in Christ: offered us a new life when we were dead in our sins (2:1-4), brought both Jews and Gentiles together in one family (2:11-18), and declared to the whole cosmos that the promised redemption has now been achieved through Jesus (3:1-13). When we move into the latter half of the letter, Paul begins by teaching about how to live together and speak to one another in the church (4:1-14), how we should leave our old lives behind and live a new life modelled after God’s love (see 5:1-2), and what this looks like in our mundane family relationships and supernatural conflicts (chs. 6).

Romans is placed first in the collection of Paul’s letters because it is the longest. However, this is also a very appropriate location because in Romans Paul claims to be setting out his gospel for the Roman church, which he has never visited (see Romans 1:8-15). Thus, while Romans is written for a particular situation, it also provides the most systematic overview of what Paul believes and preaches for an audience that has never met Paul. Romans is usually dated to about 57 AD, written just before Paul left his missionary work in the region of Greece and headed into the events that would take him to Rome as a prisoner. Paul initially seems to have written Romans in order to enlist their help as he followed a call from God to take the gospel further west as far as Spain (15:22-24). Paul gives us a sort of thesis statement for the letter in 1:16-17: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and then also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous one will live by faith.’” Thus, Paul takes up two intertwined questions in Romans. The first is: How will God grant salvation to both Jews and Gentiles? The second is: How does this salvation bring about righteousness through faith? Paul begins by levelling the playing field in chs. 1-3. Even though the Jews were the special recipients of God’s gracious gift of the covenants and the Law, they still find themselves to be sinners. Perhaps sinners in a slightly different way than Gentiles, but every person on the planet finds themselves trapped in sin and separated by God (3:23) This is where God steps in, and Paul describes this in chs. 3-8. God sends Jesus Christ to demonstrate God’s love through his faithfulness to give his life up for all humanity. Jesus’s faithfulness demonstrates the righteousness of God (3:24-26). Not only that, Jesus becomes the model for our lives. We should have faith as he and Abraham showed faith (ch. 5). Jesus makes a new model of humanity possible (ch. 5). As Jesus died and lives a new life, so we can die to sin and live a new and holy life (ch. 6). Paul unpacks some additional angles on all this in ch. 7 to set up the description of our future glory in ch. 8. From this vantage point, Paul dives into the issue of how both Jews and Gentiles, given their very different histories of relationship with God, can now both share in salvation through Jesus (chs. 9-11) The gift was first offered to the Jews, but a number of them rejected it. This led to an open door for Gentiles at the current moment, but Paul hoped that this would ultimately lead to the Jews realizing their mistake and coming back to believe in Jesus (see 11:11-12). The letter closes with some practical and ethical instructions for the Roman church, especially focusing in ch. 14 on how Jewish and Gentile believers with different mores (social norms) can live together as a Christian community.

There you have an overview of Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and the Romans. Getting a sense of these two letters sets the stage for a deeper analysis of a couple of key themes that stretch across Paul’s letters in the next segment.

Part Three

Paul develops the theme of righteousness primarily in Galatians and Romans, though it does show up in other letters as well. As with the phrase “The Kingdom of God,” we run into a translation/language issue here. There is one word family in Greek for a set of terms that have rather different nuances for us: one adjective for our words righteous and just, one verb for our words justify and rectify, one noun for our words justice and righteousness. The best thing to say is that when Paul speaks of righteousness or righteous or justification, it probably includes notions of both justice and rectification in our language. Paul views righteousness as a way of life that is both good (just) and which produces good (right). To start off in Romans, righteousness first and foremost belongs to God. God is righteous (1:17, 3:26)! The problem is that human beings are not righteous. They rebel against God in ways that proliferates evil in the world. So, what can be done? Perhaps here it is best to provide you with a slightly paraphrased and explanatory version of Romans 3:21-26. Paul says:

Now, apart from the law as a basis for righteousness, God’s righteousness has been revealed, and this revelation is supported by what we find in the Law and the Prophets [the TaNak]. The righteousness of God was shown in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who would believe. There is no distinction. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But, everyone is now rectified by his grace as a gift through the deliverance that is in Christ Jesus. God presented Jesus as a sacrificial offering of restoration through his faithfulness and by his own blood. In so doing, God demonstrated God’s righteousness. Previously, he had simply passed over the sins that people committed. But in this recent act, God has shown that God is righteous and that he also makes righteous those who trust in Jesus.

Did you follow that? It’s pretty complicated. God is righteous, and while God could simply overlook our sin that doesn’t do anything to solve our problem of being trapped in sin. To solve that problem God sent Jesus to die a sacrificial death, which required great faithfulness on Jesus’s part. The death and blood of Jesus has a profound effect on us, rescuing us from sin and making it possible for us to be free to live new lives of righteousness. So in the end, it is all about righteousness (God’s, Jesus’s, and ours) and all about faith (God’s, Jesus’s, and ours).

So, we are both set free from the chains of sin through Jesus and enabled to live a new kind of life that is consonant with God’s righteousness. All of our barriers that kept us away from God are gone in Jesus. At this point, Paul also introduces the Holy Spirit (see Galatians 5 and Romans 8). The Spirit provides us with the ongoing inspiration and power to continue to live out this life of righteousness (in a way that external laws could never do).

With that (pretty complicated) exploration of righteousness, let’s move onto our last theme which is perhaps less hard to wrap your mind around but harder to wrap your soul around. While “righteousness” is an important concept for Paul in some of his letters, Paul is always talking about what it means to be “in Christ.” Note that the word “Christ” is simply the Greek term for the Hebrew title “Messiah.” Both mean “anointed” in their respective languages. Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” over 200 times! Here’s a few examples.

· Romans 6:23: The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

· 1 Corinthians 15:22: All die in Adam, but all will be made alive in Christ

· 2 Corinthians 5:17: If anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation.

· Galatians 3:26: In Christ, you are all children of God through faith.

· Eph 2:6: God has seated us in the heavenly places with him in Christ Jesus.

· 2 Timothy 2:1: Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

This is simple on one level. Jesus is alike a container or a place. You can either be “in Christ” or presumably “out of Christ” (and “in sin” or “in the flesh” or other similar things). Being “in Christ” is a new kind of existence, a new kind of life, that leads to a new way of life. Not so hard to understand on one level, but to live in another realm while continuing to live in the world as we know it is a hard thing to do. Paul seemed to know that, and that was why he was constantly teaching, reminding, and exhorting people to be “in Christ.” Remember, how the Kingdom of God is both a present reality and a future hope yet to be culminated. Well, being in Christ is kind of the same way. Through our faith in and association with Jesus, we now live life in Christ. We share in Christ’s death. We share in his resurrection. We share in his identity. We share in his righteousness. But, we are also somehow still moored to our past and current life in the midst of this yet-to-be-fully-redeemed world. The key for Paul is that God has made this new life in Christ possible, and God has made faith the door for entering into this new mode of life. Believing “in Christ” moves us into being “in Christ” (Galatians 1:16-20).

As we conclude, we can see why Paul’s message of the gospel was so powerful and convincing. God used Paul to reach many people and spread the gospel to new regions. We can also see how people could get confused by all this and need some ongoing support in order to live out this new kind of existence in Christ. In the end, Paul says that he doesn’t know anything except Jesus Ch