Incarnation, by Will Willimon

Chapter 1

1. Every religion offers to help us finite creatures climb up to or dig deep into the infinite. Only Christianity contends that the infinite descended, taking the form of our finitude—Incarnation. This book is the good news that we need not climb up to God; in Jesus Christ, God comes down to us. God is inaccessible to us not only because God reigns in highest heaven and we are down here in the muck and mire of earth. God is inaccessible not only to human sight but also to human reason. Incarnation is the counterintuitive, not-believed-by-nine-out-of-ten-Americans assertion that even though we could not avail ourselves of God, God lovingly became available. God condescended to be God With Us.

- How does Incarnation theology stack up against modern forms of self-designed spirituality?

2. Not that Jesus Christ—as the visible image of the invisible God—is obviously, self-evidently God. From the first, most people who encountered Jesus said not, “That Jew from Nazareth is God!” but instead, “That’s not the way God is supposed to look.” A word of warning: most of us have been indoctrinated into the modern, Western conviction that we already have the ability to think clearly about anything. We have all we require innately, on our own, to think clearly and truthfully about whatever we choose. Our democratic sensibilities are therefore offended by the thought that the meaning of God is a gift given to some, a phenomenon that we lack the innate skills to comprehend on our own. God must reveal the truth to us or we can’t know it.

- “Why isn’t Jesus Christ’s divinity more obvious?”

3. The Scriptures tell us the truth about Jesus, who is in turn the truth about God. If any of us limited creatures is able to comprehend, to believe, and in believing to stake our lives upon the one who was “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), that believing is also a miraculous work of God among us. Thus we, by the grace of God in our lives, become living testimony of the truth of Incarnation. 

Theologian Karl Barth said that if you are able to believe in the strange, wondrous birth, your belief is a miracle akin to the miraculous birth of Jesus.

- Why is our faith in Jesus described as a miracle?

4. However, in the Incarnation, God (as Gregory of Nazianzus put it) “remained what he was and took up what he was not.” God became human without diminishment of God’s divinity; God’s divinity thoroughly embraced our humanity. Thus, our reconciliation to God is affected not by something we do (as in Mormonism’s theology of human ascent) but by something that God has done and continues to do in Jesus Christ (God’s gracious descent).

- How do you get your head around this truth and how does it shape your relationship with Jesus?

5. Jesus was no disembodied spirit fluttering above human life. Clearly, he cared about real people who were caught in real, earthly, human binds—babies to be birthed, children to be raised, bills to be paid, and an upper room to be prepared. He gathered disciples and embraced the hungry multitudes. He healed the sick, cast out demons, and invited ordinary folk to walk with him. When he noted hunger, he offered bread. When the wine ran out, he made more. Rather than providing people an escape route out of this world, he intruded into the full, tragic human condition, modeling a new way of living in this world. You can almost taste the dust as he walks along Galilee’s roads. The Gospels speak of him not in the fashion of a “Once upon a time in a faraway land,” but rather by locating him in real time, such as “during the reign of Caesar Augustus,” and in real places like Bethlehem and Golgotha. He not only brought a message that was addressed to real people and their real-people problems; he also fully embodied that message in his life in this real world. He thereby showed us that his “kingdom” was no dreamy fantasy but a place to be lived in here and now.

- In what ways is Jesus most “real” to you on a daily basis?

6. Even as I attempt to describe the basics of Hegel’s panentheism, you may be thinking that you have previously encountered Hegelianism and didn’t know it. Much of what passes for “Creation Spirituality,” or “New Age Spirituality” these days is panentheism in new garb. If we are thinking about God, or matters of the spirit, there must be a way to think without recourse to the grubby particularities of earthly matters, so Hegelians of every age have argued. Religion progresses (or more accurately, recesses) into ever more vague platitudes, ever more distant from the death and decay of worldly existence.

- Where have you encountered such pantheism?  What tipped you off?

7. There is no veil we must lift and peek behind, no set of undiscovered sacred texts, no archaeological discovery yet to be made that can tell us more than God has graciously revealed to us about Christ. Of course, knowing about Christ—facts and figures, the stuff of human knowing—is not enough. Post-Resurrection, we “know” Christ as fully human and fully divine by a way of knowing that is more adventurous than most of what passes for knowledge in the modern world. Only faith can lead us to be able to declare with the whole church down through the ages, “God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ” (2 Cor. 5:19).

- How is faith able to surpass knowledge?  

- Why is it preferable to the latter?

8. Faith is the name for what happens when human reason encounters and submits to the nature and reality of God as God is self-disclosed in Jesus Christ. Fortunately for sincere seekers after God, the Incarnation demonstrates that we have a God who relentlessly self-discloses.

- What does this insightful statement say to you about your own relationship with God in Christ?

9.  An aloof, allegedly caring but inactive, spiritual, vague deity is perfectly designed for modern Western people who have been conditioned to organize the world around themselves. A self-fabricated “god” (that is, idol) is always easier to get along with than the true and living God who is considerably more than a figment of our imagination. The shear strangeness of the Doctrine of the Incarnation makes it difficult to say that here is an idea of God that we came up with on our own.

- How does this assessment speak truth to cultural trends of idolatry?

Incarnation: The Surprising Overlap of Heaven & Earth, by William Willimon

Incarnation

William Willimon

Meeting/Reading Schedule

October 10 – Chapter 1

October 17 – Chapter 2

October 24 – Chapter 3

October 31 – Chapter 4

November 7– No Class 

Creation: The Apple of God’s Eye

November 14 – Chapter 1

November 21 – Chapter 2

November 28 – No Class

December 5– No Class 

December 12 – Chapter 3

December 19 – Chapter 4

December 26 – No Class

January 2 –No Class

January 9 – Chapter 5

January 16 – Chapter 6

January 23 – Chapter 7

Trinity: The God We Don’t Know

January 30 – Chapter 1

February 2 – No Class

February 9 – Chapter 2

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 15

1. For Paul there was no question about the starting point. It was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfillment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true “image”; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God—so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism, one would worship and invoke Jesus as Lord within, not alongside, the service of the “living and true God.” Jesus, the one for whose sake one would forsake all idols, all rival “lords.” Jesus, above all, who had come to his kingdom, the true lordship of the world, in the way that Paul’s friends who were starting to write the Jesus story at that time had emphasized: by dying under the weight of the world’s sin in order to break the power of the dark forces that had enslaved all humans, Israel included.

- In what ways is Jesus the starting point & goal for Christians today?

2.The point of being human, after all, was never simply to be a passive inhabitant of God’s world. As far as Paul was concerned, the point of being human was to be an image-bearer, to reflect God’s wisdom and order into the world and to reflect the praises of creation back to God. Humans were therefore made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth—like an “image” in a temple, no less—and to be the conduit through which God’s life would come to earth and earth’s praises would rise to God. Here, then, is the point of Paul’s vision of human rescue and renewal (“salvation,” in traditional language): those who are grasped by grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the One God, focused on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God’s mercy; they are also agents. They are poems in which God is addressing his world, and, as poems are designed to do, they break open existing ways of looking at things and spark the mind to imagine a different way to be human.

- What does it mean to be God’s image-bearers, agents, and poems?

3. Paul directs us to think and act with the “mind of the Messiah.”

- Where are you invited and challenged to think/act in this way?

4. Paul invites us to calculate ourselves as being dead to sin and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus...and to live accordingly, trusting in the resurrected life to come.

- How does this “calculation” shape your attitudes & expectations when faced with life’s challenges & disappointments?

5. Wright attributes Paul’s success to his sheer energy, his blunt way of telling it as he sees it, as well as many other personality traits.

- Which of Paul’s traits have most affected your faith & your life?

6. Paul’s letters and writings allowed the early churches to flourish and expand...creating a new sense of community, a new definition of family.

- How has Paul’s witness to complete inclusivity in Christ reshaped the Christian landscape of our day?

7. Paul ultimately lived and died in constant prayer.

- How does Paul’s life of prayer motivate us to do the same?

- Looking back over the past 15 weeks of reading, what will you take away from this remarkable book?

* Our next book will be, Incarnation, by William Willimon.  Since Pastor Mark is away on sabbatical in July, August & September, we will begin our new book on October 10at Panera Bread.

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 14

(This is our discussion for May 16!)
(See previous post below for May 9.)

1. Luke has constructed Acts in such a way that chapter 27, the great voyage and shipwreck, functions as a kind of parallel to the climax of his Gospel, which is obviously the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. That had been the moment when “the power of darkness” did its worst. This, now, is the moment when Paul has to face the worst that the powers can throw at him before he can arrive in Rome to announce Jesus as Lord. His rescue and his arrival in Rome thus have the character of “salvation,” a major theme of the chapter; in fact, Greek words related to “saving” occur seven times in quick succession. Luke seems to view the whole episode as a kind of dramatic enactment of the spiritual battle Paul described in Ephesians 6. It is always risky to jump too quickly to the view that Luke and Paul, being close friends and travel companions, must have held the same views on all subjects, but on this point, I think they would have been close. Nor will Luke have ignored the fact that the shipwreck, with the entire ship’s company in danger of drowning, was like a dramatic though distorted version of the crossing of the Red Sea—a Passover moment, a baptismal image in itself.

- How do these interpretations & parallels help you understand Paul?

2. Fortunately, the centurion has learned a deep respect, perhaps even affection, for his brilliant if bossy prisoner. (Perhaps it was moments like that that made Luke, in his writings, give centurions the benefit of the doubt.) In any case, he gives a different order: those who can swim should swim, and those who can’t should grab a plank and do their best. The ship, their home for the last few terrifying weeks, is falling apart under the battering of the waves. Two hundred and seventy-six frightened men—merchants, businessmen, ship owners, soldiers, apostles, sailors, slaves, and prisoners alike, in the sudden egalitarianism of emergency—gasp and splash their way to shore. There is no distinction: all are soaked, scared, freezing, and exhausted. Rank and wealth mean nothing as they crawl or stagger onto dry land. But the trial by water is over. All have been saved.

- Imagine what it must have been like to be a passenger upon this ship. 

- How would you have reacted to your survival in this extreme manner?

3. The book of Acts has focused, up to this point, on the way Paul was perceived in Jerusalem and on the charges that were brought against him in relation to undermining the Torah and defiling the Temple. These were, in other words, charges of radical disloyalty to the Jewish world and its ancestral heritage, charges that of course Paul rebutted in both his letters and the various legal hearings. But there was a large synagogue community in Rome. Having returned from the banishment under Claudius, this community might well have been sensitive about someone who might look outwardly as if he spoke for the Jewish people but who might actually be undermining their ancient culture and threatening their national security. Their question would have been one that resonates to this day: Was Paul really a loyal Jew?

- Based on your observations, how would you answer this question?

4. Paul waited two years, under house arrest, for his case to come before the emperor. A strange Jewish prisoner would not have rated highly on Nero’s list of priorities. Paul was, however, free to welcome people to his quarters and to go on making the royal announcement, the true “gospel” of which the imperial “good news” was, as he believed, simply a parody. Nobody stopped him; he told anybody and everybody who would listen that the One God of Israel was the world’s true king and that he had installed his son Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, as Lord of the world. Paul taught, says Luke, “with all boldness.”15 We are not surprised; “boldness” had been the keynote of Paul’s self-description, even in the tense and contested atmosphere of 2 Corinthians 3 when the “boldness” of his apostolic proclamation had been a major theme. He had never tried to hide things. He never tried to curry favor. (Here is, no doubt, one root of what comes across in the account of the voyage as bossiness and interfering; Paul was used to saying what he thought.) He was much more afraid of not being true to the gospel than of any consequences a “bold” proclamation might have had. He was loyal to Israel’s traditions as he had seen them rushing together in the Messiah. He was loyal, ultimately, to the Messiah himself, faithful to the one who had himself been faithful to the point of death. 

- Paul was sustained by his unflappable faith during this two-year period of house arrest.  

- What has sustained you during long periods of waiting and watching for God’s deliverance?

5. So, as with Paul’s putative trip to Spain, I have become more open to the possibility of a return visit to the East after an initial hearing in Rome. The problem might then be that these two, Spain and the East, might seem to cancel one another out. If Paul was to be back in Rome by the time of Nero’s persecution, facing additional hearings in difficult circumstances, two years would hardly be enough for the relevant trips, both west and east. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the persecution would not need any legal trappings. The emperor had laid the blame for the fire on the Christians, and that would be enough. Perhaps, then, one or both trips might after all be feasible; Paul might have been away either in the East or in the West when Nero was rounding up the Christians. Perhaps Paul came back sometime after 64 to find that it was all over, but that the social mood had changed and that, citizen or not, appealing to Caesar or not, he was straightforwardly on trial as a dangerous troublemaker. Perhaps. Paul had to live with a good many “perhaps” clauses in his life. Maybe it is fitting that his biographers should do so as well.

- Where does this shroud of ambiguity surrounding Paul leave us?

- Do you have a sense of direction here?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 13

(This is our discussion for May 9!)

1. NOW AT LAST it was time for Paul to set off to Jerusalem with the money. In other words, the collection was designed to remind the (largely) Gentile churches of their deep and lasting obligation to the Jewish people in general and the Jerusalem church in particular. And it was designed to communicate to the Jerusalem church, and perhaps to a wider Jewish audience, the fact that the Gentile churches did not see themselves as a “new religion” and had no intention of cutting loose and creating a different kind of community. They were part of the same family and as such were doing what “family” always did — helping one another out as need arose.

- What was unique and new about this approach of lending support?

2.But Paul wasn’t simply reflecting on his own time in Ephesus. He was also warning the elders about what might be waiting for them just around the corner. He had, he says, often warned them with tears about the dangers all around them, and now he could see those dangers looming all the larger. The world of idolatry and immorality was powerful and insidious, and there were many, including perhaps some who had once professed Christian faith, who were being drawn into it. It had happened in Corinth, and it would happen again in various places. Paul grieves over any who even start down that road, and he urges them, with powerful emotion, to turn back. In particular, he has given them an example by his own refusal to be drawn into the snares of materialist culture. He wasn’t in this preaching and teaching business for money, and nor should they be.

- How do Paul’s warnings against “the world of idolatry & immorality...[being] powerful & insidious” remain relevant today?

3. How does Paul react to that small triumph? We watch as the tribune’s men frog-march him back to the barracks and lock him up for the night. Paul is used to this, of course, and at least he and the tribune seem to have established some kind of rapport. 

Paul might wish that his own fellow Jews would be more sympathetic, but by now he may be getting a sense that, as in Corinth, a Roman official standing outside the immediate controversy might be a better ally. He prays the evening prayers. The bed is hard, but he has had an exhausting day. He sleeps. And the next thing he knows Jesus is standing there beside him. The last time this happened was in Corinth, and Jesus told him to stay there and not be afraid. Now he’s telling him he will have to move on. He has given his evidence in Jerusalem. Now he will have to do the same thing in Rome. So, Paul thinks, that’s how it’s going to happen. For the last year or two he has had a strong sense that he ought to be heading for Rome, but it had looked as though the Jerusalem visit might put an end to that, and to everything else as well. But now he sees how it might be done. This wasn’t the way he had planned it, but maybe, just maybe, this is what had to happen. Twice now the tribune has rescued him from violence. Perhaps that is a sign.

- How might Paul have reacted to another encounter with Jesus?

4. Once again Luke has presented all this as a fast-paced drama, action packed and with plenty of colorful characters. We can read it through in a few minutes. But we should not lose sight of the fact that it has all taken two years. Paul had written his letter to Rome in 57 and had arrived in Jerusalem late the same year. It was now 59 (Festus’s arrival as governor can be dated to that year). He had, for the moment, escaped death. But Roman custody was still Roman custody, and even though he was clearly allowed to have friends visit him and bring him what he needed, there was a sense of marking time, of an unpleasant and unwanted hiatus. He knew that a belief in providence always constituted a call to patience, but even so, this was getting ridiculous. Jesus had promised him that he would be going to Rome. He had guessed that this might mean that Rome would itself take him there. But how would that happen if Rome kept sending corrupt officials who were uninterested in moving things along?

- How do you imagine Paul kept both his faith and his wits during that long two-year wait?

5. The answer came—and Paul must have been pondering this for quite some time—when the new governor, Festus, held a brief hearing in Caesarea. Jewish speakers once more hurled all kinds of accusations at Paul. He responded by insisting once more on the three all-important points: he had committed no offense against Jewish law or the Temple: or, for that matter, against Caesar. Why he mentioned Caesar at that point is not clear, since so far as we know nobody had suggested that he was guilty of any kind of treason against the emperor. However, the sequel may show what Paul had in mind. But first we see a typical move. Festus, uninterested in justice but wanting to do the Jews a favor, suggested that they should hold a trial in Jerusalem. Paul, remembering the earlier plot, knew perfectly well where that would lead. It was time to play the card he had held up his sleeve all this time: 

I am standing before Caesar’s tribunal, which is where I ought 

to be tried. I have done no wrong to the Jews, as you well know. If I have committed any wrong, or if I have done something which means I deserve to die, I’m not trying to escape death. But if I have done none of the things they are accusing me of, nobody can hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar.

- How does this calculated move effectively advance Paul’s agenda?

6. Scholars over the last generation have wrestled with the question of whether the focus of Paul’s gospel was eitherpersonal forgiveness orthe inclusion of the Gentiles. This verse, true to what Paul says in every letter from Galatians right through to Romans, indicates that it is both—and that the two are mutually defining. Since the pagan powers had been defeated, like Pharaoh at the Exodus, all people were free to worship the One God. Since the defeat of the powers had been accomplished by Jesus’s death, through which sins were forgiven (the sins that kept humans enslaved to the powers in the first place), the barrier to Gentile inclusion in a new “sanctified” people had gone. “Forgiveness of sins” thus entails“Gentile inclusion,” and Gentile inclusion happens precisely because of “forgiveness of sins.” This is central to Paul’s understanding of the gospel from the Damascus Road experience on, for the rest of his life. He would say that it was the primary reason behind any “success” his movement would have.

- Why must Paul’s gospel include both forgiveness and inclusion?

7. The royal and official parties get up to leave. They are seen shaking their heads and commenting that this man doesn’t deserve either to die or to be tied up. He could, in fact, have been set free, if only he hadn’t gone and appealed to Caesar. Luke is aware of the multiple ironies here. If Paul hadn’t appealed to Caesar, Festus would have sent him for trial in Jerusalem, and who knows what might have happened then. Because he had appealed, putting Festus in the position of needing to write an official report on the case (and he still doesn’t seem to know what he’s going to say), Festus has brought in Agrippa to hear Paul, giving Paul the opportunity to fulfill what Isaiah had said. And the appeal, though it will send Paul to Rome in chains, will at least send him to Rome. He will stand before the ultimate earthly king, and he will do so as a helpless prisoner. When he is weak, then he will be strong.

- Paul played his hand well, allowing him to proceed to Rome as instructed by Jesus.  What do we learn from all this regarding God’s plans and our plans...our intentions and God’s intentions?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 12

1. The starting point must be the mingled sense of shock and relief when Paul was released from prison. (I date this to sometime in middle or late 56.) Imprisonment leaves a lasting scar; we today are sadly familiar with the techniques used to break the spirit of “detainees,” and we should not imagine that they were all invented in the last hundred years. Paul was used by now to bodily suffering, but in Ephesus he had experienced torture at a deeper level. His emotions, his imagination, his innermost heart had been unbearably crushed. The fact that someone comes along one day, flings open the prison door, and tells you to be on your way doesn’t mean you can take a deep breath, give yourself a shake, and emerge smiling into the sunlight. The memories are ever present; the voices, both outside and inside; the nightmares, ready to pounce the minute you close your eyes. The mental scars remain after the physical ones have healed.

- What life experiences allow you to identify with Paul in this regard?

2. Then, suddenly, the clouds roll away and the sun comes out again. His beloved churches in Philippi and Thessalonica hadn’t been able to comfort him. Only one thing would do that. At last, it happened: The God who comforts the downcast comforted us by the arrival of Titus, and not only by his arrival but in the comfort he had received from you, as he told us about your longing for us, your lamenting, and your enthusiasm for me personally. The news was good. The Corinthians were appalled to think how badly they had treated him, and they were falling over themselves to apologize. They were doing everything they could to put things right. The underlying problem had involved some actual wrongdoing (what this was, as we saw, it’s impossible now to tell), and they were keen to sort it all out. Their loyalty has been contested, but it has held firm. So Paul, having been downcast beyond measure as he waited for news, is now over the top in his celebration.

- How makes reconciliation within the church family unique?

3. From what he says it appears that they have been “boasting” of their status, their achievements, their methods, and maybe other things as well. And they are angry because Paul refuses to dance to their tunes. He will not play their games. He had seen that problem coming a long time before, which is why, though he has accepted financial support from the churches of Macedonia in northern Greece, he has always refused such help from Corinth itself. He said this already in 1 Corinthians 9, and now he reemphasizes it in 2 Corinthians 11. This was, and is, his “boast”: that he has made the gospel what it really is, “free of charge.” And now he is himself accused of being standoffish, of not really loving them. Nobody will be able to “buy” him, to pay the piper and then call the tunes. Anyone who has had to deal with the complexities of church finances, especially in a community with wide differences of wealth, knows that the mixture of money and ministry can easily cause tension, especially where, underneath it all, there is a question of social status.

- Where, if ever, have you experienced such church politics?

4. There were specific reasons for writing Romans at that moment (probably in the spring or summer of 57). We will come to those presently. But why write it like this? Romans is in a different category from Paul’s other letters for many reasons, but particularly because of its careful and powerful structure. It comes in four sections, each of which has its own integrity, underlying argument, and inner movement. Together these four sections form a single line of thought, rising and falling but always on the way to the particular points that he wants to make. It remains an open question (at least for me) whether Paul was aware of literary models or precedents for this kind of thing. What cannot be doubted is that he had thought it through very carefully and knew exactly what he was doing. Scholars and preachers sometimes speak and write as though Paul just made things up on the fly. There may be passages like that—one thinks of some of the sharp phrases in Galatians, for instance, which a cooler editorial eye might have struck out—but not in Romans. He has thought, prayed, and taught this material again and again. He has now decided to pour this distilled essence of his biblical and Jesus-focused teaching into these four jars and place them in a row where together they will say more than the sum of their parts.

- To what other masterpieces might you compare Romans?  Why?

5. Paul, coming to Rome for the first time but hoping to use it as a base for mission farther west, could not build on a foundation like that. He could not simply align himself with one or two of the Roman house-churches and ignore the rest. The unity he so passionately advocated was not just a pleasant ideal. It was vital for the coherence of his own mission. It was also, as he had said in Ephesians, the way in which God’s wisdom in all its rich variety would be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. If Caesar and the dark powers that stood behind him were to be confronted with the “good news” that there was “another king, Jesus,” the community that was living by that message had to be united. This would of course be a differentiated unity (“God’s wisdom in all its rich variety”; and we may compare the vivid lists of ministries in 1 Cor. 12 and Eph. 4). But if it was all differentiation and no unity, Caesar need take no notice; they were just a few more peculiar eastern cults come to town.

- What dangers and threats awaited Paul in unifying the church?

6. Romans, then, is a many-sided letter, but with a single line of thought. It would be silly to try to give an adequate summary of it in a book like the present one. Those who want to do business with Paul the man, Paul the thinker, Paul the pastor and preacher will sooner or later want to sit down and try to figure it all out for themselves. Reading it straight through at a sitting, perhaps often, is something few modern readers attempt, though it is of course how it would first have been heard, when Phoebe from Cenchreae, having been entrusted with it by Paul, read it out loud in the congregations in Rome. She probably expounded it too, answering the questions that would naturally arise. It would then have been copied and read again and again, normally straight through. We may then assume that it was studied in shorter sections by some at least, particularly the teachers, in the Roman congregations, and indeed in the other churches to which copies would have been sent (we have early evidence of a copy in Ephesus from which the long list of greetings to Rome was omitted). That discipline, of reading straight through and then studying section by section, all bathed in the praying and worshipping life of the community, remains essential to this day.

- What is the value of reading & studying Romans in its entirety?

7. Jesus, then, had not started a “new religion,” and Paul was not offering one. Either Jesus was Israel’s Messiah—which means, as any first-century Jew would know, that God was reconstituting “Israel” around him—or he was an imposter and his followers were blaspheming. There was no middle ground. And it was because of this Jewish, scripturally based vision of covenant fulfilled, of messianic reality come to birth, that there was such a thing as apostleship; in other words, Paul is saying to the church in Rome, “This is why I do what I do, and why I want you to back me as I do it all the way to Spain.” How are the nations to call on the Messiah without believing in him? How are they to believe if they don’t hear? “And how will they hear without someone announcing it to them? And how will people make that announcement unless they are sent?” Paul once again links his vocation to the “servant” passages in Isaiah and then pans back to show from the Psalms, Isaiah, and Deuteronomy (Writings, Prophets, and Torah) that God has done what he always said he would, however shocking and unexpected it now appears. And this brings us, he implies, to where we are today.

- How does this argument address the problem of lukewarm faith?

8. He wants the members of the Roman churches to respect one another across these differences. (We note, to ward off a very different problem in today’s contemporary Western churches, that this supposed “tolerance” does not extend to all areas of behavior, as the closing lines of chapter 13 and the equivalent sections of other letters make abundantly clear.) And, once again, he reminds them they are living out the pattern of the Messiah. The death and resurrection of Jesus is, for Paul, not simply a historical reality that has created a new situation, but a pattern that must be woven into every aspect of church life. For Paul, what matters is the life of praise and worship that now, in the spirit, couples Jesus with God the father himself. This is the worship that, when united across traditional barriers, will shake Caesar’s ideology to its foundations: 

Whatever was written ahead of time, you see, was written for us to learn from, so that through patience, and through the encouragement of the Bible, we might have hope.  May the God of patience and encouragement grant you to come to a common mind among yourselves, in accordance with the Messiah, Jesus, so that, with one mind and one mouth, you may glorify the God and father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah.

- How does the Easter event forever “connect” Jesus with the Father?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 11

1. Once again, Paul is using letters to teach his churches not just what to think, but how to think. He cannot tell them everything he would like to tell them. He would run out of papyrus scrolls long before he got to the end. But that wasn’t his job. His job was to inculcate in them the mind of the Messiah. If that happened, then it would show that he had not after all been wasting his time (that old worry again; Paul never seems to have shaken it off). And Paul, I suggest, came to this extraordinary expression of the Messiah’s mind not least through the combination of his Jesus-focused scriptural meditation, on the one hand, and his own involuntary imitation of the Jesus pattern, on the other. He too had been humbled under the weight of suffering. He had pondered the fact that this was the means by which Jesus had attained his exaltation as Lord.

- How would you describe the nuances of what and how to think?

- How have these dual approaches affected your belief system?

2.“We are the ‘circumcision’ ” is a breathtaking claim, but utterly consistent with Paul’s whole stance, ever since the road to Damascus. Once again, this is not about comparative religion. He is not saying, “We Jesus-followers have found a better sort of religion than the old Jewish one.” It is about messianic eschatology. This was the ultimate fulfillment of Israel’s hope: Messiah and resurrection! He is not saying, “I’ve decided to move from my old house to a nicer one down the road.” He is saying that his own home has been taken over by the architect who built it in the first place and that it is now being rebuilt around him. He intends to stay and see the business through. If others are saying they prefer the old house the way it was, they are missing the point: if Israel’s Messiah has come and has been raised from the dead, then those who follow him are the true people of God. The followers of other first-century Jewish leaders would have said the same. This is not disloyalty to Israel’s God. It is the contested messianic loyalty that has characterized Paul throughout.

- How does Paul connect & implement, “Messiah and Resurrection?”

3. Then comes the point of all this: the Philippians must learn to imitate him, as he is imitating the Messiah. But how can they imitate him? They have not been zealous Jews, eager for the Torah. No, but they all have their own status, their own personal or civic pride. And even if they don’t have any (because they are poor, or slaves, or women—though some women, like Lydia, were independent and free), they all have the standing temptation to lapse back into pagan lifestyles. So, whether they are Romans reverting to proud colonial ways or simply people who find themselves lured back into sensual indulgence, all must resist and find instead the way of holiness and unity that is shaped by the Messiah himself, by his choice of the way of the cross, by his status as the truly human one, the true embodiment of the One God.

- How do you find yourself imitating Paul and Jesus? Examples?

4. Paul’s aim is higher and deeper. He has been meditating in prison, as he worked through the shock and horror of his own plight, on the way in which God himself was present in the Messiah, reconciling the world to himself. Now, perhaps, God would be present in him, Paul, reconciling these two dear people through a high-risk pastoral strategy. Onesimus will go back to Philemon (accompanied, so it seems from Col. 4:7–9, by Paul’s friend Tychicus) with a letter from Paul. It is asking a lot of them both. It is dangerous for Onesimus and extremely awkward for Philemon. But perhaps the letter will not only explain what ought to happen, but actually help to bring it about.

- How does Paul model effective Christian reconciliation?

5. With this brief but breathtaking vision of Jesus, Paul puts the Colossians and himself into the picture. They have come to be part of it all, and Paul’s own sufferings too are part of the way in which Jesus’s lordship is implemented in the world. The Messiah, indeed, is living within them, just as Paul had said to the Galatians. The ancient Jewish hope that the glory of the One God would return and fill the world is thus starting to come true. 

It may not look like it in Colossae, as ten or twenty oddly assorted people crowd into Philemon’s house to pray, to invoke Jesus as they worship the One God, to break bread together, and to intercede for one another and the world; but actually, the Messiah, there in their midst, is “the hope of glory.” One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.

- What has sustained/empowered Christians from that day to this?

6. This is exactly, we may suppose, the place Paul has come to after the terrible experience to which he refers in 2 Corinthians 1. His sustained meditation on the sovereignty of Jesus, rooted in his earlier prayer life, which, growing out of its deep Jewish roots, celebrated Jesus as the humble Servant, as the truly human Image, as the exalted Lord, as the place where “the full measure of divinity has taken up bodily residence”—all this has helped him finally to climb out of the dark interior prison before he is released from the exterior one. But he has not forgotten the way in which the principalities and powers, so openly challenged in the early days of his work in Ephesus, were able to strike back.

He sensed it, he smelled it, the whiff of sulfur surrounding the hard faces of the magistrates, the diabolical glee of the guards entrusted with whipping or beating their new prisoner, perhaps even the smug faces of people he had thought might be friends but turned out to be enemies. He knows, he has learned, that when you celebrate all the truths that he rehearses in chapters 1–3, particularly the truth that “God’s wisdom, in all its rich variety, was to be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places—through the church!” then the rulers and authorities are unlikely to take this kindly. As he explains in that same passage, his own suffering itself is making the point. The victory that was won by the cross must be implemented through the cross.

- How does the cross of Christ confront such opposition today?

- Where do you experience opposition because of your faith?