We review the new theological work by two liberal scholars.
In The First Paul (HarperOne 2009) Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan offer a whirlwind treatment of the Apostle Paul as a "Jewish Christ mystic," whose life was transformed by a revelatory experience of the "risen Christ," which Borg and Crossan relate to the Buddha's "awakening" under the Bo Tree. According to the authors, Paul's theology is governed by a "fundamental opposition": "Who is Lord, Jesus or empire? In Paul, the mystical experience of Jesus Christ as Lord led to resistance to the imperial vision, and advocacy of a different vision of the way the world can be.”However, the authors contend that this theological vision is not expressed through all of the letters traditionally attributed to Paul. Rather, they argue, some of the Pauline body of work was in fact composed after the apostle’s death, and softens or even opposes "the radical Paul’s” rejection of “the Roman hierarchy in its most obvious social expressions," such as relations between husbands and wives, slaves and masters, fathers and sons. They cite the Philemon and the 1 Corinthians letters as evidence of the "radical Paul’s" social ethic, Colossians and Ephesians as evidence of a pseudo- or conservative Paul, and Titus and 1 Timothy as representing a "reactionary" anti-Paul.
Borg and Crossan set out to expose the lost social radicalism of this true Paul that they believe has been obscured beneath various "unworthy" portions of the New Testament, to say nothing of centuries of "misguided" debate about such theological jargon as “substitution” or “faith versus works.” They seek rather to reframe Paul’s work more in terms of Christianity’s confrontation with Rome’s imperial order, drawing on an extensive knowledge of Roman civic life to discuss in detail how Paul subverted such imperial titles as “Son of God,” “Savior” or “the Lord” (as in, “Jesus is Lord”) to offer a contrast between the gospel of Rome and the Gospel of Jesus: "Caesar not only proclaims but incarnates peace through violent victory, just as Christ not only proclaims but incarnates peace through nonviolent justice.”
Borg and Crossan also seek to emphasize a (supposedly) new direction in the realm of the study of salvation: "for Paul … being saved was primarily about life before death.” Thus, being "justified by grace through faith" does not mean the "Reformed" ideal of "faith as correct belief" in the past action of God for the sake of future salvation, but rather the immediate, gracious transformation of a person so that he or she is able to practice justice with the full commitment of his or her life. In fact, Borg and Crossan suggest that the "substitutionary" reading of the atonement—in which Jesus suffers in humanity’s place to appease God’s wrath against sin—first appeared only as recently as Anselm's medieval treatise, Why Did God Become Man?
In particular, they criticize the substitutionary model for its detachment from the actual history of Jesus’ life and death: "Imagine that Jesus had died a different kind of death … that he had died while selflessly and courageously treating victims of a plague and then had been raised from the dead. Would his resurrection have the same meaning?" They argue that the cross itself, and not merely Jesus’ death, figures decisively in Paul’s thought, for Imperial Rome only crucified those who "rejected Roman imperial domination.” Thus, “the cross reveals the character of empire,” as a brutal oppressor, but also “the path of personal transformation,” through the power of self-giving love, and finally “the character of God" as the one of who loves even unto death.
Borg and Crossan also note that belief in the resurrection was central to Paul’s anti-imperial theology of the cross, constituting, as it were, God’s emphatic “yes” to Jesus against the stern “no” of crucifixion. However, they—somewhat confusingly—maintain that, “for Paul, the resurrection was an experience,” and perhaps “not the kind … that could have been photographed ... real need not mean a transformed corpse who others would have seen if they had been there.”
And it is with the resurrection that their argument most clearly demonstrates its weakness against orthodox Christianity, for it is surely almost self-evident that if Christ was not actually raised to undo in the body what Caesar did to the body, then no alternate peace has burst forth in fallen creation, God has not actually shamed the powers that tyrannize our history, and, in the words of Paul himself, “we are of all men most to be pitied.” Whatever Borg and Crossan’s Paul might have believed about the mystical revelation of peace and harmony he had received, if that peace was not incarnate within and triumphant over the dominion of violence and hatred, it was a meaningless hoax. Their earlier allusion to the Buddha was telling—it is not for nothing that the genuinely mystical faiths end not with the “great cleanup of the world” to which these writers cling, but rather with the resigned rejection of both suffering and joy as ephemeral illusions.
Of course, additional arguments could be adduced against their rejection of Colossians and Ephesians as genuinely Pauline (see Colossians Remixed by Walsh and Keesmaat for a traditional reading that draws heavily on the anti-imperial dimensions of the letter), or against their contention that understanding Christ as our atoning substitute is somehow incompatible with understanding Him as the victor over sin and death (see David Hart’s discussion of Anselm in The Beauty of the Infinite, or N.T. Wright’s discussion in Paul in Fresh Perspective of the unity in Paul’s thought of sin and redemption with questions of covenant and empire). Ultimately, though, we must be grateful to the likes of Borg and Crossan, both for the details they add to our sketches of first-century life, and for the useful corrective they often provide, both negatively by their regrettable theological lapses, and positively, by shaking the Church from its myopia regarding new ways of examining old questions.
