The other day the Pope made a statement that it was better to be an atheist than a Christian who fails to live up to the name. Upon seeing some of my friends post this news on Facebook, I saw what amounts to the predictable response from what is likely a fundamentalist Protestant:¹ “Jesus is the only way to get to heaven.” Overlooking the fact that there always seem to be the need by some individuals to always play this line whenever a prominent Christian leader ever says anything remotely positive about people of other religions or even *gasp* those wicked atheists, my (hopefully holy) irritation stems around one basic point: that is not anywhere in the Bible. Did my friends who know me as a moderate/conservative evangelical think you are misreading what I said? Nope. You didn’t. The idea that only Christians get to heaven is not a Biblical idea. Rather, I would suggest it is the result of poor exegesis, the obsession of treating religion as about where one goes when one dies, and an ignorance of the Jewish background to the New Testament’s teaching.

While there are many different theological variations on the idea of why people believe only Christians get to heaven, I will summarize what is the prototypical logic of my Protestant evangelical background:²

P1) If a person commits any one sin, God will punish them with an eternal punishment in hell.

P2) Every person sins.

C1) Therefore, God will punish every person with an eternal punishment in hell.

P3) Jesus’s dies on the cross so that he would take our punishment as a substitute for us.

P4) If you believe in Jesus, Jesus’ substitution applies to you.

P5) God provides no other way except Jesus.

C2) Therefore, only those who believe in Jesus will not face an eternal punishment in hell.

Here is the thing: you will not find a single passage that clearly and unambiguously teaches P1, P3, or P4.³ You might cite a reference to Romans 6:23 which says “For the wages of sin is death,” but that passage does not actually state a) one sin makes one liable to such judgment nor b) does “death” refer to eternal punishment/hell. We frequently assume (b) is about hell because it is contrasted with “eternal life” later in the verse, but for Paul eternal life is defined by the bodily resurrection. Thus the point is that the world experiences the power of death due to sin, but God has changed that reality through a resurrection in conformity to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. One could investigate more passages that might suggest teaching P3 or P4, but this blog post is not intended to be exhaustive. However, I am not aware of any passage for which a clear, strong case can be made that P1, P3, or P4 are what is being taught. At best, one might suggest that P1, P3, and P4 are explanations we create to make sense of everything else the Bible teaches, but I don’t think it even accomplishes that purpose if we read the Bible closely and well.

The problem is that argument assumes the fundamental problem of humanity is our future fate of hell if God does not intervene. For the majority of Christians who have been influenced by the Western theological tradition, particularly conservative Protestantism, the idea that we are going to hell if we don’t believe in Jesus stands as the ultimate crux of the Biblical narrative. We sin and so we are going to be punished for eternity. Even if one manages to break free of the assumptions that only Christians go to heaven and everyone else goes to hell, often times people’s thinking is still implicitly influenced by these sort of propositions and still thinks the Bible tells the story of how to get to heaven.⁴ But if we take a close look at the Apostle Paul in Romans, which serves as the closest thing we get to a systematic theological expression summarizing the meaning of the Christian faith⁵, then what one would finds is that: the fundamental problem is that sin leads to the ever present, constant, continuous experience of the realities of death in creation. In that light, Jesus didn’t come to save us from hell; he came to save us from the powers of death (and sin) through His resurrection. Therefore, the whole line about one sin leading to hell is not consistent with Paul. In that case, the very foundation of the idea that only believers getting into heaven begins to crumble.

Here is where the problem of the standard line of Protestant thinking really goes askew: we tend to believe that justification of faith is about God’s act of forgiveness of our sins as it relates to P4. Therefore, we are inclined to say that Christians are not judged by their works, but by their faith because Jesus took on the judgment we deserve based upon our works. Therefore, if one believes, one gets into heaven and if one does not believe, one goes to hell. But the things here is in error in two ways. Firstly, whenever the final judgment is referred to in the New Testament, the criteria of judgment is always said to be based upon what one has done; never is the criteria of the final judgment said to be based upon belief; there is no hint of a substitute judgment where someone else will be punished for another’s sins. This is a pretty glaring oversight for the standard way of formulating the doctrine of justification by faith. Now, there are passages, particularly in the Gospel of John, that talk about those who believed avoiding judgment. To this end, there is something the New Testament would more or less affirm: all who are genuine believers, however we define genuine believers, will have eternal life. However, the second problem is that people simply reverse the logic here and assumes its validity: if all Christians go to heaven, then all those who are not Christians go to hell. But aside from a statement in what is almost assuredly a later interpolation in Mark 16:16, nowhere does the New Testament states that everyone else is eternally judged.

So, if we remember that the only criteria for the final judgment is works, not faith, and that the Bible does not say that all unbelievers go to hell, we are left with an interesting question: what is so important about Christian faith if unbelievers may avoid an eternal punishment? The question is answered by the fact that for Paul, there is an assurance that those redeemed by Christ can have that is others may not. Through Christ, people are freed from the power of sin and death,⁶ therefore allowing them to do the good things that the final judgment requires. Through faith, Christians can have an assurance of their righteous standing before God and know that they are forgiven,⁷ meaning they will not be judged for the bad things they have done in their pasts. While being a follower of Christ is decidedly not simply about getting to heaven,⁸ insofar as faith relates to where we spend eternity, those who genuinely believe can have a confidence and assurance when they stand before God in judgment on the day of the universal resurrection. The same assurance is not offered to the rest of the world, but this does not mean one has a reversed, absolute confidence of one’s everlasting judgment.

Now one might retort: “Aha! Doesn’t that mean there is another way to God other than Jesus. Doesn’t John 14:6 contradict what you just said?” Not in the slightest bit. Firstly, the condition for having eternal life is the resurrection, and only that occurs through Christ. Even if an unbeliever does what is good and avoids evil and is not judged, they will have life precisely because Jesus was raised from the dead. Secondly, Romans 5:18 only makes sense if the “justification of life for all people” entails some sort of an impact that happens to all people, just as the “condemnation of all people” from Adam impacts all persons. In other words, that a person who does not believe will be granted eternal life at the judgment does not deny the exclusive nature of Jesus as a way to the Father; all the essential conditions for eternal life are made possible by Christ.

Another response might be to point to passages such a 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 or Galatians 5:19-21. Firstly, let it be stated that both of these passages suggest inheritance of God’s kingdom is conditioned upon one’s behaviors and not whether one believes. However, beyond that, it is not a valid assumption to think “inheriting the kingdom of God” is about the only people who have eternal life. This reading does not make sense against the Jewish backdrop about inheritance, where Israel saw God’s promises relating to their having a land and world where they could live and rule in peace, free from the oppression of other nations. To inherit the promised land to Israel was to rule. However, that Israel ruled the land did not rule out that other people, such as alien and travelers, might reside in the land for the short-term or long-term. Inheritance wasn’t about the exclusivity of residence; inheritance was about autonomy and power that ensured the peace of God’s chosen people. Hence, we actually see 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 coming after Paul has addressed the issues of lawsuits and judging the world in the future: inheriting God’s kingdom is about having a place of autonomy and power in the world to come. It is not a ruling out that people who practiced sin in this life will always, eternally be excluded from residing in the kingdom of God.

Now, there are a lot of complexities and nuances in addressing all the various New Testament, and even Old Testament, texts; a blog post could not hope to be exhaustive. However, in conclusion, I would contend that the best summary of judgment in the New Testament is that genuine believers who have been redeemed by Christ have an assurance of their fate at the final judgment; furthermore, they will know that they will have a place of automony and status in the full-realization of God’s kingdom at the eschaton where the dead are raised from the dead. However, the Bible does not make a confident statement that the destiny of all unbelievers is to eternal punishment. Rather, they too will face the same judgment of deeds that Christians face and that any hope of eternal life is based upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ that breaks the shackling power of death. In other words, one can exhibit a great fidelity to the Biblical texts and not immediately jump to the conclusion that all who do not believe in Jesus are going to hell as is common in my evangelical circles. In fact, I would go so far to say that if one reads the Bible closely and well and does not make vast theological assumptions about the meaning of terms and phrases such as “death,” “inheriting the kingdom of God,” etc. that does not comport with their usual meanings, one should reject that conclusion in the first place as being the result of logic with faulty premises, not the Scriptures themselves.

In titling this blog, I thought about many words rather than transcendence. I thought of apocalyptic, divine distance, heaven, etc. as these are somewhat synonymous. In the end, however, I chose transcendence because it is the most flexible term, that can cover a wider-array of theological thinking than the other terms. However, in talking about transcendence, I am not talking about the “objective” claims we are making about God or the world when we talk about transcendence. but rather why it is that people choose to think about transcendence or other synonymous concepts and the impact the concept of transcendence has on them.

In Images of Hope, William Lynch says the following about transcendence in terms of hope:

This great traditional meaning of hope as that which helps us transcend our endless forms of impossibility, of prison, of darkness, is complemented by an equally classic understanding of the word imagination. For one of the permanent meanings of imagination has been that it is the gift that envisions what cannot yet be seen, the gift that constantly proposes to itself that the boundaries of the possible are wider than they seem. Imagination, if it is in prison and has tried every exit, does not panic or move into apathy but sits down to try to envision another way out. It is always slow to admit that all the facts are in, that all the doors have been tried, and that it is defeated. It is not so much that it has vision as that it is able to wait, to wait for a moment of vision which is not yet there, for a door that is not yet locked. It is not overcome by the absoluteness of the present moment.¹

While not a theological treatise², this paragraph on hope and imagination provide a bit of insight into the significance of transcendence. Transcendence is the routinely the realm where we imagine³ where things are different than they are in the present. Some transcendent being, object, or place is not enslaved and controlled by the regular, compulsory rules of reality; what is true in our experience can be different in this realm of the imagination. As such, transcendence provides the possibility of thinking and believing there is something more, something better than what is currently the truth. Whether it be the Jewish apocalyptic that envisioned a day of freedom from its foreign oppressors, or the Christian apocalyptic vision of the New Testament where the truth would be free from the ruling powers of Rome and Jerusalem, or Barth’s neo-orthodoxy that was in protest to the terrors of Nazi Germany, transcendence becomes something we call forth because it enables us to think there is a possibility that things can and will be different. Transcendence allows the possibility of hope, when hope is otherwise seen to be far from the immanent, ever present, painful order and routines.

During my time in seminary, as I had been harassed and discarded, as every avenue I took to try to address and get help for the situation or myself were met with unfulfilled promises, meaningless platitudes, laughter, gaslighting, lies, projection. neglect, spying, slander, and veiled threats, as I felt the weight of shame coming from being so isolated and not seeing much clear evidence of genuine care without harmful agendas (although, I sense some people were unaware of the harm of the agendas they had), my theology took a much more starkly transcendent turn. I routinely criticized the theological beliefs of others as contained projected self-interests, applying a critique stemming from Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud, while also having resonances with later, Barthian theology. I did not reduce God to simply projection or wish-fulfillment, but I saw the correspondence between many beliefs about God and people’s own behavior, emotions, and expressions; it was a way of saying they were wrong about so much. It was the notion that people were projecting on this God and that this God was only knowable in revelation that allowed me to operate with a subtle theological protest; it allowed me to resist the power of falsehood from overtaking my own sense of who I was and what I would hope for life to be. I prayed and hoped for a day that the terror would end and everything would resolve itself, believing that somehow, somewhere God would act and put an end to the evil that was occurring. Transcendence was the theology of my hopeful protest. And the reality never changed, and I lost not only my hope but much of anything that made me who I was.

While not everyone’s transition towards theologies of transcendence are so deeply personal and painful, I would surmise that there is a common ground for most people who find such theological beliefs compelling: transcendence allows for hope when what is immediately present would undercut that hope. As I look back on my experiences after the fact, with the benefit of later psychological knowledge, I can extrapolate at least three psychological processes I saw consistent with my own experience that I also see play itself out with other people who appeal to transcendent theologies. While these are often times labeled as defense mechanisms, I do not use that phrase as it has the unfortunate baggage as being “distortive” and leading to false beliefs about reality; I prefer to think in terms of emotional reasoning, with the sense that emotions can very well be rational, well-grounded, and in line with reality.

1) Denial – First, theologies of transcendence function to allow the person to deny the truthfulness or the degree of power of those who are in control. Transcendence has a way of letting the person find a grounds by which they can dismiss the claims of evil power. Whether it be denying the ultimate power of the rulers as in 1 Enoch 38:3-6, Paul’s claim the leading philosophers and rulers of the time did not understand God’s wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1:20-25, 2:7-8, or the Barthian protestant of Nazi Germany, theologies of transcendence have an intellectual justification for saying “No” to the claims and ultimate control of those who in evil ways control discourse and people, if not even destroy. As humans, we are naturally inclined to be submissive to those who have authority over us, but transcendence has a way of countering that natural tendency. The lies of those with great power are ultimately rejected by appeals to transcendence. Instead, faith in something much better can be realized.

2) Wish-fulfillment – Transcendence also allows for believing and expecting that something good can come in the midst of pain, suffering, and/or evil. The depth of the worst pain has a way of “seducing” the mind into entire apathy if not even the idea one should not and will not ever have a good life or have people to care, but even moderate versions of such pain can temporarily suffocate any sense of positive expectations. Transcendence has a way of saying what is real in this moment isn’t all that is true and real. In this space, one can allow the instinctual impulse for life and betterment to find a place where things can and will be different. Thus, the Apostle Paul can have hope for a redemption of the human body and all of creation in Romans 8:18-39. Transcendence allows for the barren soils of human existence to be fertilized with hope.

3) Sublimation – When the realities and powers in play prevent life as it deemed it should be, transcendence allows the space in which a person can imagine the realization of a different way of living. This isn’t just about passive hoping, but an active imagination of what one as powerless may do in the future. Transcendence allows the space to consider different ethical futures. Often times, it can sublimate the impulses of violence, such as the vivid apocalyptic wars in the scrolls of Qumran, in the safe space of imagination, looking for a day to bring these impulses into realization. However, another response is that transcendence can sublimate the opposite feelings of love; in Romans 11, Paul has confidence in the future redemption of all of Israel, this despite the fact that he had been and would continue to be the object of scorn and abuse from many of his fellow Jews. Thus, in seeing the possibilities of new realities stemming form transcendent power, one also sublimates one’s own impulses, whether to hate or love. Therefore, in conformity to the life of Christ, transcendence sublimates love into existence, even if showing that love wouldn’t be the “rational” thing to do in that world.

Hence, we may say that through denial, wish-fulfillment, and sublimation, the theology of transcendence in the New Testament allows for the manifest expression of the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. However, let it be stated that while denial, wish-fullfillment, and sublimation in transcendence is not inherently distortive, one can appeal to transcendence as simply a way to deny, wish-fulfill, and sublimate even when truth does not allow for the specific ideas one wishes to hold onto. The cognitive power of beliefs in transcedence leads us to truth not because transcendence has any inherent truth-value to it, but because there is already a transcendent reality that we happened to stumble upon, or happened to come upon us as in revelation. In other words, the imagination of faith, hope, and love in a theology of transcendence is true only insofar as the ideas that have been formed inside us somehow comes from the Truth impacting us.

[This is a post rooted in my own experience, and as such, does not attempt to be as analytical as it is expressive and didactic, even if it is sometimes imprecise and not perfectly clear.]

I was a victim, although, now I am a survivor. Many years ago, I lived in a religious environment that was ruled by emotions. In saying this, this is not some “rational” rejection of emotions as being false. I mean to say that people’s emotions ruled them, not simply guided and motivated them. The emotion that ruled that seemed to most rule over them was shame, but not in the sense that they felt shame. No, rather, people were so trying to escape the feeling of shame that they become blinded to the pain they were causing. In this environment, they taught a teaching very common to many spiritual and religious movements: the Gospel is about ending our shame, about setting us free from our shame.

Now at one level, there is much to celebrate within this idea. Overwhelming, toxic burdens of shame can paralyze, cripple, and even destroy people. I experienced it. Sometimes this shackling form of shame can come about as a result having done truly terrible things, but sometimes it can happen for even less egregious action or even things that are not bad in the slightest bit (such as being of the wrong race, gender, etc.). This type of shame is not a good thing; it is, as Paul would call, a “worldly grief that leads to death.”¹

But what is overlooked is that shame, and all other forms of emotion, come in various degrees and intensities. Not all anger leads people to destroy, sometimes anger is a righteous anger that leads them to protect others or even themselves. Not all fear cripples people; some fear allows you to avoid those circumstances and people who would do you harm but the fear passes when the threat is out of reach of you. Nor does all shame shackle people; it is the feeling of shame when you have deeply hurt someone that motivates you to not do such a thing again. All of our emotions are signals in our own body that motivate us to do something in response to our relationships and circumstances; they motivate us to protect, to resist, to show compassion, to change our course of action, etc. But sometimes, these signals go haywire and they no longer become tied to interpretations of actual, specific, real-life situations, but instead, they become too tightly tied to our imaginations and memories of things long past, or things never there in the first place. These are the distorting form of emotions. But there do exist realistic, rational emotions that motivate our response to what is going on in front of us and these are not healthy things to avoid or miss.

Often times, when coming out of situations where we have been enslaved by an emotion, we begin to treat that emotion as entirely wrong or bad. Having struggled with depression in my life, there was always this sense that sadness was always a bad thing and that I tried to avoid it. Anytime I felt bad, there must be something incredibly wrong, with me or with someone else. However, sometimes sadness is a “good” thing, such as grieving and mourning the loss of someone close to you. These forms of emotions allow you to “prune” and “mold” your memories, attachments, and thoughts so that you can adjust to your circumstances. However, when in the throes of the pain of the memory of how they emotion held you back, you think of it as always bad, always to be avoided, always to be escaped because you only remember experiencing it as bad. However, at the end of the day, when you create a rule that an emotion is always bad, you still remain enslaved to that emotion in your seek to avoid it. Anything that you might anticipate stirring up that feeling within you, you try to avoid. Or, anytime that feeling does get evoked, you immediately jump to the conclusion that something is wrong, whether it be in yourself, your circumstances, or in other people. However, when you get in that place, you can interpret these signals differently. Instead of feelings of anger being interpreted as a perception of a violation or threat occurring, you interpret the anger as something wrong in and of itself. You do not consider if there is a correspondence between the feeling and the situation you are in: you simply avoid it and as a result, begin to become unaware of the causes of these feelings, except maybe as “triggers” that must be controlled or avoided. So, a person who feels anger at violation may ignore the causes and may seek to control their anger in the first place, rather than trying to figure out how to reasonably deal with the situation. Likewise, a person who feels shame may seek everything they can to avoid the pain, and not pay attention to whether there is something happening that is causing the shame that is one’s own responsibility and not another.

In my example, there were many signals I had sent of what was happening to me; the feelings of being threatened, controlled, and stalked; the feelings of having been cast aside and becoming disconnected from any sense of belonging. However, in my experiences of the people who had the power over my, I consistently witnessed a sense of superiority and power and a quick ease of taking offense; some of my observations afterwards reinforced that idea. You see, shame makes people feel humble and inferior, and people who seek to avoid those feelings are quick to find signs of offense and blame, even when it is not there or it is only of a small, muted kind. They are quick to try to control the situation and how other people might interpret these situations; the people who offend them must be seen as somehow inferior or blameworthy, regardless of the reality of the situation, and they seek to find others who share that feeling in order to feel secure themselves. If that offending person were to have any legitimate cause or concern, that must mean that “I” am an inferior and blameworthy person, but that clearly can not be the case as making me feel shame for my actions is wrong, so clearly “you” are the problem. While I commonly heard in that environment about not being condemned in Christ as a motto of overcoming the shame, what I saw were people enslaved to that shame by trying to avoid it. As my complaints evoked a potential feeling of shame, they presumably blocked that feeling of shame and continued to put the blame and burden onto me, despite the very threatening position I had been put into. In the end, they poured my future down the drain and left me out in the cold, without the slightest bit of listening, sympathy, compassion, or realization. Because shame motivates people to correct for wrong, hurtful behaviors and yet because this idea led to the attempt to block and avoid the feelings of shame, my cries were unheard.

What more, religion has a way of legitimating these rules of emotional avoidance. Our faith often times has us to engage in acts of imagination to comprehend what God is doing, since God’s Word often speaks of that which we can not directly see or hear and thereby necessitating imagination as a tool for comprehension. However, at the same time, our imagination can be ruled by something other than God’s Word, but the very narrow range of personal experiences, struggles, etc. we have. When we engage in the imagination of faith, we may think we are in alignment with God’s Word, but we can easily be imagining a world that is the escape and avoidance of what caused us great pain. In so doing, we believe we have a religious legitimation of our own emotional experience; thus, our emotions became less and less in touch as signals of the world around us, but instead become projected onto the conceptual fabric of God, such that the enslaved emotions are “evil” and the goodness of God allows for no such emotion and seeks to rid these emotions. It is this type of religion based upon emotional rules that can become quite cultish and controlling.

To be clear, the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ definitely entails a transformation of ourselves and the world, now and in the future, such that we experience a change of emotions. If we and the world around us change, so too should the emotional signals change. As such, this will often times free us from the more distorting, debilitating, unhealthy versions of the various emotions we have, although this is not always the immediate case; sometimes a person who follows Jesus and has the Spirit will linger with a long-term battle against such debilitating feelings. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t about freeing us from certain emotions, even if it has that effect; it is about the redemption of the entire creation, our minds and bodies included. But, if we treat the Gospel as (pseduo-)therapy that counsels us to avoid certain emotions, our religiously-justified rules of emotional avoidance will leave us enslaved to the very same emotion, while becoming unaware and oblivious to its control the and to realities of the world around us that evoke these emotions; thus, we begin to get into the game of treating these emotions as evil and thus also treating those people, circumstances, and things that causes these feelings within us as somehow evil and bad. Our rules written up in an attempt to escape from pain will leave the problem lingering, put other people into pain as the problem lingers, and in some situations, this may lead to that pain rebounding back in a greater, more extreme form. But the story of Jesus Christ is not about avoiding the pain of these emotions, but it entails an openness to and acceptance of the reality of suffering, but with the faith that this form of suffering can lead us through the power of the Spirit into conformity to the very pattern of Jesus Christ. It is through this that we overcome the debilitation of toxic forms of emotion; it is through this that our emotions are changed to rightly fit the situation so that that we become molded to the character of Christ.

E.P. Sanders notes in Paul and Palestinian Judaism regarding Pauls language of righteousness:

We further see in the Philippians passage¹, and this is the only point at which this does become clear, that Paul himself was aware of his own shift in the meaning of the term of righteousness. There is a righteousness which is based on works of law. Here Pauil does not, as he does in Galatians and Romans, deny that there is any such thing. In Philippians, rather, he argues, in effect, that the righteousness based on works of law is no true righteouness or the right kind of righteousness. Just as circumcision of the foreskin of the penis does not, in Paul’s definition, constitute true circumcision – since only Christians are the true circumcision – so also righteounsess based on law is not the right kind. The only proper righteousness is Christian righteousness, which must be based on something else. Since the characteristic act of the Christian is belief in the God who raisd Christ and made him Lord, the true or Christian righteousness is based on faith.²

In this observation, Sanders hits at what I believe to be the core of the debate regarding justification³ for Paul: that there is a different meaning. Put differently, a semantic shift has occurred for Paul, where justification does not mean the exact same thing as it was commonly taken to mean. Galatians 3:7-14 highlights this conscious shift of meaning, in contrasting the unobtainable way of justification by works of the Torah with the justification that comes with by faith through Christ becoming a curse to redeem from the curse. Quite simply, while there is necessarily some similarities between the two different definitions of righteousness and justification for Paul that we might term as a family resemblance, the words can be employed with two distinctly different concepts. It isn’t that justification has stayed the exact same thing, but now a different way has been provided as it is often times construed by Protestant theology (i.e. “Trying to get forgiven by works fails, but you can get forgiven and got to heaven by faith”); it is that righteousness is itself something different (i.e. “Being a righteous person isn’t about the works you do to your credit, but comes from the one who is at work in you.”)  Paul’s teaching on justification isn’t simply that the conditions of justification are different, as true as that might be, but what is means to be justified itself has changed.

This form of semantic novelty presents a challenge for the normal pattern of Biblical scholarship. Attempts to understand Paul often times make the assumption that what Paul is saying about righteousness and justification is somehow like it is in Greek or rest of Second Temple Judaism, so we scour through the uses of δικαιοω in the Greek language, and/or we look through the Tanaatic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, apocalyptic literature, etc., in hopes of finding an analog that we can associate with Paul. But the process of semantic change means that synchronic word studies will not provide you with the necessary information. While synchronic studies still provide insight as semantic change does still retain continuity with it prior meanings that the language and culture exhibits, you can really only understand semantic change from the particulars of the person and/or community itself.

The reality is more prevalent within the New Testaments reference to Jesus as χριστος. The original sense in Greek is that of an anointed persons; through its usage by Jews, it began to be associated with an anointed figure chosen by God, the Messiah. However, while still retaining the earlier notions of anointing⁴ and the Messianic roles⁵, it exhibitσ a semantic shift as a result of its becoming a term used as an honorific⁶, where Christ is used to refer to the person of Jesus. Because of this semantic shift away from earlier conceptions of anointing and Messiahship, the term would then be defined more by Jesus whom the early Christians used the title for. The implication of this is the very meaning of anointing and Messiahship become redefined based on what they believed and knew about Jesus. Therefore, Romans 9-11 assumes the redefinition of Messiahship as the Messiah was originally conceived as one who the nation of Israel would follow, but instead the nation of Israel as a whole stumbled because of the Messiah.⁷

A similar process of semantic change for δικαιοσυνη/δικαιοω may be at hand. Paul speaks of the two different concepts of righteousness in Philippians 3:9: “not having my righteousness that is by Torah, but that is through Christ’s faith.” I take the last prepositional phrase “through Christ’s faith” (δια πιστεως χριστου) as a reference to story of Jesus Christ, where Christ’s life is characterized by faith as he obedient to the point of death and thus raised from the dead. If this construal is appropriate, then Paul is saying that righteousness is somehow characteristically related to Jesus own life. Paul is establishing the very pattern of righteousness as something that happens to people in accordance to the pattern of Christ, rather than something they do by Torah.⁸ Put differently, the meaning of righteousness is defined by what Paul knows about Jesus Christ, much as the sense of messiahship derived from what he believes about Jesus. This would explain why Paul highlights not his own faith in the following verses, as if the center of Paul’s thinking is faith, but rather that he wants to know the power of Christ’s resurrection; there is something that is characteristic of Christ that Paul is seeking to be established in himself. Righteousness is thus defined by Jesus’ resurrection in some manner and becomes realized in the believer’s own life.

In other words, Paul’s usages of the δικε- cluster of terms shifts in accordance to the story of Jesus Christ. As opposed to a justification being defined by the pattern as prescribed by Torah, now there is a justification that is outlined in the story of Jesus’s life. Rather than presuming certain definitions of justification, such as a forensic conception of a legal court, instead, justification is tightly intertwined with resurrection, such that Paul will say that Christ was raised for justification⁹ and that a person who has been baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection are justified.¹⁰ If we may generalize into a systematic proposition at this point, one could say that justification is the realization of the resurrection of Jesus in the life of the person, where they are set free from the powers that bind them to their natural way of life (σαρχ) and all the achievements and honors that goes with that way of life¹¹ To that end, justification is a freedom from the current order of creation that σαρχ is constrained to and an entrance into the life of new creation; this is why the two epistles that most highlight the topic of justification and Torah, Romans and Galatians, both make reference to a renewal of creation¹² as well as in 2 Corinthians when those in competition with Paul seem to be prescribing Torah.¹³ It is this definition of justification that is defined by the Christ-narrative that provides the relationship between the language of justification and the language of participation;¹⁴ justification is one aspect of the participation in Christ’s life whereby the Christian is allowed to fulfill their purpose through their deeds.

But this analysis comes by allowing that the δικε– cluster of phrases experienced a semantic shift in Paul that is unique for the early Christian, or even more specifically, the Pauline communities. But if this proposal is correct, then what may be the most defining attribute of Paul’s thought is not any singular proposition, nor even a common phrase or concept such as “in Christ,” but rather how the language and concepts Paul uses has experienced a gravitational shift around the Christ-narrative such that the terms bear a family resemblance to their other usages in that time in both Greco-Roman and Jewish contexts, but that they can not be ultimately understood outside of the very particular set of traditions that surround the early Church’s understanding of Jesus Christ and perhaps also Paul’s own revelation of Christ on the road to Damascus. For Paul, he does not simply see Christ as a completing element to the Jewish story or of Greco-Roman wisdom such that we can derive his theology simply by a comparative, historical analysis and/or come up with a basic set of propositions to define his thought by, but rather that these stories and wisdom become redefined by the traditions about Jesus that the early Christians told each other time and time again. This redefinition goes from the level of narratives and wisdom, down to the most basic level of language itself, the very tool which we use to describe the world we live in, the imagination of a new world evoked within us, and through both of those things, hope to move towards speaking about the nature of God’s Kingdom as that which is in heaven, coming to earth.

While certainly not a skilled exegete, I feel this quote from the English translations of Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans is apropos. Coming from his commentary on Romans 3:21-26:

We stand here before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world of time and things and men before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy of a negation by which all existence is rolled up. The world is the world; and we now know what that means. But whence comes this KRISIS? Whence comes our recognition of it and our ability to comprehend it? Whence comes the possibility of or perceiving that world is the world, and of our thus limiting it as such by contrasting it with another world which is unknown to us? When comes the possibility of our describing time only as time, and things only as things, and men only as men? and whence the possibility of our assigning a value to history nad existence by sternly recognizing that they are concrete, limited, and relative? From what left eminence do all these critical opinions descend? And out of what abuss arises our knwoledge of these last, unknown things, by which everything is measured, this shattering knowledge of the invisible Judge in whose hands lies our condemnation? All these questions revolve around one point, which is our origin, and sound one presupposition, from which our existence has emerged. From this presupposition we have come, and regarded from this point, the world and we ourselves are seemed to be bounded, dissolved, rolled up, and judged. But this one point is not a point among other points, and this one presupposition is not one among many presuppositions. Our origin evokes in us a memory of our habitation with the Lord of heaven and earth; and at this reminiscence the heavens are rent asunder, the graces are opened, the sun stands still upon Gibeon, and the mood stays in the valley of Ajalon. But now directs out attention to the time which is beyond time, to space which has no locality, to impossible impossibility, to the gospel of transformation, to the immininent Coming of the Kingdom of God, to affirmation in negation, to salvation in the world, to the acquittal in condemnation, to eternity in time, to life in death – I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away. This is the Word of God. ¹⁵

Or in another sense, we can say that in the case of describing Paul, though no reason to suspect he would say this about himself, Jesus is the Word by which all other words that either describe God’s nature, action, etc. or the relationship to this God are structured and have their semantics natures framed. While bearing a family resemblance to other uses of language does not create the sharp, absolute break with the language of the world that might be deemed necessity by a stronger, Barthian position, it is certainly to be expected that a community that so emphasizes and remembers a set of stories about Jesus as the most important story they know would unconsciously, or maybe even at times consciously, shift the meaning of their language in substantial ways. Hence, the definition of justification flows out from a larger lexical field that is defined by the story of Christ both interpreting and interpreted by the Jewish hope of God’s vindication.

The decisive battle line drawn between Reformed-Calvinism¹ and Wesleyan-Arminianism pertains to the notion of predestination, more specifically referred to as unconditional election. Did God choose all individuals who were to be saved from the beginning or not? The debate frequently hinges on understanding the passages of predestination, most notably, Romans 8:29-30, Romans 9, and Ephesians 1:3-14. More particularly, based upon Romans 8:29-30, Wesleyan and Calvinist perspectives seek to determine whether God predestines people based upon a forseen faith? John Calvin thinks it absurd that foreknowledge determines his eternal decrees.² By contrast, John Wesley argues that God knows ahead of time all who will believe, and thus God predestines them to be free from sin.³

However, the nature of this debate makes a few fundamental definitional assumptions about foreknowledge and predestination: 1) Foreknowledge pertains to knowledge of future events, 2) Predestination is about individuals, and 3) Predestination is about one’s future destination of judgment. Put more succinctly, the debate on predestination entails the interaction between God’s decrees and individual persons beliefs and actions against the backdrop of time. These highly metaphysical readings seem to bump up against Paul’s arguments, however.

Firstly, God’s knowing of people for Paul does not specifically entail a knowledge of their actions, choices, etc. Rather, it is a relational knowledge. In Galatians 4:8, Paul clarifies the knowledge that believers have about God as really being about God’s knowing of them. In context, the knowledge being spoken of is relational, as just prior in v. 6, Paul attributes to the Spirit the people’s calling God as their faith. Thus, God’s knowing is more the knowledge of people in relation, rather than people as actors/agents. This has its echoes in the knowledge metaphor being used to describe the relations between husband and wife in the Old Testament.⁴

Thus, this relational knowledge serves as the background for God’s foreknowing, as in Romans 11:2. In discussing how God moves on to include the Gentiles in the face of the disobedience of Israel, Paul makes the adamant appeal that God does not reject the foreknown people. Such language is relational as its heart, indicating a type of affinity that God has for the nation of Israel where God can never let go of Israel despite their sins because of their covenantal relationship to one another; this echoes the vision of the prophets such as Hosea, whom Paul does quote from, where God’s judgment for Israel’s sins is ultimately stymied by his covenantal love for Israel. As such, “foreknowledge” pertains to God’s specific relationship to Israel. It is not a statement about a set of individual persons who are chosen to have their sins forgiven and avoid the coming judgment; the people God foreknows come under judgment, although never with a judgment that leads to the entire rejection of the nation. However, why does Paul refer to this as fore-knowledge? It is language that is well-suited to explain God’s relationship to Israel as a specially chosen people against the backdrop that God is including the Gentiles; Israel is the nation who had a special relationship to God prior to inclusion of the rest of the nations.

So, when coming upon Romans 8:29-30, the nature of Paul’s logic becomes a bit clearer. God has a people who he has a special relationship with; it is God’s covenantal relationship to Israel that stands in the background for Paul. However, this relationship entailed a specific purpose; Israel as the foreknown people were ultimately selected so as to resemble the image of Christ. As opposed to predestination being about individual people who find their way into heaven, for Paul predestination takes on a Christ-o-centric purpose of being set forth on a path to be called in baptism, vindicated because one trusts in God, and glorified after suffering, just as happened with Christ.

It is here we may note that predestination also serves the purpose of putting the election of Israel in relation to the Gentiles; God selected Israel’s conformity to Christ before he acted to bring forth the nations as fellow inheritors. Both the Greek terms for foreknowledge (προγινωσκω) and predestination (προοριζω) are prefixed by προ–, which echoes a statement in Paul’s thesis from Romans 1:16: “to the Jew first (πρῶτον), and also to the Greek.” Foreknowing and predestination are about God’s relationship with Israel temporally prior to extending the same benefits of this relationship to the world; thus it is not an ontological statement about the determination of the salvation of individual people by some eternal decree from God but is an interpretation of God’s action in the course of history through Israel prior to the universal reconciliation.

This recounting of Israel’s own special relationship to God sets up Paul’s wonderful panegyric on behalf of God’s faithfulness, which then sets up the question of Romans 9-11: how is God faithfulness demonstrated amongst much of Israel’s disobedience and the hardening that has come upon them? The trajectory of Paul’s answer in those chapters is that God’s hardening of Israel that lead to the rejection of Jesus then leads to the inclusion of the Gentiles. However, Paul does not see Israel’s future as permanent enemies to the gospel but envisions a future, universal restoration that includes all of Israel. It is here that Paul’s notion of predestination makes sense: Israel’s purpose that was conveyed to them by Torah ultimately points to Christ as their telos⁵; however, this ordained task was not fulfilled by them. Torah’s was incapable of overcoming sin⁶, and thereby what was Israel’s righteous purpose and mission was then presented to the Gentiles⁷. God set forth Israel’s purpose which was failed by their rejection of Christ and therefore because of that the wider world was included into Christ’s redemption. However, this is not for Israel’s ultimate rejection, but they are instruments in this global reconciliation, to which they will be restored to. God’s predestination of Israel’s purpose is thus a) the mechanism by which God brings the world into reconciliation by the failure to abide by it and b) yet will be ultimately fulfilled for Israel upon the entirety of God’s purposes for the Gentiles occurring.

Therefore, for Paul, predestination is not a boundary marker by which some are determined to heaven and others are irreparably barred and left to go to hell. Rather, Paul envisions predestination as God’s original purpose for Israel to be conformed to Christ, but because of Israel’s national rejection of Christ, the whole world becomes included and not just Israel by themselves. Therefore predestination can be said to bring about Christ being the first born of a large family from all nations in a rather surprising way. Thus, it is Israel’s predestination that is the historical starting point of God’s saving work in Christ. Predestination is an explanation of Israel’s peculiar relationship to God, their mixed story of worship and disobedience, and ultimately their role in God’s universal reconciliation. This is consistent with Ephesians 1:3-14 where the “we” is spoken of predestined, whereas the “you” is not spoken of predestined; nevertheless both the “we” and the “you” are redeemed and have an inheritance. As becomes more obvious in Ephesians the “we” is Israel and the “you” are the Gentiles,⁸ highlighting more so the historical nature of predestination, rather than a metaphysical designation of an eternal decree. To be sure, Paul thinks this choice of Israel happened before the creation of the world, but it is interesting that προοριζω/predestination is not used to refer to the election in Christ before God’s act of creation, but rather is used in reference to the filial notion of adoption in v. 5 and with the corresponding inheritance in v. 11, suggesting predestination is about God’s setting forth of Israel’s purpose but not as the boundary marker for inclusion.

In short, if this reading is correct, the very debate around predestination, and the corresponding concept of foreknowledge, between those of Calvinist and Arminian soteriologies are getting the terms mixed up in the first place. Foreknowledge and predestination is the story of God’s relationship to Israel and His setting forth their purpose, retroactively understood by Paul through the lens of God’s inclusion of the Gentiles. It entails the point where God started his redemptive work in Christ, and not to set out the boundary markers of where the redemption of Christ is limited to. While this may seem to affirm the Wesleyan argument against Unconditional Election, and it does to a degree by shifting predestination away from individual salvation and to national purpose, the standard Wesleyan interpretation a) is also guilty of over-individualizing, b) thinking all this language is ultimately about who gets to heaven, c) fails to really grasp the nature of the relationship that God has with Israel, and d) reading a notion of free choice into predestiantion through an antecedent foreknowledge that undercuts Paul’s argument about the partial hardening of Israel in Romans 9-11, which presents a thorn in the side of interpretation for Wesleyan-Arminia