Abstract
There have been long debates in academic circles as to what constitutes the “heart” of Pauline theology. The traditional view, according to Fee (1994:11), is the one fostered by the Reformers and perpetuated by generations of Protestants, that “justification by faith” is the key to Paul’s theology. This view emphasises Christ’s historical act of redemption and its appropriation by the believer through faith. The inadequacy of such a view should be apparent to anyone carefully reading Paul’s letters. Not only does it focus on one metaphor of salvation to the exclusion of others, but, such a focus fails to throw the net broadly enough to capture all of Paul’s theological concerns. It would therefore, seem impossible to understand Pauline theology, without firstly beginning with salvation in Christ, and further to this, with eschatology and the Holy Spirit as the essential framework. It is within this framework that the process of sonship and adoption as related to the new covenant are unveiled to the believer.
Without denying the presence of other determining factors, Christology, and eschatology especially, shape the framework of Paul’s pneumatology. One cannot doubt that the death and resurrection of Christ, in their eschatological significance, control Paul’s teaching on the work of the Spirit within the lives of believers. It could be said that the Spirit stands near the centre of things for Paul, as part of the fundamental core of his understanding of the Gospel.
It is within this theological framework of the Spirit that Paul expresses his key ideas concerning the new covenant and sonship. One might say then, that membership in God’s family, is defined in terms of the Spirit.
“You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, assuming that the Spirit of God does indeed dwell in you. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, that person does not belong to Him” (Rom 8:9).
One could say that in eschatological terms, the Spirit of God is the beginning of the process of salvation, which will culminate in the believer taking possession of his inheritance in the future age. It could be stated as a function of the Spirit in the believer’s present that is only meaningful in relation to the future. Not only does the indwelling Spirit serve as the divine pledge of a future bodily resurrection, but guarantees it.
To give the reader further ideas as to what drives this thesis, the following urgencies are spelt out:
• Crucial to the experience of the Spirit, was the early Church’s self-understanding as “thoroughly eschatological” in the “already/not yet” sense.
• At the heart of this new understanding was their perception of themselves as the newly constituted people of God. The goal of salvation in Christ, the core of Pauline theology, was that God should create “a people for his name”.
• Although persons’ individually become members of the family of God, the goal is not to simply prepare them for heaven, but to create a people, who by the power of the Spirit, live out the life of the future (the life of God Himself) in this present age.
One final point needs to be clarified before one embarks on the enterprise of writing a theology of Paul as it relates to the title of this thesis. In the movement and dialogue of Paul’s theologising, his letter to the Romans is a relatively fixed feature (Dunn, 1998:25). It was written to a Church that was not his own founding. It was written at the end of a major phase of Paul’s missionary work (Rom 15:18-24), which included most of the other undisputed letters. It was written under probably the most congenial circumstances of his mission, with time for careful reflection and composition and, above all, it was clearly intended to set out and defend his own mature understanding of the Gospel (Rom 1:16-17) as he had thus far proclaimed it. In short, Romans is still far removed from a dogmatic or systematic treatise on theology, but it nevertheless is the most sustained and reflective statement of Paul’s theology by Paul himself. Romans provides Christians with an example of the way Paul himself chose to order the sequence of themes in his theology. If one wishes to grasp at (as attempted in this thesis) and dialogue with the mature theology of Paul, one cannot do better than to take Romans as a kind of template on which to construct one’s own statement of Paul’s theology. A theology of Paul that sets out to describe and discuss the Holy Spirit and sonship, is surely headed in the right direction, if one constantly references Romans as prompter and plumb-line throughout.
Prof. J.A. du Rand