Pauline Narratives: Creation and Covenant

“The failure of human beings to be the truly image-bearing creatures God intended results, therefore, in corruption and death… humans were made to function in particular ways, with worship of the creator as the central feature, and those who turn away from that worship – that is, the whole human race, with a single exception – are thereby opting to seek life where it is not to be found, which is another way of saying that they are courting their own death and decay. This is to say, with the entire Jewish tradition, that the basic sin is idolatry, the worship of that which is not in fact the living creator God.” – N.T. Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective

More pointedly, I think, is that idolatry is a form of pride; we worship what we want to worship in spite of being created to worship only the Creator. If we dig deeper into what Wright is saying here I think we will strike a fundamental truth that Evangelicals don’t want to admit (and, in fact, flatly deny). Christianity isn’t a relationship, it’s a religion. Granted, it is a religion structured by and around relationship but it is a religion all the same. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s look at what else Wright is painting for us in this chapter. He wants to argue, in broad strokes, that one of the theological paradigms structuring Paul’s thought was working with a theology of creation and covenant from within a decidedly Jewish framework. Wright does this by appealing to three particular Pauline passages in the New Testament: Colossians 1:15-20, 1 Corinthians 15 and (dauntingly) Romans 1-11.

The first selection seems an obvious choice given the language of reconciliation through the Son. In Him all things are reconciled to God and the “all things” is not limited believers only, rather Paul includes creation itself among that which is reconciled by the Son’s redemptive work on the cross. Wright makes the connection between these verses and the Old Testament themes of covenant and creation; particularly he connects this passage to Psalm 19. In Colossians, Paul is “making more or less exactly the same point, by means of the poetic structure itself, as Psalm 19: the Creator God is also the redeeming, covenant God, and vice versa.” The implications of this are that the God who has promised to redeem Israel will also redeem that which was promised to Israel: the land. The redemption of creation itself intertwines with those promises made to Israel. Wright, here, points out that what Paul is doing in Colossians is bringing Jesus as the Messiah into the picture. He says that Jesus “is the point at which at which creation and covenant come together” in order that the “double divine purpose”, the redemption of both Israel and creation, might be fulfilled.

Wright then moves on to a more familiar (or at least famous) passage in 1 Corinthians 15. After some initial setup, Paul launches into his argument in verse 20. Where does he start? All the way back in Genesis with Adam. The old creation is death through fleshly Adam and the new creation is life through heavenly Jesus. There are hints of Psalm 8 here that are not unintentional, Paul is keeping right in line with his particular theme of covenant and creation. This is further evidenced in Paul’s discussion of the resurrection body in verses 35-49 where we see the language of Genesis 1 in full swing. Wright summarizes: “This is how the problem within the existing creation, namely sin and death, has been dealt with through the Messiah, more specifically through the way in which the Messiah has been the means of fulfilling the promises of a great victory through which evil would be overthrown… For the moment my point is that, like the Psalms or Daniel, Paul is going back to creation itself, to Genesis, and showing how God’s fulfillment of the covenant promises has established creation’s renewal.” It is important to note, here, the connection between Messiah and Apocalyptic as it will be the next narrative theme Wright engages. Paul contrasts the earthly with the heavenly but it is not an antagonistic contrast. Paul does not want to give the impression that creation will be remade, he wants to tell us that creation will be renewed. His eschatology is at odds with those eschatologies which posit a destroying and a remaking of the creation: as we will be changed from earthly to heavenly, so shall creation be changed.

The final passage Wright would point us to in order to establish creation and covenant as a narrative theme in the Pauline corpus is Romans 1-11. I will not (and Wright does not) attempt to dig around too deeply as it should suffice for the stated purpose to make a few observations. First, Paul opens this epistle with an argument about how creation is “a way of calling the human race to account for not recognizing God and giving him the praise and honor that were his due.” In this sin man has no excuse and suffers the consequences of his disobedience, “human beings have become corrupt; violence and hatred fills the world; and even those who think they are above such things are themselves in fact no better.” It is at this point that Israel would speak up: “God has called Israel to be the light to the nations, the teacher of the foolish, the guide to the blind. That is what the covenant was there for.” As Wright continues to say, however, Paul anticipates such an argument and points out that even Israel has become part of the problem. The crisis according to Wright, then, is how is God to be “faithful to the covenant and just in his dealings with the whole creation?” Paul’s answer comes in the form of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus not only fulfills the covenant which solves the problem of creation, but also He solves the problem of Israel’s failure in that covenant.

This is just the beginning of Wright’s wading into this section of Romans but I don’t want to continue in this post. I’m sure I’ve not done Wright justice here, but I think he has done a great job of establishing this particular narrative as crucial to understanding much of Paul’s thought. It is in this section of the book where Wright introduces his (controversial) understanding of “the faithful covenant justice of God” or the dikaiosyne theou. I will let him speak for himself in conclusion:

If there is one major result of this chapter in terms of current debates, it is that the ‘new perspective’ on the one hand, and its critics on the other, both need to come to terms with the integrated vision of human sin and redemption and Israel’s fall and restoration which characterizes Paul through and through, precisely because his controlling categories are creation and covenant. He is not simply assuming an implicit narrative about how individual sinners find a right relationship with a holy God (any more than he is simply assuming an implicit narrative about how Gentiles can have easy access to God’s people). In so far as he would be happy with the former way of stating matters at all, he would insist on framing it within the much larger question of how the creator God can be true to creation, how the covenant God can be true to the covenant, and how those things are not two, but one. And that is what the phrase dikaiosyne theou is all about.

And:

Let me put the point in a sequence of three propositions which Paul everywhere presupposes and frequently makes explicit in whole or in part.

(1) God made the covenant with Abraham as the means of dealing with evil within good creation, which meant dealing in particular with evil within human beings, God’s image-bearers. This I have already explained.

(2) The family of Abraham, who themselves share in the evil, as well as in the image-bearing vocation, of the rest of humanity, treated their vocation to be the light of the world as indicating exclusive privilege. This was their own meta-sin, their own second-order form of idolatry, compounding the basic forms they already shared with the Gentiles. This further point is basic to Paul’s critique of Israel in such passages as Romans 2, 7 and 10 and Galatians 2, 3 and 4.

(3) When God fulfils the covenant through the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit, thereby revealing his faithful covenant justice and his ultimate purpose of new creation, this has the effect both of fulfilling the original covenant purpose (thus dealing with sin and procuring forgiveness) and of enabling Abraham’s family to be the worldwide Jew-plus-Gentile people it was always intended to be.