The belief in Jesus as “savior” has been central to mainstream Western Christianity from earliest times. Most Christians throughout history have looked on this as a set of doctrines, belief in which is a membership requirement for being a member in good standing of a Christian community. Why do Christians believe this? The common answer is “by faith.” Scholars typically accept this explanation, and focus on spelling out in more detail the contents of this belief–another example of the approach to which these essays are opposed. I think instead we have not fully understood a set of beliefs until we are able to form some concept of how these beliefs figure, or figured, in a larger complex consisting of particular experiences which these beliefs functioned as interpretations, motives which motivated belief, and practical life-changes which resulted from making these beliefs central to people’s lives.
This is especially important when trying to account for the origins of Christian beliefs about Jesus as savior reflected in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, chs. 2-8 of which give the earliest full account of this doctrine. Paul was not yet a recognized authority in a Christian church. He preached to people who were people like us, who would not believe just anything they heard him say, just because he said it. I think, to account for the origins of the Christian salvation myth, we have to make some educated guesses about the mindset of Paul’s audience, what experiences might have motivated them to begin believing in this “mythological” narrative, and how exactly accepting it as central to their worldview might have changed their lives.
This essay gives a very brief sketch of the essentials that I propose in answer to these questions. Another essay (Salvation by Spirit-Possession in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (2): Detailed Textual Argument) will give a much more detailed explanation of the textual bases for the theory I summarize here.
This is the context in which some elements of Paul’s unusual vocabulary needs to be understood.
On the view that I propose, in this letter Paul is addressing a Jewish synagogue community in Rome, made up of both ethnic Jews and non-Jews, but all of whom are dedicated to reading and basing their lives on writings from the Jewish tradition (which were eventually incorporated into what Jews call the Bible, and Christians call the Old Testament). Study of such scriptures was the central purpose of synagogue gatherings.
Paul assumes that he and all his addressees in this letter have had a certain kind of highly emotional and life-transforming experience which they interpreted as spirit-possession. The effect of this spirit possession was to awaken in them what I will call an emotion-driven and wholehearted “passion for rightness,” which they felt had taken over their lives. What stood out for them about this experiential transformation was a contrast with a very different way of achieving the kind of rightness-ideal they had learned through study of Jewish scriptures. This previous way involved strenuous efforts to keep a body of Jewish laws, essentially by means of will-power. Looking back retrospectively, and judging these previous efforts in the light of their experience of being carried away by a spirit-driven passion for rightness, what now stood out for them was the wholehearted character of this newly aroused passion for rightness, contrasted with a previous state in which determined efforts to keep Jewish laws by will-power were always accompanied by an awareness of internal division and conflict, feelings of reluctance and rebellion against the imposition of externally derived standards of conduct.
On the account I propose here, prior to their experience of spirit-possession, they probably had not seen anything greatly lacking in this law-oriented version of Judaism. But once they had had this experience of being wholly taken over and emotionally transformed by a wholehearted passion for rightness, this became a standard by which they judged their previous efforts to attain the rightness-ideals that they had learned from Jewish scriptures. Judged in this way, all they could see about their previous attempts was the way that their dutiful but reluctant attempts to keep God’s laws fell short of the wholehearted passion for rightness which they felt had taken over their lives.
This is the context in which some elements of Paul’s unusual vocabulary needs to be understood, special meanings he gives to the words “sin,” “justification/salvation” and “flesh.”
Sin
In the Letter to the Romans, “sin” does not refer to “committing some sins” by breaking some laws, but simply the continued co-existence of feelings of not wanting to keep these laws, coexisting with and conflicting with desires to keep them. So long as they felt in themselves countervailing desires, coexisting with a desire to do what is right, they counted themselves as still in a state of “sin.”
Flesh.
Paul’s term “flesh” in this letter does not refer to sensuality, but to merely human efforts to keep laws by means of will power, described by the terms “Flesh” and “Law,” or “works of law,” (as in “No Flesh is just-ified by works of Law.”) Because Fleshly efforts to keep Law fall short of the true, more perfect, kind of “just-ification” brought about by Spirit, “Flesh” is inescapably “sinful,” as when Paul describes it as “Sin-flesh” or “the Flesh of Sin,” or when he says that “I see that nothing good exists in me, in my flesh, that is.”
Just-ification.
In English when we speak of “just-ifying” some action or some person this means giving some defense of that action or person. But Paul uses an equivalent Greek verb to refer to a person who has actually been just-ified, “made just or right” in the eyes of God. “No flesh is just-ified before God by works of law” means that fleshly efforts to keep laws will not render a person just/right in the eyes of God. As I will explain below, “Jesus rose for our just-ification,” means that we are rendered just/right (not sinful) in God’s eyes by participating in Jesus’s resurrection (something that happens through spirit-possession, as I will explain below). In what follows I hyphenate the word “just-ifcation” to draw attention to this point.
Salvation.
This is also the meaning of “salvation” then: what people are saved from is what they now see as futile efforts to achieve true rightness by such conflict-ridden, half-hearted, will-power-driven efforts to live up to particular laws representing rightness, which could now only appear retrospectively as not achieving “true” rightness. God had remedied the failures of these merely human efforts, by sending a divine “Holy Spirit” felt as a powerful internal force positively driving a person from within to live up to very high standards of rightness in one’s daily life.
Martin Luther’s similar account.
Although this psychologically-oriented account is probably decidedly outside the mainstream of modern scholarship on Paul, it is actually very similar to ideas proposed by Martin Luther in his 1515 Commentary on Romans.
The works of the law are every thing that a person does or can do of his own free will and by his own powers to obey the law. But because in doing such works the heart abhors the law and yet is forced to obey it, the works are a total loss and are completely useless. That is what St. Paul means in chapter 3 when he says, “No human being [the Greek says “no Flesh”] is justified before God through the works of the law.” …. How can anybody prepare himself for good by means of works if he does no good work except with aversion and constraint in his heart? How can such a work please God, if it proceeds from an averse and unwilling heart?
…. No one can satisfy [the Law] unless everything he does springs from the depths of the heart. But no one can give such a heart except the Spirit of God, who makes the person be like the law, so that he actually conceives a heartfelt longing for the law and henceforward does everything, not through fear or coercion, but from a free heart. Such a law is spiritual since it can only be loved and fulfilled by such a heart and such a spirit. If the Spirit is not in the heart, then there remain sin, aversion and enmity against the law…
To complete this in reference to the community Paul is writing to, one only has to emphasize that “the Spirit of God” in Paul’s context needs to be understood very concretely in terms of specific kinds of dramatic and highly emotional experiences thought of in Paul’s time in terms of spirit-possession. (I’m not sure what Luther thought about Spirit.)
How does Jesus’s death “save” people and bring them true “just-ification?” First, it is not only Jesus’s death, but also his resurrection which brings salvation/just-ification, as Paul says in ch. 5: “Jesus died for our sins and rose for our just-ification.”
Paul’s ideas here can basically be described in terms of “participation” in the death and resurrection of Jesus, understood symbolically.
Jesus’s crucifixion is a symbol of God’s condemnation of Sin in the Flesh of Jesus: “God sent His Son in the likeness of Sin-Flesh, and in that Flesh condemned Sin.”
Jesus-followers must participate in Jesus’s death by condemning their old way of being, characterized by (futile) attempts to achieve just-ification by Fleshly attempts at law-keeping. So long as one relies on one’s own rational “human” efforts to achieve just-ification by Law-keeping, one will not be open to the experience of being taken over by irrational emotion conceived of as possession by a divine “Holy Spirit.”
The full quote from Paul here is
What the law was not capable of, in that it was weakened by the flesh, God [did] sen[ding] his own son in the likeness of sin-flesh, and… condemned sin in the flesh [of Jesus], so that the just demands of law are fulfilled in us who walk, not according to flesh, but according to spirit.
If you “put to death” your own previous “fleshly” way of being, this will make you open to the kind of spirit-possession that will remedy the “weakness” of Fleshly attempts at Law-keeping, and will make you capable of living up to the very high rightness ideals found in Jewish scriptures (here called “Law,” Torah), thus bringing you true just-ification/salvation.
All this assumes an audience for Paul’s letters that was already primed to have these kinds of spirit-driven experiences, experiences that were not only emotionally powerful, but which consisted very specifically in what I call “a passion for rightness.” Details of my argument are presented in especially the final section.Salvation by Spirit-Possession in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (2): Detailed Textual Argument
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