I’ve been trying to show that Paul thought eternal life would be lived not in some kind of bodiless spiritual existence, but in the physical body.  How is *that* supposed to work?  And didn’t he say that “flesh and blood” would NOT inherit the kingdom (1 Cor. 15:50)?  Here I explain how Paul understood it was all to happen.  I pick up with the last bit of my last post, taken from Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020). ******************************   The future resurrected body Paul imagines will be utterly and completely transformed.  It will be a different kind of body.  Paul argues that the human body that goes into the ground is like a “bare kernel” of some kind of grain that grows into a plant.  What grows is intimately tied to and related to what went into the ground; but it is also vastly different.  When you plant an acorn it doesn’t grow into a forty-foot acorn, but into an oak tree. So too the human.  When the body comes out of the [...]

What did Paul actually teach would happen after death?  It was not that after you died your soul would go to heaven or hell.  Paul taught a future physical resurrection of your *body*, to have eternal life here on earth.  I started explaining that in my previous post.  I continue here: Paul’s argument for a coming resurrection of the dead.  Again, this is taken from my discussion in Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020).   ***************************** Paul’s Teaching of the Resurrection To make his case (for a physical resurrection of all people at the end of time), Paul begins the chapter (1 Corinthians 15)  by summarizing what the Corinthians came to believe when they first joined the Christian community, that Christ died for sins and was raised from the dead, and after his resurrection he was seen not only by his disciples but by a large number of people, including 500 at one time and, finally, by Paul himself (1 Corinthians 15:1-8).  All these people actually saw Jesus.  That’s because he was physically raised. [...]

One of the most important issues for the apostle Paul is the future resurrection of the dead.  It is also one of the must misunderstood topics among readers of Paul today, who often claim that Paul had just the *opposite* view to the one he had.  And that’s because they completely misconstrue his understanding of Jesus’ own resurrection.  If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it 834,000 times: “Paul thought Jesus was raised spiritually, not bodily.”   Wrong, wrong, wrong. It will take a while to explain.  I deal with the matter in my book Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020).  Here is the first bit of what I say there.   ******************************  The Glorious Transformation of the Resurrected Body Undoubtedly the most important passage for Paul’s view of the future resurrection is 1 Corinthians 15.   The chapter, in fact, is often called “the resurrection chapter.”  It is also one of the most misread passages in all of the New Testament.  Many casual readers have thought Paul wrote it in order to prove that Jesus [...]

This past week I received a question from a reader about the book of Philemon.  The last time that happened ... well, actually, I think it has happened only once before in the history of the blog!   And now that vibrant and widespread interest has been raised, it is a good time to address  it again!  Seriously, it involves an unusually intriguing question.  What was Paul's view of slavery? Philemon provides an unexpected answer, at least as I read it.  This is the shortest of Paul’s letters (it’s a one-pager) where he is writing to his convert Philemon, a rich slave owner, asking him to receive back into his good graces his run-away slave Onesimus. So what was *that* all about?  Here is the question and my response.   QUESTION: From your writing about Greco Roman notions of dominance as status, it seems that the simple manumission of a slave was not a de facto improvement in status, because a man with no wealth, power, or influence was about as low on the ladder as [...]

I’ve been discussing how Paul understands the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection for salvation, and have done so by laying out as concisely as I could his two principal “models” of how salvation worked, the judicial and the participationist model. In this post I’ll make some brief concluding comments about the two models, in particular in relation to one another, again from my textbook on the New Testament. ****************************** Comparison and Contrast of the Two Models Let me emphasize that the two models of salvation we have been looking at are ways of understanding something. They are not the thing itself. Paul's gospel is not "justification by faith" or "union with Christ." These are ways of reflecting on or thinking about his gospel. His gospel is God's act of salvation in Christ; the models are ways of conceptualizing how it worked. The way it worked differed according to which model Paul had in mind. In both of them, the problem is "sin." But in one, sin is an act of disobedience that a person [...]

I started explaining that Paul has different ways that he conceptualizes the act of salvation – how the death and resurrection of Christ restores a person to a right relationship with God. The judicial model that I laid out can be found in several of Paul’s letters, especially Romans and Galatians. But he has other ways of understanding how salvation works, other models involving Jesus’ death and resurrection. The other BIG one can be called the Participationist model. Here is what I say about it in my textbook on the New Testament: ****************************** The Participationist Model. Most of us today have no trouble understanding how a judicial process can be seen as analogous to the act of salvation. The participationist model, however, is much harder to get our minds around. This is partly because it involves a way of thinking that is no longer prevalent in our culture. Under this second model the human problem is still called "sin," "sin" is still thought to lead to "death," and Christ's death and resurrection still work to [...]