Note: From Paul and the Good Life: Transformation and Citizenship in the Commonwealth of God (Baylor, 2020). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
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I confess that I was uninterested in the Apostle Paul right up through my early thirties. In my youth I suppose I was just ignorant. On a multiple-choice test, I would probably have guessed that Paul was one of Jesus’ twelve disciples. (I eventually learned that he wasn’t.) By the time I was in college, I had learned who Paul was, but didn’t care too much for him. Being a Christian was (and still is) all about following Jesus, in my view. Paul seemed a lightning rod for controversy, primarily of interest to the sort of people who liked arguing about doctrine, which I didn’t. For my money, the best book in the New Testament was the Gospel according to Mark, because it offered a direct, vivid picture of Jesus, and so could serve as the paradigm for discipleship. I wouldn’t have wanted to strike Paul’s letters from the canon exactly, but I wasn’t much interested in reading them.
Eventually I wound up going to seminary, where I was obliged to read and study Paul’s letters. By that point I didn’t mind; the Apostle had by then become something of an intellectual curiosity and challenge to me. In the course of my studies, I became aware of a rather significant chronological fact: the earliest extant Christian writings are Paul’s letters to the fledgling churches he planted. Interesting, you might say, but not exactly life changing.
It Turns Out Paul Was onto Something Big
But when you set Paul’s letters next to Mark’s Gospel (or any of the four canonical Gospels), a far more important observation comes into focus. Paul was grappling with the significance of Jesus a good twenty years before the first Gospel was written (Mark, ca. 70 CE). To read Mark and then pick up, say, Galatians, is like stepping into a time machine. Reading the Gospels, we discover a rich, multi-layered portrait of Jesus’ life. Reading Paul’s letters, we encounter the earliest written effort to work out the theological significance of Jesus’ life, an achievement that doubtless influenced later writers who saw fit to preserve that portrait for posterity. My seminary epiphany, if you like, was the realization that my paradigm of discipleship had not simply emerged from the pages of the Gospels. Rather, I had been reading the Gospels – albeit without fully realizing I was doing so – through the lens of Paul’s theology. The Gospels had beckoned me to come follow Jesus; Paul’s letters gave me the resources for the challenging work of figuring out how this might be done in my daily life.
After seminary and subsequent doctoral studies came another epiphany of sorts. Having spent six grueling years learning as much as I could about the New Testament, I joined the faculty of an interdisciplinary undergraduate honors college within a Midwestern church-related university. In addition to courses on theology and biblical studies, each semester I began to teach an introductory seminar on the humanities to first-year students. To my chagrin, I quickly discovered that my doctoral studies had prepared me to teach only a fraction of the texts on the reading list – Genesis, Mark, John, Augustine. Others I had a passing familiarity with – Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Aeschylus. But with respect to quite a number of texts, I was a rank neophyte – Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Zhuangzi, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare. And that was just the first semester.
My saving graces that first semester, and every semester since, have been twofold. First, my gracious colleagues and students taught me that a good teacher can also be a learner. Second, the overarching question of the seminar – What is the good life? – helped me find the common threads between these vastly different textual tapestries. Over time, this question began to animate my reading of biblical texts, as I began to ponder the church father Tertullian’s age-old question, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Thus I stumbled upon my second epiphany, namely that the philosophical pursuit of the life of human flourishing and the life of Christian discipleship have much in common.
Knowing Paul Is about Knowing Jesus, and Knowing Jesus Is about Knowing Life
This, then, is a book about the Apostle Paul, but at its heart it is also a book about Jesus. To be more precise, and slightly technical, this is a book about Paul’s Christology, how the Apostle made sense of Jesus the Christ. For this reason, the book is not concerned with Paul’s life and ministry per se. Nor will it offer a systematic interpretation of Paul’s letters or derive from them an overview of his theology. Rather, this book strives to better understand the significance Paul attributes to the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and to grasp why this constitutes for Paul good news to be proclaimed to all creation. Importantly, this book makes the case that Paul’s good news concerning Jesus the Messiah is integrally connected to the pursuit of the good life, the life of eudaimonia, or human flourishing. To do so, Paul must be coaxed into conversation with Aristotle and the wider Greco-Roman philosophical tradition of virtue ethics. Such a conversation reveals significant areas of overlap, but also the ways in which Paul offers a christological redefinition of the aim, or telos, of the good life for human beings, what the good life actually aims for.
Even though the very telos of the good life would thus have been contested by Paul’s contemporaries, I contend that there was an accepted framework within which this goal was understood to be pursued. There are four elements to this framework. First, the good life is a communal, social, even political project rather than merely an individual one. For Aristotle, the good life must be pursued within the city-state, or polis, and for Paul, this social context is the heavenly commonwealth, or politeuma, as he writes to the church in Philippi (Philippians 3:20). For both Aristotle and Paul, the life of human flourishing thus implies membership, or citizenship, within a commonwealth directed towards this end.
Second, citizenship within this commonwealth requires moral transformation, the acquisition of a character that reliably leads one to discern and choose the good for oneself and the polis. Aristotle contends that one acquires this sort of character by pursuing aretē, a term we normally translate as “virtue” but which refers to a type of excellence suited to a given task. Although Paul uses the term aretē only once (Philippians 4:8), he likewise understood that citizenship in the heavenly politeuma both required and resulted in a transformation of character.
Third, as anyone who has lived with at least one other individual for any length of time knows, shared life leads typically, if not inevitably, to conflict. Thus the political pursuit of the good life requires political unity, or – to preserve alliteration – the preservation of community. The concern for unity amidst diversity within the polis is a constant refrain amongst political philosophers in Mediterranean antiquity and also a recurring motif of Paul’s letters.
Fourth and finally, although the pursuit of the good life is anthropocentric, it is not anthropomonistic; that is, it does not conceive of humans as “unique and uniquely solitary, cut off from the community of creation.” [Francis Watson, “In the Beginning,” p. 130] Humans are “implaced” creatures, existing only within a larger framework of physical and biological processes, and thus the life of human flourishing must attend to ecology, the interconnected web of relationships comprising all of life. Within the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, the environment within which humans live was understood as nature. Paul, informed and shaped by Israel’s Scriptures, understood this rather as creation.
Paul’s Jesus: The Center of a Good Life
Thus the thematic foci of this book – citizenship, character, community, and creation – constitute what I consider to be a shared framework within which Paul and his contemporaries saw themselves to be pursuing the good life. Admittedly, this is an artificial framework constructed for heuristic purposes. Certain elements, moreover, would not have been universally shared. The notion, for example, that human beings exist within the community of God’s creation and are responsible to God for the care of creation is probably only intelligible within the context of Israel’s, and Paul’s, Scriptures – what Christians commonly call the Old Testament. In other words, this framework does not fall from heaven; I shall have to argue for it by showing how central it all is to Paul’s interpretation of Jesus and what it means to follow him.
Whether or not this framework finally has any utility – the proof of the pudding, so to speak – depends upon whether the following can be demonstrated. The framework must resonate with the wider discourse in Mediterranean antiquity regarding the good life, and it must make intelligible within this wider discourse Paul’s christological vision of the good life. Specifically with respect to the latter goal, the argument intends to show that Paul understands Jesus as a type of ancient ideal king, a figure who both saves and rules – two functions that were often considered integrally connected with the pursuit of the good life in antiquity. These twin functions of Jesus – saving and ruling – suggest that Paul’s soteriology might provide an illuminating entrée into his Christology. Starting here illustrates one of the ways in which Paul’s legacy is both vitally important and, as I will show, worryingly confusing.
Note: From Paul and the Good Life: Transformation and Citizenship in the Commonwealth of God by Julien C. H. Smith. Copyright © Baylor University Press, 2020. Reprinted by arrangement with Baylor University Press. All rights reserved.
Julien C. H. Smith, associate professor of humanities & theology, Valparaiso University
