Note: From Pauline Theology as a Way of Life (Baker 2023). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
The quest for living the “good life” or pursuing “happiness” is nothing new. But a spate of recent literature, TED talks, and professional conferences suggest that contemporary quests for life’s purpose, practical strategies and guidance for living well, and questions surrounding the pursuit of happiness are particularly urgent. Can we find any clues as to what a good human life might look like from scientific investigations of our world or from the wisdom of philosophers both ancient and contemporary or perhaps from the research of contemporary social psychology? Are medicine and technology sufficient to help us with the challenges of aging, suffering and ultimately death? What role should emotions play, if any, in the pursuit of character and the good life? Where can one find social belonging when friendships, political and civic engagement, and community commitment are often largely instrumental and subservient to one’s personal self-fulfillment?
Paul as Participant in the Quest for Living the Good Life
The apostle Paul provides powerful resources for our most central questions about what constitutes human flourishing, happiness and the good life. In this book I argue that the synthetic task of “Pauline theology,” on the basis of a careful reading of Paul’s Letters and their subject matter, can be helpfully reframed as an invitation to pursue a particular way of life, a way of life predicated upon humanity’s ultimate good or telos. One of the primary arguments of this book is that the good life, for Paul, depends upon humanity’s telos. Stated differently, human flourishing – that is, the good life – is determined by humanity’s final supreme good. Articulations of the good life, human flourishing and happiness that ignore or eschew humanity’s divinely given telos would be, for Paul, deeply deficient.
For all their wisdom and benefits, most scholarly investigations of Paul’s theology have somewhat obscured the fact that Paul’s Letters are not best approached as instantiations of dogmatic speculation. While Paul’s Letters are certainly filled with theological claims, I will argue that Paul’s Letters are better understood and approached as self-involving invitations to Paul’s churches to pursue a way of life, a way of human flourishing that takes its starting point from the person of Christ. As such, Paul’s theological discourse, as seen in his letters, makes excellent sense when it is seen as in service to humanity’s pursuit of the good life. “I consider everything to be a loss in comparison to the supreme value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). Here and elsewhere, Paul claims that he has a stable notion of a singular supreme good to which he has devoted the entirety of his life. Paul’s knowledge of the supreme good enables him to construct a theory of value that guides his own life as a model to imitate, grounds his multifaceted exhortations to his churches, and is the basis for his advocacy of certain practices and exercises so as to guide them into living the good life.
For decades scholars have understandably turned to Hellenistic and Roman philosophers in order to elucidate and contextualize Paul’s discourse, yet rare is the suggestion that Paul, like his philosophical contemporaries, was similarly motivated to both articulate a vision of the good life and aid people in living it out. Thus, despite popular notions of Paul as otherworldly and escapist in his eschatology, ascetic and austere in his views of the human body, and minimalistic in his appreciation for good emotions and pleasurable feelings, my central contention is that Paul’s theology is deeply committed to the pursuit of human flourishing and happiness.…
An Invitation to Pauline Theology as a Way of Life
When I refer to Paul as a theologian of “the good life” or as one invested in the project of human flourishing, I mean that his pastoral exhortations call his churches to live a particular way of life that flows from his notion of the person of Christ, and our relation to this person, as the supreme good for humanity. Paul’s theology is best understood as taking its starting point from his conviction that the telos of human existence is found in the person of Jesus since he is God’s definitive revelation of what it means to be human and the one who enables humans to participate in the life and character of God.
This approach to Pauline theology may strike some as unusual. Does Christian theology have a category for happiness or the good life, or is it oriented exclusively to heaven and the otherworldly? Certainly most Pauline theologies, while recognizing Paul as a pastor, have focused upon the apostle’s thinking…. Further, most Pauline theologies are descriptive in nature, meaning that their success depends solely upon their historical and exegetical accuracy. A distinction between meaning and significance or between “what it meant” and “what it means” is insisted upon; and the goal of Pauline theology is simply to provide a descriptive account of Paul’s theological thinking. While it is often the case that Pauline theologies are written because the author believes in the enduring value and significance of the apostle, the standards of the guild that emphasize disinterested historical and exegetical descriptions often result in Pauline theologies that seemingly hold Paul’s theological claims at arm’s length.
Traditional Pauline theologies are immensely useful, but I do think there are good reasons for pursuing new approaches to the synthetic task of setting forth his theological claims. Allow me to give three initial justifications for reading Paul’s Letters as the discourse of one deeply committed to aiding humans in their pursuit of the good life.
Christ and the Fullness of Life
First, the classic genre of Pauline theology, along with its arrangement of Paul’s discourses, rarely captures the passion and intensity with which Paul calls his churches to pursue Christ as the singular means to human flourishing. Paul claims that he considers “all things to be loss for the sake of Christ” (Philippians 3:7b); he will speak of nothing except “what Christ has accomplished through me to win obedience from the gentiles” (Romans 15:18); he repeatedly speaks of his emotional states of anxiety and joy for his churches (II Corinthians 1:12-2:17; Philippians 1:20); he employs biting sarcasm, irony and parody to tear down the arguments of his opponents and to set himself forth as a true apostle of Christ in II Corinthians 10-13. Statements like these pervade Paul’s Letters, and yet they are rarely emphasized in Pauline theologies given that they do not always fit well under traditional theological categories. A few scholars have recently made similar claims about the nature of Paul’s Letters and theology. For example, recently Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun have argued that Christian theology is ultimately a matter of human flourishing, and they set forth an account of Paul’s theology devoted to “how the true life is led well, goes well, and feels as it should” [For the Life of the World, p. 153]. Colleen Shantz has written a short essay arguing that “happiness is very much to the point of Paul’s communication with the small groups of Christ-followers” [“‘I Have learned to Be Content,’” p. 188]. She notes how Paul works to restore the conditions for happiness among his churches and build new social identities that will enable the generation of happiness that comes from shared group identities, values and emotions. Julien Smith has recently argued that there is a discernible telos in Paul’s theology and that it is best captured as a vision of the good life with four components: citizenship, character, community and creation.
These scholars have rightly seen that Paul’s theological communications are best understood as an invitation to his churches to pursue a particular way of life – a way of life predicated upon humanity’s ultimate good. Paul’s theologizing centers upon matters of life and death; truly, one could say that Paul is obsessed with death and how the resurrected Christ provides – both now and for eternity – fullness of resurrection life. Paul’s Letters maintain that there is no greater virtue than love for others, that humility is divine, that great good can come out of faithful suffering and adversity, and that the cosmos will one day be renewed to perfection. One can give a purely descriptive account of these incredible claims. But one can also embrace the reality that Paul is claiming to describe the reader’s own situation before God in Christ and calling them to a particular way of life. For this reason, the interpreter of Paul is constantly pressed to ask, What does this text or this statement claim for humanity? In other words, on this view, there is no neutrally “descriptive” ground on which to stand, for Paul claims that the life of the crucified and risen Christ determines the very life of everyone (and this would include, of course, the interpreter of Paul). Paul’s Letters consistently witness to God’s revelation in Christ for the salvation and rescue of humanity; therefore, interpreters are constantly engaged in theology given that the subject matter is a form of proclamation to humanity about God that presses the reader to make personal existential responses to the God revealed in Paul’s writings. I suggest, then, that interpreters of Paul’s theology can indeed engage in careful exegetical, historical and synthetic work with Paul’s Letters but that they can also seek to set forth the intensity of Paul’s call to believe, behave and commit themselves to an all-encompassing way of life.
Second, there is significant Christian theological pedigree for the claim that Paul and the entirety of the Christian Scriptures are invested in humanity’s quest for realizing the singular good for which it was created. Lactantius (250-ca. 325), Ambrose of Milan (340-397) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) all read the Christian Scriptures as providing insights into how to live the happy life. Perhaps it is Augustine, however, who most rigorously asks about the telos of humanity and the quest for happiness. His City of God frequently puts the Christian Scriptures in conversation with the ancient philosophical quest for the supreme good. Hence, Augustine gives robust responses to questions of moral agency, the emotions, the pursuit of societal peace, and value in suffering and adversity in the quest for eschatological life with God. Augustine’s On the Trinity attempts to show how the telos of human existence is found in our participation in the love and life of the triune God and our continual conformity to the character of Jesus Christ. Matthew Levering notes that for Augustine, “happiness is enjoying all the good that we were made for, and enjoying it without threat of losing it against our will. This is so because happiness describes the fulfillment of the human will, the human desire for the good” [Theology of Augustine, p. 176]. Humans were created, Augustine says, “to perceive the good in itself,” and this good consists in seeing God. “And if you cling to Him by love, you will be at once blest” [On the Trinity, 8.5]. Ultimately, for Augustine, happiness consists in “knowing, loving and enjoying God, and loving self and others in pursuit of that goal” [Ellen T. Charry, God and the Art of Happiness, p. 57]. And this goal has remarkable consequences for Augustine’s understanding of society, of moral agency and the emotions, of suffering and death, and of cultivating habits and practices that enable us to pursue happiness – all of which is worked out through reading the Christian Scriptures. While I will engage Augustine in places throughout, here my purpose is to make the simple point that happiness and human flourishing are by no means tangential to the history of Christian theology.
Third, Paul writes letters to his churches as aids to encourage, exhort and guide them to progress toward transformation in Christ. Paul’s Letters always have the goal of persuading Paul’s churches to live, behave and think in a particular manner. Paul does not write philosophical or doctrinal treatises. He does not use the language that later systematic theologians use to conceptualize Christian theology. Rather, like philosophers such as Epicurus, Cicero and Seneca, Paul uses letters for the purpose of character formation and instruction. As such, his letters console, rebuke, exhort and encourage – in other words, they all have the rhetorical aim of producing real transformation among his churches. This is by no means to say that they are devoid of theology or to say that we cannot profit from our own attempts to provide doctrinal order to his claims, but it is to say that Paul’s theological discourse always serves to enable his churches to reach the goal of conformity to the person of Christ. James Thompson states this point crisply: “The telos of [Paul’s] ministry aligns with God’s telos, for he has been called to be God’s servant. The letters are not theological essays but his means of persuading the reader to reach that goal” [Apostle of Persuasion, p. 10]. Reading Paul’s Letters well, then, requires attention to the ways in which Paul uses them as a medium to guide his churches into the fullness of life that is found in the person of Christ.
Joshua Jipp, professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
