PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF REVERSAL: KERYGMATIC ...

[D]ying and rising with Christ as part of the body of Christ is central both to
Paul’s understanding of Jesus as Savior and to his understanding of Christian
life. 48
S.A. Cummins succinctly summarises this “corporate Christology” in Paul:
For the apostle Paul, an integral aim and outworking of God’s self-disclosure in
Jesus Christ is the incorporation of the whole of humanity into Messiah Jesus and
his Spirit, and thereby into the divine life that is eternal communion with the
triune God. The historical and theological dimensions of such a claim involve at
least two key interrelated aspects of Paul’s Christology: namely, that Jesus’
messianic identity and destiny encompass an Israel-specific life and death
transposed into his exaltation as universal living Lord, and that this pattern and
path are replicated in the lives of all those who are incorporated into him as the
messianic and Spirit-empowered eschatological people of God. 49
In reacting to perceived presumptuous/autonomous spirituality in Corinth, then, Paul was
able to interpret and respond to the situation by means of the reversal motif that had,
beginning at the Damascus Road, become focused in his kerygma of the Christ. 50 Those
who were engaging in boastful, presumptuous status games were effectively blinded by
the shame of the crucified Christ, preferring to play the role of the boastful ruler. They
48
Terrence Callan, Dying and Rising with Christ: The Theology of Paul the Apostle (New
York: Paulist Press, 2006), 8.
49
S.A. Cummins, “Divine Life and Corporate Christology: God, Messiah Jesus, and the
Covenant Community in Paul” in The Messiah in the Old and New Testaments (ed.
Stanley E. Porter; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007), 190-209; 190. Cummins’
summary unfortunately lacks recognition of the hiddenness of Christ’s exaltation. Callan
rightly gives some attention to this theme: “Thus Christians have died but not yet risen
with Christ; or their death and resurrection with Christ has not yet been revealed; or their
life is an ongoing death and resurrection with Christ. All of this is so because salvation
has not yet fully arrived”. Callan, Dying and Rising with Christ, 128.
50
Hengel and Deines make a similar connection: “When Paul explicitly stresses around
twenty years later that the crucified Christ – here one could almost speak of the crucified
Messiah – is a stumbling block to the Jews (I Cor.1.23), he is describing not only his
present experience of mission but the personal offence which he had taken to the message
of the crucified Messiah as a Pharisaic scribe on the basis of his understanding of the
Torah, when he still knew Christ ‘after the flesh’”. Hengel and Deines, Pre-Christian
Paul, 81.
47