Canter Bridge

Paul’s articulation of Jesus’ being lies often at huge distance from the cautious language of the church’s later creeds. To make this observation casts no shadow either upon Paul or upon the creed-makers, for they were pursuing similar ends by very different means. Each employs his own code, so to speak.

Like all true monotheists, Paul is convinced that strength and peace come through serving just one, supreme deity and not worrying about the rest. Even to refer to ‘the rest’ is to allow for heavens packed with or perhaps loosely populated with other powers. Biblical monotheism never denies the possibility. Its ends have less to do with ‘scientific’ description of all who—the personal pronoun is intentional—might exist. It is unconcerned with filling out the roster.

Rather, biblical confidence in just one God flows from the conviction that he is supreme. The One, the Ineffable, is himself the creator and ruler of all other powers, authorities, even of pretenders to his own mostly uncontested status.

Paul’s Christology survives this monotheistic criterion. It co-exists with full-bodied biblical insistence that there is but one God worth worshiping. Quite apart from whether Paul describes reality as it really is, this is one of the things that makes the Pauline Christology so interesting. It is not simplistic, but rather complex. Yet one senses that Paul would not consider the nascent christological ‘system’ that is ascribed to him to be complicated. Like all reality, as C.S. Lewis has taught us to expect, there is an oddness about it, a complexity, a challenge to all manner of intellectual tidiness.

Of Christ Paul has this to say:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.

Like God Himself, Paul affirms, Christ exercises supremacy over all of creation. Indeed it was created by him. Even its most formidable powers are his product.

If all existence were to be divided between the one God and everything else, Paul’s Christ would be on the side of the one God. Yet there is something other than a simplistic equivalence that would posit that God = Christ and Christ = God. Rather, he is the image of the one true God. God ‘was pleased to have his fullness dwell in him’.

There is an overagainstness in the relationship between what we might carelessly abbreviate as the two of them.

Not for naught would Trinitarian credal language require utmost caution, even exactitude, precisely in its attempts to describe that which cannot be exhaustively described.

Paul’s point, at the end of a page, is less cautious: you can trust him, he tells his readers. Trust whom? God? Or Christ?

Exactly.