Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then every one will receive his commendation from God. (1 Corinthians 4:5)
Paul warns his followers frequently of this judgment, which he calls the “judgment seat of Christ,” admonishing them to “judge themselves” now so they will not have to be judged and thus condemned along with the world: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body” (2 Corinthians 5:10).
Stage two, which Paul calls the “end” (Greek telos), follows, but only after an indeterminate period of time. That is when Christ, who has been given all rule, authority, and power, is able to successfully put “all his enemies under his feet.” Presumably, during this interim period, he will be assisted by his newly glorified heavenly family—thus Paul’s statement that they will be future judges of the world and the angels (1 Corinthians 6:2–3). Paul never writes explicitly of “hell” as a final state of those judged as wicked. He does believe in the “wrath” of God against sinners who do not repent when Jesus appears as judge in the clouds of heaven: “The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night. When people say, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child and there will be no escape” (1 Thessalonians 5:2–3). In contrast, those “in Christ” are saved from this wrath (1 Thessalonians 1:10; 5:9–10). Presumably, as victorious glorified Spirit-beings, these members of the God-family assist their older brother Jesus Christ in adjudicating the fate of all humanity—whether living or dead. Paul apparently conceives of this as a process involving dispensing of rewards and punishments impartially to all human beings: “There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first, but also the Greek [i.e., Gentile], but glory, honor and peace for every one who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek” (Romans 2:9–10).
The last enemy to be destroyed is death, which seems to imply a full resurrection of all the dead in Hades, but since “everything” becomes subject to Christ, and all those who died “will be made alive,” the implication, at least, is of universal salvation.
Paul ends the long passage from 1 Corinthians 15 with his final, most cryptic statement: “When all things are subjected to him [Christ], then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be everything to everyone” (verse 28). Here we see that in Paul’s view the rule of Christ, as well as those who assist him in this cosmic transformation, is an intermediate and functional rule. It is for a specified period of time, to accomplish a designated end. Once that goal is achieved and the universe reaches a complete harmony, “God will be everything to everyone.” The phrase in Greek, panta en pasin, is difficult to translate but literally says, “That God may be all things in everything.”
The author of the letter of Ephesians, an obvious devotee of Paul writing in Paul’s name several decades after his death, seems to offer a fair summary of what we can otherwise deduce directly from Paul’s letters about the mystery: “For God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his predetermined purpose that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:9–10).
Salvation then, for Paul, is, in the end, rescuing the entire human race from the disharmony and death that pervade the entire cosmos as a result of the rebellion of the angelic hosts. Christ, along with his newly empowered family of chosen ones, must reign until they have destroyed “every rule, authority, and power,” so that God can be all things to all. Ultimately, Paul says, the “creation itself will be released [i.e., “saved”] from its bondage to decay” (Romans 8:21).
Paul believed that his own experience as well as that of his followers verified the Announcement he proclaimed, this gospel of the mystery of God, uniquely revealed to him. He is adamant that he received his extraordinary personal revelations directly from Christ, swearing to his followers, “In what I am writing you, before God, I do not lie!” (Galatians 1:20). He even went so far as to place a curse on himself, or anyone else, who would dare to change his message, or depart from it. Paul also regularly appealed to the specific ecstatic spiritual experiences of his followers, who he believed had been “joined to the Lord, having become one Spirit with him.”
In the following chapter we will see the radical implications of these shared spiritual experiences. For Paul, being “united with Christ” was not merely a metaphor expressing solidarity and unity of faith but an experiential reality that he and his followers relied upon as evidence of their salvation. As we will see, baptism was not merely a symbolic water purification ritual but a means to achieve direct possession of the Spirit of Christ. Those so united with Christ, through being possessed of his Spirit, became one spiritual “body” with him and were spiritually sustained by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ through the Eucharistic meal of bread and wine. This transformation of the Jewish rituals of water purification and the blessing of God for bread and wine took Paul and his followers far afield from the practices of Jesus and his first followers and would have been viewed as shockingly pagan by James and the leaders of the Jerusalem church.
SIX
A MYSTICAL UNION
WITH CHRIST
What does it mean to be “in Christ”? I don’t mean believing in Jesus in the sense of having faith in Christ, but literally being in Christ. The phrase might be familiar to readers of the New Testament or to churchgoers, but what does it mean and where did it come from? The Hebrew Bible speaks often about believing and trusting in God, but never about being in God, and Jews don’t talk about being in Abraham, Moses, or any of the Prophets.1
The phrase “in Christ” belongs exclusively to the thought world of Paul and he uses it more than fifty times in his genuine letters.2 It is never used in the New Testament Gospels, either by Jesus or anyone talking about Jesus. That alone should give us pause. No matter how familiar the phrase might be, or what we think we might understand about it, we need to first hear the words of Paul in the context in which he uses them. As we will see, Paul’s concept of being in Christ is a key to understanding his view of what it meant to be a Christian.3 It is the underpinning of his teaching about God creating a new heavenly family of glorified Spirit-beings and it forms the basis of the experiences he and his followers were convinced showed that they were dealing directly with Christ as a living Spirit-being.
I have often thought of my task as a historian as trying to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It is all too easy to think that we understand some aspect of the past when in reality we are more likely looking through the tint of our modern assumptions. If we can distance ourselves in order to see the ways in which the past is strange to us, then we have a chance to understand it in a new and more authentic way.
One of my professors in graduate school at the University of Chicago once said to us, “If you had a time machine and traveled back to Greece in the first century A.D., dropping in to observe a gathering of a cell group of Paul’s followers meeting in Corinth, don’t assume you would have even the slightest idea of what was going on.” At that time I thought he was exaggerating for effect but my decades of research in the history of ancient religions has convinced me that his was an understatement.