Why Foreign Missions? 20a1. The Gospel According to Paul: Sermons
and Confessions
What Gospel did the early Church take to the Jews and
Gentiles of the Roman world outside Israel?
This study, focussed mostly on Paul, begins a section that seeks to
identify the content of the early Church’s ‘Gospel.’ Here, I will present how several scholars, such
as C. H. Dodd and James D. G. Dunn, have approached and answered the question,
‘What is the Gospel According to Paul?’ by exploring sermons and confessional
formulae in Acts and Paul. [1] The next studies will expand this discussion.
Challenges in the
Twentieth Century
The twentieth century saw several challenges to coming up
with a content to the Gospel. Michael
Green discussed these in Evangelism in
the Early Church.[2] First, there is the question of whether
different scholars can arrive at the same results when reviewing the evidence
from the New Testament. Is there a unity
to the content of the Gospel? Second,
existentialists (such as Rudolf Bultmann) predictably argued against the very
possibility of a content to the Gospel.
Their emphasis was on the faith that was elicited—on ‘believing,’ not on
‘beliefs.’ A third challenge was the
claim that, while there was content to the Gospel, it varied according to
context. Thus the Gospel was not
monolithic but dynamic. A fourth
challenge was whether the speeches in Acts that present the Gospel were not
considered by some scholars to reflect actual speeches of the early Church so
much as Luke’s own theology.
Green concluded his consideration of these challenges by
saying that scholars (such as C. H. Dodd, Ralph Martin, W. Hollenweger, and T.
W. Manson) looking at the early creeds in the New Testament found a unified
content to the Gospel. This creedal
approach confirms the content of the Gospel, as follows:
Jesus Christ was God's last
word to man, the one who brought as much
of God to us as we could appreciate in the only terms we could take it in, the
terms of a human life; the one who in dying and rising again was manifestly
vindicated in his claims and achievement.[3]
C. H. Dodd
C. H. Dodd believed that he identified
an early kerygma of the early Church by comparing the speeches of Acts with
passages from Paul's letters and noting recurrent themes.[4] Of particular importance in the letters are
the following passages: 1 Cor. 15.1ff; Rom. 1.1ff; and 1 Cor. 1.23; 2.2‑6;
3.10ff; 2 Cor. 4.4; Rom. 10.8f; 14.9f.
Dodd himself arranged the themes slightly differently in several places,
so the following presentation of Dodd’s work is taken from M. Green, Evangelism in the Early Church:[5]
“*The Age of Fulfillment had dawned.
*This has taken place through the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus.
*By virtue of the resurrection, Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God, as Messianic head of the new Israel.
*The Holy Spirit in the Church is the sign of Christ's present power and glory.
*The Messianic Age will shortly reach its consummation in the return of Christ....
*The Kerygma always closes with an appeal for repentance, the offer of forgiveness and the Holy Spirit, and the promise of salvation, that is, the life of the Age to Come to those who enter the community."
“*The Age of Fulfillment had dawned.
*This has taken place through the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus.
*By virtue of the resurrection, Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God, as Messianic head of the new Israel.
*The Holy Spirit in the Church is the sign of Christ's present power and glory.
*The Messianic Age will shortly reach its consummation in the return of Christ....
*The Kerygma always closes with an appeal for repentance, the offer of forgiveness and the Holy Spirit, and the promise of salvation, that is, the life of the Age to Come to those who enter the community."
Not only are such points to be found in creedal
statements in Paul’s letters but also in the speeches in the book of Acts. One might, e.g., work through these features
of the kerygma in Peter’s speech in Acts 2.
What we see in Dodd’s proposal is that the early Church’s Gospel (not
only Paul’s) focussed on Jesus Christ.
This entailed who Jesus is, what he had accomplished, and that he
fulfills what had been promised by the prophets of Israel.
Dodd wrote in the days before we began to speak of
narrative theology in Scripture, but the narrative dimensions of the Gospel can
be appreciated in our day. The prophets
told a story about a messianic age that is fulfilled in the story of Jesus and
is now experienced in the story of the Church.
Sixty-one years later, for example, Ben Witherington could phrase the ‘tapestry
of Paul’s theology’ in terms of a story that was comprised of four stories:[6]
1. The story of a world gone
wrong
2. The story of Israel in that
world
3. The story of Christ, which
arises out of the story of Israel and humankind on the human side of things, but in a larger sense
arises out of the very story of God as creator and redeemer
4. The story of Christians,
including Paul himself, which arises out of all three of these previous stories and
is the first full installment of the story of a world set right again.
In my own dissertation, I argued that the Gospel
was the story of Jesus that was lived out in the life of Paul and the Church.[7]
James D. G.
Dunn
James D. G. Dunn presents the work of others on
the early Christian kerygmatic and confessional formulae that appears in the
literature, with much of the evidence coming from Paul.[8]
Resurrection Formulae: ‘God raised him from the
dead’
|
Rom. 4.24-25; 7.4; 8.11; 10.9; 1 Cor. 6.14;
15.4, 12, 20; 2 Cor. 4.14; Gal. 1.1; Col. 2.12; 1 Th. 1.10; Eph. 1.20; 2 Tim.
2.8; 1 Pt. 1.21; Acts 3.15; 4.10; 5.30; 10.40; 13.30, 37
|
‘Died for’ Formulae: ‘Christ died for us’
|
Rom. 5.6, 8; 14.15; 1 Cor. 8.11; 15.3; 2 Cor.
5.14-15; 1 Th. 5.10; Ign. Trallians
2.1
|
‘Handed over (paradidomi)’ Formulae: ‘he was handed (or handed himself) over
(for our sins)’
|
Rom. 4.25; 8.32; 1 Cor. 11.23; Gal. 1.4; 2.20;
Eph. 5.2, 25; 1 Tim. 2.6; Tit. 2.14; 1
Clement 16.7
|
Combined Formulae: ‘Christ died and was raised’
|
Rom. 4.25; 8.34 (14.9); 1 Cor. 15.3-4; 2 Cor.
5.15; 13.4; 1 Th. 4.14
|
Confessional Formulae: ‘Jesus is Lord’
|
Rom. 10.9; 1 Cor. 8.6; 12.3; 2 Cor. 4.5; Phl.
2.11; Col. 2.6; Eph. 4.5; Acts 2.36; 10.36; Jn. 20.28
|
[1]
All letters attributed to Paul will be taken as written by Paul. While many scholars dispute the authenticity
of Paul’s letters to the Ephesian and Colossian churches, his second letter to
Thessalonica, and the Pastoral Epistles to Timothy and Titus, I do not find
these arguments compelling. Even so, the
main concern in a Biblical theology of mission is to render the theology of
Scripture, and internal divisions of any sort (whether authentic or
pseudonymous letters) eventually give way to how the texts fit together
theologically.
[2]
Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early
Church, pp. 60ff.
[3]
Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early
Church, p. 63.
[4] C.
H. Dodd, Apostolic Preaching and Its
Developments (HarperCollins, 1936).
[5] Michael
Green, Evangelism in the Early Church,
p. 60.
[6] Ben
Witherington, III, Paul’s Narrative Thought
World: The Tapestry of Tragedy and Triumph (Louisville, KY:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994).
[7] Rollin
G. Grams, Gospel and Mission in Paul’s
Ethics, unpublished dissertation, Duke University, 1989.
[8]
James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul
the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 175.
[9]
James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul
the Apostle, pp. 175f.
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