Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [244]
Spirit for Paul is seen within a Jewish context. In 1 Corinthians 15:45 he refered to the creative spirit of God which was hovering over the waters in Genesis 1:1. The spirit of the Lord resurrects the dead in Ezekiel 37:6. The spirit of the Lord gave Paul his prophetic visions. Christians will be changed into spiritual bodies in their resurrection state (1 Cor 15:44).
The very same Spirit of God which directs prophecy also directed Paul’s sermons and also miraculously accounts for Paul’s success and the success of the Gospel. In form, however, Paul’s kerygmatic message appears to grow out of Jewish missionary literature, in which the promise of resurrection and the fear of the end of time feature prominently, as one would expect from a preacher. Thus Paul’s own experience helped organize the early Christian church for mission and mission; conversely, it energized the group’s commitment to the new religious sect.
Mission and Vision
THE SPECIFIC nature of Paul’s personal vision of Christ changed the quality of that apocalyptic prophecy in a characteristically christological way. It is not so much that Paul affected Christian apocalypticism as he exemplified Jewish apocalypticism with a single and important change-Jesus had ascended to be the Messiah and heavenly Redeemer, a part of God. This would be characteristic of Christian preaching ever afterward.
Here is another Pauline version of the vision of the end, this time seemingly in answer to a crucial question for new converts:
But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. (1 Thess 4:13-18)
Some in the community died without the end having come. The resurrection of all Christians will follow closely upon the coming of the Lord, also explicitly called both Jesus and Christ. (This formula demonstrates Paul’s transferral of the traditionally divine name YHWH to a designation of the Messiah [Kyrios = LORD].) It both shows Paul to be entirely within the Jewish mystical tradition, yet to have made important Christian modifications in it. But he did not go on in baroque detail about the nature of the apocalyptic end. Instead, he concentrated on the issue of resurrection in a way that was not necessarily characteristic of apocalypticism before.
But Paul was preaching the start of the period of resurrection based on the death and resurrection of the Christ, to gentiles at that, so the lack of apocalyptic detail is understandable. In 1 Thessalonians 4, the resurrection of all living Christians immediately follows upon the resurrection of the dead. Jesus will keep faith with the dead, again called “those who have fallen asleep” as in Daniel 12. Thus, Paul reproduced a typical apocalyptic pattern, though his apocalyptic pattern also had several unique and quite identifiably Christian characteristics. At the same time, the enormous value of sermons of this kind for the mission of the church are obvious.
The Chain of Vision and the Spirit
WE SEE THE same connection between Paul’s apostolic authority and the resurrection of the Christ when Paul replied to accusations of antinomianism: