• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2483 0

continues until the second coming. Indeed it is parallel to the consummation. The redemptive and transformative processes appear to correspond exactly with the turning of the ages. This age is passing away, though it certainly remains a present evil reality (1 Cor 3:19; 5:9; 2 Cor 4:4; Gal 1:4; Rom 12:2). The Gospel, which is the power of God for salvation (Rom 1:16), was progressing through the world (Phil 1:12; also Rom 9-11). It would have been hard not to see the success of the mission as a sign that the end was growing closer and the efforts of the faithful were helping to bring it. Paul’s mission was, by all accounts, more successful than anyone imagined, including himself. The mystical vision of Christ was combined with a new and quite innovative missionary force in history.

The Presence of Christ in the Liturgy

PAUL’S COMMUNITIES must have had access to the presence of Jesus. That access was in the liturgical life of the community. The way that ordinary converts participated in the process of historical culmination was through the liturgical life of the community-through baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Larry Hurtado has just finished an exciting new study of Christ devotion in early Christianity which makes this point quite effectively.60 As several generations of scholars have now clarified, Paul understood that the name of Jesus and the term “Lord” not only referred to Jesus in his newly achieved divine dimension but used the name devotionally within the newly converted Christian community.

Given our lack of information, it is hard to know exactly how. One obvious place, where we do have evidence, is in baptism. Christian baptism was at first a full body immersion, as in Judaism, and that practice continued into earliest Christianity. Many sources attest that baptism was performed in the name of Jesus: “And Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’” (Acts 2:38; see also 8:16 and 10:48). In the Corinthian correspondence, Paul explained that the recipients of his letter had not been baptized into his (Paul’s) name (1 Cor 1:15), rather into the name of Jesus. As he said later: “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor 6:11). Just as is implied here, Acts says in several places that the reception of the Holy Spirit followed immediately upon baptism, giving us a social context for the Gospels’ depiction of Jesus’ own baptism being followed immediately by the descent of the spirit. The narrative parallel reflects the Early Church’s understanding of the meaning of the ritual.

This parallel strongly suggests a liturgical basis for the reception of the Spirit in the baptismal ceremony in the early Palestinian, Christian community. It also suggests that the emergence of baptism in Pauline Christianity comes not from any presumed and unprovable links with Hellenistic mystery cults but easily and directly out of the use of this rite apocalyptically by Jewish millennialist groups. We now have considerable evidence that the rite was used at Qumran to prepare the community for their contact with the holy angels and the heavenly temple. Hence, the most obvious connection between Christianity and ritual immersion in an apocalyptic community is surely from the story of Jesus’ own baptism “of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” at the hands of the apocalypticist John the Baptist (Mark 1:4).

All this demonstrates what Paul meant when he stated that the name of Jesus was used liturgically in baptism. Hurtado says: “The ritual invocation of Jesus in baptism helps explain why Paul described those baptized as having ‘put on Christ’ (Gal 3:27), and as having been ‘buried with him [Christ] into his death’ through the rite (Romans 6:4).”61 Baptism was one way in which the believer came to be “in Christ” and therefore became mystically heir to the reward of the martyr-resurrection.