Does Paul include Jesus in the “Shema” in 1 Corinthians 8:6?

I have dealt with this question a few times, most recently in “How Paul can proclaim one Lord Jesus Christ and not compromise Jewish monotheism,” and in a chapter in In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. But it has come up again:

Paul distributes the key terms of the Shema—“God” (Theos) and “Lord” (Kyrios)—between the Father and Jesus. This deliberate reformulation of the Shema integrates Jesus into the monotheistic identity of YHWH.

I still think this misconstrues the argument in the passage. Paul does not blur the boundary between eschatology and theology in this way. Jesus remains a distinct eschatological agent, in the presence of God but unassimilated at this early stage into the divine identity. Here is an outline of my reasoning.

Hear, Israel…

The Shema is an affirmation of the oneness of YHWH, who is the god of Israel:

Hear, Israel: YHWH our god, YHWH is one. You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (Deut. 6:4-5*)

Hear, Israel, the Lord our god is one Lord; and you will love the Lord your God from your whole heart and from your whole soul and from your whole strength. (Deut. 6:4-5 LXX*)

Israel serves only one god, identified as YHWH, unlike the peoples of the land which they are about to enter. Therefore, they should love this god with their whole being. They do not have to divide their love among different gods.

“YHWH” is not an attribute or function of God. It doesn’t mean “Lord,” for example; it was merely conventional for Greek-speaking Jews to substitute Kyrios. YHWH is the name by which the God who made the heavens and the earth was known to the priestly nation which served him (cf. Exod. 3:13-15; 33:19) and by which he was distinguished from the gods of other nations.

Many gods…

This affirmation of divine oneness is obvious background, directly or indirectly, for Paul’s discussion of “food sacrificed to idols” (eidōlothytōn) in 1 Corinthians 8.

Then concerning the eating of food sacrificed-to-idols, we know that there is no idol in the world and that there is no God but one. For although there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, just as there are many gods and many lords, but for us there is one God the Father, from whom all things and we for him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things and we through him. (1 Cor. 8:4-6*)

Against the intensive and intrusive practice of idolatry in a city such as Corinth, which presupposed belief in “many gods,” Paul insists that “there is no God but one… for us there is one God….” The point is made twice in the short paragraph. It is substantively a reference back to Israel’s foundational confession, in opposition to Canaanite polytheism, that their God is one.

Paul identifies the God who is one, however, not as “YHWH” but as “the Father.” Why? Presumably because at the front of his mind is this God’s special relation to Jesus and to those in him:

grace to you and peace from God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ…. God is faithful, through whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord. (1 Cor 1:3, 9*)

We will come back to the distinction between “Father” and “Lord” later, but we may ask here whether Paul has freed up the name YHWH to be applied in Greek as kyrios to Jesus. That seems very unlikely. He is surely not saying that we have one God, now known as the Father, and one YHWH, identified as Jesus Christ.

• What was the name which is above every name?

If we suppose, on the other hand, that kyrios in the expression kyrios ho theos has become a title for the God who is sovereign, then we are already moving away from identity towards function, and we can reasonably ask in what functional sense Jesus might have been acclaimed as “one Lord.”

…and many lords

We have already had two adequate Shema-like statements about the oneness of God against the “many gods” of the idolatrous pagan world, which do not name God as YHWH/Kyrios. This strikes me as odd if Paul then means to distribute the terms of the Shema between God and Jesus Christ. Why not draw attention in verse 4 to the fact that in Greek the Shema identifies God as kyrios?

In any case, there is a better way to account for the attribution of lordship to Jesus here. My view is that the affirmation that there is “one Lord Jesus Christ” derives from the intersection of Paul’s immediate rhetoric and a dominant christological tradition drawn principally from Psalm 110:1.

First, then, there is the recognition that there are not only “many gods” but also “many lords” to be reckoned with in the ancient world. There is disagreement about the precise nature of this distinction, but it is clear that it derives from the political-religious language of the Greek-Roman world. The leading argument in 1 Corinthians 8:4-6 is that there is one God against the “many gods” of a society that eats food sacrificed to idols. It is a secondary or parenthetic premise that “many lords” are also acclaimed in this culture, whereas the apostolic communities acclaim Jesus Christ alone as Lord.

Secondly, there is the early and pervasive tradition that viewed Jesus as the ʾadon of Psalm 110:1 = 109:1 LXX*: the Kyrios who is YHWH said to the kyrios who is ʾadon, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”

In this drama, Jesus is not YHWH but the ʾadon who will exercise dominion in the midst of his enemies while YHWH shatters kings on the day of his wrath and judges among nations. This operational distinction is projected into the future, to be resolved, in Paul’s view, only when the last enemy—that is, death—has been destroyed and the Son gives back this dominion to the Father, that the one God may be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:24-28).

Every tongue confess…

In the meantime, the expectation is that the hostile nations of the Greek-Roman world will be given to Jesus, the Davidic king, as his inheritance to rule over them (cf. Ps. 2:1-7; Rom. 1:4; 15:12). This is the lordship that is confessed in Philippians 2:10-11:

in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:10-11*)

True, originally it was to YHWH that every knee would bow and every tongue would swear allegiance, as the gods of the Babylonians were driven into exile (Is. 45:22-46:2). But it is precisely Paul’s controversial claim in the encomium that YHWH rewarded Jesus’ radical obedience by exalting him and making the “name of Jesus” the appellation for supreme political-religious allegiance on the day of YHWH’s wrath against Greek-Roman idolatry (cf. 1 Thess. 1:9-10; 1 Cor. 1:2).

Bestowing on Jesus the divine prerogative to rule the nations on YHWH’s behalf was the act of extraordinary elevation and favour expressed in Philippians 2:9: “God highly exalted him and favoured him with the name which is above every name.”

The nations do not confess that Jesus now has the name of YHWH; they acclaim him as the one Lord who is above the “many lords,” and by that far-reaching conversion the one God of Israel, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ and of those who bear witness to him, is glorified.

God of gods, Lord of lords, Lord of kings

In the extended Old Greek version of Nebuchadnezzar’s speech after his sanity is restored, the king praises the Most High because he is “God of the gods and Lord of the lords and King of the kings, because he does signs and wonders and changes seasons and times, removing the kingdom of kings and setting others in their place” (Dan. 4:34 OG*). He then sends out a proclamation, saying:

I will show to you the deeds that the great God has done with me. Moreover, it seemed good to me to show you and your wise men that God is, and his marvels are great; his kingship is a kingship forever; his authority is from generation to generation. (4:34c*)

Here we have the distinction between “many gods” and “many lords” and some evidence for the political orientation of divine lordship in the Hellenistic period. God is Lord of lords and kings in that he has the authority to overthrow kings and set others in their place. Indeed, he will eventually overthrow the blasphemous king who is the little horn on the head of the fourth beast and transfer his kingdom to the people of the saints of the Most High, represented symbolically by the “one like a son of man” (Dan. 7:7-27).

We also have a very condensed expression of the uniqueness of God without naming God as YHWH/Kyrios, on the lips of a pagan king: “God is.”

This gives us the basic constituents of Paul’s argument about “one God” and “one Lord”: the pagan setting, the affirmation of the oneness of God against many gods, and the outline of a distinct sphere of political action in which an eschatological figure/community may become a significant agent.

Let us not provoke the Lord

Finally, I have suggested before that the distinction between the God who is YHWH and the Christ or Lord who is provoked by the “idolatry” and “fornication” of believers (1 Cor. 10:7-9, 22) is anticipated in Malachi 2:10-12 LXX:

Did not one God create us? Is there not one father of us all? Why then did each of you forsake his brother, to profane the covenant of our fathers? Judah was forsaken, and an abomination occurred in Israel and in Jerusalem, for Judah profaned the sacred things of the Lord with which he loved and busied himself with foreign gods. The Lord will utterly destroy the person who does this until he has even been humiliated from the tents of Jacob and from among those who bring sacrifice to the Lord Almighty.

The one creator God is the father of the covenant community (behind this is the Shema, to be sure), but if Israel goes after “foreign gods,” it is the “Lord” who will be provoked and who will destroy the idolator, who will come suddenly like a refining fire to purify the priesthood, who “will draw near to you in judgment” (Mal. 2:12; 3:2-3, 5).

So for Paul, the one creator God is the father of the new covenant community, but if the Corinthian believers busy themselves with foreign gods, one way or another, it is the Lord Jesus Christ who will judge the people over whom he has been given authority (cf. 1 Cor. 4:4-5; 5:5; 11:32). This does not require us to identify Jesus with the YHWH of the Shema. It is simply that the authority to act as eschatological judge, originally reserved by YHWH for himself, has been given to Jesus.

Another way of putting it would be to say that for Paul there are now in effect two Shemas, two distinct, definitive affirmations: for us there is one God, the Father who raised Jesus from the dead, not many gods; and for us there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, not many lords.

Then what happened…

This apocalyptic material lays the groundwork for the subsequent inclusion of Jesus in the divine identity. God remains creator and father of Israel. He has delegated a significant political function to his Son, Israel’s king and messiah, the root of Jesse who will rule over the nations. Jesus participates in the exercise of divine authority with respect to his people and the nations at this critical moment in history—for example, by opening the seals that release divine judgment across the region (Rev. 5:1-6:1). But “heaven” or the “heavenly court” is unified; the rule of YHWH and the king seated at his right hand is one.

As the conflict between the church and the nations subsided, however, the whole apocalyptic-kingdom narrative lost relevance, and the relationship between Father and Son was necessarily reconstructed along idealist philosophical lines.

I realise this is awkward for us evangelicals, but let’s resolve at the start of a new year to tell the biblical story—forgive the presumption—the way it was written.