Paul’s idea of God’s empire: the limited scope of his gospel

Did Paul proclaim a universal gospel? “Of course he did,” you mutter. Or: “Of course he did, you nutter!” What use is a non-universal gospel?

Well, on the train from Jeddah to Medina, I came across this paragraph in Neil Elliott’s Paul the Jew under Roman Rule: Collected Essays (2024):

Indeed, Paul’s proclamation of Jesus as kyrios, the “lord of God’s empire,” relied heavily on Roman political concepts, and “could easily be understood as violating the ‘decrees of Caesar’ in the most blatant manner.” As Calvin Roetzel and John L. White have shown, the very breadth of his eschatological vision—of an oikoumenē of nations, united in faithful obedience to a single lord—relies upon Hellenistic, and most especially Roman, political ideology. (124)

That sort of statement anchors Paul’s proclamation in history, and the expression “an oikoumenē of nations, united in faithful obedience to a single lord,” conceived by analogy to the Roman oikoumenē, evokes a rather mundane historical arrangement, very different from our customary theologising about the kingdom of God as a transcendent state of affairs. So let’s give it a go.

White’s book The Apostle of God: Paul and the Promise of Abraham (1999) is available on the Internet Archive. Here I want to look at a short section on “The Physical Limits of God’s Empire” (130-32). He appears to think that Paul was in two minds about the scope of the empire that would replace the Roman empire. I think Paul was quite single-minded.

God’s empire encompasses the whole universe

White says, first, that several statements in Paul’s letters indicate that he thought of “God’s empire as encompassing the whole physical universe,” in much the same way as the poets ascribed universality to the rule of Augustus (130).

1. Christ is the appointed ruler “before whom all knees would bend.”

2. Paul identifies God’s new creation with God’s original creation: ‘For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6).

3. The whole of creation is depicted “groaning in labor pains as it awaits new birth” (Rom. 8:18-23).

4. Paul “states explicitly that God’s reconciliation in Christ is worldwide” (2 Cor. 5:14-19).

5. Christ is not only the “firstborn within a large family” (Rom. 8:28-30), he is also ‘the new Adam, the “first fruits” of a new humanity’ (Rom. 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15:20-22).

6. Christ’s status as the new humanity is matched by the “universality of his authority” (1 Cor. 15:24-28; Phil. 2:9-11).

On the other hand, no, it doesn’t…

On the other hand, White also maintains that in Paul’s thinking God’s empire had “physical limits,” arguing the point from three statements in Romans.

First, Paul believed that his remit as an apostle and evangelist extended both to Greeks and barbarians (Rom. 1:14).

Secondly, Paul claims to have preached the gospel from Jerusalem to the Roman province of Illyricum along the east coast of the Adriatic (Rom. 15:9), though we have no evidence that Paul had personally travelled that far west—perhaps he meant that “the influence of his Macedonian churches would extent upward into Illyricum” (131).

Thirdly, Paul expresses his intention to proclaim the gospel in Rome and then to travel on to Spain (15:23-24). “In antiquity, Spain was regarded as the western limit of the inhabited world, and consequently for Paul, a man of the eastern provinces, it may have represented the most distant boundary of civilization (at least in the West)” (132).

But even this missionary arc “falls short of the limits that Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar imagined.” It does not encompass regions to the north, east, and south.

In any case, although Paul’s idea of the regions he had to traverse was probably not influenced directly by either Alexander’s or Caesar’s conceptions of worldwide rule, the physical specificity of his obligation as Christ’s ambassador was probably inspired by the boundaries of the Roman Empire (to the extent he was conversant with these). The physical limits for which he was accountable as apostle and the regions over which Christ must rule were imagined by Paul in the concrete terms available to him from his culture. (132)

So in White’s view, Paul thought of God’s future empire as both universal and, in historical terms, less ambitious than the campaigns of Alexander or Julius Caesar.

Paul’s single-minded non-universalism

I have argued for a long time that Paul thought of himself as one called to proclaim the coming rule of Christ Jesus, Israel’s crucified messiah, specifically over the peoples of the Greek-Roman world. The mission should not be universalised. God as creator is sovereign over the whole cosmos, Jesus as Lord has been granted sovereignty over a historical civilisation, limited in space and time. I think White has misconceived the universality of Paul’s gospel.

1. The prophetic template for Philippians 2:10-11 is Isaiah 45:23: “By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance’” (Is. 45:23). The sphere of political-religious action in this passage encompasses Babylon and Jerusalem. Wealth and labour for rebuilding Jerusalem will come from Egypt and Arabia (45:14). When the nations turn to YHWH, it is the old gods of Babylon, Bel and Nebo, which are carted ignominiously away into captivity (46:1-2). The prophecy, therefore, is of the transformation of an idolatrous civilisation, not of the whole world.

There is no reason to think that Paul envisages anything other than a comparable transformation of the idolatrous, polytheistic civilisation of the Greeks and Romans. When he says that there will be wrath against the Greek, he means that there will wrath against the Greek.

2. I doubt that there is a new creation motif in 2 Corinthians 4:6. The creator God has shone in the darkened hearts of the apostles, metaphorically speaking, enabling them to grasp the significance of Jesus’ suffering. But the operative contrast is not with the original creation; it is with the blindness of Jews who cannot see beyond the Mosaic covenant (2 Cor. 3:12-18). In effect, what Paul proclaims here is not a new creation but a new covenant in the Spirit.

3. In my view, our universalising theologies have led us to misread Romans 8:18-23. I won’t expand on the point here, but I have argued that Paul speaks here not of the liberation of the whole creation but of the liberation of the created object—the material artefact—(cf. 1:25) from its subjection to the futility of idol-worship. See my Bulletin for Biblical Research article “The Subjection of the Creature to the Futility of Idolatry: The Scope and Application of Romans 8:19–22.” The eschatological horizon is not cosmic, it is the end of classical paganism.

4. Paul says that God has reconciled the Jewish apostles to himself and has given them the “service of reconciliation, as that God was in Christ reconciling a world to himself, not reckoning to them their trespasses, and putting in us the word of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18-19*).

What is he getting at?

Speaking of the afflictions faced by the apostolic team in Asia, Paul says that “in simplicity and sincerity of God, not in fleshly wisdom, but in the grace of God, we behaved in the world—even more so towards you” (1:12*). I think what he is saying is that if this is how they behaved in the world, in Asia, where fleshly wisdom prevails, how much more (perissoterōs) would they behave with simplicity and sincerity towards the Corinthians. That means that the “world” is not the cosmos or the whole of humanity—in quantitative terms—but something more like a mode of being in contrast to the new creation life in Christ.

So the “world” that is being reconciled to God is the “old things” (archaia)—the old ways of thinking and behaving, “according to the flesh”—which have passed away, to be replaced by “new things” (kaina), new ways of thinking and behaving in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). That gets us to the heart of the argument in the letter: the Corinthians need to grasp the importance of the un-worldly, un-fleshly Christ-like attitude towards suffering, weakness, and disgrace embodied in exemplary fashion by the apostles.

5. When Paul says that Christ is “firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29), he means that he is the first among many who would suffer, die, and be raised as he was. He is firstborn of a fellowship of martyrs—those like Paul himself who are being conformed quite realistically to his image.

The analogy with Adam is also used in much the same sense. Christ is the singular person through whose act of righteousness the many in him are justified. That “act of righteousness” is the obedience to the point of death that will be reproduced in the lives of the many who are being baptised into his death (Rom. 5:15-6:11).

Similarly, he is the first fruits of the martyrs who will share his resurrected existence (1 Cor. 15:42-49).

There is no argument here for a “worldwide” or cosmic transformation. Paul’s focus is quite narrowly on the relationship of these communities of eschatological witness to their risen Lord. It is precisely through their suffering that they function as signs of the coming rule of a crucified messiah over the nations of the Greek-Roman world.

6. In Paul’s mind, I suggest, new humanity and new creation themes play a subordinate or secondary role in the overarching argument about an impending, new political-religious order for the world encompassed by his apostolic mission. For this new historical reality to come about, the churches need to model in very practical terms a new way of being human.

The appeal to Psalm 110:1 in 1 Corinthians 15:24-26 keeps the political dimension firmly in view. Christ is the Davidic king of Israel who will rule in the midst of hostile nations through to the destruction of the last enemy, which is death. And I have already made the point that Philippians 2:10-11 envisages the acclamation of Jesus as Lord by the peoples of the formerly idol-worshipping oikoumenē.

A bit of transcendence at the margins

Paul’s eschatological vision focuses resolutely and almost entirely on Elliott’s “oikoumenē of nations, united in faithful obedience to a single lord,” geographically co-extensive with the Roman Empire. Transcendence intrudes in two respects. The martyrs will participate in Christ’s resurrection at the parousia; and when death is finally defeated, he will give back his authority to rule as Lord to the creator God (1 Cor. 15:24-28). But the substance of the vision is mundane and historical.