The Theology of Death and Life in Paul

What is it about?

The resurrection of Jesus was the event which most radically altered Paul’s vision of Israel’s unfolding destiny. That this is the case can be determined from how the apostle writes of the event in the midst of his arguments. Though the event is itself unprecedented, metaphorically, the emergence of new life from death in Jewish texts represents the remedy, rehabilitation or liberation of a person, or indeed Israel herself, from situations where divine intervention was necessary. Just as in Jewish thought, only God could create life from inanimate material, only God could rescue people from certain situations. Paul creatively harnesses the metaphor within his polemics, but with one essential difference. Unlike Israel’s prophetic tradition, Paul did not use resurrection to interpret an event he encountered. Rather, he interpreted the divine work through a resurrection he encountered. Strong echoes of this are detectable in the proliferation of death-life language and imagery in Pauline texts. This short account of said imagery in 2 Corinthians demonstrates the functionality of this death-life lexicon.

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Why is it important?

The way in which the resurrection actually functions in Paul’s arguments often becomes swallowed up by the more high profile debates triggered in the wake of ‘New Perspective’ scholarship (and indeed the counter-reaction to it). This is notoriously true of Galatians, largely because the event of Jesus’ resurrection is absent from the letter – it is explicitly referred to only once in Galatians, in the opening verse as part of a divine title. Though resurrection features more prominently in 2 Corinthians, little attention is given to its broader connection with the pervasive life and death motifs throughout the letter, and how these might affect Paul’s arguments. A number of passages suggest that Paul did not view resurrection as simply something that happened to Jesus, but, by virtue of his ministry, something that was happening through him. New life emerging from death was, in Pauline thought, a rubric for how God is repairing the world. In Rom. 5 alone, having been reconciled by Christ’s death, his life is what saves the faithful (v.10); death is sovereign because of Adam’s transgression – yet because of the gift of grace by which the faithful are justified, death in dethroned by life (v.17-18). As such, to focus in reductionist fashion on the resurrection only a component of the ‘Christ event’ is erroneous.

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