Last week during our Open Table class (that happened to fall on Ash Wednesday), I had an epiphany. Discussing our reading of Paul during the Spring term, Douglas Campbell shared something E.P. Sanders, the eminent scholar, once said to him: anyone approaching these letters without a preconceived agenda will see that the center of Paul’s theology isn’t “justification by faith” but being “in Christ.” I realized with a start that this distinction cuts right to the heart of the matter: Paul’s theology is not a set of nouns but a family of names.
Unlike a set of abstract nouns that we define and systematize, names carry the weight of story and promise. “Justification by faith,” at least as many of us have taken it, is a closed set, nouns fixed in relation—a system requiring constant maintenance. “In Christ,” is an open-ended and unfinished construction—an invitation to discover our fit in relation to each other and God in Jesus. Paul is a man with a history, a history with God. And his entire life was consumed with what it means to know that all things are for Christ and from him. The letters we’ve received from him aren’t repositories of doctrine but living testimonies to a new way of being human, where truth is known through participation in a symphony of relationships.
It is a mistake to think of Paul as an ideas man. He was a father, friend, and co-laborer, working tirelessly to make new contacts, deepen relationships, and nurture the communities he founded. He wrote letters, remember, not treatises, for people he had met or wanted to meet face-to-face, and had them delivered and read by his most trusted companions. His work is family correspondence, as can be seen on almost every page. His words pulse with pride and frustration, concern and longing. Consider just three of many such examples:
1 Thessalonians 2.17-20 As for us, brothers and sisters, when for a short time we were made orphans by being separated from you—in person, not in heart—we longed with great eagerness to see you face to face. 18For we wanted to come to you—certainly I, Paul, wanted to again and again—but Satan blocked our way. 19For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? 20Yes, you are our glory and joy!
2 Corinthians 6.11-13 We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. 12There is no restriction in our affections but only in yours. 13In return—I speak as to children—open wide your hearts also.
Philippians 4:1-3 Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. 2I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. 3Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my coworkers, whose names are in the book of life.
When he talks about being “in Christ,” Paul is narrating a family history—God’s family history, which finally includes all the families of the earth. He’s celebrating the new order of relationships and new mode of relating created by God through what has happened and continues to happen with Jesus who is still present and active in the church. Having faith in Christ is not, for Paul, about making Jesus the object of trust (as if we would be capable of such a decision) but realizing his faithfulness makes faith possible. Believing in Christ is possible only because of being in Christ. To believe in Christ is not to hold true ideas about Jesus but to live like Abraham, carried along by the promise that is not of one’s own making.
When Paul calls the church “the body of Christ,” he is not deploying a metaphor for community organization; he’s reminding the faithful of their identification with Christ, their existence as his ongoing God-created presence for the world’s good. He urges his communities not to hold the same ideas about his teaching, but to have the mind of Christ, living together in ways that make the gospel intelligible and absorbing for their neighbors, so Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free can join together in equally full-throated thanksgiving to God as God’s kin.
••
Paul’s family of names theology is clearest perhaps in Galatians 2:20, where he boasts: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” Whether we can make sense of it or not, he apparently did believe he shared an identity with Jesus, that his life and Christ’s were bound together. He talks not of a shift in thinking or practice but a total alteration of being, thrust, along with others claimed by God, into a mystical co-involvedness in Jesus’ life.
Thus, in Colossians 3 Paul urges his readers to think of Christ not just as someone for whom they are living but as their very life, sharing his oneness with God. They are to put off their old ways—anger, wrath, lies, and slander (notice, these are all sins against neighbor, violations of the second table of the Law, and just so the first)—and put on Christ, the New Human, being renewed in his image, where “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, enslaved and free, but Christ is all and in all!” (Col. 3.11).
When he talks about being “in Christ,” Paul is not describing a private spiritual experience; he is celebrating the new order of relationships and the new forms of relationality created by God through what has happened with Jesus of Nazareth. The truth he’s concerned with isn’t abstract or transactional but active and transformative, changing not what we think or feel about the idea of God but how we actually relate to God and each other. He can move so fluidly between what we call doctrine and practice because for him they are never separate.
This explains why he can say “there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal 3:28) while honoring distinctive Jewish beliefs and practices and blessing others for doing so. In a system of ideas, this would be a contradiction. In a network of relationships, it’s wisdom—the kind of both/and give-and-take that families and long-lasting friendships require. Paul is inflexible about including both Jews and Gentiles in one community, yet remarkably flexible about practices like dietary laws and circumcision because his priority isn’t maintaining a system but nurturing relationships that embody Christ’s reconciling love. The practices and structures he insists on are necessary for sustaining these new patterns of relating, which open up the nations to the promises of God.
In this light, we see too that the words on love in 1 Corinthians 13 are not an odd digression from a lecture on “spiritual gifts” and “church unity,” but the beating heart of the new and renewing way of life that the gift-giving, crucified God has made possible. This, then, is the culmination of Paul’s family theology: knowledge must pass away because it’s abstract; love endures because it’s personal.
The apostle’s “practical” instructions are determined by this commitment. In discussing worship, he’s concerned not with correct doctrine but whether the baptized build up the community of faith in hope and love. Speaking in tongues is worthless if it doesn’t strengthen that belonging: “I would rather speak five words with my mind to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue” (1 Cor 14.19). His teaching about the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11 shows this same pattern. The problem that moves him isn’t deficient theology but damaged relationships. The same goes for how he handles the problem of meat offered to idols. Rather than dictating a solution, he requires the faithful to attend to the truth of their relatedness in Christ, warning the Corinthians not to “sin against Christ” (1 Cor. 8.12) and urging the Romans to “welcome those who are weak in faith but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions” (Rom. 14.1).
This clarifies Paul's approach to authority. His letters combine strong correction with deep affection, aiming to strengthen bonds between believers. When he exercises apostolic authority, it is not to enforce rules but to protect the way of life needed for mutual flourishing in love. And this also explains why Paul insists on the resurrection being bodily (1 Corinthians 15). A family is known by names and faces in moments of bathing and washing, shared bread, and open embrace. And the promise of all people joining that intimacy cannot be real if the body isn’t really perfected.
•••
Some hear in all of this the notion that Christianity is “not a religion but a relationship.” But this contrast is a category mistake, missing the point entirely. Religion is essential precisely because the relationships created in Christ require such a dramatic reorientation of life. We cannot sustain these new patterns of relating without practices that reshape our awareness, beliefs that challenge and overturn our assumptions, and authorities that guide our transformation. Religion provides the necessary scaffolding for relationships and ways of relating we cannot otherwise sustain.
What is particularly striking—as a friend has helped me see—is how the Eucharistic liturgy culminates in a doxological supplication. At the end of the epiclesis, the presider prays:
All this we ask through your Son Jesus Christ: By him, and with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father, now and forever.
This prayer is immediately answered by the Great Amen—the entire congregation’s emphatic and overwhelming affirmation of the goodness of God’s will, leading into the Lord’s Prayer, prayed with one voice.
It is no accident that this supplication emerges at the heart of our Eucharistic offering. The liturgy does not simply describe but enacts the truth that defined Paul's life: the mystery “hidden throughout the ages and generations but now revealed to his saints” (Col 1.26) is not a system to be mastered but a relationship to be entered, a communion to be received and given. The cascading praises of the prayer—by him, with him, in him—captures exactly what Paul wants us to understand about our life with God. We live because he lives, included in his intimacy with the Father, and we are joined to his ongoing intercession for the healing of the world, so that we might “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” and be “filled with all the fullness of God,” exactly as he is (Eph. 3.19).
Finally, then, this shift from nouns to names not only opens up a truer way of reading Paul but also a more faithful way of doing theology and speaking the faith. If we operate with systems of nouns, we grasp at control. But if we are met by a family of names, we are invited into communion, welcomed home. And that is what Paul’s theology is all about in the end, a shared life made possible by the One who gives himself to us as bread and wine, making us one body with him and with God.
So good to consider how we are “In Christ” and not in ideas or doctrine or dogma!
Posted by: Fritz Trost | March 12, 2025 at 02:06 PM