Abstract
In his apocalyptic understanding of the gospel, Paul weaves together the presence of hostile powers, warfare imagery, and a powerful description of a God who seeks to deliver humanity and creation from evil by means of divine rescue.
Introduction
Paul’s apocalyptic perspective is recognized as central to his understanding of the gospel. 1 His proclamation provides his audiences with the good news that God, through the Christ event, has invaded the cosmos and intensified a war of liberation for all of creation, including humanity, from enslaving hostile powers. This perspective appears throughout his letters, including in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, where he foregrounds this apocalyptic battle in his use of warfare imagery, which appears throughout the missive. 2 In Paul’s account, a cosmic conflict is underway, and he uses this correspondence to remind the Corinthians of this conflict by depicting the war’s all-encompassing nature. The struggle involves the body, the mind, the human, and the supra-human. At the same time that Paul portrays vividly this supernatural struggle, he makes a point of depicting for his audience the God who fights for them and with them.
Who is this God who engages in battle for the deliverance and salvation of all of creation? And how does Paul’s depiction of this God function formatively for the apostle’s audience? This essay explores these two questions and argues that Paul’s language about God in this letter serves several purposes: to underscore God’s benevolent nature, to articulate a trenchant contrast to the anti-God powers, and to shape the Corinthians’ view of themselves and their life together as believers. 3 In other words, Paul’s God-talk has implications for theology, soteriology, cosmology, anthropology, and ecclesiology.
Hostile Powers and Warfare Imagery
Who are the enslaving hostile powers in 2 Corinthians and in what acts do they engage? The apostle identifies explicitly two powers in the opening chapters of the letter, Death and Satan. In his description of his severe affliction (thlipsis) in Asia, which he did not think he would survive, Paul identifies Death as the entity who pronounced his demise: “Indeed, we received in ourselves Death’s sentence” (1:9). 4 For Paul, Death is a power that rules over human beings and holds them in its grasp (cf. Rom 5:14, 17; 6:9; 1 Cor 15:26, 55). Death’s declaration that Paul would not live provides a glimpse into Death’s devouring character, its desire to destroy all of God’s creation. The apostle continues to depict Death as a power in subsequent verses, writing that he is always being handed over to Death (4:11) and that Death is at work in him (4:12). The verb “hand over” (paradidōmi) appears in settings of conflict to denote being handed over to an enemy or opposing power. 5 By his use of this word (and other military vocabulary in the letter), Paul portrays himself as involved in a cosmic battle with Death, a power that opposes God and him. Accordingly, Death is at work or operates in him (4:12) through the many afflictions his body undergoes. Indeed, his outer body wastes away, but his inner self is renewed day by day (4:16). Death’s desire to consume his physical body leads to a threefold paradox. Through Death’s activity, the apostle’s afflictions reflect Christ’s sufferings (4:10), enable the Corinthians to see the dying of Jesus in Paul’s own body (4:10), and facilitate the spread of the gospel in every place (2:14) since Paul, through his various afflictions, becomes an embodiment of the gospel message. As Alfred Plummer comments, “In his frail, weary, battered person he ever bears the dying of Jesus, in order that the life also of Jesus may be exhibited to the world. This may mean that the frequent deliverances from difficulty, danger, and death are evidence that the Crucified is still alive and has Divine power.” 6 Death’s unrelenting pursuit of Paul ironically leads to life for the Corinthians, since they witness Jesus’ sufferings in Paul’s life and God’s resurrection power through divine preservation of the apostle in all that he experiences.
Along with Death, Paul denotes Satan as another hostile power in 2:11, 11:14, and 12:7. In these verses, Paul delineates this enemy’s agenda. Using the martial term pleonekteō, which means to take advantage of or outwit an enemy, Paul depicts Satan as an entity at war with believers attempting to take advantage of them (2:11). Additional tactics deployed by this figure include employing deception to lead believers astray from the gospel (11:13–15) and opposing human access to divine revelation (12:7). The designation “god of this age” in 4:4 also refers to Satan and reveals another activity of this being, which is blinding the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot receive the gospel (cf. 6:15; 11:3). Through these instances, Paul demonstrates to the Corinthians that the god of this age affects all humanity, both believers and unbelievers, by attempting to consign unbelievers to blindness and subject believers to deception, concealing the truth from them. That this entity’s subjugation of human beings renders them instruments of its own aims is indicated by the false apostles in 11:13–15 who, under the enslaving power of Satan, deceive and preach a different gospel. In the words of Ernst Käsemann, “The servant becomes like his master and shows this by his behavior.” 7 Paul aligns the behavior of these false apostles to that of their lord in several instances. As Satan transforms himself into an angel of light, so too do these false emissaries (11:14–15). Like the god of this age, they too enslave, devour, take advantage, and lord themselves over the Corinthians (11:20). 8 In all of these passages, Paul offers a coherent picture in which all humans are victims of Satan’s ploys.
Within this intense picture of the nature of these powers’ activities, Paul injects martial terminology to depict a divine campaign for humanity’s rescue from powers against which it cannot prevail. For example, in 10:3–6, Paul affirms that God’s weapons will capture every mind, thereby indicating that the minds that the god of this age blinds (4:4) and attempts to lead astray (11:3,13–15) will receive liberation through God’s benevolent action. God’s weapons mount a rescue operation that refuses to leave humanity in the grip of the anti-God powers. The presence of the language of war indicates that for Paul this cosmic battle is of great significance, something he underscores by returning repeatedly to this imagery. He portrays himself as receiving a soldier’s wage (11:8; opsōnion) and like a general he views himself as strategically cutting off (11:12; ekkoptō) the opportunity (11:12; aphormē) of his opponents. Although he employs militaristic vocabulary from the human arena, he applies it to the cosmic battlefield, portraying God and the anti-God powers as enemies on the field. He subverts this martial language, however, by underscoring human weakness and emphasizing divine liberation, for, unlike human war where human strategy and ingenuity are key, Paul has learned that God’s power, not human strength, prevails in this conflict. His language, Paul insists, is not about sanctioning or advocating domination, destruction, and oppression of human beings, but rather proclaims the liberation of those oppressed and enslaved to hostile powers. These hostile powers, which target minds (4:4; 10:5; 11:3) by blinding them to the gospel and leading them astray from the gospel also target bodies (4:6–12; 11:23–33; 12:7) by afflicting them and tormenting them through persecution. They conscript human beings into their service using them in their campaign against God.
This holistic assault on human beings by supra-human hostile powers in which minds and bodies both suffer demonstrates an important aspect of Paul’s anthropological viewpoint in which humans are weak and susceptible in this struggle and in dire need of divine rescue. Käsemann’s classic programmatic statement regarding humanity’s position in the cosmos is worth repeating here: Man for Paul is never just on his own. He is always a specific piece of world and therefore becomes what in the last resort he is by determination from outside, i.e. by the power which takes possession of him and the lordship to which he surrenders himself. His life is from the beginning a stake in the confrontation between God and the principalities of this world. In other words, it mirrors the cosmic contention for the lordship of the world and is its concretion. As such, man’s life can only be understood apocalyptically.
9
The God who Rescues
In 1:3, Paul describes God as the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. Paul portrays God as full of mercy, indeed, as the author or the source of mercies, signifying that mercy is integral to God’s identity and being. He goes on in v. 4 to specify further that God comforts us in all (pas) affliction. With his use of all (pas) here, Paul emphasizes that there is no affliction for which the God of all comfort cannot provide consolation, for every affliction is an occasion to experience the depth of God’s care and powerful presence. 11 This descriptive portrayal of God as a merciful, comforting father functions to foreground the character of the God who has called into being the church which is in Corinth (1:1). Once Paul has piled up the attributes and actions of God in the opening verses of this communiqué, he reveals two more of the defining characteristics of God for his Corinthian audience: God as the one who raises the dead egeirō (1:9) and God as the one who rescues ryomai (1:10). 12
In his earlier letter to the Corinthians, Paul declared to them that Death was the last enemy to be destroyed in this apocalyptic conflict (1 Cor 15:26). In this opening chapter, Paul returns to this topic, announcing again God’s power over death. Although Death had pronounced its dying declaration over Paul in Asia (1:9), God’s power had the final word. For as Paul further describes his dangerous experience, he goes on to reveal that God did rescue him and he views this profound experience of rescue as similar to revivification. Murray Harris states, “He apparently viewed his deliverance from the θλῖψις as a veritable resurrection from the dead brought about by God, because he assumed that his death at that time was inevitable; he was as good as dead.” 13 In his comments, Harris captures the sentiments of the apostle in 1:10, yet equally significant to Paul’s dramatic description of his deliverance is his linking this past act to God’s future activity. While Paul delineates God’s rescue as a past action, he also sees this deed as indicative of future action; he expects the God who rescued him in the past to rescue him again: “[God] who rescued us from so great a death and indeed will rescue, in whom we have hoped that he will rescue yet again.” 14 Paul knows that the cosmic struggle is ongoing, and so the need for divine rescue will happen anew.
Paul’s expectations for divine rescue are not presumptuous or signals to his Corinthian audience of apostolic entitlement. Rather, he grounds his expectation in the character of a God who is merciful, full of compassion, and whose identity as a Death annihilator has been assured in the Christ event. Paul’s description of his deliverance in Asia, then, functions on multiple levels in the epistle, for the event is both a symptom and foreshadowing of an ongoing cosmic conflict. The apostle’s experience becomes a sign of ultimate rescue from Death and a pledge of God’s future rescue of him and other believers from all enslaving powers and oppositional forces.
Thus, Paul combines in the opening verses of this letter a powerful description of God, a sinister portrayal of Death, and a dramatic depiction of the apostle’s divine deliverance, all of which set the tone for the rest of the letter. God overturned Death’s attempted seizure of Paul’s life, and this account of Death’s submission to the “God who rescues” frames the apostle’s subsequent depictions of Death, Satan, and all anti-God powers, relegating them to the status of already defeated foes. God’s mighty deed of deliverance from Death in Paul’s case acts as a paradigmatic form of down payment (arrabōn), so to speak, for Paul and his Corinthian audience (cf. 1:22). The God in whom he has hoped, Paul proclaims, is one in whom the Corinthians can also hope for deliverance from Death as well as from all powers that oppose God. By demonstrating the identity of the God who wages war on behalf of him and the Corinthians, Paul constructs a foundational probative description of the God he will continue to proclaim in the following chapters.
The God who rescues and raises the dead also reconciles the world (2 Cor 5:18–20). The language of reconciliation (katallassō) appears often in warfare texts where opposing factions seek peace and restoration of relationships. 15 Paul’s semantic decision to describe the world as needing reconciliation demonstrates the apostle’s apocalyptic perspective in which the world before Christ's advent stood in opposition to God and needed divine intervention. The powers of this age have attempted to rule and destroy the cosmos, but God, through the Christ event, has divinely interrupted the demonic and restored the cosmos to peace with God. This reconciliation, although real and effective because of the cross, is still promissory to a certain extent, since the battle continues because the enemy and its forces refuse to admit defeat. Nonetheless, for Paul, divine reconciliation is a reality, for he can already proclaim “New Creation!” (5:17), indicating that the new reconciled creation has come into being in the midst of the old. That God initiates reconciliation underscores God’s benevolent nature and the divine desire to save humanity from the powers that blind it and attempt to demolish it.
In sum—heretofore, Paul has proclaimed to the Corinthians a benevolent God who is in direct contrast and opposition to the anti-God powers that the apostle discusses in the epistle. Paul states that the god of this age, Satan, blinds minds to the gospel and leads people astray (4:4). God, however, rescues minds (10:5), shines into the hearts of believers so that they may receive the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in Christ (4:6), and spreads knowledge of the divine through the apostles in every place (2:14). Death seeks to destroy, but God brings life and rescues humanity from its clutches (1:9, 10; 1 Cor 15:26, 54–57). God, the apostle declares, comforts, raises the dead, delivers, reconciles the world, and is full of mercy. This God is the one whose power will ultimately prevail to save all creation. The apostle’s description of God illustrates God’s munificent disposition and the stark dissimilarity between God and the powers of evil. Equally important is how the apostle’s God-talk has implications for the Corinthians and their lives together in community.
Believers’ Participation in the Divine Life
As we have seen up to this point, 2 Corinthians begins with God as the subject and primary actor. Paul is an apostle through God’s will (1:1); grace and peace come from God who is both our father and the father of our Lord Jesus Christ (1:2). In addition, God is the father of mercies and the God of all comfort (1:3). Yet Paul makes a point to emphasize that this divine comfort flows through believers—”[God] who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God”—enabling them to participate in the divine mission of compassion and encouragement (1:4). Harris appositely remarks that “The spiritual principle [Paul] is enunciating is that Christians’ experience of God’s help, consolation, and encouragement in the midst of all life’s afflictions constantly qualifies and empowers them to communicate the divine ‘comfort’ to others who face troubles of any variety.” 16 When Paul describes God as a God of mercy and comfort, he also describes believers and their attributes. The mercy and comfort that they experience from God overflows through them to others who also need to experience divine support and encouragement in times of difficulty. A merciful and compassionate God generates a merciful and compassionate people.
Similarly, when Paul describes God’s salvific act on his behalf in Asia and his expectation of future divine rescue, he appends to this expectation the Corinthians’ role in God’s liberating activity. He writes in 1:10–11 of the “[God] who rescued us from so great a death and indeed will rescue, in whom we have hoped that he will rescue yet again, even as you join in prayer for us, so that from many people thanks may be given in our behalf for the gracious gift given to us through the prayers of many.” Paul links God’s future act of deliverance to the prayers of the Corinthians, insisting that “divine deliverance, when it occurs, is always an undeserved blessing (χάρισµα), but in some mysterious way it is intimately related to human intercession (cf. Phil. 1:19; Phlm. 22).” 17 Undoubtedly, the apostle expresses a divine and human partnership here where the prayers of the Corinthians liaise with God’s activity of rescue. God’s actions and human intercession work cooperatively and in tandem.
At the same time that Paul conveys a deep association between the human and divine, he communicates a poignant interconnection between himself and the Corinthians. Their prayers for him have the potential to affect his life in profound ways in that his deliverance from Death’s grasp is intricately tied to them speaking to God on his behalf. Paul’s life and the lives of his congregants are inherently interlocked, for they are bound up together in life and in death. As they pray for Paul’s future rescue, they participate in God’s mission of divine rescue. In a provocative narration, the apostle explains that God’s mission to rescue humanity from anti-God powers recruits believers as participants. To revisit Käsemann’s quote from above, “The servant becomes like his master and shows this by his behavior.” 18 So it follows that believers take on the characteristics of their Lord and bear witness to God’s work on earth. God’s identity as a merciful, compassionate parent and acts of deliverance shape believers’ lives and calling. They are called to be merciful, compassionate, and a people of prayer who intercede for those who need God’s liberating power. In this way, they too become a people who work for and seek the deliverance of others.
Furthermore, God, who is the subject and primary actor of reconciliation, designates believers as ambassadors (5:20) and heralds of the word of reconciliation (5:18–19). God acts through believers to proclaim God’s saving grace to the world. Käsemann, who aptly comments upon Paul’s emphasis on God saving the world and not just individuals, is worth quoting at length: In this situation of peace what was formerly separated becomes solidly united, i.e., the heavenly is united with the earthly, just as warring earthly camps are united with one another… The world is made peaceful, as under the pax romana, in that it is everywhere subjected to its new Lord, Christ, as Cosmocrator. But since in Christ the Kingdom and majesty of God become manifest the earth reverts, under the sign of eschatological peace, from its conditions of general rebellion and mutual animosities. The new creation, like the old, grows out of chaos… Though the world may not yet know of the transformation that has taken place, the Christian community does. Its message is characterized by the open proclamation of the seizure of power by God and his appointed Saviour.
19
In this way, the apostle brings together theology, soteriology, cosmology, anthropology, and ecclesiology. God’s act of reconciliation releases humanity and creation from the dominion of the demonic, bringing salvation to the entire cosmos. As a result, believers exhibit this cosmic transformation in the way they live their lives in their communities and in their gathering together (ekklēsia). This is why Paul repeatedly reminds the Corinthians of who they are and how they are to behave—they are witnesses to and evidence of God’s cosmic redemption and transformation of the world and so ought to live like it. Because God has already acted, they are empowered to live and be who and what God calls them to be. Paul’s descriptions of God as merciful, comforting, rescuing, and reconciling have definite implications for how believers should live their lives. As people who receive God’s mercy, consolation, deliverance, and reconciliation, they in turn become ministers of these divine activities. Hence, Paul’s talk about God finds concrete embodied expression in the lives they live with and for one another.
Paul’s Apocalyptic Theology on the Ground—Some Reflections
As stated above, Paul’s description of the world in need of reconciliation indicates the world’s fall into the hands of powers that cause it to be alienated and in opposition to God. But God takes the initiative to liberate the cosmos. This initiative on God’s part, which Paul vividly describes, actually subverts the reconciliation language of the apostle’s day. Normally, the party that caused the offense sought reconciliation, not the party that received the offense. Paul, however, depicts God as the one who seeks and implements reconciliation with humanity and creation. God comes to us and transforms us and the world, indicating that the “normal” rules of engagement do not apply. In fact, Paul shows that in this conflict, God does not fight fair at all, for God makes Jesus, who knew no sin, sin for us, and we who did not know righteousness now become righteous (5:21). The apostle illustrates that this is not a fair fight but a “grace fight,” as it were, in which God’s gift of liberation leads the divine to become human and the human to become divine. 22 God in Christ takes on human nature and, in doing so, allows human beings to participate in the divine life. This transmogrification means that the landscape of the battlefield is no longer the same. God can neither be domesticated nor conscripted to fit within a predefined order or taxonomy of military strategy, but God can be counted on to act mercifully and with compassion.
God’s actions reveal that when humanity and creation could not liberate themselves or fight for themselves, God acted on their behalf. As God’s ambassadors who carry this word of reconciliation, believers share this news of God’s love in action, of God helping those unable to help themselves. It follows then that ambassadors of this reconciliation fight for the helpless, for the powerless, for those who cannot fight for themselves, working on behalf of those about whom no one cares. Such a fight may take many forms ranging from protesting unjust laws, to writing and signing petitions, to taking in those displaced, forgotten, and deemed “other” by society. As recipients of such a divine gift of reconciliation, believers honor and demonstrate this gift when they embody it and pass it on to others.
Relatedly, Paul’s discussion of minds that the god of this age blinds (4:4) and his riposte that his divine weapons capture every mind (10:5) is, as we have seen, a recognition that it is God’s own power that finally stands behind the apostle’s efforts to rescue minds blinded by the enemy. Yet his mission to capture every mind also emphasizes the breadth of God’s saving work, for every person counts to God and is worthy of divine rescue. One can extrapolate from the apostle’s language that God calls the believing community to participate in God’s mission of divine liberation, which includes rescuing those who believe that they are beyond saving. To be sure, then, believing communities cannot allow society’s delimiting polarities to become their own, for society often labels people as expendable, unworthy, or unfit. In a world that increasingly makes people believe they do not matter, believers are called to be mediators of God’s love and rescue and to proclaim as gospel truth that even those whom society considers worthless matter to God.
Finally, some may find the apostle’s language about Satan irrelevant today. After all, one may argue, he subscribed to a worldview to which we can no longer adhere. Some years ago, I attended a conference on Paul with attendees there from all over the world. In one of the discussions, Rudolf Bultmann’s name and his demythologization project was mentioned. One of the participants related to the group that he had had the privilege of teaching in different parts of Africa and introduced his students to Bultmann’s demythologization process. He informed us of his students’ reactions, “Why would anyone want to do this? Doesn’t everyone know that powers are real?”
23
More than likely, these African students are not the only ones to raise such questions. A number of Christian communities here and elsewhere would raise similar queries. Whether or not one subscribes to the idea of a satanic figure as Paul did, one can, I think, find common ground with the words of Käsemann, who attempts to define in modern terms what the notion of the demonic in Scripture may mean for us today. Käsemann follows Bultmann in demythologizing the notion of a literal devil or Satan as this figure appears in Scripture but he, nevertheless, believed that powers were real.
24
Several quotes provide a glimpse into his perspective. He eloquently writes, Who we are is merely a reflection of our lord, the one to whom we are most deeply obliged. These lords need not necessarily be other humans, though they can be. Ideals, utopias, and systems, each with their compulsions, can also rule us, can thus be gods for us.
25
Written tradition renders untold numbers possessed [by demonic powers]. But we can see this only when we awake to the threat to our existence by the now-regnant principalities, powers, and tyrants, when we know we are called to resist wherever in our time human rights, human dignity, and human community are violated. All this is demonic activity in opposition to the Creator’s work and intent. Wherever God’s creation is threatened, misused, or ruined, whether through persons, systems, theories, or techniques, the devil and his company are at work.
26
The world is sinful insofar as it always emerges historically from revolt against its Creator and enters into fresh rebellion against him. With their deeds, individuals participate in such a fate. By it they give evidence that they never and nowhere can truly be their own master, but always and everywhere they are claimed, co-opted, “possessed” by powers and forces and become sinners.
27
Concluding Remarks
In the final verses of this letter, Paul closes with a description of God: God is a God of love and peace (13:11b; 13:13). In 13:11b the apostle promises the Corinthians that this God of love and peace will be with them, empowering them and enabling them to be and do all that God wills for them. Hence, love and peace describe God but also describe the very gifts God bestows upon this community, so that they may bear witness to a reconciling God by living in love and peace with each other. Here again, God’s character compels the apostle’s audience to embody the gifts (charismata) that they have been given. Paul’s evocative description of God throughout the letter, then, serves as an incisive reminder to the Corinthians and to us of God’s character and divine desire to rescue and liberate every one of us.