How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (35 page)

Second, in the Adam and Eve story in Genesis, it is not Adam who wants “to be like God”—it is Eve. Adam eats the fruit only when she gives it to him, and we are not told why he does so. But this means in his desire
not
to be equal with God, Christ would be the counter not to Adam, but to Eve. Nowhere in his writings does Paul make a connection between Christ and Eve.

Third, and possibly most important, from other passages in Paul it does indeed appear that he understands Christ to have been a preexistent divine being. One example comes from a very peculiar passage in 1 Corinthians, in which Paul is talking about how the children of Israel, after they escaped from Egypt under Moses, were fed while they spent so many years in the wilderness (as recounted in the books of Exodus and Numbers in the Hebrew Bible). According to Paul, the Israelites had enough to drink because the rock that Moses struck in order miraculously to bring forth water (Num. 20:11) followed them around in the wilderness. Wherever they went, the water-providing rock went. In fact, Paul says, “the rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). Just as Christ provides life to people today when they believe in him, so too he provided life to the Israelites in the wilderness. That would not have been possible, of course, unless he existed at the time. And so for Paul, Christ was a preexistent being who was occasionally manifest on earth.

Or take another passage, one in which Paul actually does speak of Christ as a second Adam. In 1 Corinthians, Paul contrasts Christ’s place of origin with that of Adam: “The first man was from the earth, and was made of dust; the second man is from heaven” (15:47). What matters here is precisely the difference between Adam and Christ. Adam came into being in this world; Christ existed before he came into this world. He was from heaven.

And so, the interpretation of the Philippians poem that takes it as an indication that Christ was a kind of “perfect Adam” does not work, on one hand, because the passage has features that do not make sense given this interpretation. And on the other hand, this interpretation is completely unnecessary. It does not solve the problem of an incarnational Christology—because Paul clearly says in other passages that Jesus was indeed a preexistent divine being who came into the world. That’s what this poem teaches as well.

Lots of other things can be said about this amazing passage. Among scholars it is one of the most discussed, argued over, and commented upon passages in the New Testament. If the majority of scholars are correct in their opinion that it embodies an incarnational Christology, then the basic perspective on Christ that it paints is clear: Christ was a preexistent being who chose to come in the “likeness” of human flesh, who, because he humbled himself to the point of death, was elevated to an even higher status than he had before and was made the Lord of all. This view of Christ makes sense if we think of him as existing before his birth as an angelic being who abandoned his heavenly existence to come to earth to fulfill God’s will by dying for others.

I want to stress that Christ appears to be portrayed here, in his preexistent state, as a divine being, an angel—but not as God Almighty. He is not the Father himself, since it is the Father who exalts him. And he is not—most definitely not—“equal” with God before he becomes human.

There are several reasons for thinking that he was not yet God’s equal in his preexistent state. The first comes in the first part of the poem, where it says that Christ did not regard being equal with God “something to be grasped after.” Interpreters of this passage have long debated the precise nuance of these words. Do they mean that he already had equality with God and that he did not clutch on to this equality as something to retain, but instead became human? Or do they mean that he did not already have equality with God and chose not to grasp for that kind of equality, but instead became human? It makes a big difference.

Part of the problem is that the key Greek word here—the verb for
grasped
—is rare and could in theory be used in both senses. But in reality, the word (and words related to it in Greek) is almost always used to refer to something a person doesn’t have but grasps for—like a thief who snatches someone’s purse. The German scholar Samuel Vollenweider has shown that the word is used this way widely in a range of Jewish authors; moreover, it is the word used of human rulers who become arrogant and so try to make themselves more high and mighty (divine) than they really are.
¹¹
This seems to be, then, what is meant here in the Philippians poem.

A second reason for thinking that Jesus was not yet God’s equal is that only this interpretation makes sense of the second half of the poem, in which God “exalts” Christ even more “highly” than he was before (which is the probable meaning of the verb I translated as “highly exalted” in the poem). If Christ were already equal with God, then it would not have been possible for him to be exalted even higher than that after his act of obedience. What could be higher than equality with God? Moreover, it was only after this higher exaltation that Christ is given “the name that is above every name” and is to become the object of worship for all living beings. Christ must have been a lower divine being before he humbled himself by becoming human and dying. When it says, then, that he was “in the form of God,” it does not mean that he was the equal of God the Father. It means he was “Godlike,” or divine—like the chief angel, the Angel of the Lord, as referred to in passages of the Hebrew Bible.

It seems strange to many people today that Christ could be a divine being yet not be fully equal with God. But it is important to remember what we found in Chapter 1. Our notion that there is an inseparable chasm between the divine and human realms, and that the divine realm has only one level or layer to it, is not the view held among Greeks, Romans, and Jews in the ancient world—or by Christians. Recall the inscription that I cited on page 39, about how Caesar Augustus was declared “divine,” and if he provided even further benefits for the people during his reign, they could deem him even “more divine.” How can someone become “more” divine? In the ancient world, they could—because divinity was a continuum. So too in Jewish and Christian circles. For the Philippians poem, Christ started out as divine, but at his exaltation he was made even “more divine.” In fact, he was made equal with God.

This is a point that is widely agreed upon by interpreters, and it is because of the wording of the final two stanzas of the poem, vv.10–11. There, we are told that God “hyperexalted” Jesus, so that “At 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.” The casual reader may not realize this, but these lines allude to a passage in the Hebrew Bible. And a striking passage it is. According to the original passage as found in Isaiah 45:22–23, it is to Yahweh alone, the God of Israel, that “every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess”:

           
Turn to me and be saved

                 
All the ends of the earth!

                 
For I am God, and there is no other.

           
By myself I have sworn,

                 
From my mouth has gone forth in righteousness

                 
A word that shall not return:

           
“To me every knee shall bow,

                 
Every tongue confess.”

The prophet Isaiah is quite explicit. There is only one God, no other. That God is Yahweh.
¹²
That God has sworn that to no other shall every knee bow and every tongue make confession. Yet in the Philippians poem, it is not to God the Father—apart from whom, according to Isaiah, “there is no other”—but to the exalted Jesus that all knees will bow and tongues confess. Jesus has been granted the status and honor and glory of the One Almighty God himself.

This interpretation of the Christ poem in Philippians shows that very early in the Christian movement the followers of Jesus were making audacious claims about him. He had been exalted to equality with God, even though God himself had said that there was “no other” apart from him. Somehow, Christians were imagining that there was indeed “another.” And this other one was equal with God. But it was not because he was God “by nature”—to use the later philosophical/theological term that came to be applied to discussions of Christ’s deity. He was God because God had made him so. But how could he be God, if God was God, and there was only one God? This became the key question of the Christological debates in later times, as we will see. At this stage, all we can say is that early Christians were not bothered enough by this dilemma, or this paradox, to have written anything about it, so we don’t know exactly
how
they dealt with it.

One final point to make about the Philippians poem may have occurred to you already. I have been calling the Christology that it embraces “incarnational,” since it portrays Jesus as a preexistent divine being who becomes human. But there is obviously an “exaltation” element in the poem as well, since at Jesus’s resurrection God exalted him to an even higher state than he had before. In a sense, then, this poem provides us with a transitional Christology that combines an incarnation view with an exaltation view. Later authors will move even further away from an exaltation Christology, such that Christ will come to be portrayed as being equal with God even before his appearance in the world—in fact, as equal with God for all time. But this is not the view of the Philippians poem. For this beautiful passage, as quoted by and presumably believed by Paul, Christ was indeed a preexistent divine being. But he was an angel or an angel-like being, who only after his act of obedience to the point of death was made God’s equal.

The incarnational Christology that lies behind the Philippians hymn can be seen in other passages of Paul’s letters as well. I have already said that Paul understood Christ to be the “rock” that provided life-giving water to the Israelites in the wilderness (1 Cor. 10:4) and pointed out that Paul stated that Christ, unlike the first Adam, came from “heaven” (1 Cor. 15:47). When Paul talks about God “sending” his son, he appears not to be speaking only metaphorically (like John the Baptist is said to have been “sent” from God in John 1:6, for example); instead, God actually sent Christ from the heavenly realm. As he put it in the letter to the Romans, “For what the law could not do, God did, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (8:3). It is interesting that Paul uses this term
likeness
—just as the Philippians poem did when it spoke of Christ coming in the “appearance” of humans. It is the same Greek word in both places. Did Paul want to avoid saying that Christ actually
became
human, but that he came only in a human “likeness”? It is hard to say.

But it is clear that Paul does not believe Christ just appeared out of nowhere, the way angels seem to do in the Hebrew Bible. One of the verses in Paul that long puzzled me was Galatians 4:4, in which Paul writes, “When the fullness of time came, God sent his son, born from a woman, born under the law.” I always wondered why Paul would indicate that Christ had been born from a woman. What other option is there, exactly? But the statement makes sense if Paul believed that Christ was a preexistent angelic being. In that case, it is important to point out that Jesus was born in a human way: he did not simply appear as the Angel of the Lord did to Hagar, Abraham, and Moses. Here in the last days he actually was born in the likeness of human flesh, as a child.

Paul says even more exalted things about Christ. In Chapter 2, we saw that some Jewish texts understood God’s Wisdom to be a hypostasis of God—an aspect or characteristic of God that took on its own form of existence. Wisdom was the agent through which God created all things (as in Proverbs 8), and since it was God’s Wisdom in particular, it was both God and a kind of image of God. As the Wisdom of Solomon expressed it, Wisdom is “a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty . . . for she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness” (7:25–26). Moreover, we saw that Wisdom could be seen as the Angel of the Lord.

Jesus, for Paul, was the Angel of the Lord. And so he too was God’s Wisdom, before coming into this world. Thus Paul can speak of “the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). Even more striking, Christ can be described as the agent of creation:

           
For us there is one God, the Father,

                 
from whom are all things and for whom we exist,

           
and one Lord, Jesus Christ,

                 
through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Cor. 8:6)

This verse may well incorporate another pre-Pauline creed of some kind, as it divides itself neatly, as can be seen, into two parts, with two lines each. The first part is a confession of God the Father, and the second a confession of Jesus Christ. It is “through” Christ that all things come into being and that believers themselves exist. This sounds very much like what non-Christian Jewish texts occasionally say about God’s Wisdom. And God’s Wisdom was itself understood to be God, as we have seen.

So too Jesus in Paul. One of the most debated verses in the Pauline letters is Romans 9:5. Scholars dispute how the verse is to be translated. What is clear is that Paul is talking about the advantages given to the Israelites, and he indicates that the “fathers” (that is, the Jewish patriarchs) belong to the Israelites, and “from them is the Christ according to the flesh, the one who is God over all, blessed forever, amen.” Here, Christ is “God over all.” This is a very exalted view.

But some translators prefer not to take the passage as indicating that Christ is God and do so by claiming that it should be translated differently, to say first something about Christ and then, second, to give a blessing to God. They translate the verse like this: “from them is the Christ according to the flesh. May the God who is over all be blessed forever, amen.” The issues of translation are highly complex, and different scholars have different opinions. The matter is crucial. If the first version is correct, then it is the one place in all of Paul’s letters where he explicitly calls Jesus God.