"Life-giving spirit": Probing the center of Paul's pneumatology

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 1998 by Gaffin, Richard B Jr

Are we left, then, with the conclusion that v. 45 teaches something like Dunn's functional Spirit-Christology? To avoid any misunderstanding, let me affirm emphatically my own rejection of such a Christology in Paul. It seems to me, however, that both Dunn and many who oppose his view share a mistaken assumption-namely, that to admit a reference to the Holy Spirit in v. 45 necessitates the functional Christology argued by him and others.

The way out of this impasse is to recognize Paul's clearly Trinitarian understanding of God. And here we are indebted to no one more than Fee himself for so admirably demonstrating that understanding.25 As far as I can see, this treatment is without a peer in recent literature on Paul's theology and ought to settle the matter for anyone with doubts. At any rate, I assume its basic conclusions here. Paul's Trinitarian conception of God is not at issue but is properly made a presupposition in the interpretation of 1 Cor 15:45.

It is completely gratuitous, then, to find here a functional Christology that denies the personal difference between Christ and the Spirit and so would be irreconcilable with later Church formulation of Trinitarian doctrine. The scope of Paul's argument, in particular its limits and its salvation-historical focus, need to be kept in view. Essential-eternal, ontological-Trinitarian relationships are simply outside his purview here. As we have already noted, he is concerned not with who Christ is timelessly, eternally, in his preexistence, but with what he "became," with what has happened to him in history, specifically in his resurrection.

Moreover his interest in Christ here is not in terms of his true deity but his genuine humanity. Paul could hardly have been more emphatic on that. Christ is in view specifically in his identity as "the last Adam," "the second man" (v. 47). When Dunn, for one, largely on the basis of this passage concludes epigrammatically that "as the Spirit was the 'divinity' of Jesus . . ., so Jesus became the personality of the Spirit," the apostle's focus is blurred and the limits it entails are totally missed.26

It is one thing to show that v. 45 is not a source of Trinitarian confusion but another to honor the terms in which Paul expresses himself here. In view is the momentous, epochal significance of the resurrection/exaltation for Christ personally. Paul means to affirm what has not always been adequately recognized in the Church's Christology. In his resurrection something really happened to Jesus. By that experience he was and remains a changed man in the truest and deepest-in fact, eschatological-sense. As Paul puts it elsewhere, by the declarative energy of the Holy Spirit in his resurrection God's Son became what he was not before: "the Son of God with power" (Rom 1:4).27 Relatively speaking, according to 2 Cor 13:4, while Christ was crucified in (a state of ) "weakness" he now "lives by God's power." His is now, by virtue of the resurrection and ascension, what he did not previously possess: a glorified humanity.