Over the past four years I’ve become increasingly convinced that the heart of Paul’s theology can be traced back to his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus.

“Saul, Saul, why do you you persecute me?”

After this encounter—and still blind—Paul sat in a house on the Street called Straight, he was surely meditating deeply on these words. He hadn’t harmed Jesus directly, had he? He had persecuted those who follow this Jesus, but that’s not how Jesus had put it. Apparently this Jesus was in such tight union with his people that to persecute them was to persecute Him.

In other words, these Christians must’ve been in “union with Christ” by their virtue of being “in Christ.” They were his body and Christ was their head. Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” well over 160 times throughout his letters. And this is (literally) the beating heart of his gospel: our participation “in Christ.”

Unfortunately, many Christians in our world don’t read Paul this way today. Rather than centering “union with Christ” at the heart of Paul’s thinking, many have come to see Paul’s judicial or legal language at the center (i.e. “justification”) because of misreadings of Romans and Galatians.

Following New Testament scholar Douglas Campbell, we try to trace the heart of Paul’s theology not to Galatians and Romans but to Ephesians and Colossians. It is interesting that “justification” language does not appear in either of these letters. Rather, what we find shot through both Ephesians and Colossians is Paul’s meditations on our “union with Christ.”

It isn’t that Paul’s use of legal/judicial language in Galatians/Romans is wrong, but that it is not central. What we need to do is read Romans and Galatians through the lens of Ephesians and Colossians.

Why?

In foregrounding our union with Christ we see that Paul’s primary way of speaking about our relationship with God is with personal and familial language, rather than legal language. In the words of Clark Pinnock, when it comes to our relationship with God we are in the “family room” not the courtroom.

By letting the familial language be the driving force in Paul’s thought, we can more easily see the way in which our relationship with God is covenantal rather than contractual.

Covenantal relationships are familial, personal, unconditional, and driven by love. Contractual relationships are legal, impersonal, conditional, and driven by obligation. Contracts are centered on me and my rights. Covenants are centered on my responsibility and love for you.

As James B. Torrance writes:

The God of the Bible is a covenant-God not a contract-god, and the worship appropriate to a Covenant God is radically different from the worship appropriate to a contract-god. The one is a worship of joy and gratitude, the other can be a worship of fear and anxiety.

God has established a covenant with humanity. He says to Israel: “I will be your God and you will be my people,” “Be holy as I am holy.”

Doesn’t this sound like a condition? Like a contractual relationship? “If you have faith, if you are holy, then you are in the covenant relationship with God.”

But this is Paul’s radical, unconditional gospel: not even your faith or holiness is a condition to salvation. You and I are not by ourselves on our side of the covenant. In fact, the whole covenant (the whole diagram above) is just another way of saying the name “Jesus.”

Jesus is himself the entirety of the covenant. He is both God and human! 

Karl Barth puts it like this:

Jesus Christ is in His one Person, as true God, man’s loyal partner, and as true man, God’s [loyal partner]…Thus He is in His Person the covenant in its fullness, the Kingdom of heaven which is at hand, in which God speaks and man hears, God gives and man receives, God commands and man obeys, God’s glory shines in the heights and thence into the depths…We do not need to engage in a free-ranging investigation to seek out and construct who and what God truly is, and who and what man truly is, but only to read the truth about both where it resides, namely, in the fullness of their togetherness, their covenant which proclaims itself in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is God to us and us to God. His life, his obedience, his love, and even his faith in God become ours.

But don’t think of this as an accountant’s ledger where what was in Jesus’ “bank account” gets impersonally transferred to our “bank account.” That’s legal/contractual language.

Rather, think of Jesus’s life, obedience, love, and faith as the root and trunk from which our life, our obedience, our love, and our faith grow. It is from him that we receive it all. We are grafted into him. Any love, obedience, or faith we have is just the life of Jesus growing up in us. We are in Christ!

This is what Paul begins to learn on the road to Damascus: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The connection between Jesus and his body is not a legal fiction. It is real, organic, and deeply personal.

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