God-Christ Interchange In Paul: Impressive Testimony To The Deity Of Jesus -- By: Don N. Howell, Jr.

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 36:4 (Dec 1993)
Article: God-Christ Interchange In Paul: Impressive Testimony To The Deity Of Jesus
Author: Don N. Howell, Jr.


God-Christ Interchange In Paul:
Impressive Testimony To The Deity Of Jesus

Don N. Howell, Jr.*

The full deity of the Lord Jesus Christ is one of the essential doctrines of historic, orthodox Christianity. Most scholarly discussions and defenses of the doctrine involve the marshaling of major proof texts that attribute to Christ the prerogatives of deity and/or those that clearly identify him as theos.1 While such presentations are valuable, the passages cited are often hotly debated and the methodology of proof-texting itself is circumscribed by the isolated and often limited nature of the evidence. When one examines the Pauline corpus, for example, there are perhaps only two verses that clearly designate Jesus Christ as theos (Rom 9:5b; Tit 2:13).2 Even such decisive passages (at least they are in my view) as Phil 2:5–11 and

* Don Howell is associate professor of New Testament at Japan Bible Seminary, Oogi Machiya Danchi 10–304, Kubo Inari 1–12-3, Iruma Shi, Saitama Ken 358, Japan.

Col 1:15–20 fall terminologically short of the pregnant Trinitarian formulation of later Church creeds. It is my conviction that a broader dimension of Pauline Christological expression—namely, the factor of God-Christ interchange—is often underestimated in the discussions regarding Christ’s divine nature. By interchange is meant the overlapping of roles, functions, attributes and prerogatives assigned to both God and Christ in the Pauline literature. My task in the present article, then, is to plot the vast language of interchange where the apostle Paul describes the person and work of the Son in much the same terms as he does the person and work of the Father. Having observed the data, I shall attempt to draw out the implications of the interchange factor for the apostle’s understanding of Christ’s nature.

Eleven of the thirteen Pauline letters open with salutations that directly coordinate God and Christ. Here the apostle denotes God the Father and Jesus Christ as the co-source of grace and peace (Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:3; 2 Cor 1:2; Gal 1:3; Eph 1:2; Phil 1:2; ...

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