Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 177:706 (Apr 2020)
Article: “Every Spiritual Blessing”
Author: Douglas J. Moo

BSac 177:706 (April-June 2020) p. 135

“Every Spiritual Blessing”*

Douglas J. Moo

^* This is the second article in the four-part series “Salvation in Paul’s Epistles,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 5–8, 2019.

Douglas J. Moo is Wessner Chair of Biblical Studies, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ
—Ephesians 1:3

In my first lecture, I focused on the “why” of salvation in Paul. God inaugurates the new realm and all the blessings we enjoy in it, because in his grace and love he chooses to do so. He ultimately does so for his own glory.

In this second lecture, we turn to the “what” of salvation. In an inevitably cursory way, we want to get a sense of the features of the landscape of salvation in Paul, beginning with the general contours of Paul’s concept of salvation.

General Contours Of Paul’s Soteriological Landscape

When we look over the new realm with the widest perspective, we see Christ. Union with Christ is the fundamental and all-encompassing blessing—and source—of the new realm. The text from Ephesians quoted above ends with the phrase “in Christ,” and this phrase or its equivalent is the leitmotif of the long sentence this verse introduces (Eph 1:3–14). Paul uses “in Christ” language so often and in so many contexts that the union-with-Christ concept it denotes deserves to be considered as the center of Paul’s theology. In terms of our purposes here, then, our being “in Christ” is the fundamental blessing from which all the others flow.

BSac 177:706 (April-June 2020) p. 136

Focusing our survey of the new realm a bit more narrowly, five general conceptions stand out.

First, “new creation.” This might seem like an odd starting point, since the phrase occurs only twice in Paul (Gal 6:15; 2 Cor 5:17). We begin here because we think this conception is the most general of those under consideration: it encompasses the breadth of God’s new realm work. To be sure, many interpreters think it refers narrowly to the Christian, as a “new creation” in Christ. This view is represented in the English Standard Version translation of 2 Corinthians 5:17a: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” Others think “new creation” re...