Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 22:4 (Winter 2018)
Article: Living Is Christ And Dying Is Gain: Paul’s Reimagining Of Human Flourishing In Philippians
Author: Gregory E. Lamb

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Living Is Christ And Dying Is Gain: Paul’s Reimagining Of Human Flourishing In Philippians

Gregory E. Lamb

Gregory E. Lamb is an adjunct professor of Greek at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, North Carolina, where he is presently finishing his PhD, and a lead/solo Docent Group researcher. He has a wide range of scholarly interests and is a regular presenter at academic conferences such as SBL, AAR, and ETS, and has published articles in Evangelical Missions Quarterly, Christian Education Journal, Presbyterion, and Word and World. Gregory is also a bi-vocational minister at an historic church within the Sandy Creek Baptist Association of the Southern Baptist Convention, a husband, and father of five.

Introduction

Given modernity’s explosion of diversity and specialization of knowledge, few ideas or concepts can be thought of as truly universal or unifying. However, the idea of living and dying well, also known as “human flourishing”1 (expressed in antiquity as εὐδαιμονία in the Greek,2 Maat in Egyptian,3 and ars vivendi/ars moriendi in Latin4), has been a thematic thread that has woven its way throughout the warp and weft of the tapestry of human history. Bedrock to human existence are questions such as: “What does it mean to live and die well?”; and “What of human suffering and death?” Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, perhaps more than any other New Testament (NT) writing, succinctly addresses these questions and more.

While the term εὐδαιμονία is not found in Scripture, Jonathan Pennington contends that three additional terms in the NT can also convey the sense

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of “human flourishing”:5 εἰρήνη (often glossed as “peace”),6 μακάριος (“blessed”/“happy”),7 and τέλειος (“complete”/“perfect”).8 Philippians is important for discussions of human flourishing because it, in its four brief chapters,9 contains four references to two of these three terms: εἰρήνη (