God The Father As Giver Of Life: Exploring A Pauline Motif

Abstract

Scholarly scrutiny of Paul’s theology proper has recently produced a view that Paul’s reflections about God are axiomatic. As an exploration of the apostle Paul’s creative theologising, this thesis challenges this prevailing view that Paul assumed his theology proper wholesale from Jewish thought that preceded him, especially as propounded in the Old Testament. The thesis investigates how Paul develops the divine fatherhood metaphor established in both Jewish and Greco-Roman sources, and how he intersects the metaphor with concepts of life-giving. The first chapter introduces the state of the question and elaborates the methodology used in the ensuing arguments, where emphasis is given to metaphor theory and Relevance Theory, a framework taken from the field of cognitive linguistics. The second chapter establishes background for the proximity of divine fatherhood and the giving of life, arguing that Paul was the first to intersect these two trajectories begun several centuries previously. Jewish sources from the Old Testament, the deuterocanonical literature, and Second Temple literature are prioritised, though a brief section on Greco-Roman thought is presented. The third chapter examines how Paul relates God as Father to Jesus by analysing those texts where Paul intersects God’s paternity with the resurrection of Jesus. The analysis seeks to show that Paul offers a new identity for God as the Father who raised Jesus from the dead. The fourth chapter presents the outworking of this new identity in demonstrating how Paul relates God as Father to those who are ‘in Christ’ (ἐν Χριστῷ), where the thesis seeks to show how the apostle conceives of a derivative sonship that flows from Jesus to those who are in him. A brief conclusion follows with suggested avenues of further research.