Thursday, November 4, 2021

Troels Engberg-Pedersen on 2 Corinthians 3:17 and "the Lord is the Spirit"

  

In Greek: ο δε κυριος το πνευμα εστιν. ου δε πνευμα κυριου . . . The meaning of this phrase is a minor storm centre in Pauline scholarship. See .e.g. Dunn 1970 and Moule 1972, both of whom deny that the ‘Lord’ is Christ since they taken ο δε κυριος to refer back to the ‘Lord’ in the quotation from Exodus 34 just given in 3:16. More recently, Fathei 2000:289-302, has argued extensively for the traditional reading, which I have adopted. The secret lies in seeing, as Fatehi does, 296-298, that ο δε κυριος  may very well refer back to the ‘Lord’ in the Exodus quotation at the same time as it stands for Christ. For the quotation itself is already part of an application of the Exodus text to present situation. I am sceptical, though, about Fatehi’s general thesis to the effect that since the risen Christ and the Spirit in Paul are, at least partly, dynamically and even ontologically identical (392-7), and since the Spirit and God are just as intimately connected as in earlier and contemporary Jewish literature (47-163), ‘Paul had a “divine” Christology’ in the sense that ‘Christ would be included within the Godhead, rather than posited somewhere alongside God’ (331). What is troublesome is not so much the various readings, which are often solid enough, but rather the conceptual framework (that of a ‘Trinitarian theology’, 333, however tentative) with which the issue is addressed. A clear sign of the problem is the fact that Fatehi constantly uses scare quotes around the term ‘divine’, for instance when he speaks of Paul’s ‘”divine” Christology’, his ‘view of Christ as “divine” person’, and the like (332). (Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 227-28 n. 32)