Paul appears to once call Christ ‘God
over all’ (Rom 9:5), but this passage is difficult to interpret. Otherwise he
carefully distinguishes between God and the ‘Lord’ Jesus Christ (Rom 16:27; 1Cor
8:6). God is ‘Father’ and creator ‘from whom are all things and for whom we
exist’, whereas Christ is a participator in creation. He is seen as the ‘one
Lord’ ‘through whom are all things and through whom we exist’ (1Cor 8:6).
In other passages Paul describes the incarnation
in greater detail, this providing additional material that creeds could and did
build upon. Interestingly, the otherwise highly influential pericope Phil
2:5-11 was rarely used in credal discourse and left no trace in the classic
creeds, probably because the idea that Christ had descend to take ‘the form of a
slave’ raised all sorts of theological difficulties which made the text
unsuitable to be used in credal formulae aiming at the widest possible
consensus. Other Pauline utterances created fewer problems. In Gal 4:4 Christ
is described as God’s Son, sent by the Father and born from a woman under the
Law. Paul also repeatedly mentions the resurrection from the dead as a central Christian
tenet. In Rom 8:34 he adds Christ’s sitting ‘at the right hand of God’. Paul
does not mention Christ’s return, but in 2Cor 5:10 he does refer to the Final
Judgment ‘so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body,
whether good or evil’ (a passage which was later often quoted in credal texts).
(Wolfram Kinzig, A History of Early Christian Creeds [De Gruyter
Textbook; Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2024], 82)
