Here’s Jimmy! 8

Paul was a convert, that much is clear. But from what to what?  J.D.G. (Jimmy) Dunn, in his newest book, Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels, jumps into the question above with some fresh clarity, and what he says is of value both for understanding Paul but for understanding the gospel itself.

How do you describe Paul’s conversion? What did he move from and what did he move into? Is it just personal salvation or is more? What do you think about his argument from experience in the lives of Peter (Acts 10-11) and Paul, where each saw God’s Spirit do things that led them to think: God accepts Gentiles, without works of the law (boundary line markers), into the true People of God?

His central argument to get the chp going is that Paul was a zealot, but that term needs some fresh digging to understand. Here are the central ideas:

1. Paul was a persecutor, Paul was Pharisee, which is a kind of Jew, and Paul was a zealot. That is, he was a zealous kind of Pharisee. But what is zeal?
2. We need to think of God’s jealousy/zeal and that Paul’s own zeal breathes God’s own zeal. The famous zeal-focused heroes of Israel included Phinehas, Simeon and Levi (Judith 9:2-4), the Maccabean revolt folks, and those mentioned both in Philo and the later Mishnah who killed someone who married an Aramean or a priest who performed duties while unclean!
3. Thus, a zealous Pharisee meant these things: sparked by fellow Jews who disregarded the Torah, it was as directed at fellow Jews as at Gentiles, and it regularly involved violence and bloodshed.

This is what Paul was. And he was converted, but to what? Here Jimmy Dunn digs into three points:

1. Paul became convinced that Jesus was indeed Messiah. Christology.
2. Paul became convinced the true people of God included Gentiles. Ecclesiology.
3. Paul’s sense of the saving act of God (righteousness of God) saved all by faith, including Gentiles.

And an argument Dunn makes is that both Peter and Paul were further formed and converted by their experience of seeing Gentiles receive the Spirit and live in the church.

Their theology was shaped by their witnessing the manifest work of the Spirit of God. Experience, in other words, helped reshape them.

All of this means that the Reformation theology of justification, which focuses almost solely on personal conversion, is not complete, for there is a social dimension to justification: it means that Jews and Gentiles are brought together into one people of God, the Body of Christ.