A Review of Jonathan A. Linebaugh’s The Word of the Cross
Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022).
“The word of the cross” animates the Epistles of Paul (1 Cor. 1:18 RSV). The world is scandalized by this word, dismissing it as folly and weakness. Yet, paradoxically, it is in this word God’s saving power and wisdom are revealed (see 1 Cor 1:18–31). Because this word is the living address of Christ himself, who died but now lives evermore (see Rom. 6:9), the word of the cross becomes contemporary; with each successive generation, the risen Christ continues speaking through his emissaries, such as Paul. The word of the cross thus accosts its listeners, not merely summoning us toward projects of self- or world-improvement, but cutting us to the quick and enlivening us, like Ezekiel’s vision of the word of God giving life to dry bones (see Ezek. 37:4). The word of the cross heralds an event: the victory of God’s grace over the anti-God powers of sin, death, and cosmic evil is unveiled in the death and resurrection of Christ as life for the dead and vindication of the ungodly, crucifying the cosmos and remaking it into a new creation (see Gal. 6:14–15). Especially by faith, and through baptism and the Lord’s Supper, we become so united with Christ by the Holy Spirit that we are cocrucified with Christ, buried with him, and also share in his resurrection life (see Gal. 2:20, Rom. 6:4; and 1 Cor. 10:16–17).
Jonathan A. Linebaugh’s The Word of the Cross is a collection of twelve essays devoted to the exposition of these themes in Paul. Ten of its dozen chapters were previously published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, and two are new essays that had not appeared elsewhere before. Books such as this, compilations of previously published essays, make the highest level of academic research more accessible to the reading public, but they also risk incoherence if what were previously disparate articles in a variety of journals do not relate well to one another. They can also risk inaccessibility, since the density of scholarly prose does not often translate well to a general readership. Linebaugh’s volume succeeds admirably in each of these regards. Despite a wide variety of aims, interpretive methods, and primary and secondary sources, several coherent themes emerge over the course of these twelve chapters. And because Linebaugh writes with such verve, invoking poets, novels, plays, musical pieces, and more, the book manages to be both an erudite analysis of Paul and an invigorating and even beautiful read.
The central thread that weaves together the twelve essays is that God’s saving wisdom and power are revealed in the folly and weakness of the cross. That announcement “weak and foolish though it seems, is a wisdom beyond the world, a power beyond the possible, and a miracle whose name is Jesus Christ” (xvi). Although none of the essays in this book are specifically devoted to 1 Corinthians 1, Paul’s logic in that chapter is a leitmotif across Linebaugh’s book as a whole (xvii). His imagination is gripped by Paul’s theology proper in Romans 4, where Paul heralds that God is the one “who justifies the ungodly” (4:5 NRSV), and God is the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (4:17). Linebaugh, who previously edited a volume on the relationship between law and gospel in the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, notes that Paul is an apostle of “a double apocalypse”—Christ Jesus God has come to the world, he says, in both judgment and grace (xvi).[1]
That thread of double apocalypse is worth following as it twists and turns through Linebaugh’s various chapters, and each deserves its own exploration. Here, I attempt to briefly describe only a few of the most salient contributions of this volume to the constructive work of Christian theology and their practical import for pastoral ministry.
First, in Linebaugh’s reading of Paul, Christ himself is the source, structure, and telosof Paul’s theology. Few things have been more debated in the past century of New Testament scholarship than the Pauline expression “the righteousness of God,” resulting in a vast and ever-growing body of secondary literature on the ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts of this phrase. Linebaugh astutely notes that “to suggest that Paul theologizes from an inherited notion of God’s righteousness to an interpretation of God’s act in Christ is to read Paul backwards—to read him, in the most basic sense, un-apocalyptically. Paul does not employ δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ to make sense of what happens in Jesus; for Paul, δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is what happens in Jesus” (9). Linebaugh is not suggesting that research into Paul’s first-century context is unimportant, but he is claiming it is not necessarily determinative of what this phrase means in Paul’s Epistles because “Paul does not look in the lexicon of early Judaism to define δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ. He deduces his definition from the gift of Christ that makes God’s righteousness visible by demonstrating it in the enactment of eschatological judgment that both judges unrighteousness and justifies the unrighteous” (19). Thus, to understand well what “the righteousness of God” is in Paul’s Epistles is to encounter—or to be encountered by—the God who reveals God’s self. Rather than offering abstract speculation or considering human affairs only within the immanent processes of history, Paul heralds good news of the God who speaks and who acts and who has quintessentially been made known in and through the saving work of Jesus Christ. The source, content, norm, and aim of identifiably Christian theology is thus no less than the person of Jesus Christ himself.
Another epicenter of debate in Pauline scholarship over the past half century has been about how to understand participation in Christ (53–56). Linebaugh advances a theologically learned and pastorally rich exposition of who the I is of Galatians 2:19–20, where Paul declares: “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Linebaugh wrestles with a key question: “is (or are) the I that no longer lives and the I that now lives the same I?” (66, italics in original). Following Martin Luther, Linebaugh contends that our life is extra nos et in Christo, that is, “we live both outside ourselves and in [Christ]” (68). Hence, the life that is confessed as “not I, but Christ in me” is grounded outside of the self and in relationship to Christ (68). Yet, simultaneously, the I is the broken and sinful self whom Christ freely loved. Although participation in Christ indeed effects a disjunctive break between the old self and the new, problems can emerge from solely focusing on radical discontinuity: “Is (or are) the I as created and fallen and re-created the same? If the distance between the old and new is death, and if the ‘life I now live’ is extra se, in Christo, and sola gratia, does the person persist? . . . According to Paul’s confession, there is a ‘me’ that Christ loved and gave himself for” (72–73). This is a paradox of the Christian faith—we can rest in our newness only if we remain connected to the old.
Linebaugh further explains this continuity like so:
The me—the us—that Jesus loved and gave himself for is me a sinner and an enemy, me when I was weak and ungodly (Rom 5:8). . . . The I may no longer live, but the I was and is loved. According to Paul, the self does not survive salvation: “One died for all therefore all died” (2 Cor. 5:14). But the gospel is an Easter sermon that rolls away the stone: it says, in the words of the novelist Walker Percy, “I love you dead” (cf. Eph. 2:1–4); and it also sings, to quote Ephesians, “Wake up sleeper, rise from the dead.” The persistence of the person, in other words, is not grounded in the person. I am: not me but, by grace, in Christ. But it is exactly this grace and this Christ—the one who loved me and gave himself for me—that establishes a kind of continuity, what might be called the passive persistence of the person (73).
Linebaugh’s theological imagination is thus strongly informed by a law-gospel hermeneutic. Virtually all ethical matters touched upon in the Christian life are at stake in this tension, between the continuity and discontinuity of the self that dies and rises with Christ. But at its heart, the vision of Paul that emerges in Linebaugh’s treatment is not merely a sound reading of Paul but a deeply humane one. In the event of the gospel we are utterly known and yet loved. Scoundrels and sinners that we know ourselves to be, we are not summoned to become merely better versions of ourselves. In Christ, God has so loved us as to put our old selves to death, that we might rise with Christ, so that Christ’s life might now be manifested in and through us by the work of the Holy Spirit.
Another point I want to highlight is that Linebaugh’s essays represent exemplary instances of working within, but not being bound by, the modern division of the theological disciplines. Far too often, New Testament scholars have restricted their disciplinary concerns to questions of history, as if reading the New Testament in its first-century context simply is the significance of Holy Scripture for the life of the church today. Alternatively, far too often systematic theologians, ethicists, and practical/pastoral theologians have been content to conduct their work apart from patient attention to the deep structures of Holy Scripture. Linebaugh’s work is clearly that of a New Testament scholar but one who has read widely in other theological disciplines. He is attentive not only to the ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish historical contexts for Paul’s Epistles but also to deep theological structures inherent within Paul’s Epistles, especially as illuminated by reading Holy Scripture in conversation with the communion of saints who have gone before us and with an eye to the pastoral use of Holy Scripture in the Christian life. Some theologians may be perplexed by his exhaustive scriptural exposition, whereas some biblical scholars will be baffled by how much theology informs Linebaugh’s New Testament scholarship—but I find this way instructive and worth expanding upon, as well as an outstanding resource for anyone who preaches from Paul’s Epistles.
Finally, Linebaugh’s The Word of the Cross is beautifully written. One could be forgiven for expecting a compilation of essays, largely published in peer-reviewed journals of New Testament scholarship, to be written with all the panache of an instruction manual. But rather than dull prose or the inaccessible jargon of niche subfields, the gospel as described in Paul’s Epistles comes alive in Linebaugh’s spirited exposition. Moreover, he complements this lively writing with well-chosen conversation partners, including a wide array of primary sources from Paul’s ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts (especially Wisdom of Solomon, Pseudo-Solomon, and 1 Enoch), ecclesial and theological interpreters of historic influence (especially Luther and Thomas Cranmer), and the latest secondary literature from contemporary New Testament scholarship. He elucidates key themes of Pauline theology via the poetry of William Shakespeare, George Hebert, W. H. Auden, and the literature of Miguel de Cervantes, George Eliot, and many others. Writing theology, or expositing Holy Scripture, in such a style is not easily done well, but in this case, it is masterfully executed. Linebaugh avoids locking Paul’s word of the cross in the dull prose of academic precision—in his hands, it is a word that sings, that slays and makes alive.
[1] See Linebaugh, God’s Two Words: Law and Gospel in the Lutheran and Reformed Traditions (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2018).