Half Seas Under : Seaman, Submariner, Canoeist Book

Dr Seyoon Kim's PhD dissertation under F. F. Bruce in the University of Manchester submitted in 1977. I picked this up having read Dr G. K. Beale's New Testament Biblical Theology which cited this dissertation prevalently, and having read some raving reviews about how this work "could stand up against the 10 top books on the New Perspective on Paul and still come out ahead," but it must be noted that E.P Sanders pioneering work on the NPP came out in the same year so Wright's and Dunn's contributions to NPP scholarship would be dated later so the focus of this work was not an intentional polemic against NPP (but Dr Kim did released follow up scholarly contentions against the NPP), and it is slightly dated in terms of the debates in Pauline and NT scholarship. Rather, Dr Kim's thesis must be situated when higher criticism and the "history of religion" (religionsgeschichtliche) ruled the day in the works of many European/continental (especially German) theologians and New Testament scholars. Contrary to the prevailing continental scholars which postulated that the Christology and soteriology of the Pauline corpus were influenced and drawn from a diverse mixture of Palestinian Judaism, Hellenistic Judaism, mystic cults, Gnosticism/Gnostic gospels and sects, or any semi-divinity legend of the ancient world (for example, you might have heard of the popular internet theory that Jesus is a ripped off Horus), Dr Kim has done a magisterial exegetical work to demonstrate that all of Paul's gospel and even his apostleship to the Gentiles is grounded in his personal experience of the Damascus Christophany. Indeed, traces of Paul's Damascus Christophany is found prevalently in 1 Corinthians 9, 15, 2 Corinthians 3-5 Galatians 1, Philippians 3, Romans 10, Ephesians 3 and even in Paul's epistolary opening of Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians. Indeed, a Reformed avid would spot this title as a play of J. Gresham Machen's influential, earlier "The Origin of Paul's Religion" which contended against anti-supernatural, liberal Christianity that dominated Machen's day, which was no Christianity at all.

Dr Kim begins by tracing Paul's rabbinical Judaism and the centrality of the Torah to his religious experience and his persecution of the Christian church. The examination of rabbinical Judaism of Paul is essential because it provided Paul with the blueprint in which the Damascus Christophany would reconstruct, as much of this dissertation is given to the constructing of Paul's Christology. The prevailing climate of continental NT/Pauline scholarship in the previous century was that much of the Christological formulas (Philippians 2, Colossians 1) found in the Pauline corpus were pre-Pauline and unoriginal to Paul. Against this accepted norm, Dr Kim demonstrated that both Wisdom-Christology (that the eschatological Messiah was the pre-incarnate wisdom of God that was involved in creation and revelation/giving of the Torah, as well as possessing personal divinity) and Adam-Christology (that the eschatological Messiah was also the new Adam that will restore the original divine image of humanity, the "one like the Son of God" figure in Daniel and Ezekiel) can both be traced to rabbinical Judaism's interpretation of the Old Testament canon (citing a lot of Qumram material and Philo), in which the Damascus Christophany for Paul reconstituted to that revelation of Jesus was both the Son of Man/eschatological Adam and that divine Son of God/pre-incarnate Wisdom (a precedent for the later hypostatic union of Christ in the church fathers).

That the same Damascus Christophany is also crucial to Paul's apostleship to the Gentiles is much of Dr Kim's attention. Since Paul's Damascus Christophany is the sine qua non to his Christology, it follows that it is also the building block of his soteriology/gospel. For Paul's entire religious experience of rabbinical Judaism, centred upon righteousness by the Torah is set entirely upside down and ablaze by his commission as an apostle to the Gentiles at Damascus, as well as having his own sin of bloody persecution against Christ's body forgiven by grace through faith, therefore Paul is consistently able to contend against his opponents and the Judaizers that his gospel is not from man but from the divine revelation of Christ Himself and that his gospel is a new creation of humanity, by the glorious light of Christ that dispels the darkness within sinful hearts, reconstituted to the image of God as Adam was originally the image of God, so the eschatological Adam has come to restore as He is the perfect image of God, that same glorious Christophany and image of God that prevailed over Paul on the Damascus road. Indeed, the law-gospel dynamic, the works-faith tension, the circumcision-freedom polemics would only make sense in light of Paul’s personal confrontation with Christ at the Damascus Christophany, in which Paul the zealous persecutor for the Mosaic Torah was reconstituted to become the apostle of freedom to the Gentiles. Here Dr Kim follows with some attention to the doctrine of justification, reconciliation, adoption and the final eschaton as touching to Paul's gospel/soteriology, which must be constructed upon Paul's Christology reconstituted at the Damascus Christophany. Therefore, Paul's Christology and soteriology/gospel is entirely original, based upon his rabbinical Judaism, reconstituted at the Damascus Christophany by the glorious revelation of Christ as the image of God (implicitly, it also demonstrated a theological and canon unity with the rest of the NT and especially the canonical Gospels as Christ consistently maintained His identity as the eschatological Son of Man and the divine Son of God).

This being a scholarly dissertation made it rather inaccessible as one needed a certain level of grasp over koine Greek, biblical Hebrew and even theological German, as there were large chunks of block citation in Greek, Hebrew and theological German left untranslated here and there (theological shorthands like "stammvatar" and "vorgeschichte" can be deduced from context or google, but a googling of the word "theophanietrager" yield only four results, two from citations of Dr Kim and one in Korean, which was absolutely no help for understanding this word). Unexpectedly, there were a lot of footnotes and even a few entire pages of footnotes, as Dr Kim engaged and drew prevalently from premier continental/European NT-Pauline scholars of his time (names like Oscal Cullman, Edward and Albert Schweitzer, Martin Hengel (who wrote the foreword), Jacob Jervell, Peter Stulmacher, Alexander Wedderburn and of course, Ernst Kasemann, perhaps the most influential German NT-Pauline theologian after Bultmann/European theologian after Barth), which would be rather unfamiliar to us that grew up in the nurturing work of D. A. Carson or the novelty of N.T. Wright (I say premier not because they are conservative in the evangelical-Reformed sense but rather influential in their NT-Pauline scholarship, though many of their magnum opuses are still left untranslated in German). It still made for a rather pacey and tight reading if one skip the footnotes altogether, which I did after the first two chapters. If one has a rather masterful grasp over koine Greek, biblical Hebrew and theological German, this would make a rather succinct but comprehensive, single-volume Pauline theology (about 330 pages inclusive of long footnotes) that is much aligned with the Pauline theology in the Reformed tradition, speaking of which I am also digging into Ridderbos' Paul: An Outline of His Theology soon, that came out two years earlier from Dr Kim's dissertation and subsequently became a staple textbook in Reformed seminaries until today and I’m excited to see how this stacks up against Ridderbos’.