There has been something of an intramural debate*–over the past Century and a half–concerning Paul’s use of the sa??/p?e?µa (i.e. flesh/Spirit) distinction in relation to the Person and work of Christ in Romans 1:3-4. The old school, represented by Warfield, Hodge, Cranfield et al, held that Paul was merely referring to the two natures of Christ when he declared that He was “the seed of David according to the flesh” and “declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of Holiness through the resurrection of the dead.” Warfield explained his understanding of these verses when he wrote:
This is fundamentally, then, how Paul preached Christ – as the Son of God in this supereminent sense, and therefore our divine Lord on whom we absolutely depend and to whom we owe absolute obedience. But this was not all that he was accustomed to preach concerning Christ. Paul preached the historical Jesus as well as the eternal Son of God. And between these two designations – Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ – he inserts two clauses which tell us how he preached the historical Jesus. All that he taught about Christ was thrown up against the background of His deity: He is the Son of God, our Lord. But who is this that is thus so fervently declared to be the Son of God and our Lord? It is in the two clauses which are now to occupy our attention that Paul tells us.
If we reduce what he tells us to its lowest terms it amounts just to this: Paul preached the historical Christ as the promised Messiah and as the very Son of God. But he declares Christ to be the promised Messiah and the very Son of God in language so pregnant, so packed with implications, as to carry us into the heart of the great problem of the two-natured person of Christ. The exact terms in which he describes Christ as the promised Messiah and the very Son of God are these: “Who became of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was marked out as the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead.” This in brief is the account which Paul gives of the historical Christ whom he preached.
Of course there is a temporal succession suggested in the declarations of the two clauses. They so far give us not only a description of the historical Christ, but the life-history of the Christ that Paul preached. Jesus Christ became of the seed of David at His birth and by His birth. He was marked out as the Son of God in power only at His resurrection and by His resurrection. But it was not to indicate this temporal succession that Paul sets the two declarations side by side. It emerges merely as the incidental, or we may say even the accidental, result of their collocation. The relation in which Paul sets the two declarations to one another is a logical rather than a temporal one: it is the relation of climax. His purpose is to exalt Jesus Christ. He wishes to say the great things about Him. And the two greatest things he has to say about Him in His historical manifestation are these – that He became of the seed of David according to the flesh, that He was marked out as the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead.
In contrast to Warfield’s ontological view, Geerhardus Vos explained the redemptive-historical view in the following way:
The analogy, and its bearing upon our problem become most clear when the passage, Rom. 1.3-4, is somewhat closely analyzed. Here we read that Jesus was ???s?e?t?? ???? ?e?? e? d??aµe? ?ata p?e?µa a???s???? e? a?astase?? ?e????. The clause stands in parallelism to the one in vs. 3: ?e??µe??? e? spe?µat?? daß?d ?ata sa??a. It will be noticed that the following members correspond to each other in the two clauses: ?e??µe???————???s?e??; ?ata sa??a————?ata p?e?µa a???s????; e? spe?µat?? daß?d————e? a?astase?? ?e????. The reference is not to two coexisting states in the make-up of the Savior, but two successive stages in his life. There was first ?e?es?a? ?ata sa??a, then a ???s???a? ?ata p?e?µa. The two prepositional phrases have adverbial force, yet so as to throw emphasis on the result no less than on the initial act: He became, as to his sarkic (fleshly) existence, and He was “of the seed of David.” The ???s???a? Paul refers to is not an abstract determination, but an effectual installation, with bestowal of the requisite energy pertaining to the new state. Paul seems to avoid the repetition of ?e??µe???, not so much for stylistic reasons, but because it might have suggested, even before the reading of the sentence to the end could correct this, that at the resurrection the sonship of Christ, as such, first originated, whereas his actual meaning is that the sonship ?ata d??aµ?? there began to enter into operation. By the twofold ?ata the manner of each state of existence is contrasted, by the twofold e? the sphere of origin of each. As to the one He was “from the seed of David,” as to the other He was “out of resurrection from the dead.” The resurrection (both of Jesus and believers) is therefore according to Paul the entering upon a new phase of sonship characterized by the possession and exercise of unique supernatural power. That this should apply to Christ’s body alone, or to the exertion by Chris of somatic power on the bodies of believers alone, while not here expressly denied, is in itself highly implausible.
The above interpretation does not, of course, imply that Paul denied the supernatural conception of Jesus by the Spirit. Precisely because speaking of the pneuma-state in the absolute eschatological sense, he could disregard here the previous Spirit-birth and the Spirit-endowment at the baptism.2
Following Vos’ exegesis, the late John Murray also held that Romans 1:3-4 was teaching two progressive stages in the redemptive-historical experience of Jesus. He helpfully explained what the shift in the two stages of experience meant in the life of Jesus–and for believers–when he wrote:
Just as “according to the flesh” in verse 3 defines the phase which came to be through being born of the seed of David, so “according to the Spirit of holiness” characterizes the phase which came to be through the resurrection. And when we ask what that new phase was upon which the Son of God entered by his resurrection, there is copious New Testament allusion and elucidation (cf. Acts 2:36; Eph. 1:20–23; Phil. 2:9–11; 1 Pet. 3:21, 22). By his resurrection and ascension the Son of God incarnate entered upon a new phase of sovereignty and was endowed with new power correspondent with and unto the exercise of the mediatorial lordship which he executes as head over all things to his body, the church. It is in this same resurrection context and with allusion to Christ’s resurrection endowment that the apostle says, “The last Adam was made life-giving Spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45). And it is to this that he refers elsewhere when he says, “The Lord is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17). “Lord” in this instance, as frequently in Paul, is the Lord Christ. The only conclusion is that Christ is now by reason of the resurrection so endowed with and in control of the Holy Spirit that, without any confusion of the distinct persons, Christ is identified with the Spirit and is called “the Lord of the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). Thus, when we come back to the expression “according to the Spirit of holiness”, our inference is that it refers to that stage of pneumatic endowment upon which Jesus entered through his resurrection. The text, furthermore, expressly relates “Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness” with “the resurrection from the dead” and the appointment can be none other than that which came to be by the resurrection. The thought of verse 4 would then be that the lordship in which he was instated by the resurrection is one all-pervasively conditioned by pneumatic powers. The relative weakness of his pre-resurrection state, reflected on in verse 3, is contrasted with the triumphant power exhibited in his post-resurrection lordship. What is contrasted is not a phase in which Jesus is not the Son of God and another in which he is. He is the incarnate Son of God in both states, humiliation and exaltation, and to regard him as the Son of God in both states belongs to the essence of Paul’s gospel as the gospel of God. But the pre-resurrection and post-resurrection states are compared and contrasted, and the contrast hinges on the investiture with power by which the latter is characterized.3
John Skilton, in his outstanding 1996 WTJ article “A Glance At Some Old Problems in First Peter,” appealed to the redemptive-historical take on Romans 1:3-4 for arriving at a conclusion on the difficult exegesis of 1 Peter 3:18-20 :
Readers of the NT have been puzzled at times by statements that seem to indicate that our Lord has become something that he already had been before. For example, in Matt 28:18, Jesus says: “All power has been given unto me in heaven and on earth.” The reader asks, “Did he not have all power previously?” In Acts 2:36, Peter says: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made that same Jesus whom you have crucified both Lord and Christ.” One inquires, “Was not Jesus both Lord and Christ already?” Other verses raise similar questions. The answer to these questions will be found in a right understanding of 1 Pet 3:18. At the close of that verse Peter writes:?a?at??e?? µ?? sa??? ???p????e?? d? p?e?µat?. Here we have a balanced structure that contributes substantially to the interpretation. For example, in their tight parallelism we expect both sa??? and p?e?µat? to be used in the same way. Mounce claims that the translation in the NIV, “in the body…by the Spirit,” has two faults:
First, the words “body” and “spirit” are parallel and should be translated in the same manner (both are in the dative case and the NIV’s “in the body…but…by the Spirit” is misleading). Second, the capital S on “Spirit” interprets the word to mean the Holy Spirit. In other words the clause is made to say that Jesus died physically but was resurrected by the Holy Spirit. While this theology is certainly orthodox, it is not what the text actually says. Flesh and spirit represent two spheres of existence or two successive conditions of Christ’s human nature…
…Marked off in 1 Pet 3:18, as in Rom 1:3–4, would be two successive stages in our Lord’s messianic work. These different stages are reflected also in such verses as Matt 28:18 and Acts 2:36, which were mentioned earlier. The second stage, introduced by the resurrection, was “one all-pervasively conditioned by pneumatic powers.” The p?e?µat? in 1 Pet 3:18 accordingly refers not only to the resurrection, but also to the state of power that followed it.4
While Warfield’s position falls entirely within the realm of the analogy of Scripture and analogy of faith, it does not do full justice to the exegetical construct of Romans 1:3-4. Much more satisfying is the explanation provided by Vos, Murray, Skilton, Gaffin et al. Understanding the sa??/p?e?µa (i.e. flesh/Spirit) distinction in redemptive history helps us understand more of what we have as believers living in the new age (i.e. the age of the Spirit).
1. B. B. Warfield, “The Christ That Paul Preached,” in The Person and Work of Christ (ed. Samuel G. Craig; Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1950), 73-90.
2. Geerhards Vos The Pauline Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1961) n. 10 pp. 155-156. For a continued treatment of this passage see Vos’ chapter, “The Eschatological Aspect of the Pauline Concept of the Spirit” in the Princeton Seminary Biblical and Theological Studies p. 228ff.
3. John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964) 6.
4. John H. Skilton, ”A Glance At Some Old Problems in First Peter,” (Westminster Theological Journal 58:1 (Spr 96) p. 6
*See Lee Irons 10 posts defending Warfield’s position.
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