Abstract
The central claim of Professor Gorman’s new book is that “already in the first Christian century the apostle Paul wanted the communities he addressed not merely to believe the gospel but to become the gospel, and in so doing to participate in the very life and mission of God” (2). Writing at the intersection of Pauline studies, hermeneutics, and missiology (10), Gorman presents a “brief treatment of participatory mission, or missional participation” (11), “a theological interpretation of Paul’s letters within a missional framework” (14), with 2 Corinthians 5:21 the “theme text” of the book (8).
Chapter 1 shows that Paul’s understanding of participation in Christ involves both salvation (the benefit of God’s mission of liberation and reconciliation) and bearing witness to God’s mission by becoming a faithful embodiment of it. Chapter 2 explores the way in which Scripture, including Paul’s letters, can and must be read from a missional perspective. Chapter 3 examines 1 Thessalonians 1:3 and 5:8, showing that God, through Christ, by the Spirit, transforms people into a community of Godlike, Christlike faith, love, and hope, thus bearing witness to the Gospel by embodying the Gospel. Chapter 4 uses Philippians 2:6–11 to show that the community of believers is called to participate in the self-giving, life-giving mission of Jesus, the Son of God and the sovereign Lord. In chapters 5 and 6 Gorman surveys Paul’s language of peace and reconciliation and argues from Ephesians that sinners who have been reconciled to God through Christ are invited, indeed expected, to participate in God’s ongoing mission of making peace, understood in the sense of shalom. Chapter 7 mines Paul’s two letters to the Corinthian believers to show that Paul’s teaching on justification includes the deep concerns for justice that we find in the Old Testament. Chapter 8 explores “missional theosis” in Romans—”theosis” (lit. “divinization”) is a term that Gorman uses to refer to “transformative participation in the life and mission of God” (8n18)—concluding that, for Paul, the ongoing transformation of believers means that the local community of the redeemed is God’s covenant people. They are part of the new humanity that God is creating, “restored to the original glory for which it was created,” a glory that “will be finally realized only at the parousia” (295).
As far as the title is concerned, I doubt that Paul would ever say that he is “becoming” the Gospel: he preaches the Gospel of the crucified, risen Messiah Jesus, he calls on churches to live out the reality of the Gospel, and his suffering is the result of his being a missionary who is “in Christ,” but he himself is never the reason why God forgives sins as Jesus’ suffering and death is the reason for God forgiving sin. Gorman is mostly interested in theological questions, venturing into historical or practical dimensions only when it comes to contemporary examples of missional living. Gorman would certainly not dispute that Paul not only thought and wrote as a missionary but also lived and worked as a missionary. He includes some comments on Paul’s practice of faithfulness, love, and hope for the Thessalonian Christians (85–89). But the unity of missional theology and missionary practice in Paul’s ministry could have been analyzed much more extensively, for example, by a discussion of 2 Corinthians 11:23–29 and the evidence in the Book of Acts.
Gorman’s analyses are always stimulating, consistently focused on the work of God through Christ by the Spirit, emphasizing the necessary unity of believing and being, confessing Christ, and incarnating the reality of the Gospel in everyday life. The book should be required reading for biblical scholars, missiologists, missionaries, pastors, and students.