by Nigel Turner
Much has been written about the theology of prepositions, which will be regarded as suspect in these days. Nevertheless, the student of biblical Greek grammar must acknowledge a peculiar usage of the preposition en which is theologically important. It is neither the instrumental en (“by” or “with”), which increased its vogue in the post-classical language, nor is it simply the local meaning of “in.” It is mystical, if that would be understood not as metaphorical or spiritual, but as secret and invisible. To be “in Christ” is not to be taken in a local sense, which is crude and meaningless, but neither is it a metaphor. It is what certain theologians have termed “Christification,” a sharing of the physis or nature of Christ—an adumbration of what in later theology was known as the theosis or deification of human nature, having as its ultimate goal the consummation which is described by St. Irenaeus as anakephalaiōsis, the “recapitulation” of all men in Christ, adopting the verb used in Eph. 1:10.
This is the full flower of which the seed alone may have been in the mind of St. Paul and of the author of the phrase, “partakers of the divine nature” (II Pet. 1:4). However, it is probably not fortuitous that certain features of St. Paul’s style point in this direction. Designedly, he chose substantives rather than verbs or adjectives to describe Christ’s relationship with those who are en Christo, and delicately turned away from activity to existence, his idiom subconsciously following his theology. What was once activity and growth and movement has now become identification. Verb and adjective cease to be appropriate, supplanted by the substantive idiom. Christ no longer gives life. He is Life (Col. 3:4). He does not sanctify or redeem. He is sanctification and redemption. Neither is he sanctifying, living, or redeeming; these attributive qualities are rejected in favour of equivalent substantives. He does not make us wise, but is to us wisdom. The unusual and unidiomatic parade of substantives is consistent with St. Paul’s doctrine of the union and indwelling of the believer. Identification renders activity and attribution redundant, for they would represent a relationship between separate entities. Christ and the believer, like Christ and the Father, are one—a substantive whole. Predication alone is feasible and a new idiom is demanded where “Christification” has taken place—the predication of an abstract noun to a personal name.
It is not only Pauline Christianity that used the idiom. St. John refrained from saying that God is loving, preferring the mysterious declaration that “God is love.”
The mystical union with Christ, described as en Christo, is also explained in complementary terms as Christ or the Spirit existing in the believer. It is a reciprocal indwelling. “You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Rom. 8:9). The idea of mutual indwelling is real enough to those who actually live inside this new sphere of spiritual existence. It was real enough to St. Paul and many of his readers. Indeed, it is difficult to find any other way of explaining the en which occurs in the first Epistle of St. John. Men walk in either of two spheres: in darkness, lies and hate, on the one hand, or in light, truth and love on the other. God’s Word is in us, his love is perfected in us, and we in our turn abide in God, as well as he in us. Pauline theologians, as notable as Père L. Cerfaux, have argued that St. Paul intended nothing mystical by the en-formula, and that the preposition expresses no more than simply a faith-connection with Christ, for all that we share in is no more or less than the life of Christ through faith. There is no mutual indwelling, and anything spatial about the term, “in Christ,” is dismissed as a vague and pantheistic mysticism in which Christ is reduced from a person into the status of a spirit or “mana.” Père Cerfaux for instance argued that the phrase, “to put on Christ,” is only a metaphor, not to be understood realistically; it is the equivalent of the phrase, “to be like Christ.” Theology apart, I would feel uneasy about such an interpretation of the grammar. It does scant justice to the rich precision of Pauline syntax, and, from a theological standpoint, one fears that this is not the first time in Christian history that mysticism has been too easily equated with pantheism.
The debate whether St. Paul’s experiences are those of the mystic is a fruitless excursion into terminology. Denials that they amount to mysticism have to be qualified in the next breath in a way that makes the previous denial simply academic. According to Dr. Martin Dibelius, for instance, “We can feel the passionate ardour of the wonderful new life when he testifies, ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation’.” The fact that St. Paul can say of every true believer (for instance, Andronicus and Junias) that he is “in Christ,” does nothing to diminish the mysticism, for it is not the esoteric kind. It is Christian, and the distinction between so-called mystics and ordinary Christians is unreal. In that sense St. Paul is never “on the path of mysticism,” but the experience of being “in Christ” must not be under-rated simply because he does not use the “pagan” word apotheosis. He repeats essentially what the “pagan” word means and accepts it for Christ. Neither does he use the word Logos of Christ, and yet St. John has no scruples. The name matters not, but man is being transformed into God’s image. When St. Paul claims no longer to “live” independently, but that Christ lives in him (Gal. 2:20), this is strangely like what the accredited mystic asserts when he becomes God and God is identified with him.
Attempts to explain this en as having merely an instrumental meaning (“by” or “with”) should be resisted, for the predominant meaning is still “in,” “within,” “in the sphere of,” at this period. In a paper on the preposition en, I set out its basic spatial meaning and proffered a warning against too flexible an interpretation of the passages. Sometimes, where at first sight it seems not possible that en can mean “in,” a closer look and deeper insight into the primitive Christian viewpoint brings awareness that this is more than the exceptional instrumental en. An example would be John 13:35. The best known translation, “if ye have love one to another,” assumes that en means “to,” not “in.” But there is no reason at all why the Greek, which is en allēlois, should not be construed, “if you have love among one another,” for the sphere “in” which the love is exercised is Christ’s redeemed community. The tendency to give to en so little of its primary force, without reckoning with the mystical sense of “within,” is unfortunate. By way of baptism, a Christian comes into the new atmosphere which is the Body of Christ and ceases to be “in” darkness or “in” the flesh. That being so, St. Paul described himself in Eph. 4:1 as “the prisoner in the Lord,” and not “the prisoner of the Lord” (A.V.). He lived in Christ, in hope, in consecration, in peace. They are spheres or atmospheres, air, which the Christian breathes. No one, having examined I Thess. 4:7, would charge St. Paul with anything short of precision in his use of prepositions where the finer points of theology are at stake. In the same sentence he distinguished epi from en, but, bluntly insensitive, as often, King James’ bishops failed to make the same sort of distinction in English. It is easy to make it: “God has not called us to uncleanness, but his call is addressed to us in our state of sanctification.” The call to believe, too, comes to us in this same sphere of Christian sanctification and redemption. Adolf Deissmann, grammarian and theologian, made it clear a long time age in his Die N.T. Formel “in Christo Jesu” (1892); he showed that the verb, “to believe,” when followed by the pre-position en, means neither to believe in a person nor to believe a person; where that is demanded by the context the verb is always followed either by different prepositions (i.e. eis or epi) or by a simple dative. When the verb is followed by en, a new situation is in mind, and I suggest that it is the mystical conception of Christification once again. We do not therefore “believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15), nor does “everyone who believes in him” have eternal life (John 3:15). What we ought to read sounds revolutionary: “In this gospel dispensation, you must repent and believe”; and “every believer whose life is hid in Christ possesses eternal life.”
These highly mystical phrases, “in Christ,” and “in the Lord,” occur as many as forty-two times in two epistles of St. Paul. But, in addition, it was felt that Christian experience demanded several others of the same kind, such as: “in the Truth,” “in the Spirit,” “in the Name.”
Interchangeable with the “in”-formula in this mystical sense is a characteristically Pauline genitive construction. He spoke of “all the churches of Christ” (Rom. 16:16) in the same manner as elsewhere he refers to “the churches in Christ Jesus” (I Thess. 2:14, Gal. 1:22). It is doubtful whether any difference was intended by such an obvious parallel but the construction in St. Paul’s epistles deserves a careful interpretation. The syntax volume of Moulton’s Grammar gives further examples of the “mystical” genitive: II Thess. 3:5 “steadfast loyalty in the Body of Christ” (not “the patience of Christ”), Rom. 3:22–26 “faith exercised within the Body of Christ.” The controversial phrase, “the faith of Jesus Christ,” is an instance where careful interpretation of the genitive proves to be rewarding; we have already found that it was difficult to comprehend it within the limits of either the subjective or objective genitive exclusively, and suggested that it shared in the qualities of both. This may be the occasion to raise the question whether it may not also be an instance of St. Paul’s “mystical” genitive. That is to say, it is not merely subjective, objective, nor even both. It may be one of those characteristically Pauline genitives.
Nigel Turner, Grammatical Insights into the New Testament. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1966), 118–122.