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"What is more, this radical redefinition of the battle (en kamp/strid mot Synd och Död och inte blott vanliga eller handgripliga människor) is exactly cognate with two key moves in Paul's whole theology. First, if the problem has been redefined in terms, not of pagan oppression of righteous Jews, but of a cosmic-scale struggle between the creator God and the parasitic forces of evil, and ultimately death itself, it removes from the pagan world and its inhabitants the slur of being automatically 'wrong' or 'evil', and allows them to be human again. Yes, they are idolators; yes, they are sinful; yes, they are full of wicked thoughts and deeds; but they are human, called to reflect God's image, loved by their creator That is why there can be a gentile mission in the first place. Second, if pagans are relieved of being automatically evil, Jews are relieved of being automatically good. In other words, if the battle is no longer 'the good Jews' against 'the wicked pagans', but a matter of God's victory in the Messiah over forces of evil that have enslaved the whole world, Paul can admit that even the best of good Jews (in other words, modesty permitting, hos own former self) were actually, in the last analysis, in the same boat as the pagans they were intending to overcome. They, too, were 'in Adam', and needed to join the Messiah in his crucifixion, so that they too could come to share in his resurrection. The shifting of the battle-symbol from an ethnic to a cosmic battle thus enabled Paul to open the way both for the gentile mission (not that the gentiles were therefore 'all right really', but that they were not 'automatically excluded') and for the full critique of the Jewish people, his own self included, such as we find not least in Romans. This redefinition of the battle thus indicates, not that Paul was really a dualist, but that he really was not. The whole point of the battle as he now describes it is that it is rooted in the desire and firm intention of the creator God to re-establish his loving, saving sovereignty over the whole of his creation. Death (and its henchman, Sin) are rebels, intruders, destroyers of his good creation. This battle is a battle within creational monotheism."" (Paul and the Faithfulness of God band I, s. 371f).

 

"But it doesn't stop there. When Paul thought of humans worshipping the regular gods of the ancient orld, and being thereby dehumanized, he thought also of the breathtaking alternative: that, instead of invoking Bacchus or Aphrodite, and getting high on drink or sex, or instead of invoking Mars or Mammon, and concentrating on making war or money, it was possible to invoke the spirit of the living God and be remade in his likeness, to become a renewed, freshly image-bearing human being. [...]. [Y]es, worshipping the divine is a good thing to do and yes you really do become like what you worship. But rather than having your character shaped by this or that pagan god or godess, why not worship and invoke the creator God in whose image you are made, and find your character, your life, transformed and reshaped by his spirit? [...]. [W]hat Paul envisaged was a radical transformaton of 'nature' itself – human nature, and the entire cosmos – by the powerful indwelling of the divine spirit." (s. 378)

 

"In other words, without the resurrection, Jesus of Nazareth goes down simply as another disastrous would-be hero. Another failed Messiah. A great martyr, perhaps; but not the bringer of the new age. If he is not raised, new creation has not begin.

With Jesus' resurrection, however, Paul, like all other early Christians actually known to us, believed that all this had now happened.