In Part 4 of my lecture “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”: Paul, the Kingdom, and Living between the Times, I continue to explore the plight of humanity in bondage.  Standing behind the fallen principalities and powers are the cosmic slaveholders Sin and Death.  Under the reign of Sin and Death, the powers often compete with one another seeking to enlist human beings and demanding that they sacrifice themselves and one another for the sake of ensuring the survival of the principality.  Human beings are taken in by the various deceptive tactics of the powers and find themselves developing a type of perverse love or allegiance for the very forces that seek to hold them in bondage.  For human beings in such a predicament, help can only come into the system from above.  This is what God has done in sending “his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children” (Gal. 4:4-5 NRSV).  The latter section of this segment explores the person and work of Christ through integrating recent scholarly debates surrounding the Pauline phrase “pistis Christou” with Irenaeus’ doctrine of recapitulation and David Fitch’s emphasis upon “faithful presence.”

Part 4 – The Injection of Faithfulness into the Reign of Sin and Death