Confessing Evangelical

I loved this point made by NT Wright in his essay, "One God, One Lord, One People", where he discusses what a verse that he describes as "one of Paul's most remarkable Christological formulations", 1 Corinthians 8:6:

...yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

Wright points out the parallel between this verse and the Jewish Shema, which "was already, at this stage of Judaism, in widespread use as the Jewish daily prayer".

The Shema reads:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One

Paul's formulation is then (using Wright's translation, but altering the indenting slightly to make the parallel clearer):

But for us:

One God

the father,


from whom are all things and we to him

and one Lord

Jesus the Messiah,


through whom are all things and through whom are we.

In other words, as Wright puts it:

In what is surely one of the most striking Christological formulations ever written in any century, Paul takes an argument which is about monotheism, and takes the Jewish formula which is the most basic expression of Jewish monotheism, and places Jesus at the heart of it.

Paul ... has glossed "God" with "the Father," and "Lord" with "Jesus Christ," adding in each case an explanatory phrase: "God" is the Father, "from whom are all things and we to him," and the "Lord" is Jesus the Messiah, "through whom are all things and we through him."

This is significant because it means that "Paul has placed Jesus within an explicit statement, drawn from the Old Testament's best known monotheistic text, of the doctrine that Israel's God is the one and only God, the creator of the world".

In other words, Paul manages to accomplish two purposes simultaneously: first, he explains Jesus in terms of Jewish monotheism: Jesus is God; He is that God of whom Israel had confessed that "the Lord our God, the Lord is one". And second, he redefines Jewish monotheism in terms of Jesus, so that Israel's God is shown to be the God who has come in the Person of Jesus Christ: so that we can say, with Luther, "I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ".