G. K. Beale. <i>Union with the Resurrected Christ: Eschatological New Creation and New Testament Biblical Theology</i>

If John Calvin is right, that “we see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ,” then few things are more worth contemplating than our union with Christ (Inst., II.xvi.19). G. K. Beale’s biblico-theological analysis of union with Christ—specifically, union with the risen and ascended Christ—richly illuminates the deep, intra-canonical resonances of how union with Christ is described in the New Testament. This work will prove enormously resourceful to pastors, preachers, and teachers by illuminating the matrix of Old Testament story lines that are integral to how union with Christ is described in the New Testament. Simultaneously, this work suffers as a contribution to historical and theological scholarship on union with Christ by its choice of conversation partners, overreliance on summaries or references to the author’s own prior scholarship, and due to an under-developed relationship assumed between exegesis and theology.Across numerous publications in the last few decades, Greg Beale has significantly influenced how evangelical scholars understand the New Testament use of the Old Testament, especially in influential biblical-theological accounts of themes such as idolatry, the temple, a handbook on the New Testament use of the Old, commentaries, and more. His most recent book, blurbed as a “magnum opus” by both Richard B. Gaffin Jr. and Robert Yarborough, respectively, has a clearly stated thesis: “Christ’s resurrection and ascension place him as the beginning of the eschatological fulfillment of the new-creational kingdom” (p. 1). Moreover, “through identification (or union) with the resurrected and ascended Christ . . . what is true of Christ in his end-time resurrection and ascension is true of believers in their union with his resurrection” (p. 2, italics original). At almost six hundred pages long, in-depth interaction with the whole of Beale’s argument across nineteen chapters well exceeds the possibilities of a short review. Since some degree of selectivity is required, rather than attempting to summarize the whole book, I want to draw attention to what is arguably the single greatest contribution of this book, before discussing three matters in need of further development.The single greatest strength of this book is that it offers a compelling case that union with the resurrected and ascended Christ must lie at the heart of a biblical-theological reading of the New Testament. Beale is at his best as he consistently describes union with the risen Christ as a multifaceted gem; some of these textures differ drastically from one another and seem to involve almost contradictory metaphors or concepts, but they are ultimately inseparable from one another and together constitute one precious and radiant reality. Beale begins each chapter with a visual diagram of a multifaceted diamond, clarifying which aspect he seeks to illuminate in each chapter, such as Christ becoming for us wisdom and righteousness and holiness from God, or being the eschatological temple, etc. While I am overall warmly sympathetic to Beale’s construal of union with Christ (especially on how forensic justification and transformational/renovative sanctification are distinct but inseparable benefits of being united with Christ the Benefactor), I also want to raise three questions about Beale’s project.First, while the book has an excellent, succinct, and eminently supportable thesis, rather than giving his readers sustained argumentation or evidentiary support, at many places the book heavily relies upon, or gestures toward, Beale’s prior publications. Now, it is appropriate for an often-published author to refer to his or her own prior publications, especially when cursorily treating a topic handled in greater depth elsewhere. But counting up references in the index, this book has well over 160 references to Beale’s prior work. In many places, every other page contains a footnote that says something like “this section is based for the most part on Beale, NTBT . . .” or “See Beale for analysis . . .” or “as summarized from sections of my NTBT” and similar expressions. The present reviewer is unsure how to evaluate the argumentation of such a book; desiring to be charitable, readers should appreciate that, to a large extent, this book represents an attempt by the author to build upon his prior New Testament Biblical Theology by further developing a theme only briefly touched upon in that prior work, namely, union with the risen Christ. Simultaneously, the relationship between these two books is puzzling. This is not quite a volume 2, a further sustained development along the first book’s trajectory; rather, this book involves so much summarization of the prior book that portions of this book are analogous to a digest of Beale’s prior scholarship. Differently, this is not a lay-accessible work that attempted to distill and popularize the earlier book and also develop a new theme. Instead, this book is to a large extent a summary of his earlier scholarship but still written in an academic register with originally coined words whose significance might not be self-evident to lay readers, such as the adjective “new creation-al eschatological kingdom.” Why complain about all of this? Beale’s self-citation is primarily used to support sweeping claims about the grand story line of the Bible—claims that are not incidental, but integral, to his central thesis. As someone familiar with the overwhelming majority of, if not the whole, of Beale’s publications, I have a number of sympathies with his overall construal of the grand story line of Scripture, and of his account of union with the resurrected and ascended Christ in this book. Yet, this book would have more persuasive power and could have been shorter if it merely referred readers once to his earlier work, before focusing only on his original contribution to the narrower topic of union with the risen and ascended Christ.Second, while a strength of this book is that Beale provides evangelicals a reading of the Bible that rightly so critiques classical and progressive dispensationalism, his own covenantal reading of Scripture does not adequately address the problems of supersessionism. There are varying kinds or degrees of supersessionism, such as David Novak’s comparison between “hard” and “soft” supersessionism; moreover, some degree of supersessionism is probably unavoidable, even within the OT itself, since Jer 31:32 seems to envision some kind of supersessionistic future. But Beale makes some provocative claims while declining to discuss that concern altogether, such as where he writes that “as true Israel and a latter-day Moses, Jesus is the micro-Israel who has replaced the macro-national Israel,” which has a footnote that paraphrases: “to put it another way, Jesus is the continuation of the faithful remnant among the unfaithful majority of Israel” (p. 111, italics mine). Given the enormous attention in the past fifty years of New Testament scholarship devoted to the history of Christian anti-Judaism, it is surprising to find replacement language used without qualification or nuance in this book. On a different, but related note, it is surprising that the bibliography of this book includes few publications from the twenty-first century, apart from a few works by evangelical scholars. To be clear, the present reviewer is under no delusions that the latest is always greatest; I appreciate C. S. Lewis’s critique of “chronological snobbery.” But it is surprising that Beale’s chosen conversation partners and influences throughout are largely neither (1) reception-historical dialogue or theological retrieval of the Great Tradition of Christian theological interpreters nor (2) the latest critical scholarship on the New Testament. Beale interacts often with the arguments Dunn and Wright advanced in the 1980s and 1990s about justification in Paul, and for the most part my sympathies lie with Beale’s positions, which are adjacent to the magisterial reformers and historic Protestant confessions. But Beale simply declines to interact with the most salient developments in recent scholarship over the last few decades, such as Apocalyptic readings of Paul and readings of Paul within Judaism. Whether Paula Fredriksen, Matthew Thiessen, Anders Runesson, John Barclay, and others offer a reading of the New Testament that is regarded as helpful or unhelpful, interaction with their work would have, at the very least, been a generative conversation partner necessitating more careful speech about Israel and Jews.Finally, Beale claims that “the attempt in this book has been to discuss union with the resurrected Christ. As far as I am aware, no other studies have focused exclusively on union with connection to Christ’s resurrection, and then how union with each facet of Christ’s resurrected status is the origin or many NT doctrines and concepts, as we have seen in this book” (p. 513). Has there indeed been a gap in prior scholarship on union with the risen Christ? Beale’s sense that prior studies have been inattentive to Christ’s risen status is a bit surprising; there has been an ocean of scholarship not only on the New Testament but on union with Christ in particular in recent decades, and Christ’s resurrected status has been integral to this conversation. The work of scholars such as Constantine Campbell, Michael Gorman, Susan Eastman, and Grant Macaskill are thus interacted with only minimally or not at all; a notable omission is Andrew Boakye’s 2017 Death and Life: Resurrection, Restoration, and Rectification in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. Differently, love it or hate it, readings of participation in Christ as theosis/deification in the New Testament have been an important part of scholarship in the last few decades and it receives no attention in this book, to my knowledge. But arguably the most significant oversight in Beale’s account of union with the risen and ascended Christ across the entire New Testament is his inattention to the reception history of this theme from premodern theological interpreters. For instance, Beale concludes his book by noting how John Calvin described the Holy Spirit as the bond that unites us with the risen Christ—but what metaphysics underwrite Calvin’s account? The discipline of “biblical theology” indeed contributes some genuine insights about union with Christ by tracing its organic unfolding across the canon of Holy Scripture. But can our understanding of union with Christ become distorted if we pursue a biblico-theological or biblical studies–style approach to this topic alone, abstracted from what John Webster termed “biblical reasoning,” that work of sanctified intelligence in the society of the saints, when a theological interpreter exhibits this theme as part of a broader dogmatic program of God’s immanent life as Trinity, and all else in relation to God? Again, Beale’s account of union with the Christ represents a genuinely insightful illumination of the inner-canonical resonances of union with Christ that is highly attuned to how virtually every aspect of union with Christ emerges from the grand story line of the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments, especially on the theme of the temple. But surely there is more to understanding union with the risen Christ than detecting how the New Testament authors are using the Old Testament; what metaphysic informs or is required by the New Testament’s account of union with the resurrected Christ? Outside of conservative reformed evangelicalism, biblical theology has fallen on hard times in the broader guild. Whether he is right or wrong, theologians such as Hans Boersma criticize classical Protestant readings of Scripture for presupposing a nominalist ontology and a biblicistic historicism. The tradition of biblical theology Beale is an heir of, which descends from Geerhardus Vos and Herman Ridderbos and Richard Gaffin, is arguably both compatible with and a complement to the sacramental hermeneutics of the church fathers and the metaphysical concerns of classical theism, but one would not realize that from this volume. So, while Beale’s chapters are helpful insofar as they emphasize that Christ became for us wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption (1 Cor 1:30), how can “righteousness” be predicated both of creature and the Creator—how can something that is true of Christ become true of those united with him by the Spirit? Whether right or wrong, interpreters from Gregory of Nyssa to Thomas Aquinas thought about this by means of the doctrine of divine simplicity and an analogy both of being and of theological language, all of which has its center in the God-man, the Incarnate Word, in whom alone creatures can share in the Creator’s divine perfections. What is the contribution of a biblico-theological reading of the New Testament for understanding how those and other categories of classical trinitarianism and Christology relate to biblical texts? I hope that others will take up these and related questions in conversation with Beale’s work, which is a rich exposition of union with the risen Christ within the parameters of a reformed evangelical approach to biblical theology.