Spirituality According to Paul: Imitating the Apostle of Christ

Reeves, Rodney. Spirituality According to Paul: Imitating the Apostle of Christ. Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2011. What would it look like for a person to take Paul at his word and imitate him, just as he implored his converts to do (1 Cor 11:1; 1 Thess. 1:6)? In Spirituality According to Paul, Rodney Reeves sets out to do just this, describing the various ways in which Paul incarnated the Gospel of Jesus Christ in his daily life. Although the focus of the book is on Paul, the reader also gets an insightful glance into what it has meant for Reeves to follow Paul’s (and thereby Christ’s) example. The pages are full of often moving anecdotes from Reeves’ personal experiences in ministry of pain, suffering, and joy. Alongside of the flesh and blood examples the author provides, the reader also receives stimulating discussions on Pauline theology as well as illuminating pictures into Paul’s historical context, which offer helpful ways of understanding Paul’s life and theology as documented in the New Testament. Moreover, the author is able to venture into and allude to the scholarly discussions on Pauline theology without becoming bogged down and sidetracked in the interminable theological and historical debates by offering clear and concise positions to some of the nettlesome questions in Pauline theology. The combination of personal stories and theological insights allow the author to deliver incisive critiques against some of the unbiblical aspects of contemporary Christianity, such as our persistent belief that God is not at work in weakness and the ways in which we manipulate Paul into being a champion of our political agendas when he would have brought a much more nuanced position to the table. Nevertheless, the work seems to give a fair, if not provocative, picture of how Paul followed Jesus. The only aspect that seems underdeveloped is Paul’s own prayer life, which is surprisingly absent from a book entitled in such a way as to suggest that Paul’s spirituality would be paramount in the discussion. Though the author talks about how Paul asked his readers to pray for him, the book fails to engage Paul’s rich and meaningful prayers on behalf of his churches to the degree that they have been recorded in the pages of the New Testament. Consequently, the book seems more of a practical application of Pauline theology than an exploration focused solely on Paul’s spirituality. The book is segmented into three sections that correspond to the essential elements of Paul’s proclamation of Christ, namely, the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Christ. In the first section devoted to living out (or should I say dying) the crucifixion of Christ, the author shows how the Gospel entails loss, which brings death to our Promethean identities and the loss of gratification in our earthly pleasures. In this section the author also describes the way in which the Gospel calls followers of Jesus to self-denial, whether this self-denial entails forgoing sumptuous food or illegitimate sexual gratifications. Moreover, in contrast to a culture that values success and achievement, the author challenges his readers to embrace the hardships and pain of life, not as an indication of one’s failure, but as an indication that one is in fact following the cruciform kind of life shown in the Gospel. The entire section is rounded off with a discussion of the law’s relationship with the believer, wherein the author contends that Christians have been emancipated from the law’s demands now that the Spirit has come, delivering the Abrahamic blessings upon the Gentiles apart from the law. Thus, while being crucified with Christ calls us to take up our own cross, it also brings freedom from the law’s demands. The second section focuses on the implications of Christ’s burial. Here the believer’s baptism with Christ into his death is explored, noting particularly how this necessitates the corporate nature of Christianity. In this section, the author contends that being baptized into Christ means that believers are united into a single entity, which should alter the human penchant for factionalism along various lines. The church is to be one place where diverse groups meld into one, a place where each individual puts aside his or her interest for the benefit of others. The third section addresses the final part of Paul’s proclamation of Christ, being raised with him. Believing that the resurrection of Christ and the Spirit’s arrival signaled the denouement of the old age and the inauguration of the new, Paul thought that believers were to be living as new creations and members of the age to come. Moreover, the resurrection of Christ shapes Christian hope in a particular direction. By being in the Second Adam, believers share in a hope that they will partake of Christ’s victory over death. It is precisely this outlook, namely, that Christ has conquered death, which allows believers to embrace pain and death in their current experience, knowing that God’s glorious destiny will one day engulf the pain and misery one faces in this life. Furthermore, the resurrection of Christ shows that the insidious powers of evil have been vanquished as well. While modern society blithely ignores the existence of demonic forces in the world, the author shows how this was quite different for life in the first century. The cities where Paul proclaimed the Gospel lived with the ominous awareness that evil powers were active in their world. The resurrection showed that these powers too had been vitiated, freeing believers from fear of such forces. In the end, the book succeeds in articulating what it would mean for us, as Christ followers in the twenty-first century, to live out Paul’s theology in a robust and compelling way with its myriad of contemporary examples. Moreover, it delivers a potent contribution to contemporary Christian spirituality by reminding the readers that spirituality is not simply a set of practices or regimens; it means embodying the Gospel in every recess of one’s life. As a result, anyone looking for a depiction of what following Paul would practically look like in our current world will find this book worth his or her time. Benjamin J. Burkholder This review is published in Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 5, 2 (2012): 295-7.