GORDON FEE: Paul’s Letter to the Philippians

Why Fee shouldn’t have written a commentary on Philippians

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When C. S. Lewis lost his wife he discovered his grand-sounding reasoning in The Problem of Pain was of no help. The calm assurance with which he helped so many others deal with their grief turned out to be useless when he actually encountered it himself. It doesn’t matter how lucid a thinker a person is or how skilled a writer: there is no way to imagine what something is like purely through intellectual exercise.

The problem with a seminary professor writing a commentary for scholars and teachers is that it feeds a closed loop of people who attempt to understand Paul through artificial means. John LeCarre writes good spy novels because he was a spy. Scott Turrow writes good legal thrillers because he is an attorney. Heart of Darkness is a masterpiece because Joseph Conrad actually made the trip, lived the terror, and returned a changed man. (Nostromo is not a masterpiece because Conrad only visited the place to get the names and scenes right.)

The New Testament was written by people who actually lived it. Someone who has never done anything like what Paul did has no chance of understanding or explaining Paul. When Paul describes his hardships and writes letters from the midst of those difficulties, there is no way a professor can claim expertise just because he has spent years learning Greek and reading other commentaries on the subject. Two experts agreeing on something does not double the credibility of those experts. It simply means that two people who know very little about a subject agree with each other.

There would be nothing wrong with Gordon Fee teaching at Regent and writing books if the Christian higher education system in general weren’t so overwhelmingly populated with people distanced from the work. But we have a huge problem with such an out-of-balance intelligentsia in the Christian church. There must be representation from people who have actually lived like Paul. When Fee is congratulated by his peers it is hollow praise because the field is monopolized with like-minded people. Why not ask people who have given it all up what they think about Fee’s views on Philippians 2? What if he finds these people consider his book trite, that his insights are of little value to doing the work of God? My hunch is that he would discover, just like C. S. Lewis, that speculation from a distance, no matter how intelligent the observer, is nothing but fantasy. Fee reads like J.R.R. Tolkein: a marvelous piece of literature from a tremendous intellect, but in the end is nothing but fanciful creations, shallow characters, and attempted pathos that comes off flat.

If a medical university had only one or two professors who had actually practiced medicine they would be considered a joke. Everyone knows that academics go only so far, that unless the book learning is applied in real life there is no way to test it and improve upon it. In every field of study—engineering, architecture, psychology, medicine, computer science, nursing, chemistry, agriculture, music, sports, politics, the military—the vast majority of the teachers have proven themselves in the workplace. Only in the religious world are professors hired proving themselves first.

Can you imagine instructors at the Navy’s Top Gun school who have never actually flown in combat? How do you confidently show people how to survive when you’ve done nothing but fly simulators? Yet in Christ’s Top Gun school most of the instructors have only degrees; no medals. They’ve never been in combat, don’t understand it, and more than that: want nothing to do with it.

So how does a person become a Top Gun for Christ? Poorly. You read the books. You know these people are the best of the best, so they can’t be wrong. But it’s not working. Something must be wrong. With me. You crash a lot, make huge mistakes.

Bible schools and seminaries are sterile institutions that hire people to peer at the work of God from a distance and attempt to explain Christ through a telescope. Generation after generation, the teaching is contrived from purely intellectual exercise, never being tested, never being lived out. And when the leaders treat the Christian life as an intellectual exercise, what can the rest of the people do but follow suit? The result is that most Christians spend their lives thinking rather than doing.

A seminary professor explaining away Jesus’ command in Luke 12 to sell our possessions is silliness. They invariably tell us only why we don’t have to do it. In fact, there is no commentary that treats Luke 12 to 16 with any degree of integrity. It is inevitably high-sounding exegesis that does nothing but reveal their own determination to never actually do it. I have never read a decent explanation of what Paul means in Romans 8.17 when he says, “if we suffer with Christ.” And all commentaries on Philippians are an embarrassment.

Wouldn’t it be nice if just one Bible school that had a course called, “Just do it”? Why is it that no hermeneutic includes the necessity of doing it?

Fee should do it. It would do him a world of good to experience just this one part of Paul’s life: What happens when a person who is considered a scholar discards it all and takes up a ministry where he is criticized, misunderstood, and disregarded? God is greatly pleased when people voluntarily sacrifice the one thing they hold most dear. My hunch is that the most difficult sacrifice Fee could make would be the esteem he gets from his peers and readers.

Could we even begin to imagine the thrill of being able to go back in time to interview Paul? If we could do that, think of the incredible leap forward we could make in understanding Scripture. Imagine all the years of speculation and guessing we could throw away. What if we could ask him questions on what it was really like, what he went through, what he knew... what he would say to the churches now.

We can. There are people out there who know exactly what it means to call it all garbage, who have found out what “I want to know Christ and the sharing of his sufferings” means. There are people out there who have given up the position and prestige in order to be thought fools.

So here’s my challenge to Gordon Fee: Find the people out there who have lived Philippians. Live with them. Talk with them. Believe them. Have them read your commentary. Listen. Take their views as having (a lot!) more value then your own.

Or better yet, do it yourself.

The great disconnect

It is bad enough if your learning has disconnected you from Christ, but the situation is far worse than that: Christ has disconnected from you.

When Paul says in Phil 3.10 that “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death” Fee is right in saying that this is not some form of mysticism. Fee is also right in saying that, for Paul, knowing Christ involves participation in his sufferings because it is certain evidence of his intimate relationship with his Lord.

But Fee refuses to take the next step. If the way to know Christ is to participate in his sufferings, is it possible to know Christ without participating in his sufferings? We want to say that some people know Christ one way, some another. Or that some people know Christ to a greater or lesser degree. But Paul says, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” We blunt this by saying Paul was talking about his status as a Pharisee and his zeal for his religion, proven by his persecution of the church. But he takes care of this in verse 7: “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.” In verse 8 he goes much further: “More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Now, “more than that” can mean nothing other than not that. Paul never said, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of my Jewish religion.” Paul said, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.”

For Paul, the leaving behind of all things was the way to gain Christ. And yet we say that’s just one way to gain Christ.

But Christ says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” Where is the other path in this statement, the one that says we can follow Christ not doing these things?

You want to know Christ your way. Paul says that’s impossible. Christ says that’s impossible. Christ says it even more strongly: go away. Yet we insist it’s one way—and a way that is just as legitimate.

Christ set the way, away from the scholars and teachers and experts of his day because they were heading the wrong direction. He made them his enemies. He attacked them. He belittled them. He excluded them.

These experts, these rulers and leaders of the people of God, Jesus avoided. And yet we claim that this is a path to God.

How? How does a person know Christ by having nothing in common with how he lived?

You examine Paul and tell us that knowing Christ “is the ultimate goal of being in right relationship with God.” To you, it’s axiomatic that you know Christ already. But why would Paul say what he did if it can happen either way? You say that “because of the righteousness Christ has accomplished for his people, we know him now, both the power of his resurrection and the participation in his sufferings.” How? How have you arrived at the point that Paul was still driving towards?

Paul was struggling with every ounce of strength toward something that you don’t want to experience. It was in the knowing of Christ’s sufferings that Paul hoped to know Christ. Yet you know Christ without ever having done anything like this. And no desire to do anything like this.

You say you can get there. You say you’re already there. Really! Could Paul have gotten to where he was taking the course you have chosen? Could he have come to know Christ without knowing the Christ’s sufferings?

And you’re absolutely certain you know Christ?

Christ defined the way to know him. Paul headed that direction so he could know him. Paul knew that not heading that direction meant he would never know him.

Paul said “join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.” Is this just a casual remark or does it mean that the way to know Christ is to follow Paul’s example?

So please explain it so we can all understand: How does refusing the demand of Christ allow you to know Christ? How does going the opposite direction of Christ allow you to know Christ? How does embracing the things that Paul hated allow you to know Christ? How does giving yourself to a profession that Jesus despised allow you to know Christ?

There’s a movie called “K‑Pax”. It’s about a man in a mental institution claiming to be from the planet K‑Pax. The psychiatrist examining him is troubled because the man seems credible. The psychiatrist has a brother-in-law who is an astrophysicist, and as a test he asks him to submit a list of questions for this supposed mental case to answer. The patient answers them all correctly. So the psychiatrist takes his patient to meet a group of astrophysicists, and the man proceeds to explain why a certain star they are observing exhibits strange behavior. It turns out that this star is the sun of the planet he claims to be from, and when the patient diagrams the planets in the solar system it answers their questions on why the star is behaving strangely. When they ask him how he knows this he answers impatiently, “Every schoolchild on K‑Pax knows this, just like every school child on Earth knows how many planets there are and how they orbit the sun.”

The greater the distance someone is from something—in either time or space—the greater the education is needed to know anything about it. On K‑Pax any ordinary schoolchild knows more than the most educated astrophysicist on Earth. It is a straight-line graph: The greater the distance, the greater the need for education. The less the distance, the less the need for education.

In theological circles, it doesn’t take as much study to write authoritatively about Luther as it does about Paul because Luther is 1500 years closer. And we can know more about Paul than Moses because Paul is 1500 years closer.

There’s a shortcut. There’s a way a person can know all about a thing without spending his entire life studying it. And that’s by being there. A child on K‑Pax knows more than the most brilliant astrophysicist on Earth because he is there, thousands of light years closer.

Consider the mountain peaks in the line of God: Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Daniel, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, John the Baptist, Jesus Christ, Paul. When we talk about the continuity and coherency of Scripture we commend it to the Holy Spirit. It was the Holy Spirit working through these writers from wildly different times and places and backgrounds, superintending them so they wrote Scripture that was never self-contradictory and always consistent within itself. That is true, but it’s not the whole story. The reason these men could write Scripture that was consistent and coherent was not just that the Holy Spirit “forced” them too, and it certainly wasn’t because they studied the older writings to make sure what they wrote agreed. The answer is that they were a single type of people. They were all from K‑Pax and it took no effort for them to write in a way that was consistent with one another because they were all observing the same world. It was the “natural” thing for them to write. It was not a foreign language or a distant place that they studied. Nor was it conjecture on what God would expect a man of faith to write. What they wrote was what they lived.

In fact, being highly educated was something either completely foreign to them or something that worked against them being men of God. While Paul was a trained theologian, that training was of very little consequence in turning him into a man of faith. As a trained theologian he hated Jesus and hunted down those who claimed him as the Christ. After his conversion he made it a point to say that he didn’t discuss religious matters with the other apostles.

Consider the other great people of faith. All theologically uneducated. Moses was brought up as an Egyptian and probably knew more about Ra than Yahweh. David had no theological education, yet was honored above all men by having the throne of the Messiah named after his. John the Baptist was a common man, virtually a hermit, yet Jesus said, “I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist.” Jesus intentionally chose 12 uneducated men. Why? There were thousands of legal experts to choose from. Why did he purposely not choose one priest, expert on the law, or religious leader?

The answer: Because that’s not how you know God.

There is not a single example in Scripture of a theologically trained person who lived for God because of that education. And it’s not because education wasn’t available. It was. But Jesus avoided the educated. His foremost enemies were from the ranks of the educated. Paul’s education made him an enemy of Christ—the worst of sinners.

The thing that allowed Paul to know everything he needed to know about Abraham, 2000 years later and with no modern archeology or language studies to aid him, was “the shortcut.” He didn’t spend years peering through a telescope. He just did it. He left, he went, he stepped into the unknown, he conquered the fears, he did the impossibly difficult thing. The same as Moses, Joshua, Daniel, and all the others who somehow managed to become heroes of the faith with no formal education about the one true God, and yet were honored by being entrusted with authoring the very word of God.

Here’s the point: Based upon the examples from Scripture, the only way to know God is to make the sacrifice. Abraham is the father of all who have faith like him. Abraham moved when God told him to. Abraham rose early in the morning to sacrifice his son. Is the faith of modern-day Christianity really the faith of Abraham? Paul gave up everything and became a fool for Christ: dishonored, hungry, thirsty, homeless, beaten, the scum of the earth. Is it really to be claimed that a person can explain Paul from a position that Paul abandoned in order to follow Christ?

I’m not saying I’m anything special. I’m certainly not saying I’ve arrived. But I’ve been close enough to K-Pax to know it’s nothing like how Fee pictures it. I know the sun is not yellow, the sky is not blue, the grass is not green, the mountaintops are not covered with snow. Fee makes a picture-book for us, describing in detail the terrain and the flora and fauna, and it only describes where he lives. It looks nothing like K-Pax.

Fee has spent his life becoming the greatest astrophysicist possible, but after all that he knows less than a schoolchild. The first-grader on K-Pax shows Fee’s Illustrated Authoritative Guide to K-Pax to her father and asks, “Daddy, why did he make the sun yellow?” and her father says, “I don’t know sweetie. I don’t know why he made the water blue either.”

Fee could know a lot more, and save a lot of time, by just going there. Don’t study it; live it. Don’t study Paul; be Paul. Make the sacrifice. Leave it all behind. Forsake the honor; embrace the dishonor. Find a place in the work of God where there’s no status or reward. Be the fool. Become the type of Christian other Christians don’t want to be like.

Know it. Firsthand. By doing it. Then you’ll know everything you need to know about the Philippians. And Paul.

And Christ.