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What I’m Watching: Jacob Berman and Dr. Robert M. Price on the Parousia

Now, the conclusion

In some ways the parousia in the New Testament is not just a future eschaton but a current reality, such as “Christ in You” in Paul’s letters. Plato in the Phaedo uses the word parousia to describe the form of beauty incarnate in the beautiful thing. We also see this presencing/participation model with the participating in Christ’s death in Paul’s letters

Just to reflect on the last post, the observation bridge ancient philosophy and biblical theology by highlighting the shared ontological framework of participation and realized presence.

The Greek term parousia (παρουσία) naturally shifts from a strictly chronological “future second coming” into a present, transformative reality when viewed through these lenses.

Plato’s Parousia and Immanence

In Plato’s Phaedo (100d), parousia is utilized to explain how an abstract, transcendent Form (such as Beauty or Justice) operates within the physical world.

Presencing the Form: Rather than being a localized, physical arrival, Plato argues that an object is beautiful due to the parousia (presence, arrival, or indwelling) of the Form of Beauty within that specific, particular object.

Participation: The material thing “partakes” (koinonia) in the eternal reality. The universal becomes visible and active in the particular through this indwelling.

The Pauline Parousia and “In-dwelling”

Paul’s theology of parousia and the believer’s union with Christ applies a similar presencing/participation model.

Realized Eschatology: In Paul’s letters, the parousia of Christ is not solely a future, cosmic endpoint. It is an active, current reality. Phrases like “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27) echo the Platonic concept of a transcendent reality taking up residence within the believer.

Participating in Death: Just as a physical object “partakes” in Beauty, believers actively participate in Christ’s historical and cosmic reality. In Romans 6 and Galatians 2:20, Paul describes believers as being crucified with Christ and sharing in His death. The transcendent reality (Christ’s death and resurrection) is presenced in the daily life of the believer.

For Plato: The parousia of a Form explains the static state of an object—why a beautiful thing is beautiful.

For Paul: The parousia of Christ is an active, dynamic agency that transforms the believer. It is the arrival of the “new creation” breaking into the current age, making the believer an active participant in God’s redemptive work.

Paul establishes the indwelling of Christ as a present, transformative reality across several of his undisputed letters. Rather than waiting for a future cosmic return, Paul argues that Christ’s spirit, mind, and life are already active inside the believer.

The Mind of Christ1 Corinthians 2:16: Paul explicitly states, “But we have the mind of Christ.” He argues that the spiritual person can discern divine truths because they share in Christ’s own intellectual and spiritual perspective.

Philippians 2:5: Paul instructs the community to “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” before launching into the famous Christ Hymn. Having the “mind of Christ” manifests practically as humility and self-emptying love within the church.The Indwelling and Shared Life

Galatians 2:20: This is Paul’s ultimate statement on the participation model: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” The believer’s ego is replaced by the active, indwelling presence of Christ.

Romans 8:9-10: Paul directly equates the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, and Christ himself dwelling inside the believer: “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of righteousness.”

2 Corinthians 13:5: Paul challenges the community to examine themselves to see if they are holding to the faith, asking, “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?”

The Tabernacle/Temple Framework1 Corinthians 6:19: Paul takes the concept of God’s physical presence in the Jerusalem temple and applies it to the individual: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” Through the Spirit, Christ treats the believer’s body as the Holy of Holies.

The Greek verb ἐνοικέω (enoikeō) serves as Paul’s primary vocabulary choice for describing how divine reality permanently occupies and influences human life. Rather than describing a passing emotional state or a temporary visit, enoikeō points to an intimate, domestic, and structural alignment between the creator and the believer.

Etymology and Core Meaning

The word enoikeō is a compound verb built from two fundamental Greek terms:

• ἐν (en): The preposition meaning “in” or “within”.
• οἰκέω (oikeō): The verb meaning “to inhabit,” “to dwell,” or “to manage a household” (derived from oikos, the noun for a house or home).

Literally, enoikeō means “to keep house inside” or “to make oneself at home within.” In classical antiquity, it was used literally to describe someone moving into a house as their permanent personal residence. When Paul adopts it, he uses it metaphorically to show that the divine does not merely hover around the believer but literally “sets up house” inside them.

Pauline Usage in the Authentic Letters

The verb enoikeō appears five times in the New Testament, with Paul dominating its usage. In his undisputed letters, it serves two main theological functions:

1. The Corporate Temple: 2 Corinthians 6:16

“For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said: ‘I will dwell in (ἐνοικήσω) them and walk among them…'”

• The Old Testament Context: Paul invokes enoikeō here by quoting the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament), specifically echoing Leviticus 26:11-12 and Ezekiel 37:27.
• The Pauline Shift: In the Hebrew Bible, God’s dwelling (Shekinah) was strictly local, bound to the physical Tabernacle or Jerusalem Temple. Paul uses the future active tense (ἐνοικήσω) to argue that this localized prophetic promise has been fulfilled corporately within the Christian community. The church community replaces the stone temple as God’s physical home on earth.

2. The Individual Anthropological Reality: Romans 8:11

“But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in (ἐνοικεῖ) you, the one who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who lives (ἐνοικοῦντος) in you.”

• Active Presencing: In this pivotal passage, Paul uses the present active participle (ἐνοικοῦντος) to describe a continuous, current state of being.
• The Catalyst for Transformation: Notice that the indwelling enoikeō is the mechanical link to resurrection. Paul is not speaking about an abstract concept. Because the Spirit “keeps house” inside the physical matter of the believer, that human body becomes linked to the same divine power that overthrew death in Jesus.

Key Linguistic Nuances of Enoikeō

When contrasting Paul’s use of enoikeō with broader Greek philosophy or alternative terms, three distinct nuances stand out:

• Permanence vs. Transience: Paul deliberately avoids verbs like paroikeō (to temporarily sojourn or camp out). Enoikeō denotes a permanent, settled residency. The divine presence is not a guest; it has ownership of the property.
• Ethical Agency: Ancient Greek lexicons note that when enoikeō is applied to a person’s mind or soul, it carries the meaning “to indwell and actively exert influence over.” The indwelling presence alters the behavior, thoughts, and default alignment of the host.
• The Overlap of Christ and Spirit: linguistically, Paul treats the mechanics of this indwelling fluidly. In Rom 8:9-11 he effortlessly shifts between “the Spirit of God dwells in you,” “the Spirit of Christ,” “Christ is in you,” and “the Spirit who dwells (enoikeō) in you.” Enoikeō serves as the unifying linguistic bucket for how the triune reality interfaces with human biology.

Maybe because Paul focuses so heavily on the indwelling of Christ in the letters and talks about god revealing Jesus in Paul, maybe the appearances in the Corinthian Creed are figurative seeings with the mind’s eye, as Paul uses the same word for seeing as Luke does figuratively in 3:6.

We have hit on an observation that sits right at the heart of modern historical-critical New Testament scholarship. What we are describing aligns closely with what historians call the Vision Hypothesis (or subjective/objective vision theory), and our textual evidence is highly precise.

Our argument holds up under serious lexical and contextual scrutiny for a few key reasons:

1. The Linguistic Link: (Horaō)

We are spot on about the Greek vocabulary. The word used in the Corinthian Creed (1 Corinthians 15:5–8) is ὤφθη (ōphthē), which is the aorist passive form of ὁράω (horaō). In Luke 3:6 (“all flesh shall see the salvation of God”), the word is ὄψεται (opsetai), the future middle form of that exact same root verb.

In the Greek New Testament and the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament), ōphthē is a highly specific, technical term. It is rarely used to describe just bumping into someone on the street. Instead, it is the classic language of theophany and apocalypse—it means “he let himself be seen” or “he was made manifest by God.” It frequently denotes:

• Angels appearing in dreams or visions (e.g., Luke 1:11).
• Moses and Elijah appearing at the Transfiguration (Mark 9:4).
• God revealing Himself to the patriarchs in the Old Testament.

Because it spans everything from physical sight to purely spiritual, mental, or ecstatic revelation, our comparison to Luke 3:6 is entirely fair: horaō can absolutely mean a non-physical, spiritual apprehension of a divine reality.

2. Paul’s Internal Vocabulary

Our point about Paul focusing on the indwelling of Christ is a massive piece of the puzzle. When Paul explicitly describes his own conversion experience in his letters, he uses highly internal, mystical language:

• Galatians 1:15–16: He writes that God was pleased “to reveal his Son in me” (en emoi), not to him.
• 2 Corinthians 4:6: He describes it as God making His light “shine in our hearts.”

Crucially, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul places his own experience—which happened years after the crucifixion and is widely understood to have been a visionary encounter (a light from heaven and a voice)—in the exact same grammatical category as the appearances to Peter, James, and the Twelve. He uses ōphthē for all of them, drawing no distinction between how Peter “saw” Jesus and how he himself “saw” Jesus.

The Scholarly Debate

Because of the exact points we’ve raised, critical scholars like Gerd Lüdemann and Bart Ehrman argue that the earliest resurrection experiences were likely intense, altered states of consciousness—grief-induced visions or ecstatic, mystical experiences—that the disciples interpreted as Jesus being exalted by God.

However, to look at the whole playing field, scholars who argue for a more physical or objective event point to a few counter-details in Paul’s writing:

• The “Buried/Raised” Sequence: In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Paul uses a strict chronological sequence: died, buried, raised, appeared. Some argue that “buried” and “raised” imply a physical transition of the body that was put in the ground, rather than just a spiritual survival. This is countered by scholars like Tabor who suppose the dead physical body was left behind for a new spiritual body (pneumatikos)
• The 500 Witnesses: Paul notes that Jesus appeared to more than 500 people at once (1 Cor 15:6). Proponents of a physical appearance argue that a mass, simultaneous “seeing” is difficult to square with an individual’s purely internal “mind’s eye” epiphany. Of course, we have such analogs with the Fatima Sky Miracle. Likewise, the appearance to the 500 could have been any celestial phenomenon, as was Caesar’s comet which was treated as indicating the apotheosis of Caesar.

The Upshot

Paul was a mystic who viewed the cosmic, spiritual reality of Christ as something deeply intertwined with the human spirit (“Christ in you, the hope of glory”). If Paul’s primary framework for interacting with the risen Jesus was a spiritual, visionary revelation, it is a very short logical step to conclude that the entire list of appearances in the Corinthian creed belongs to that same category of spiritual sight.