Chapter 26 — Jesus as "Lord" in Paul
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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There's a moment in Paul's letter to the Romans that should stop every reader cold. He writes, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Rom. 10:13), quoting Joel 2:32, a prophecy about calling on the name of YHWH, the God of Israel.
But in Paul's argument, "the Lord" is Jesus. The very name of YHWH that Joel says will save, Paul applies to Jesus Christ.
Paul does this again and again in his letters, and chapter 26 of The Incarnate Christ and His Critics follows the thread carefully. What it reveals is that Paul, the former Pharisee who was once violently opposed to Christianity (Acts 9:1), developed a thoroughgoing "YHWH Christology": a pattern of reading Old Testament texts about Israel's God and applying them directly to Jesus.
That matters more than it might sound. Paul was trained at the feet of Gamaliel and steeped in Jewish Scripture his whole life, and here he is, treating Jesus as YHWH.
Romans 10:9-13: the Saving Lord
The passage in Romans 10 is worth reading carefully in full:
"If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, 'Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.' For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For 'everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.'" (Rom. 10:9-13)
Paul quotes Isaiah 28:16 and Joel 2:32, both originally about YHWH, and applies them both to Jesus, the Lord whose name saves. The "Lord" who is "Lord of all" and who "bestows riches on all who call on him" is the risen Jesus.
This is the heart of Paul's gospel. Salvation comes through calling on the name of Jesus, the name the Old Testament assigned to YHWH as the divine Savior.
1 Corinthians 8:6: One Lord, Jesus Christ
In one of his most concentrated theological statements, Paul reframes the Shema, Israel's most fundamental confession of faith, around Jesus:
"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." (1 Cor. 8:6)
The Shema (Deut. 6:4) declares, "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one." In Hebrew, "the LORD" is YHWH; "God" is Elohim. Paul's restatement splits these divine titles between the Father ("one God") and Jesus ("one Lord"), while clearly implying that Jesus shares in the divine identity of the one God. Creation, "all things," came from the Father and through Jesus. Paul isn't introducing a second deity here; he's presenting Jesus as included within the identity of the one God.
It's a remarkable move: Paul takes Israel's foundational monotheistic confession and reformulates it around Jesus. If "the Lord" in the Shema is YHWH, and the "one Lord" in Paul's reformulation is Jesus, then Jesus is YHWH.
Philippians 2:9-11: Every Knee Shall Bow
We've seen this passage before, but it's worth revisiting here. In Philippians 2:10-11, Paul writes that at the name of Jesus, "every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
This is drawn directly from Isaiah 45:22-23, where YHWH says, "Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return: 'To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance.'"
In Isaiah, every knee bows to YHWH, the one God beside whom there is no other. In Paul's letter, every knee bows at the name of Jesus instead. The transfer is deliberate, and it isn't subtle: Jesus occupies the place of YHWH.
What This Meant for Paul
Paul didn't arrive at these convictions easily. He'd been trained his whole life to believe that Israel's God was unique, singular, and absolutely not to be identified with any human figure. He'd persecuted the church precisely because he saw the exaltation of Jesus as a violation of Jewish monotheism.
Then he met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3-6), and everything changed.
Paul's "YHWH Christology" isn't a compromise of his Jewish faith. It's the faith of a man who discovered, through an encounter with the living Christ, that the Lord he'd served his whole life was the one who had died and risen again outside Jerusalem.
He didn't abandon monotheism. What he found was that the God he already worshiped had revealed himself in a new and decisive way, in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6).
What It Means for Us
Paul's letters weren't written to satisfy theologians. They went out to struggling churches, people facing persecution, confusion, temptation, and grief. Into all of that, Paul writes this: Jesus is Lord. Not a lesser lord, and not a divine helper standing in for the real God, but the Lord, YHWH, the one who saves and reigns and before whom every knee will one day bow.
That's the Christ in whom our lives are hidden (Col. 3:3), and that's enough to build a life on.
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