Philippians

Philippians returns on the show mainly because of how much theological weight later Christians have placed on a relatively short and intimate Pauline letter. The hosts come back to it for the Christ hymn in chapter 2, where Paul’s language about Jesus’s humiliation and exaltation has become one of the key places scholars and believers debate early christology, preexistence, divine identity, and the conceptual resources that made it possible to speak of Jesus as somehow divine without simply collapsing him into God.

The letter also matters because it shows Paul at both his most pastoral and his most rhetorically forceful. The show uses Philippians not only for the hymn, but also for the vivid way Paul talks about loss, status, and value, including the famous skubalon line that many translations sanitize. Philippians keeps coming up when the hosts want to show that some of the New Testament’s most influential christological and ethical claims are carried by language that is at once devotional, polemical, and much more earthy than many readers realize.