The Christian in the Theology of St Paul is the final volume in Lucien Cerfaux's monumental trilogy on Pauline theology. It is the fitting culmination of the series which included Christ in the Theology of Saint Paul and The Church in the Theology of Saint Paul because it is concerned
with the relation of the individual Christian to Christ through the meditation of the Church. For that reason the present book may be regarded as a synthesis of the preceding volumes.
Canon Cerfaux relies in this book as he did in his earlier ones on the threefold development of the thought of Saint Paul. He thus studies the epistles in their living context and organic development rather than in the artificial and abstract setting imposed upon them by many exegetes. The first stage in the evolution of Pauline doctrine is that of the epistle to the Thessalonians, which shows the Apostle preoccupied with the expectation of the kingdom of Christ. The faith of the Christian community is focused on the parousia, and morality is grounded in the hope for the second coming. The second stage is that of the major epistles, Corinthians, Romans, Galatians, which reflect Saint Paul's encounter with Greek wisdom, and which announce a doctrine oriented to the present rather than to the future. The third stage is that of the captivity epistles in which the Apostle elaborates the teaching of the earlier letters and clearly proclaims for the first time that the Christian life attains its fulfillment in the "knowledge" of the mystery of Christ.