Christ and Caesar? maybe not...

While the emperor worship was practiced when Paul wrote Philippians, it may have yet been confined to dead emperors, as it was when it was established by Augustus. Nero did insist that he was on equal footing with the gods and had a statue of himself erected, but this was in 65 A. D., which most scholars would consider to be too late for the composition of Philippians (most prefer to place it at the beginning of the 60’s). Furthermore, Nero wasn’t taken very seriously, and didn’t do anything to enforce his claim. I believe the first Roman Emperor to demand and enforce worship of himself during his lifetime was Domitian. This is most certainly addressed in the book of Revelation, but Paul was long dead. Caligula also tried to enforce emperor worship, but was assasinated before anything could come of it; but this was long before Philippians was written, and probably before Paul had even been commissioned by the church in Antioch for missionary work.

While I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that Paul is referring to Nero or the imperial cult, I think it is more plausible to conjecture that he has someone like Antiochus Epiphanes, the ’manifest god’ as a recent example of something which went back much, much farther. I would actually relate the whole thing more directly to a reversal of the fall in Christ:

Adam was created in the image of God, the ’form’ of God, if you will. And what was the serpent’s bait? "You will be like God."

Eve, and Adam, being in the image of God, thought equality with God was something to be grasped. What they thought would be their bid for divinity turned out to be their humiliation.

Jesus, in the renewed image of God, as God’s second ontological son, chose subordination; and it turned out to be the true road to glory.

It’s interesting, then, that Philippians is the only letter of Paul’s that addresses a group of leaders in salutation ("Overseers and deacons" or "Overseers who are also servants"). These leaders in the church, as Jesus made so clear, were to be the servants of the church, not the Lords of it, as pagan rulers. Perhaps there was a situation in the church where authority was being abused, which Paul addresses. Perhaps this is a both a warning and an exhortation to clergy who have overstepped their bounds.

That is not to say that Paul did not intend for echoes of the behavior of contemporary political figures to be found in his illustration about Adam, but I don’t think they were of principle importance to his point.

Aaron Christianson