(This was originally a comment attached to the ‘Why the historical Jesus matters’ post.)
Why shouldn’t Jesus or Paul in principle have imagined a future event or period when the community, after years or decades or even centuries of persecution, would finally be delivered from its enemies and vindicated or justified for having believed in the good news?
I have no doubt at all that both Jesus and Paul did indeed envision exactly such a period (and they each do say so on a number of occasions) but the central questions are twofold. First, Jesus ties his predictions of a dire response from the world to the act of "following" his own way and gospel, indeed himself, in living lives of love. Love, light, truth, faith, justice, and mercy are the themes that Jesus enjoins on us to live out and he himself points the way for his own circumstance, environment, culture, and history
I think a distinction needs to be made between what Jesus demanded and what Christendom actually morphed that teaching into, certainly partly by ignoring the integral connection between Jesus teachings and Pauls practical applications of these to the Graeco-Roman world, and thence spiritualising Paul’s own writings into an unrecognisable meld of Platonic-Gnostic -Christian philosophy that becomes the hallmark of Christendom. Eventually, the same sort of selective reading comes through both in the Reformation and later on in Evangelicalism.
I would even argue that outside of the NT environment, no sustained attempt has been made by ‘followers’ of Jesus to actually follow Jesus. Given that Jesus teachings are an essential part of his gospel, and given that discipleship is also tied to following that unique set of teachings, the foundation of a community that considers the law of love to be normative is something of a distant dream for us today.
There can be no accurate guage of how ‘the world’ will react to Jesus and his followers until we have first tried to follow. So, there’s my first major doubt -where can there be talk of vindication until we have been obedient and then found that ‘the world’ does appreciate the gospel rather than what has commonly been seen in history as the response of persecution and rejection. My guess is that we cannot speak meaningfully of vindication unless it is vindication before, in, and by ‘the world’. Even today, being cynical, what I expect is that we will either be ignored/discounted when we are ineffective disciples or actively persecuted when we do choose to sacrificially stand for justice and truth in love.
My second major doubt about your optimistic interpretatin comes from your idea of a new pardigm that while informed (in some way) by the narrative in many ways is not bound to any of that narrative.
In other words, for one thing you would seem to want a fresh paradigm to spring out of a community that has actually cut its ties with any thought of discipleship being central and that acknowledges ‘the gospel’ as a historically delimited phase that we have now quite outgrown. By cutting us loose in this way, what would you consider to be the hallmarks of this community-paradigm that could actually claim any sort of continuity with these ‘historical’ narratives? Your understanding of ‘new creation’ itself seems to rely heavily upon strands of ancient teaching that are carefully bracketed off from their connections to other NT themes which would have equal importance for the NT community and that now you would wish us to ‘leave behind’.
I’m a great fan of ‘open source’ theology especially as you have practiced it here at OST, but it seems to me that by pushing for such a one-sided historical reading as normative, you are in some danger of creating a community-paradigm that really has no historical anchors to either Paul or Jesus - and all for a parousial happening (& a vindication) that I can find no trace of at all.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Skepticism and hope
I would argue that it is not bound to any particular moment in the biblical narrative but it is bound to the narrative as a whole - that we cannot make sense of the existence of the church without taking account of the narrative as a whole. I think that the narrative defines us essentially as God’s new creation, an actual and anticipatory alternative to the old corrupt creation; and it seems to me that the fulness of this vocation cannot be realized in the model of Jesus-discipleship - any more than the fulness of the promise to Abraham could be realized in the life of Israel in the wilderness.
As I see it, the essence of Jesus-discipleship is not ‘love, light, truth, faith, justice, and mercy’, as you suggest, but the announcement to Israel that God is about to act as king to judge and redeem. That announcement is enacted in the life of the community of disciples, and it cannot be enacted without a concrete demonstration of ‘love, light, truth, faith, justice, and mercy’; but what fundamentally defines their calling and task is the expectation of God’s imminent intervention in the affairs of Israel. That puts them in a unique situation, a unique moment in the narrative, which is only ever partially or analogously replicated in the subsequent experience of the church.
Under conditions of liminality, such as the period in the wilderness or the exile or the eschatological crisis of the end of the age of second temple Judaism, the people of God are not in a position to demonstrate the fulness of new creation. They travelled through the wilderness in order to reach the promised land in which, if they learnt obedience, they would experience of the blessing of creation (cf. Deut. 28:1-14). The time in Babylon was not a wholly negative experience, but the prophetic witness is quite clear that these conditions were sub-optimal, that God would restore his people to the land, and that this restoration would be a new creation (cf. Is. 65:17). So I think that if we are going to take the new creation theme seriously, we have to find a way to emulate not the exodus or exile experiences but the ideal of creational blessing.
The model of ‘discipleship’ makes sense in a situation where people are called specifically to learn from Jesus’ prophetic stance in relation to Israel - to live out the proclamation concerning the coming reign of God. Significantly, Paul has no apparent interest in the model of Jesus-discipleship. What matters to him primarily is the switch from Law to Spirit as the basis for behaviour. The Law was given to regulate the whole life of God’s new creation - it embodied the obedience that was demanded of Abraham as the condition of blessing. Presumably, then, it is the active indwelling of the Spirit of God that must in principle be trusted to give form, identity and character to a community that has entered into a ‘new covenant’ with the creator God. So what I think we need to ask ourselves is: What would the Law, wisdom, and prophetic witness of the Old Testament look like when transposed from the minor key of the old covenant into the major key of the Spirit?
Christendom was a flawed attempt to make that transposition under the conditions of an imperializing consciousness. We are now making the transposition again but under the conditions of a postmodern consciousness that distrusts the imperializing mentality. We are at the moment in a period of transition, of liminality, but if we restrict ourselves to the Jesus-discipleship paradigm, we will find ourselves stuck in the wilderness or in exile - or with a ‘this world is not my home’ attitude that will never allow us to do justice (in both senses of the expression) to the expansive vocation to be God’s new creation.
Re: Skepticism and hope
Sorry Andrew, it took me a while to find that you had tweaked this off as a separate thread.
I do admit that my parsing of what true discipleship is, is very open to dispute. Perhaps my main defense is that Paul brings his ethic back again and again to ‘the law of love’.
Nonetheless, by asserting that you do not wish to be bound to any particular ‘moment’ but rather wish to be under the ‘whole’ of the narrative, I think its not too great of a stretch to feel that you wish to have the freedom to reject whatever the NT considers foundational in their view of the meaning of their "whole narrative". As an aside, is your idea in any way related to B.S. Childs’ ideas on what constitutes a canonical approach to Biblical Theology?
In any case, a problem is that such wholesale overview ideas almost demand the creation of metanarrative(s).
I think it’s interesting that themes such as the Exodus or Covenant or even the Exile, figure rarely in the NT. Yet these are the themes that you think would form the ground for the call to face suffering. Indeed, while the NT is seen by some to be replete with Exodus themes and typologies, in the few passages where it is explicitly discussed, eg 1Cor 10:1f, clearly for Paul the period of struggle is over! That tale is only an example of what can go wrong when the whole body resists unity.
I think it’s quite fair to say that for the authors of the NT and for their communities, the beginning of the revealing of the Son of Man had already been decisively accomplished by Jesus. The resurrected one is now Lord. The revelation of the Lordship of Christ continues and is actualised in the present. Such is certainly the filter through which Paul analyses anything, including his ideas on whatever may be coming.
In other words, it is neither exile, nor exodus that the NT is full of. What the NT is full of is Jesus. Jesus way is a way that will set us in a head on conflict with the world. In a world where power always wins (or seems to) this means that following Jesus will lead to conflict. As it was for the master, so it will be for the followers.
If one is arguing that Jesus broke the paradigm once and for all so that we are therefore now free to follow an entirely different path, this is perilously close to a Pentecostal reading of the cross. Jesus suffered so that we wouldn’t need to. Instead you would want to tie this new paradigm to an ‘event’ sometime in the future, but if this were true then the nature of power would have had to change. Rome became ‘converted’ but its power was just as corrupt and just as corrupting after its ‘conversion’. The fact remains true today. Today, if you will speak the truth the world will still turn on you, so what if anything has changed?
As we can see in 2Cor 5, the new creation is already with us in the only important way, and while we may long for more and for the ultimate in fulfilment, yet, what is given to us now is of primary importance and precious enough and it does boil down to being able to love others just as (and because) Jesus loved us… unto the death.
Getting back to bird’s eye views, recent history (post WWII) has led me to question what really was going on in the ‘choosing’ of Abraham, the subsequent appearance of Moses and his Laws and then the establishment of the kingdoms all leading in the biblical story to the final occupation by Rome. There is indeed a ‘big picture’ in the narrrative and I see echoes from a very big theme in Jesus’ prophetic pronouncements that Israel has fallen away and his calls to the nation to account. There is no doubt that he denounces rather forcelfully the direction that they have taken. Such a theme is arguably common to all of the prophetic tradition going right back to Moses himself. In fact Paul echoes Jesus condemnation of the ‘crooked and perverse generation’ in Phil. 2:15, citing Dt. 32:5. and
So, as the NT records, Jesus announces the Kingdom of God knowing that most will reject both him and his kingdom. If this theme were to colour our view of the whole story, it could be argued that throughout history, as reported repeatedly in the whole narrative, God has been trying to channel and control a very recalcitrant people, probably also with an eye on protecting their neighbors, and perhaps even the world at large. It’s quite obvious that with David and Solomon, all vestiges of control were shaken off and the hegemonistic nature of this people becomes plain calling for an even more drastic solution of first a divided kingdom and then a wholesale conquest and exile.
When we come to NT times, again this people is back on track and with an aim to coerce or overthrow their present conquerors. It’s significant that both John the Baptist and Jesus shun these two paths, but certainly the path of becoming the business powerhouse of the Roman Empire is the more seductive option. In condemning the current lucratively active cooperation that is at the heart of Israel’s economics under the Romans, Jesus knows that he is setting himself on a hard and probably fatal path. The demise of the Baptist only underscores the danger. Yet he persists, and for a time it seems that the people are responsive, but when they realise that Jesus does not stand for any alternatively advantageous power play, he is rejected, as has been the universal experience of any prophet that dares to continue in truthspeak despite warnings.
The question that then arises is whether such an understanding can be seen to be foundational for the path that the NT church then takes. Certainly Paul wants to get behind the period of the Exodus and all the way back to Abraham, but even here there is contradiction in his handling of the tradition. As Dr. John Doyle has pointed out elsewhere, Gal 4 does an interesting flip flop with Israel being identified as the children of the handmaiden while those believers (certainly in this context) not of Israelite stock are declared to have been born of the Spirit. This, to Paul, is what is new, startlingly new. Suffering becomes secondary though no less inevitable, but our recreation as sons in the Spirit, makes it all worthwhile and gives us the strength and the hope to continue in our Lord’s path. In the NT’s ‘new perspective’, the entire meaning of the old typologies is turned upside down and the whole has become wholy other.
It’s well known that the covenantal option and the nomistic option are two of the dominant metanarrative approaches. Perhaps we could number the COSM approach as one more and one that allows much greater freedom from the old narrative than the others. But, as a number of such metanarratives can be depicted when attempting to grapple with ‘the whole’ I think it’s going to be difficult to appeal to this "whole" in order to jettison the much more particular understanding of the living way of discipleship under an ever active Lordship of Christ that is clearly what I think the NT itself would support, at least until there is some clear indication that something else is enjoined on all who believe in and wish to actually follow Jesus.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Skepticism and hope
Sorry for the confusion!
Could you be more specific? Clearly there is going to be some discussion about what it means for the people of God to have gone through the New Testament experience, the Christ event, but I don’t myself see the narrative reading as an excuse for rejecting aspects of New Testament teaching that are uncongenial to the modern or postmodern spirit, if that’s what you’re saying.
This approach must resonate with a canonical theology, but the emphasis is less on the integrity of the canon than on the relation between narrative and historical experience, which is why I think something like ‘critical realism’ is a more appropriate paradigm.
I would dispute that. At least, it seems to me that the New Testament is seething with allusions to the history of Israel: Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness is clearly an ‘exodus’ experience; the prayer for ‘daily bread’ evokes the feeding of the people in the wilderness; the Lord’s supper is a renewal of the covenant; his entry into Jerusalem enacts the return of YHWH to Zion; and so on…. At every turn the situation of the church is interpreted in the light of Old Testament passages that cannot be read a-contextually as mere prooftexts.
Yes, the exodus struggle is over in 1 Corinthians 10:1-13. But that is not the point. Paul’s argument is that the believers in Corinth face the same type of situation: if they are complacent in the way that the wilderness generation was complacent, some of them will not overcome the testing that imminently threatens the survival of the community (cf. 7:25-31). It is not simply a matter of the body resisting unity. What Paul has in mind, I think, is an analogous historical situation.
I would find the ground for the call to face suffering principally in Isaiah 53, in the judgment texts in the prophets, in Daniel 7-12 and arguably in the theology of the Maccabean martyrs.
I agree that the New Testament makes Jesus pivotal. But if Jesus had actually read Daniel 7, we must assume that he understood the story that is being told there, which is the story of a people suffering under pagan aggression. My argument is that that narrative is acted out again, first in Jesus himself, then in the experience of the community that he directly involves in his own drama of suffering, death, resurrection and vindication (cf. Matt. 16:21-28). That is a historically limited drama, but it has immense implications for the continuing life of the people of God, just as the exodus had continuing significance for the life of Israel. So, no, we are not ‘free to follow an entirely different path’ - but through the victory of the ‘Son of man’ over the enemies of the people of God, we are free to live in righteousness and truth and peace, not in fear of our enemies.
What changed with the ‘defeat’ of Rome as John predicts it in Revelation 18 was i) that believers were no longer threatened with persecution; ii) that the church was no longer threatened with extinction; iii) that Caesar was concretely deposed as Lord over the people of God; and iv) that those Jews and Gentiles who had taken the risk of trusting in Jesus under these extremely difficult conditions were both publically and supernaturally vindicated.
I agree that the creational microcosm of God’s people was renewed in Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17), but as I argued in ‘New creation, Spirit, blessing and kingdom: a clarification of terminology’, ‘new creation’ is not equivalent to ‘kingdom’. When God’s new creation comes under attack from its enemies, for whatever reason, then the ‘kingdom’ theme comes to the fore: judgment, deliverance, vindication, etc. As far as the New Testament views the future, that theme culminates in victory over Rome. From that point onwards we live under the kingship of Christ until the final enemy is defeated, which is death.That’s an interesting and surely highly revisionist reading of Israel’s history! Is there any evidence (eg. in the prophets) that David and Solomon were condemned by God for their expansionist policies?
I agree with this - suffering is secondary in the New Testament. It is part of the ‘kingdom’ story; it is for the sake of the new creation. My argument is simply that the New Testament fundamentally develops this narratively and historically; and although it takes a big leap of imagination, I think we will grasp our own situation better if we follow the implications of the historical-narrative method through consistently.
anti-Constantine
I’m just excerpting here a few comments made a couple of years ago by the historian Paula Fredriksen in conversation with (DH) publisher David Hulme:
DH It’s been said that Paul’s been wrongly portrayed for the last 2,000 years or so. What do you make of the idea that we’ve not really known who he is?
PF "People who loom large in history are very easy to misinterpret, precisely because they’re so important culturally that, in a sense, the image of the person is continually obligated to make sense to us. So this is how Paul can seem to be a Protestant; “He doesn’t like all that messy ritual,” Luther thought. Or he can very easily seem to be an orthodox Christian. Certainly, when Augustine, in the fourth century, does his commentaries on Paul, he sees him as a type of proto-Augustine.
What’s really enabled us to stop being cheated of a historically accurate image of Paul is all the work that’s been done in the past half century on late Second Temple Judaism. Seeing Paul in his Jewish context has enabled historians to understand how this man can be a passionately committed Jew and at the same time be a passionately committed apostle for the message of redemption in Jesus Christ, without being confused about the prospect. What he’s doing is precisely a radical form of Judaism. We, with the benefit of retrospect, know that this form of Judaism will eventually give rise to gentile Christianity. Paul in his own lifetime did not have the benefit of our retrospect."
…
DH "You’ve noted that the divide between Judaism and Christianity resulted from politics within the Roman Empire and Constantine’s decision in favor of Roman Christianity. Under Constantine the Sabbath was officially changed to Sunday and Christians were told not to confer with rabbis on the dating of Easter. What would Paul have made of that if he were living in that period?
PF We habitually refer to the conversion of Constantine. I think it’s more appropriate to say that under Constantine we have the conversion of Christianity. Christianity under Constantine becomes a form of imperial Roman culture. One Christian denomination is favored with his patronage. They get tax breaks. They get big, beautiful Bible codices copied at public expense. They can use the imperial post for free. They ask Constantine to kick out the leaders of the other Christian denominations in town. So the people who get the worst treatment after Constantine becomes a patron of this one church are other Christians. More Christians are persecuted after the conversion of Constantine than before, because they’re targeted by one particular branch of the church.
Paul’s first reaction to all of this would be that the type of Christianity Constantine is patronizing is very different from what Paul enunciated. The fact that Constantine’s Christianity understands itself as the only one that’s true to what Paul taught wouldn’t help the historical Paul’s shock in seeing how different Constantine’s Christianity was from his own. For one thing, when Constantine’s official biographer, Eusebius, writes about the emperor, he sees the foundation of the Christian Roman Empire as “Isaiah’s peace”—the Messianic peace promised in what we call the Old Testament. When Paul’s thinking about the kingdom of God, he’s certainly not thinking of the Roman emperor as His agent.
DH Is there any continuity between what we see in the fourth century and what might have been happening in the first, during Paul’s time?
PF Whether they are pagan or eventually Christian, these gentile populations in the Mediterranean never stop going to synagogue. But once some Christians develop an ideological commitment to the distinctive difference between Judaism and Christianity, this synagogue-going drives them crazy. We have complaints in sermons from bishops through the fourth and fifth centuries. We have law codes from ecclesiastical conferences in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries. This means that Jewish synagogues, even if the bishop of their gentile-Christian neighbors is saying horrible things—calling the synagogues “whorehouses,” and saying that Satan lives in them, and that the Jews all killed Christ, and so on—these synagogues are still worshiping the God of Israel, reading the Bible stories in Greek, and welcoming their gentile-Christian neighbors and also their gentile-pagan neighbors into the community. It never stops. We think so easily of Paul abandoning the synagogue, of Jewish Christians no longer going to synagogue, of gentile Christians absolutely stopping on a dime, of the church and the synagogue as two completely different institutions from the beginning. But that picture is false."
A lot of this is fairly standard "New Perspective" insight but what particularly struck me is her characterisation of Christianity in the time of Constantine (and later) as already very corrupted. This is certainly close to the way I see this and hardly does it in any way match up with what Jesus or Paul would have wanted as any sort of fulfilment of their prophecies of the ‘end’.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: anti-Constantine
The excerpted conversation between Paula Fredriksen and David Hulme is interesting, and raises a number of issues for me:
i. the tendency of systematic theologians to adopt Paul and interpret him according to their own cultural contexts rather than according to Paul’s historical cultural context
ii. the suggested continuity of attendance by Christians at synogogues into the Constantinian era. This is of interest, as I was under the impression that Christians were excluded from synagogues following the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and certainly after the Council of Jamnia, AD 85-90, around which there now seems to hang considerable doubt.
iii. Andrew’s fourfold description of the outcome for believers at the fall of Rome seems a-historical.
This may or may not have any relevance to the discussion on the thread, which I have not been following closely.
Re: anti-Constantine
Yes indeed Peter, it certainly is fascinating. Not being particularly well read in this period I have no idea how reliable a historian PF actually is. Certainly the diatribes against Jews and synagogues are well documented, which indicates that there may indeed have been more of a natural connectedness between ‘the two sides’ than we usually credit - else why so much vitriol?
I think your point on being "a-historical" sums up one major objection to seeing the advent of the "Holy Roman Empire" as having apocalyptic significance and particularly as being some sort of a satisfactory fulfilment.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Skepticism and hope
Regarding the attendance of Christians at synagogues in the 1st C, here’s what Stanley Stowers says in his 1998 A Rereading of Romans:
Re: Skepticism and hope
Well, now this is pushing the boat out on the NPP Lake. I’m not sure how the comment relates to the issue of Christians attending synagogues, however.
As far as I can see, Stowers argues that the distinction between Jews and Christians is sociological rather than soteriological, and that as proposed by E.P. Saunders, each has separate, if related, boundary markers which provide a means of identifying them as the people of God.
Browsing through various websites on the subject, using Stowers as the subject (come on, we all do it), there is an interesting Catholic website which includes Stowers and other NP apologists in its purview. The NP is here traced back to a German theologian in the 19th century.
I don’t know where all this is taking us, except to say that there is great diversity in the NP camp, and I go a long way with Wright, who maintains that in Romans, Paul is presenting a Jewish gospel for a Gentile world. I find if these tensions are held together, they go a long way towards providing a coherent explanation of the continuities and discontinuities between Judaism and Christianity.
In other words, Paul was not ‘universalising’ a localised Jewish religion with Hellenistic thought-forms, and thereby creating a world religion (a now discredited interpretation). He was, however, taking deeply Jewish concepts, and applying them to the Gentile world. But with Stowers I do not think I can go along: that Romans is about the Messiah restraining his Messianic powers for the sake of the Gentiles, who needed to exercise self-mastery in order to be included in the people of God, and that this was the exclusive people group addressed by Paul in the letter.
Re: Skepticism and hope
"NPP"? Ah, it’s "new perspectives on Paul."
I brought Stowers into consideration because someone had mentioned his work in relation to the book of Romans, and in reading the first chapter of Stowers’s book online I came upon the bit I quoted in my prior comment.
Stowers recognizes that the 1st-C believers in Christ would have differed substantially from mainstream Judaism on both theological and sociological grounds. Being Jewish had deep sociological consequences, not just in the form of worship but also in governance and social relationships. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial, inasmuch as the Law presents itself as a sociopolitical blueprint as well as a moral code. Even if we disregard the priestly cult at the center of Jewish worship, the 1st century proto-Christians probably wouldn’t have been welcome in mainstream synagogues because their explicit beliefs conflicted so dramatically. I think Stowers oversells his case when he says that 1st-C communities of Christ-followers differed structurally from all forms of Judaism then on the scene. Some scholars regard the early Christians as having begun as an Essene splinter group not that different from the Qumran community of Dead Sea Scrolls fame.
In that linked-to first chapter, Stowers cites E.P. Saunders as exemplifying the anachronistic tendency to impose contemporary ideas of "Christianity" and "the Church" on 1st-C believers who hadn’t fully developed either the collective or individual identity as Christians. So, while the proto-Christians were distinct socioculturally and theologically from orthodox Judaism, those distinctions took on a different tenor from present-day differences between organized Christianity and Judaism.
Stowers agrees that Romans is written primarily with a Gentile audience in mind. Paul says as much in his greeting:
First-century followers of Christ accepted the Jewish Scriptures as authoritative, which in a sense made Gentile believers converts to a variant of Judaism. The precise contours of that proto-Christian Jewish variant were, of course, subject to debate, then as now, and these debates figured prominently in several of Paul’s letters. Most of the Gentile believers in Rome would have become familiar with the Mosaic Law, so even when Paul discusses the limitations of the Law in his letter to the Romans he would still have been addressing the Gentile converts.
I don’t know anything about Stowers’s opinions about Jesus’ Messianic powers. However, I think it’s fair to assert that reading Romans with Paul’s expressly-intended Gentile audience in view might significanlty alter the way one interprets the text, regardless of whether one is evangelical or liberal in theological outlook.