MetaCatholic

I want to draw attention to the generally very useful series on justification that Michael Pahl has posted. This link is to his index page for the series. I think it’s quite important to read the whole series, since he takes things in a different order to others.

I’m fascinated by the way in which there is comparatively little explicit emphasis on either eschatology or the forensic dimensions to the metaphor. (Fascinated but dubious!) I like the social-scientific awareness of identity and relationship. I think he gives the most persuasive short account of the (mainly) subjective genitive for pistis Christou, showing why it makes sense.

I have some minor quibbles, for example in the post on representation and substitution, where I think the place of gift-offering and sacrifice as relationship restoring should be more highly stressed.

I have at least one major quibble. Although he deals with “solution to plight” later in the series, (which I think is an important emphasis) I’d personally like to argue that this was not only derived from his commissioning experience, but an earlier and perhaps quite primitive mirror-version of his later theology underlies his persecution, and is not entirely unrelated either to the apostolic preaching, or the transmission of the Jesus tradition.

Despite these quibbles I think that this series is as good and accessible an introduction to a broadly new perspective understanding of justification that you will find. It’s less polemical than many, and perhaps will be more broadly acceptable to evangelicals. I will certainly be referring beginning students to it.

Let me leave you with one taster from this post.

Paul knew the general story of Jesus; he knew Jesus had been viewed by Paul’s Pharisaic peers and the Jewish elders as a Law-breaker - “soft” on Sabbath and the purity regulations, to be sure - even finally condemned as “unrighteous” according to the highest Jewish court. However, in Paul’s commissioning experience near Damascus he was confronted by a mind-boggling reality: God had resurrected this legally “unrighteous” Jesus. Therefore, although Jesus had been deemed unrighteous according to the Law, God clearly considered him righteous, effectively overturning the condemnation of Jesus according to the Law by justifying him through resurrection. Thus, by resurrecting the legally “unrighteous” Jesus, God demonstrated that the Law is irrelevant to one being justified by God. The converse was also true then: by resurrecting the Jesus who had been obedient to his divine commission, God demonstrated that justification is available through the faithfulness of Jesus.

That serves as an admirable summary for a general reader.

Discussion of biblical texts is regularly anachronistic. This certainly affects heated and ongoing debates carried out at a non-specialist level such as what the Bible says about “homosexuality”, when in fact it knows of no such category (which is bound up with the 19th century medicalisation of behaviour). But it happens at every level. Here’s an example from the careful (to the point of obsessiveness) and hermeneutically sophisticated Tony Thiselton accepting an element of social-scientific criticism:

I now perceive how this [the Corinthians] theological misperception [over “being spiritual” – which Thiselton had argued for previously as a key unifying theme of 1 Corinthians] combined with the seductive infiltration into the Christian church of cultural attitudes derived from secular or non-Christian Corinth as a city.¹ 

There are two overwhelming anachronisms in this. The idea of applying the word “secular” to first-century Corinth as a synonym for non-Christian is completely misplaced. From the household gods, to the meat-markets, to the many temples around the forum, to the burgeoning imperial cult no Roman city was “secular”. This is, however, the less significant anachronism, and arguably just a matter of linguistic carelessness.

More seriously problematic is the idea that the church is sufficiently well established and developed for ideas to “infiltrate it” as alien, or that what Paul thinks is “church culture” and what the Corinthians think are alien cultural misperceptions. Partly the Corinthians are new converts, and conversion of mind, practice and culture is always a long drawn out and imperfect process, however impassioned the conversion of commitment and heart is. Partly Paul is one of many people trying to work out what a Christian vision is (and other equally prominent people in the new movement are articulating rather different ones). 

Paul comes from a long-standing Jewish communal tradition which has considerable experience of singing the Lord’s song in strange land, and is working out how that is transformed by his Messiah Jesus. The Corinthians have no real idea they are living in a strange land, and in so far as they might think in these terms it is not an idea of being in exile, but one of being a colony, there to teach everyone else to sing the Roman song.

Finally, there is nothing other than personal charisma and persuasive argument to say who is doing any misperceiving: Paul or the Corinthians. There is no orthodoxy for the Corinthians to be seduced away from. What will later (in varying degree) become orthodox emerges in part from Paul thinking on his feet. It is not apparent to me that if the Corinthians hadn’t provoked Paul to argument, the church would ever have so strongly committed to belief in the resurrection of the body. It is equally arguable that in some historical periods aspects of the Corinthian view of the body and sex, say,   have been at least as close to mainstream Christianity as Paul’s. (“It is well for a man not to touch a woman.” 1 Cor 7:1)

In short, Thiselton makes it sound as though what was happening on the ground was straightforward and obvious. I think it was a mess, in which people (especially in this context) Paul and the Corinthians are contending for the appropriate cultural forms of Christian practice and thought in a non-Jewish culture, one partly alien to Paul, in which the Corinthians are fully at home. I also think that’s much more like most of our own situations, whether in the traditional “mission-field” situation or in our very non-traditional one, where the culture has changed under our feet, and there are competing visions about how much to change with it. 

Reading this particular scriptural case as the “seductive infiltration into the Christian church of cultural attitudes” encourages us to do the same today, and engage in name-calling our opponents. Me Paul, you Corinthian. I argue that the reality of what’s going on is more complex, then and now, and if we’re less anachronistic about then, we might be more constructive about now.

1. First Epistle to the Corinthians NIGTC Eerdmans / Paternoster 2000. I use Thiselton here as an example of widespread practice, and indeed an instance of how even Homer nods [↩]

I’ve been meaning to comment this week on a slightly odd story reported in the Sunday Telegraph. As reported:

A police community support officer ordered two Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham.

The evangelists say they were threatened with arrest for committing a “hate crime” and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. The incident will fuel fears that “no-go areas” for Christians are emerging in British towns and cities, as the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, claimed in The Sunday Telegraph this year.

Arthur Cunningham, 48, and Joseph Abraham, 65, both full-time evangelical ministers, have launched legal action against West Midlands Police, claiming the officer infringed their right to profess their religion.

…

West Midlands Police, who refused to apologise, said the incident had been “fully investigated” and the officer would be given training in understanding hate crime and communication.

For those who aren’t familiar with the UK scene, a “police community support officer” is sort of equivalent to a teaching assistant in a classroom. 

I want to offer a few observations:

This story seems to have sunk from view like a stone. That makes me think there may be rather more to it than reported, and that journalists investigating further decided it was less news-worthy than they thought. The “evangelists” concerned seem to be seriously fundamentalist. Of the Bible they believe that “Every Word of the original manuscript [sic] is inspired”, but they are also keen to state:

What We are Not
We are not ecumenical, Charismatic, Arminians, Calvinists or denominational.

That doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for manoeuvre.

A large part of this story’s power comes from the bigger immigration narrative. Without wanting to downplay any of the issues involved, I want to highlight what I see as the biggest danger for the way some people want to enlist Christians to their aid on immigration. The implicit subtext is that Christians are white and native, and if you’re foreign and black you must be Muslim or some other religion. (Something similar seems to have happened in the US in the way some people regard Obama as Muslim.) This is not only politically dangerous, but, from a Christian viewpoint, profoundly heretical.

Churches that don’t evangelise ought to be seen as a contradiction in terms. Mission more generally is of the essence of the church. There are, however, good and bad ways to do it, and (as far as I can tell) what these particular preachers were doing is such a bad way of doing it it’s doubtful that it can be seen as evangelism at all. It looks rather more like an aggressive act of religious and racial hostility, than a generous sharing of the love of God. The preachers’ readiness to pose for a photo and take their story to the paper to tell a story of Muslim no-go areas for Christians encourages me in that suspicion.

It is interesting that nowadays the cases that may most test “freedom of speech” are religious ones. Christians probably need to remember that historically, they have approved of this no more than many Muslims today would, and that effectively it evolved more to protect those outside or against the churches from Christian totalitarianism. Its transformation into a basic Western value that Christians now appeal to both against the secular state and in favour of the freedom to evangelise, is deeply ironic.

I think we will see more and more of this sort of story, and we will need to be very careful about how we read them. They raise quite complex questions of civic polity as well as inter-faith relationships, dialogue and mission. They also suggest that there’s room for far more theological reflection on methods of evangelism that are appropriate to gospel and culture in the early 21st century West. How much power does the method used have to stop it being good news at all?

Jim West loves flogging a dead horse, and the name of the horse is Bultmann.

This is compulsory viewing. Well, it’s not but it ought to be.

HT Inhabitatio Dei