4.2 A Body and Soul? (philosophy series)

My spring philosophy class has been going now for almost eight weeks, so my live sessions have resumed. The idea of this series was to slowly fill in a rough sense of the journey through philosophy that I take semester after of semester. These posts of course go well beyond what we have time to talk about in our live sessions. For example, I am being more forthright here in what I actually think.

This post is in the section on what a human being is. My last post in this stretch was here. See the bottom for the overall shape.
___________________________
1. I think it's clear that we human types have a body. I've never met a person yet who didn't. (At least not that I know of.)

I seem to remember my mother resisting the notion that we are animals. I wasn't saying that we are only animals. But this seems difficult to deny short of some grunt of irrationality. I am much more than a mammal, but by every defining characteristic of a mammal, I am one.

My observation of human behavior is that we behave far more like animals than we would like to admit. I have noted that the roosters in my yard seem preoccupied with fighting each other and mounting hens. So it would seem with a quite large portion of the human men in the world. Very little going on upstairs. A lot of fighting and mounting.

When I'm having this train of thought, I sometimes think of the 1968 movie, The Planet of the Apes. Interestingly, that was a time of American history not unlike our own. The movie is of course a parable of humanity. The sentient apes of the movie mirror human society. There are virtuous apes. There are intelligent apes. But they had better watch out because there are militant, violent apes too.

2. As I observe humanity, the difficulty is not seeing that we are animal as well as human. Strictly from observation, the difficulty is in seeing how we are more than animal. So few humans seem self-reflective. Rather, we seem driven and tossed by our urges.

B. F. Skinner long ago demonstrated that we can be manipulated using behavior modification, just like animals. In one episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon humorously trains Penny to stop talking when he offers her a chocolate. Most of us are just as easily manipulated.

What might be defining characteristics of humans that rise above other animals? Is it our self-consciousness? The majority of humans are barely self-aware, it seems to me. We are elephants that go where we want, with our riders rationalizing our actions after the fact. [1]

We are herd animals. We do whatever our tribe does, and say what our tribe says. Nowhere is this clearer at the moment than in politics, where the official line of the government is so obviously false it is excruciatingly painful. And yet a third of the population mindlessly parrots insanities. Ironically (or perhaps revealingly), a predominant part of that third are evangelicals.

Is it our ability to tell the difference between right and wrong? I have long been disabused of any sense that humans come with a universal conscience. I have never found C. S. Lewis' moral argument persuasive. Our consciences seem in large part culturally conditioned and psychologically formed, apart from some basic instincts.

Theologians call what I am describing "Sin." If you were beginning to get nervous, I am simply describing what we Christians call "fallennesss." Our failure was to think that we were somehow immune. Yes, the other side is fallen, but we have our act together. No, we are all human, all too human.

2. Do we have a soul? Is there a spiritual dimension to us as well? From a Christian perspective, we are image-bearers regardless. We are intrinsically valuable one way or another because God says so. [2]

There is a stream of Christian thought that might be described as "non-reductive physicalist." It does not believe in a detachable soul or a true spiritual ontology, but does not believe that humans can merely be described in terms of our bodies. Our minds may be based in our brains, but it would not be adequate merely to equate them with our brains. The mind is "more than" our brains in some sense.

I would put Joel Green in this category. [3] I'm not sure that N. T. Wright exactly fits this category but his work on the resurrection has emphasized that resurrection in Scripture is an embodied existence. [4] These books, which came out around the same time, were pushing back on the popular Christian narrative that "you die and go to heaven or hell" and that's it.

Rather, resurrection in the New Testament is overwhelmingly physical. It involves a body. The tomb is empty because Jesus' resurrection self is in continuity with his body. It was not a merely spiritual resurrection, as so many in the church seem to imagine the afterlife. 1 Corinthians 15 is emphatic about the corporeal nature of resurrection, as we would expect from an ex-Pharisee.

This is not a new observation although popular Christianity is often disconnected from common scholarly knowledge. Oscar Cullmann, while no doubt oversimplifying the categories, pointed out in 1955 that the notion of the immortality of the soul was far more Greek than biblical. [5]

Nevertheless, I believe these scholars have created too sharp a distinction. There are places in the New Testament that use imagery of the soul or spirit as a detachable part of our identity, not least the pre-resurrected souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9. Paul speaks of the "unclothed" dead (2 Cor. 5:3) and to be absent from the body (2 Cor. 5:8). In what way might the thief be with Jesus in Paradise before the resurrection (Luke 23:43)?

It would thus seem easily that many biblical authors had some notion of a disembodied intermediate state between death and resurrection. Despite what we are often told, embodied resurrection was not the only Jewish tradition around the time of Christ. I and others have argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls, which reflect one stream of Jewish thought in the century before Christ, would far more accurately be characterized as looking to a disembodied future existence in the afterlife even if you can find a few fragments that assume a different position. [6]

3. I should emphasize that these are pictures. The Bible gives us incarnated revelation, revelation that comes to us in the clothing of ancient paradigms. It is the reality to which these images point that we are to look. The clothing is ancient, reflective of the categories of the day. The clothing can change even withinn the pages of the Bible itself. 

So, the point is that we survive death. We survive death not only when God resurrects us in the future. We survive death immediately. In my opinion, the form of that survival is above our paygrade. The Bible uses ancient images drawn from its world to picture that survival. But those images are not the point. Paul can express these uncertainties: "Whether in the body or out of the body, God knows" (2 Cor. 12:2).

4. Even from an empirical perspective, I do believe it is plausible that humans have a spiritual dimension to their identity that "goes beyond" what we can see. Let me use a modern image that is also an attempt to give clothing to a timeless truth.

Science fiction has given us a sense that there may be other "dimensions" to existence beyond the three (or four) that are most obvious to us. In 1884, Edwin Abbott published his novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. In it, a three dimensional creature terrifies a two dimensional one. He seems to be able to walk through walls by simply stepping in and out of the third dimension.

It seems to me that there have been countless instances of events that seem to go beyond what can be observed physically. Someone wakes up in the night with an urge to pray for someone who, at exactly that moment, is undergoing some kind of a crisis. [7] A person seems to effect spiritual power both good and evil.

As a Christian, we nest these sorts of events within a larger spiritual framework--a personal one at that. God and the Devil are personal agents, as are angels and demons.

5. The ontological existence of the soul would be incredibly convenient philosophically. Here are just a few examples:

• It would account for continuity of identity between this life and the next. If God merely recreates us in the resurrection, how is that anything more than cloning some version of our bodies and giving that new person our memories?
• It could anchor human identity at the moment of conception.
• It could ground a notion of human free will outside the cause-effect flow of the material world.
• It might account for human identity beyond the memory and personality functions of the brain.

This last possibility is fascinating. What if, for example, Alzheimer's was an interface problem? What if, the person is in there but unable to connect with us through the brain, like a defunct computer screen on a computer that still works? You can't see what the computer is doing because the screen isn't working, but all the functions are still being performed.

Of course, the advantages of a concept are not in themselves an argument for the truth of the concept. That would be the fallacy of subjectivism--wanting something to be true doesn't make it true. Nevertheless, faith in the existence of a detachable soul would seem to cohere well with Christian faith and biblical faith.

6. The brain does correlate well to many functions we like to attribute to our identity. When a rod blew through Phineas Gage's frontal lobe, his personality changed. The same is of course true for those in the past who were forced to undergo a frontal lobotomy. Alzheimer's involves the tangling of physical neurons in our brains, leading to a loss of memory and self. Biochemistry clearly affects our moods and behavior.

Years ago, a colleague at Indiana Wesleyan University (Michael Boivin) presented a paper showing that certain parts of our brains "light up" when we are undergoing a spiritual experience. That is to say, it is at least theoretically possible that someone could counterfeit religious experiences by targeting those parts of our cerebral cortex.

However, these data points are not proofs that the brain is all there is to human identity. They merely indicate that the brain is significantly involved in human identity. They do not disprove the existence of a soul. 

[1] An image from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012).

[2] I realize my statement borders on incoherence. I am using "intrinsically" in a questionable way. What I am trying to say is that our value cannot be detached or dislodged from us. Yet all created value is derivative. It derives from God. I do not see it as "ontological" in the sense that it inheres in us in some metaphysical way. It is ascribed value--undetachable, inalienable--but solely based on God's assignment. "Good is good because God says so." It is permanent and thus "essential," but it is not truly intrinsic.

[3] Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker, 2008).

[4] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).

[5] Oscar Cullmann, The Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead (Epworth, 1958).

[6] See John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: Death and Afterlife in the Second Temple Period and in several other works.

[7] It is tempting to invoke some sense of quantum entanglement here, although any literal reference would no doubt expose a quantum incompetence on my part. I am simply wondering if there is such a thing as a "spiritual" quantum entanglement.

___________________________

Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated?

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 How to Structure Government
6.2 Christ and Culture

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics 

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism 

Classic Articles on Romans

Because some of my Romans students are taking the class as part of a new residential MA program, I've been feeding them some articles and sources. Here are a few:

The Context of Romans
Krister Stendahl, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West"
Peter Lampe, "The Roman Christians of Romans 16," although I still find Kasemann very tempting.
I also sent them a copy of Dunn's, "The Incident at Antioch"

Righteousness of God
Chapter 6 of What Saint Paul Really Said
Ernst Kasemann's "The Righteousness of God in Paul"
Another important article is Wright's, "On Becoming the Righteousness of God"
Dunn's Romans 1-8 is helpful for 1:16-18 as well, I think

Homosexual Acts in Romans 1
I gave a couple books to a presenter, including Gagnon
Richard Hays has a chapter in Moral Vision

Justification by Works in Romans 2
Wright's out of print commentary is good here, I think.

Faith of/in Jesus
The famous sparring of James Dunn with Richard Hays

Works of Law
I didn't actually send but here are some excerpts I might have:
Dunn mentions both in his preface and in many articles in here
N. T. Wright has one on 4QMMT in here

Justification
Chapter 7 of What Saint Paul Really Said (although I think Wright over-does it)

"Lacking the glory"
I didn't but might have copied from Dunn's Romans 1-8 here.

Hilasterion in Romans 3:25
Here's one I could have given them, even if I'm not necessarily convinced

The Weekly Wright: Stories of the Second Temple

Two weeks ago I re-started reading through N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God. I'm in the middle of the horrendously long chapter 2. Today I want to review pp. 108-39. I apologize for how boring this post is.

1. I'm beginning to see the structure of chapter 2. Wright is reconstructing a Jewish worldview (and especially what he sees as a Pharisaic worldview) in the categories that he developed in The New Testament and the People of God. There he suggested four components to a worldview. Pages 90-108 cover two of them--praxis and symbol. Now in pages 108-79 he covers the other two--story and basic questions.

So in the pages I've covering today, we have his basic introduction to the analysis of story (108-14) and his analysis of the basic Jewish story (114-39).

2. "Despite the danger of generalization, we can and must say that most Jews of Paul's day perceived themselves, at a deep, worldview level, as living in a story in search of an ending" (109). "Any narrative analysis of the letters he would write as Paul the apostle... has to begin with a proper understanding of the stories in which he had lived all his life."

I think I would have really liked these statements twenty-five years ago, but they drive me a little crazy today because of how far Wright takes them. He just seems to generalize too much for me.

So, given the last 100 years, you might think that the second coming has dominated the thinking of Christians for the last 2000 years. But in reality, it was only in the late 1800s that the imminent second coming of Jesus became a central feature of much Christian thinking, perhaps even since the time of the New Testament itself.

You can create a metanarrative out of specific texts that you stretch out for all of history and it can make a lot of sense in terms of ideas. But it may not match what real people thought at real times and places.

Does it make sense, in terms of an idea system, to think that all Jews were waiting for Messiah to come, that they were waiting to return from exile. It makes perfect sense as a set of ideas. And we do have evidence of some messianic expectation here and there. Some Jews probably were thinking these sorts of things. Wright has convinced me of some things.

But his sweeping, two-dimensional metanarrative is the stuff of the classroom, not of real people (especially real ancient people) with their inconsistencies and practical existences. Wright's ideological balloon too easily becomes un-tethered, and that massive genius of his gets carried away into some Platonic realm.

He's responded and will no doubt continue to respond to this critique. But I suspect the critique will continue to be true, no matter how much more he writes, digging in his heals.

3. So his introduction plays out the basic Jewish story using Greimas' actantial model. I've used it myself, so I don't oppose the model. He makes three claims at the end of the introduction to this section:

• "There is every indication that the kind of Jew who became a Pharisee was implicitly aware of living in a continuous story going back to Abraham, perhaps even to Adam, and on to the great coming day" (113).
• They did not expect the decisive moment to come "to involve the collapse or disappearance of the universe of space, time, and matter" (114).
• The Pharisees saw their current time as being one of continuing exile.

He has convinced me of the second bullet (or rather, his Doctor Father, G. B. Caird, has). Apocalyptic, "sun darkened, moon turned to blood" language was never meant literally. Not as powerful but similar is when we speak of "earth-shaking" events.

I am quite willing to believe that some Jews saw themselves currently in a kind of exile, but I don't think we have nearly enough evidence to say that Pharisees did. Frankly, I think we can make a better case that many Essenes felt that way. I think many Jews did expect a royal figure to rise soon, but perhaps not necessarily in a way that was well-connected to Abraham or Adam. I see these more as separate mini-narratives that weren't necessarily well connected to each other.

The first one is Wright once again going metanarrative. It is hard enough to say that Paul himself thought in terms of a single narrative, so that makes the idea of a single proto-Pharisaic narrative all the more problematic.

4. So on page 114 he gets down to business with his single story. He reminded me a little of the method Bultmann used to come up with a Gnostic Redeemer myth. Wright sees pieces of the overall story popping up here and there. Now mind you, it is hard to find the whole story in any one place. :-) But he is just sure it is there below the surface. Everyone's thinking it, even though they don't really come right out and say it. "They were, in other words, snatching items at random as miscellaneous examples or warnings" (117). Classic.

But, alas, I do agree that the backdrop at least to some of the earliest forms of Christian faith was some limited version of what Wright is saying, and that he does see patterns, even if his personality can't help but over-systematize them.

Here are his concluding points to this section:

• "There are considerable and obvious differences between the examples we have studied" (135). Great!
• "Despite the considerable differences there are also remarkable commonalities." 
• "In more or less all cases the story being told is a story in which the writer believes that he and his readers are still participants" (136).
• "Most of these long and varied accounts of Israel's history are the very opposite of success stories" (137).
• "The Messiah will precisely bring the story of Israel to its goal" (138).

I apologize that I have not been able to capture why so much of this is just bad business to me. I think it's because he's not talking specific people at specific times. He's trying to speak of a whole people over a large period of time.

5. I just finished a section of a chapter on Jewish views of the temple at the time of the NT, especially Philo and Essenes. In the case of Philo, I had several passages where I could draw evidence about him. I knew of events in his life that arguably could have altered the intensity of his attachment to the temple as well as other Jews. We know when he lived and that it was about the time of Jesus.

As far as the Essenes, we again have several texts that mention the temple, including a Temple Scroll. We have solid hypotheses about the Dead Sea Scrolls and can locate them in time in relation to the NT. We don't view even them as a single point of view but recognize them as a set of documents that covers as much as a century, with various events potentially altering their circumstances during that period.

My point is that we can talk reasonably about the point of view of these specific people toward the temple around the time of Christ. What Wright does is abstract the question of story from real people at specific times and places under specific circumstances. As such, his overarching narrative becomes detached from history and becomes something else, something abstract and theological.

The balloon becomes untethered from history, IMO, and becomes somewhat of a two-dimensional caricature.

Wednesday Wright - Paul and the Faithfulness of God, chapter 2

Dare I say that I've restarted reading N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God? I finished chapter one in January of 2014! Wright has a book coming out this Fall on the history of the interpretation of Paul that I'm very much looking forward to, but may I find the strength to continue through this Leviathan until then.

So here are some observations from chapter 2 to jump start myself. My last post was here.

1. The title of chapter 2 is, "Like Birds Hovering Overhead." It comes from Isaiah 31:5: "Like birds hovering overhead, so the Lord of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it, he will spare and rescue it" (NRSV). So this 122 page chapter is going to be on the Jewish background to Paul.

Wright has already covered much of this territory in the first volume of the series: The New Testament and the People of God (NTPG). So in this chapter, he hopes especially "to bring out the way in which the faithfulness of Israel's God functions as a theme throughout so much of the period" (77) of the New Testament (the Second Temple Period or early Judaism).

2. So how about the Pharisees? Twenty years ago I found Wright's version of the Pharisees compelling. Mind you, if he was cautious to weigh in around greats like E. P. Sanders and Jacob Neusner, you can imagine how foolish I feel to have an opinion.

Nevertheless, I find his sense of them to make good sense. They were very popular and influential. He were active in promoting their perspectives. They were far more than a pure-food club but many were highly active politically. Wright largely divides the active from the non-active between the School of Shammai (active) and the School of Hillel (non-active).

So if we are to see the pre-believing Paul, if we are to see what zeal for the Law looked like, we need only turn to 1 and 2 Maccabees. Ioudaismos meant, "not simply the practice of a 'religion', but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life and its defense against attack whether from outside (as in the case of Mattathias) or inside (as in the case of Saul of Tarsus)" (89).

3. The third section of this chapter is the last I want to hit today. "Torah is a symbol which by its very nature is about praxis" (91).

There's some material on the temple here, which is of great interest to me. Wright goes a little too far, I suspect, when he says that "when you went up to the Temple, it was not as though you were 'in heaven'. You were actually there" (97). That comment just sounds ridiculous to me, at least when it comes to the overwhelming majority of Jews. I'm sure there were some heady Jews like Wright who thought that. But how many farmers or blue collar workers in your congregation would have thought that?

In general, I was disappointed with the next few pages (102-107).

a. Temple = cosmos.
b. Temple is connected with David.
c. Restoration of king = restoration of temple = new Genesis = new Exodus

"To those who pored over Torah night and day, looking for the consolation of Israel, this combination of motifs - Temple, presence, glory, kingship, wisdom, creation, exile, rebuilding, and unfulfilled promise - would be part of their mental and emotional furniture. Touch one and you would touch them all" (107).

Show me the texts. He is filling in too many gaps, seeing too much system. Are these all potentially related themes? Yes. But in reality groups tend to focus on some and not others. People aren't consistent, even thinkers, unless you're N. T. Wright. (P.S. There aren't many of those.)

In short, there seems to be a lot of ahistorical hermeneutic here disguised as a historical one. He is constructing too many connections between ideas in texts and not listening enough to the individual particularity of texts in history. It's not that I don't think there are some Jewish expectations to be found in the literature. It's that he just seems to take it too far, to reconstruct too much "common Jewish expectation" here.

More perhaps next Wednesday.

Wednesday Reading: Wright's Romans

I didn't get much further in Philo this week, but I did read some more of N. T. Wright's Romans commentary. I'm finding it very readable and very helpful. For my Wednesday post, I thought I'd comment on his section on the key verses of Romans--1:16-17.

One of the reasons I wrote a New Testament series for Wesleyan Publishing House is because the the pulpit often lags about twenty to thirty years behind current trends in interpretation (the mission field even more). You often hear from the pulpit things people were saying decades ago about the Bible. For example, I still hear regularly from pastors all over word fallacies that were very popular back in the Kittel generation of the 1960s and 70s.

I wrote the second volume of my three Paul books especially to bring the church up to speed on where the interpretation of Romans has moved in these last twenty to thirty years. It turns out, contemporary scholarship is very friendly to Wesleyan-Arminian thinking...

Wright doesn't go into a lot of detail in his short section on Romans 1:16-17 but he does touch on some features that reflect the best understanding of scholarship on Romans at this time (built on the best of the scholarship of the past--scholarship may change, but I would argue there can be a cumulative dimension rather than simply a bouncing around):

• The gospel, in the first place, is the good news that Jesus is king and all that his enthronement entails. Salvation is thus part of the good news but it is not the focus of the good news. Jesus is the focus, not me.
• The "righteousness of God" is a concept with a history. In particular, if you look at the overlap between Psalm 71:1-2 and Romans 1:16-17, a strong case can be made that God's righteousness is his propensity to save his people (and the world). (in this verse at least, not a righteousness ascribed to us from God, as the NIV1984 translated it--the NIV2011 has fixed it)
• "From faith to faith" is a cryptic shorthand. It is too cryptic I think to say for sure what Paul was thinking, but I am very sympathetic to Wright and Dunn's sense that it is a shorthand for "starting with God's faithfulness and ending in our faith in response." 

Tom Wright's Romans Commentary

Tucked away in the New Interpreter's Bible from Acts to 1 Corinthians is N. T. Wright's commentary on Romans.

I finished his Introduction to Romans yesterday and let me just say that this is Wright at his best. IMO, there is very little of Wright's eccentricity here but a clear presentation of what I consider some of his most plausible positions without eccentricity.

Looking forward to working through the rest of it.

N. T. Wright the Pattern See-er

I deeply appreciate N. T. Wright. He has left his mark all over NT studies with generative insights all over the place. He was very impactful on me in the mid-90s. It would be fun to list all the little nuggets I have taken from him--it would be a significant list.

But, man, his massive Paul to me is like all of the whacky ideas he had in grad school come home to roost. It's like a pre-modern pie cooked from a thousand modernist bits. It embodies exactly the kind of grand escrit that postmodernism was built to deconstruct.

He should have published it in the 90s. He's mulled this material over too long, IMO.

Grafting Gentiles into the Tree

In the first chapter, we saw that one aspect of the recently revised perspectives on Paul and Judaism was a greater sense of the continuity between Israel and earliest Christianity. Indeed, throughout the book I have argued that it is much more accurate to speak of Christian Jews than it is to speak of Jewish Christians. Even Gentile believers in Christ were, at the beginning, something along the lines of Gentile converts to Israel. When I speak of "Gentile Christians," I am in a sense speaking of a certain species of "Gentile Israelite."

In this chapter, we now want to look at Hebrews in relation to the Jewish sense of election, covenant, and the Law in its environment. The previous chapter looked at the Christology of Hebrews in relation to Jewish "monotheism." Earlier chapters have looked at Hebrews in relation to the temple, which speaks to Jewish conceptions of land and redemption. [1] Now we want to ask to what extent Hebrews might reflect a partitioning or parting of the ways with Judaism in relation to election, covenant, and Torah. [2]

At this point it is perilous to enter into Pauline waters, even though we must. Much like the first chapter, we will simply have to take certain positions and more or less by-pass the significant amount of debate that surrounds an issue such as this one. The amount of literature on Paul and the Law is staggering to the mind. To some extent, we will simply have to comfort ourselves with the fact that the position we will take here in relation to Paul has already been defended elsewhere by others, even though we cannot hope to rehearse an exhaustive argument.

So we begin with Paul as potentially relevant background to Hebrews on the question of election, covenant, and the Jewish Law...

[1] In Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood  Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009), Pamela Eisenbaum considers redemption one of three key components of Judaism at the time, along with worship and Torah (68). N. T. Wright considers her category of redemption to correspond loosely to his third element, "eschatology," alongside monotheism and election, in Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 612 **.

[2] See chapter 1. For language of "partitioning," see especially D. Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004).

In the Wright

I've decided to take a Schencky approach to my depressing reading list. Since I know I can't read through the list from start to finish--simply the realities of my life--I'm going to pop in and out of them.

So tonight I popped into the Introduction to Part III of N. T. Wright's tome, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. This is the beginning to the second book of this "one book." This is where he gets to Paul. The first book is background and context.

1. His goal in this second book is to show the central concern and inner logic of Paul. He emphasizes the coherence of Paul's writings. I'll confess that I much prefer Dunn to Wright. Dunn builds up patterns from the text up. Wright has a tendency to presuppose a metanarrative and then see it everywhere, implicit in passages even at times when he can't point to a verse.

I actually wonder if his earlier work on Paul was more helpful before he had looked at Paul so long that he began to see all these complex patterns everywhere. Also I think his Paul articles on specific passages are more helpful.

2. His reduction of Second Temple Jewish theology to monotheism, election, and eschatology is interesting (Dunn had four pillars--monotheism, election, covenant, and land; Eisenbaum has worship, Torah, and redemption). I'm not sure how prevalent eschatology was at all times but it obviously plays a large role for Wright.

"Paul remained a thoroughly Jewish thinker" (611). Fair enough.

Early Christianity reworked monotheism, election, and eschatology around Jesus the Messiah and the Holy Spirit (612). Definitely on the first. I wait to see what he means by the second.

3. Wright and I will no doubt soon find ourselves in tension over how much of the OT context Paul presupposes in his use of Scripture. My dictum is, "As far as the intended meaning, see no more meaning in the words than is necessary." Wright will rather see lots of resonances and a deep theological richness. I have no problem with that as a reader response, a "theological interpretation." I just think it goes beyond what Paul himself was likely thinking. I call it promiscuous exegesis.

Wright versus Campbell at Duke

Finally made it through the hour and a half panel discussion from last Monday that took place at Duke Divinity School. N. T. Wright was the reason, who spoke last Tuesday there. Richard Hays moderated. Douglas Campbell was the main debate partner, with Susan Eastman and Ross Wagner occasionally weighing in.

If I am allowed an opinion, I have similar questions about the extent to which Wright sees the exodus/return from exile motif in Paul, as well as his identification of Christ with Israel. Campbell's opening question seemed quite apropos.

Still, I didn't enjoy what soon felt like Campbell badgering him. Wright fittingly asks him if he is a lawyer at one point. I'm currently trying to wade through Campbell's own tome. Frankly, I don't think Barth is particularly helpful for understanding Paul, for whom I believe theology is ultimately more central than Christology.

For those not acquainted with Richard Hays, he is the elder statesman of Duke Divinity School, currently Dean. He made his entry into the scholarly world by championing that the expression, "the faith of Jesus Christ," referred to Jesus' faithfulness (to death) rather than to faith in Christ. Most reading this post would benefit most by reading his book called, The Moral Vision of the New Testament.

The table seemed arranged from least sympathetic at least to most congenial. Ross Wagner is a class act, and a steal for Duke. Beyond that, I'll let the video speak for itself.

Best New Perspective Insights

Here is my attempt to capture the best insights of the last sixty years or so since the first rumblings of a revised perspective of Paul in relation to Judaism:

• Paul did not see himself as a miserable failure at keeping the Law before he believed on Christ. If anything, his attitude was more like the Pharisee in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18. As far as the righteousness in the Law, he was blameless (Phil. 3:6). Stendahl
• Paul's "conversion" certainly was not a change of religions but a partial modification of his beliefs within Judaism, most significantly the fact that he came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. (Stendahl would say a call, but that is probably too weak.) Paul is not his Christian name (Acts continues to call him Saul for over a decade after he believes Jesus is the Messiah) but relates to his Roman name. It would be easy to argue that Paul had long suppressed his Diaspora identity--a more generative psychological explanation for his conversion than introspective guilt in the modern sense.
• Paul's turning point centered on a religious experience he had of the risen Christ. (Segal)
• The earliest Christians were thus a messianic sect. They in no way saw themselves as departing from Judaism but saw themselves representing what all of Israel should believe and do, true Israel, as it were.
• Those elements of Paul's theology that the "new perspective" has most impacted largely grew out of the Gentile mission. In these areas, Paul's theology largely developed "from solution to plight." (Sanders) Paul knew that the Gentiles were in through Christ (solution); therefore, he presented arguments for why keeping "works of Law" was not effective for "justification" before God (problem).
• "Works of Law" for Paul referred especially to those aspects of the Jewish Law that were "boundary markers" that separated Jew from Gentile. (Dunn) These stood at the heart of the earliest Christian debate over the inclusion of the Gentiles into the community of faith. Judaizers argued that Gentiles had to be circumcised to be included, and James/Peter argued that they had to observe certain purity rules to have table fellowship. Paul's teaching on justification by faith (solution) grew out of these problems.
• Later interpreters of Paul have understandably misread Judaism in the light of Paul's arguments. For example, Jews did not see themselves as keeping the Law to get right with God. Keeping the Law was not about "getting in" but about "staying in" (Sanders). Indeed, it wasn't even as much about staying in as about responding appropriately to God's covenant expectations (covenantal nomism--Sanders).
• Judaism thus thoroughly presupposed that God was a God of grace, meaning that his favor was not earned by Israel's faithfulness. (Sanders) Once we understand grace against the backdrop of patron-client relationships, we see that there were informal expectations that came with grace, even if grace could not be earned. (Malina)
• It is thus incorrect to accuse either Judaism or interpretations of Paul as "justification by works" if we conclude that there were definite ethical expectations of both Jews and believers. Paul teaches that our deeds are an element of our final justification before God. (Wright) This neither contradicts a proper understanding of grace nor Paul's arguments that keeping the ethnic particulars of the Jewish Law cannot demonstrate one's right standing before God.
• Justification language did not stand at the heart of Paul's theology but was rather a set of lenses Paul used in response to opposition to the Gentile mission from conservative elements within the earliest church. (Sanders, Dunn)
• Paul's arguments about "faith in Christ" begin with statements about how he and the Jerusalem church agree on the necessity of the "faithfulness of Jesus" for a right standing before God. (Schenck, synthesizing both Hays and Dunn)
• Paul's arguments with his opponents are thus arguments over a story (Hays), namely, the story of Christ's death and resurrection. Paul shares with earliest Christianity the belief that the resurrection has enthroned Jesus as Messiah. He shares with earliest Christianity the belief that the cross has functioned as a sacrifice of atonement, that the "faithfulness of Jesus" has made justification possible before God. He agrees that baptism in the name of Jesus is a mystical participation in the death of Jesus (Sanders, Schweitzer). He disagrees on the implications of these affirmations.
• Wright is probably correct on a background narrative at least in this respect. The cross was seen by the earliest Christians as the solution to the problem of Israel's "captivity." Israel should not be under the power of the Romans. God would send a Messiah to deliver it. Jesus' death was likely initially seen as a Maccabean type sacrifice to atone for the sins of Israel.

Is there a rapture?

... Revelation 7 first looks to the salvation of those in Israel who remain true to the Messiah despite persecution. The number 144,000 is surely symbolic. But these from Israel are not alone. There is a great multitude there as well from every nation, tribe, people and language (7:9). Who are they? They are all those from all the nations who have remained true to God throughout times of great tribulation and persecution by those who oppose Christ.

In the past, some have seen this gathering in God's throne room as a result of a “rapture,” the snatching of the faithful from the earth before the final judgment. They would connect this passage to 1 Thessalonians 4:17, where “we who are still alive and are left” are snatched up to meet Jesus in the clouds. There are some similarities to 1 Thessalonians 4 but also some differences.

The biggest similarity is that John seems to picture individuals who are alive when the final judgment begins. The great multitude of Revelation 7:14 has come out of the great distress and tribulation that John is saying will soon take place. They are not said to be all the saints of all the ages. To be clear, they do not come out of a seven year Tribulation, but Revelation seems to see them as those from the earth who are saved in the time leading up to the final judgment.

The big difference between Revelation and 1 Thessalonians 4 is that, in Thessalonians, the resurrection of the dead in Christ happens before this snatching from the earth. Further, it seems like those who are "caught up" to meet Christ in the clouds in Paul's understanding then return to participate in the judgment of the world (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:2-3). By contrast, those in Revelation 7 are not said to participate in the final judgment.

We will also notice below that the book of Revelation pictures two resurrections separated by a symbolic thousand year period. Since the book of Revelation is so symbolic, it would be perilous to use it to provide the basic framework for how we think the events will specifically play out. Better to stick with Paul's sense that the resurrection and evacuation/salvation of those in Christ will take place together before the final judgment of the earth. [1]

[1] N. T. Wright is well known for applying his genius to 1 Thessalonians 4 so that it might be taken a little less literally. See, for example, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and 1 Thessalonians (London: SPCK, 2002), 124-26. While he is surely correct that Paul is not picturing the saints going off to heaven forever, while he is surely correct that the image is more of meeting a visitor to escort them back into the city, he may be guilty of trying to "demythologize" the imagery a little too much. Paul probably did picture Jesus as straight up and descending straight down. Wright may certainly be correct that heaven is in another dimension, but no biblical author was equipped to understand what that statement even means.

Wright: Finishing chapter 1

Well, here's the rest of chapter 1 of N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God, finished reading it about three weeks ago. :-(

Preface

Chapter 1
1. The Basics of Philemon
2.i-iii. Philemon and Christian Worldview
iv. History, Exegesis, "Application"
v. Sources

vi.Worldview, Theology, History
Summary
In this section, Wright finishes setting up his analytical system. He has already reminded his reader of the components of worldview he uses: story, praxis, symbols, and basic questions. He has also set up a quasi-matrix for analyzing Paul: history, exegesis, theology, and "application." Now he tries to connect the two.

In a person or community, there are basic beliefs (theology) that flow out of a person's worldview. These basic beliefs provide a person or community's basic aims (history). As a natural consequence of such basic beliefs, there are consequent beliefs (theology) that are a natural by-product and play out in more detail. These are more negotiable and lead to our more specific intentions in life (history).

Then to complete the loop back to earlier in the chapter, basic beliefs/consequent beliefs/theology all relate to the worship dimension of a community. Aims/intentions/history then relate to the culture of a community.

Finally, Wright brings in the complication that no interpreter is objective. There is a gap between us and the text. We have our own worldviews, worship, and culture that get in the way of seeing the text. We tend to infect our reading of Paul with what we are looking for or from him.

Reflection
How complicated! The real world is complicated, but I can't imagine that this Rorschach has any staying power. Wright is brilliant. He has tried hard to upgrade his initial idealist software with numerous real world plug-ins, but the result is clunky.

Wright's fundamental personality and bias remains very rational, despite the way he has tried to take on board all the correctives and insights of philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. His account of worldview is light years ahead of van Til but for all Wright's distancing from these arch-presuppositionalists and antihistorians, he is still their child. He still assumes that real life aims and intentions flow from underlying beliefs.

So he has all the elements, but he remains a structuralist in his thinking. He sees the underlying pattern as more primary than the world from which he abstracts it. Rather, human thought is epiphenomenon, a mechanism for living in the world. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs gives a more accurate picture of what stands behind human aims and intentions. Behind our lives are more fundamentally drives, not ideas.

Our ideas are collections and clumpings of family resemblances, not deductive masterpieces. Our identity-giving stories are more often short vignettes than large metanarratives. Human thought is much more atomistic and a front for more basic urges than anything like tidy systems.

vii. Philemon as Allegory
Wright ends the chapter with a fun allegory, which of course is not the meaning of Philemon but we are delighted at this intentional sensus plenior. Philemon represents theological orthodoxy. Onesimus is the Enlightenment project of historiography. Some historical approaches have left the Paul of faith behind. Meanwhile, some (John Piper) do not want the Paul of history to come back.

Paul himself knows that he must unite his whole self. He must send history back to theology. A unified Paul--both of faith and history--can be recovered. Such is Wright's aim.

Tom Wright and the New Perspective

Filling in gaps in my Hebrews book...
_____________________
... N. T. Wright substantially agrees with Dunn on the question of works of Law. Even before Dunn began to popularize the phrase, "new perspective," Wright had written that Israel's problem, according to Paul, was not legalism or an attempt to become righteous by doing good works. Rather, Paul saw Israel as guilty of "national righteousness," "the belief that fleshly Jewish descent guarantees membership of God's true covenant people." [1] Dunn agreed. [2]

We see this sentiment play out especially in Paul's letter to the Romans. Dunn writes, "The 'boasting' of the 'Jew' in Rom. 2:17-23 is certainly to be understood as a boasting in covenant privilege over against the less-favored, or rather passed-over Gentiles" [3] Dunn assents to what Brendon Byrne has written similarly of Romans 10:3. In this verse, Israel is said to have attempted to establish its own righteousness. Byrne writes, "'their own righteousness' ... can only mean the righteousness of Israel as holy people separate from the sinful rest of humankind." [4]

Wright and Dunn thus shift the sense of boasting in Romans from a sense of boasting in individual righteousness, because of an individual's good works, to a boasting in one's race, one's Jewishness, over and against non-Jews. Similarly, the works in question are not just any good works but especially those works of the Jewish Law that most differentiated Jew from Gentile in matters like circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath observance. The so called "new perspective" thus pulled the trajectory of Pauline scholarship out of the clouds of a generalized and universizalized Paul, the Paul of Augustine and the Reformation, and back down to the concrete earth that was the real world that Paul was navigating as he conducted the Gentile mission...

[1] "The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith," (1978), in Pauline Perspectives, 6.

[2] E.g., "The New Perspective on Paul," (1983), in The New Perspective on Paul, 114-15.

[3] New Perspective, 9.

[4] "The Problem of Nomos and the Relationship with Judaism in Romans," CBQ 62 (2000): 294-309, esp. 302, quoted in Dunn, New Perspective, 11 n.40.

Sources for the Study of Paul 4

I'm a bit clogged up because I haven't had much time to post this last week.  So let me start by nearing the end of chapter 1 of N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God. I actually finished reading the chapter a couple weeks ago. Thus far,

Preface

Chapter 1
1. The Basics of Philemon
2.i-iii. Philemon and Christian Worldview
iv. History, Exegesis, "Application"

v. Sources
Summary
In this section, Wright addresses the question of the sources he will use to construct an understanding of Paul's theology and worldview. The main issue here is the fact that, for the better part of the last century, a large number of Pauline scholars have questioned whether Paul wrote Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians. Similarly, a strong majority have concluded it not likely at all that Paul wrote 1, 2 Timothy and Titus.

Wright argues that the consensus in several of these cases should be re-examined. He argues, for example, that ideological reasons stand behind the consensus in relation to several of these letters. He lays the blame first at the feet of the nineteenth century interpreter F. C. Baur. Baur famously categorized the New Testament in terms of a Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis, with Jewish Christianity as the thesis, Pauline Christianity as the antithesis, and "Catholic" Christianity as the synthesis. Accordingly, any Pauline letters that seemed "catholic" were considered as non-Pauline.

In particular, Wright thinks some of the difficulty with regard to Colossians and Ephesians, in his view, is because they "seem to have a much stronger and higher view of the church" (57). They "did not appear to teach 'justification by faith.'" They "fly in the face of the liberal protestant paradigm" (57-58). He seems a little puzzled that the "new perspective" on Paul, which challenges the liberal Protestant paradigm, has not challenged it at this point.

So he suggests another ideological "prejudice" he suspects may be in the way now--the household codes. So he suggests that egalitarianism may now stand in the way of what he considers a fairer consideration of Ephesians and Colossians. Whatever the cause, it has become such a dogma, in his view, that younger scholars are not allowed to question it. He mentions with favor Clifford Geertz's comment that "it is almost more of a problem to get exhausted ideas out of the scholarly literature than it is to get productive ones in" (59).

So he says, "let us put the chess pieces back on the board from time to time and restart the game" (60). He does not find arguments from stylistic difference convincing. He finds the stylistic differences between 1 and 2 Corinthians more striking than between Galatians/Romans and Ephesians/Colossians. In the end, he proceeds with the assumption that Colossians is certainly Pauline and Ephesians is highly likely to be Paul.

He also considers it highly likely that 2 Thessalonians is Pauline. The "prejudice" he identifies against it is the older prejudice against Paul being an apocalyptic thinker. But since now it is even trendy to think of Paul as an apocalyptic and political thinker, it would be ironic to rule 2 Thessalonians out of consideration, he says. Nevertheless, "as a concession to troubled consciences" (61), he will still try to let the "normal seven letters" bear most of the weight (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon).

Wright seems careful not to say explicitly that 1 Timothy and Titus are not from Paul's hand, but he implies that he thinks so. At the end of all this rethinking, 1 Timothy and Titus remain in "a different category" for him. He does not consider 2 Timothy as doubtful. "My own opinion is that if the only 'Pastoral' letter we had was what we presently call 2 Timothy, the 'problem of the Pastorals' might not have occured" (61).

Finally, he addresses Acts as a source for Paul. Once again, he finds a liberal prejudice underlying the unpopularity of using Acts as a source for the historical Paul. The Gospels and Acts were seen as a coping strategy with the failure of Christ's return to take place. He thinks Acts has been dated later and later for these sorts of theological and ideological reasons. Luke is seen as an architect of a road toward early Catholicism, a la Baur.

"None of this means, of course, that Acts can be used naively as it stands as a historical source" (63). But he believes it is less in conflict with Paul's own writings than is sometimes supposed. He even suggests that we should no longer just assume that Acts 15 and Galatians 2 refer to the same event. Basically, he wants to open the doors on any consensus that may exist and look at Paul's writings freshly, with no presumptions unexamined.

Reflection
Wright is clearly trying to redress what he sees as an unsubstantiated bias among Pauline experts in relation to which books Paul wrote in the New Testament and which books might be "pseudonymous," written under Paul's name a few decades after his death. We must applaud his plea that each generation of scholars, indeed each student, be willing to examine long-held consensuses like these.

I think of what Mark Goodacre has said in relation to the existence of Q--while most scholars may believe in Q, few have done the hard work to come to that conclusion on their own. They more or less assume the existence of Q because it has been a consensus for so long. (By the way, Goodacre hasn't convinced me yet that he is right, even though I agree with the need to re-examine the consensus.)

Wright's words in this section have been greeted with great delight among evangelicals, who have more or less always rejected the arguments for pseudonymity anyway. Indeed, it is practically forbidden in most evangelical circles even to question the literal Pauline authorship of any of his books in the New Testament. To do so is usually seen as tantamount to calling these books forgeries and their authors liars (I reject that this is the only alternative position, as does Wright).

We thus see prejudice on both ends of the spectrum. On the one end are the scholars who won't let you study with them if you actually think Paul might have written the Pastoral Epistles. On the other end are those who will kick you out of their fellowship if you even entertain the idea that Paul might not have. Wright stands in the middle between these two extremes. He only thinks 1 Timothy and Titus were written as a literary device under Paul's name (and he does not see this as an obstacle to considering them Scripture). The rest he more or less accepts as coming from Paul's hand, with the possible exception of 2 Timothy.

The reaction to Wright's thoughts here is predictable. Evangelicals, who have never accepted pseudonymity at all on principle, will greet his thoughts here as vindication. "Told you so." Meanwhile, it is doubtful that Wright's arguments here will convince any scholars who already accept the old consensus. I privilege the Pauline authorship of all these books in my teaching, but like Wright would love to see a climate where the question is about the evidence rather than the politics.

It is doubtful that I can be objective, but let me try my best to evaluate Wright's push back on the century-long majority positions. Since he does not reject the consensus on 1 Timothy and Titus, I will not address them.

Let me say that I have long agreed with Jerome Murphy-O'Connor and now Wright on the topic of 2 Timothy. It is far less "problematic" than 1 Timothy or Titus. The only reason I personally can think to doubt whether Paul wrote 2 Timothy is chapter 4, which seems to see Christ's return as some time in the future. This represents a shift from 1 Corinthians 7:29-31 and 1 Thessalonians 4:17, where Paul seems to expect the Lord to return much more imminently. For this reason, Murphy-O'Connor suggested 2 Timothy might have been built out of a final letter of Paul, with some supplementing by someone else.

Wright's questions on the extent to which style can be used to make such determinations have been made for some time. E. Randolph Richards suggested that the common use of a secretary when composing a letter especially makes questions of style more difficult to use against authorship. Whether this is simply telling a certain audience what it wants to hear or giving a substantive corrective remains to be seen.

I think of what James Dunn wrote in relation to Paul's authorship of Colossians. Dunn was clearly quite willing to believe that Colossians came directly from Paul's hand but in the end suggested that perhaps the hand of Timothy, who is also mentioned as an author, was more directly responsible. In this scenario, perhaps Paul drafted a basic outline and agreed with what Timothy composed, but would have largely left the writing itself to Timothy. Such a proposal is speculative, of course, but it underlines Dunn's ultimate inability to reconcile differences in "manner and mode of expression," in light of "the relative constancy of Paul's style elsewhere" (35). Whether Wright or Dunn is correct on this one, I feel Dunn's pain.

Wright is surely correct that young scholars often accept the consensus of previous generations without enough of a critical eye. There is surely some truth that fumes of earlier consensuses live on by their own momentum. I seriously doubt, however, that F. C. Baur or his fumes continue to have any role to play whatsoever in the current lay of the scholarly land. Wright has more evidence at hand that the egalitarianism of someone like Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza might want to distance Paul from the household codes of the Prison Epistles. Then again, I doubt she would have any problem critiquing Paul himself.

Is an anti-apocalyptic bias at work against 2 Thessalonians--or maybe an anti-dispensational bias? Maybe so with some scholars. As I see it, what is difficult about 2 Thessalonians is 1) how difficult it is to place in Paul's timeline and 2) the fact that it is just so different from anything we hear Paul say elsewhere. It is just an enigma all the way around. Perhaps Wright has some silver bullets here, and I look forward to hearing them.

I smiled when I read Wright's statements about Ephesians. Regardless of Paul's authorship, it is not surprising that Wright would not so much feel the pain of those who think Ephesians is more generic than Paul's other letters. That is to say, in my opinion, Wright's interpretations of Paul are already a more theologized and abstract version of the real Paul, so it is no surprise that he would not seem to notice that Ephesians is less concrete than Paul's other letters. Edgar Goodspeed once speculated whether Ephesians might have been created as a cover letter for Paul's letters once the church started collecting them and binding them together. He wondered if it was created to present a synopsis of Paul's theology.

Obviously such ideas are unprovable. They are purely speculative. Goodspeed's speculation merely testifies to the general, rather than concrete, nature of Ephesians.  The words "at Ephesus" were not likely part of the original letter, leaving some to suggest Paul wrote it as a circular letter to a whole region, rather than to a specific church in Asia. Quite unusually for Paul, the only actual, concrete name mentioned in the whole letter is Tychicus.

A careful eye will observe numerous minor shifts in Ephesians from Paul's earlier letters (e.g., saved by grace rather than justified by faith). That does not mean Paul didn't write it. But if we truly want to listen to Paul, we won't sweep them under the rug either.

The point is not to say that Wright is wrong about Ephesians. It is to say that far more is going on with the consensus than some ideological fume carried over from F. C. Baur. Wright will not change anyone's mind by what he has written here, only inspire those who already agree with him.

Similar responses could be made with regard to Wright's treatment of Acts. There are no doubt some "liberals" who would want to distance Acts from the actual events, to distance it from history. Yet there is just as much bias on the other end, pushing it to be as early as possible. In the middle are at least a few scholars who are really trying their best simply to follow the evidence to its most likely conclusion.

Yet surely his basic position is correct. We should neither assume that Acts is fiction or be naive about its precise historicity. Let the evidence go where the evidence goes.

Wright - Exegesis is historical in nature 3

More on chapter 1 of N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God in bits. Thus far,

Preface

Chapter 1
The Basics of Philemon
Philemon and Christian Worldview

iv. History, Exegesis, "Application"
Summary
Thus far in this section, Wright has been trying to create a framework within which to approach Paul's worldview. He has also tried to create a framework for connecting worldview with theology and culture. He continues his prolegomena in the next section by clarifying the nature of history, exegesis, and application of a text, three other tasks normally undertaken when Paul is studied.

His historical method is sound and he is quite insistent that the historical task cannot be ignored. "The normal charitable assumption is that the words were written by writers who were doing their best to say, more or less, what they meant" (53). "The historical task remains central and non-negotiable" (55).

Exegesis is the second task and "is a branch of history" (52). Wright wants to avoid reductionism, which in his view would isolate the task of interpretation from history, theology, or application. Application is the third task and has to do with connecting the meaning of the text with our context.

Wright reiterates his critical realist perspective. We avoid on the one side the naive realism that imagines we can see the text with a God's eye view and, on the other side, the narcissistic reductionism that thinks all perception is projection. "History is possible" (50), even though what we have is "a seemingly random selection of Paul's writings, in which each letter contains some striking material not found in any of the others." "Real advance in historical knowledge is possible" (53).

The proper method of historical investigation is to 1) account for the data, 2) do so with appropriate simplicity, and 3) shed light on areas outside the subject-matter of the inquiry (54).

Some of the final sentences of this section are worth quoting at length. Although the study of Paul must begin with the interpretation of his actual letters, "Only when we have understood Paul's worldview do we understand why his theology is what it is, and the role it plays precisely within that worldview. Only when we understand Paul's theology do we understand why he believed himself called to do what he did... Only then, in fact, do we really stand a chance of approaching the tasks of exegesis itself... with any deep overall understanding" (55).

Reflection
It seems to me that Wright's general sense of things in this section is helpful. It is helpful more as individual insights than as a systematic scaffolding. Wright is, as it were, creating a grand recit next to any text--and that structure is vulnerable precisely because it is a systematic metanarrative. His individual claims are helpful and ring true, but he cannot resist creating an overarching system, quite possibly reflecting his early engagement with structuralism. At some points he seems vulnerable to the very characteristics he critiques in others.

A far more helpful (and simple) model for approaching texts is that of Paul Ricoeur, the "three worlds" of the text. The 1) world within the text is the text itself. It never exists as a text-in-itself, to be sure, because anyone who reads it already informs the words with meanings from another world.

The 2) world behind the text is all the things Wright is concerned with--history, culture, "worldview," "mindset," theology. These are the elements that informed the intended and assumed meanings of the text originally. Meanwhile, the 3) world in front of the text is my world as a reader, all the elements of "worldview," "mindset," theology, and so forth that I see in the text by drawing on my world, usually without realizing it.

Ricoeur's model is a heuristic model at best, because in reality it is all mixed together in ways we can never parse out entirely. Wright has no penchant to separate the meaning of a text from that which was originally intended. Certainly he recognizes the reality of polyvalence, but I strongly suspect he has no desire to treat non-original meanings to the text as true meanings.

Yet he is surely spot-on when it comes to critical realism over naive realism and "narcissistic projection." Exegesis is a worthy goal and historical investigation is to some extent possible. Whether it is non-negotiable we can debate, but it seems a quite worthy task. All truth is God's truth, and so all truth is inherently valuable and a blessing, whether we see the immediate benefit or not.

It is in the nature of Protestant and evangelical identity to be interested in the historical meaning of the text, even if this quest tends to deconstruct somewhat in its own pursuit. For mainline Protestants, it deconstructed into liberalism. For evangelicalism, it logically leads to polyvalence. Everything else is transitional, a hermeneutic not taken to its logical end.

Wright's historical method could perhaps be expressed better. Good historical investigation does indeed 1) draw on as much data as possible, 2) formulate hypotheses that account for as much of the data as possible with appropriate simplicity and elegance, and 3) continues to test such hypotheses against new data and over and against competing hypotheses. For a theist, possible explanations include not only the normal cause and effect hypotheses (cf. Troeltsch) but also the possibility of divine intervention.

In general, the role of the divine should be left in the category of the mysterious, unless there is good reason to suspect supernatural interruption. It is not reductionistic to suppose the normal workings of cause and effect when they seem to explain the data appropriately. At the same time, room must always be left for a divine element in the equation.

I find the final sentences from this section of Wright a bit troubling. I am consoled by his caveats that the texts themselves must be the ground for all discussion of Paul's meaning.  I would translate his statements into the need to know the deep assumptions behind Paul's words before we can fully understand them. I completely agree.

However, Wright still seems to have a hangover from his pre-chastened modernist days in his penchant to see worldviews and theologies as coherent systems. His early engagement with structuralism is probably revealing here. A worldview is more a collection or family of related perspectives and impulses than a grand recit or system. By building such a magnificent meta-scaffolding alongside Paul, Wright is setting himself up for skew at some point, in my opinion.

Wright: Philemon and Worldview

The journey through N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God continues. Thus far,

Preface
The Basics of Philemon

2. Philemon and the Study of Paul
Summary
Wright believes that there is a worldview coming to expression in Philemon (23). Here he draws on his earlier work especially in The New Testament and the People of God. "One of the extraordinary achievements of Paul was to turn 'theology' into a different kind of thing from what it had been before in the world either of the Jews or of the pagans. One of the central arguments of the present book is that this was the direct result and corollary of what had happened to Paul's worldview. Paul effectively invented 'Christian theology' to meet a previously unknown need, to do a job which had not, until then, been necessary" (26).

Wright's understanding of worldview involves four core components: 1) an underlying narrative or story, 2) habitual actions or praxis, 3) symbols, a symbolic universe, and 4) common answers to certain worldview questions like "Who are we?" "Where are we?" "What's wrong?" "What's the solution?" "What time is it?" He seems to add "Why?" with this book, and indicate that the why questions point to theology. As he has already set, he considers a mindset to be an individual or sub-cultural perspective within a broader worldview.

Wright is aiming at a "thick description" of Paul. This is a term from anthropologist Clifford Geertz that aims at understanding actions in their deepest, culturally embedded sense, "to attempt to discern those things which people knew easily and without effort even if such 'knowledge' is remote for us and hard to reconstruct" (29). Cultural assumptions are often those of which we are least aware and yet are generally held in common by a whole culture. These assumptions are most key to understanding someone from another culture and yet they are least likely to be stated explicitly because they are so deeply assumed.

The core elements of worldview are "not likely to be topics of regular conversation, whether in a family or in a culture; they are the presuppositions which enable people to make sense of everything else" (33). "Story, praxis, and symbol generate and sustain a set of implicit answers to the five questions. People normally do not talk about these four elements of their worldview... [except] when something has gone wrong [or] when an outsider issues a challenge or a new question..." (33-34).

"The study of Paul's worldview leads to a striking, dramatic conclusion: this worldview not only requires a particular 'theology' to sustain it, but also requires that 'theology' itself play a new role, integrated with the worldview itself" (30). The why question, when addressed to the components of worldview (story, praxis, symbol, basic answers) leads to an underlying theology. "This theology cannot be reduced to a system of ideas" (31).

Two other dimensions quickly come into play. First, culture draws together narrative, praxis, and symbol into particular patterns. Culture brings to expression beliefs and perceptions that either reinforce the prevailing worldview or stand in tension with it.

Second, Wright uses the word "worship" instead of religion so as not to assume the division of religious and secular created in the period of the Enlightenment. "'Worship' is a specific activity in which the other elements of the worldview are caught up, colouring praxis, shaping and influencing narrative, generating symbols, and frequently offering answers to the key questions" (36).

The next part of the chapter discusses how Paul's worldview could only be sustained by constantly, thoughtfully, and prayerfully addressing the question of who the one true God is, what he has done and is doing, and what his doings mean for the community of faith in the Messiah. At the center of this theology, for Wright, is a "Jewish-style (but christologically redefined) monotheism" (37). "I shall propose... that monotheism is indeed at the heart of Paul's theology... as the integrating theme which explains and gives depth to all the others."

The rest of this section goes through some of the "centers" of Paul's thought that have been proposed over the years. "Salvation" was implicitly the center for most of the time since the Reformation (justification by faith). Albert Schweitzer (and now Douglas Campbell) have emphasized participation in Christ as the center. Other "organizing" elements have also entered the scene, vying for attention (Wright has another entire volume coming out on the interpretation of Paul).

First there is the idea of salvation history, the idea that history is the outworking of God's plan of salvaiton. Second, there is the category of apocalyptic, the breaking in of the heavenly realm into the events of the earth. Third is the notion of covenant, that the events concerning Jesus are the fulfillment of ancient promises.

Then there are questions of how history impinges on Paul. Is Paul more a Hellenistic or Jewish thinker? Unfortunately, "he is so many-sided that he can be appealed to this way or that on all kinds of issues, not only in theology and ethics but in culture and philosophy..." (42).

Is Paul more doctrinal or ethical? Wright thinks this false distinction owes much to Kant. Wright himself thinks there was also a politically subversive dimension to Paul. All these aspects of Paul have to be brought into dialog with each other. Wright aims to jumble them all together, "like pieces of the same jigsaw puzle that had somehow found their way onto quite separate tables" (43).

We also need to distinguish between the derivation of Paul's ideas (where they came from) and how he used them in the confrontation of his world (where they were going to). How did Paul use elements of his "history-of-religions" world in the engagement of his world?

We can't choose between sharp antitheses any more. "There is indeed a way of analyzing and understanding Paul in which these several multi-layered dichotomies can be resolved..." (45).  "We are looking, not so much for a 'centre' to Paul's thought-world (and his worldview in the sense explained), as a vantage point, a summit from which we can survey, and see the way to explore, the landscape of the letters and their implicit worlds" (46).

What is this vantage point? First, "Paul remained a deeply Jewish theologian who had rethought and reworked every aspect of his native Jewish theology in the light of the Messiah and the spirit, resulting in his own vocational self-understanding as the apostle to the pagans" (46). Jews do not have a theology in the way Paul and subsequent Christian theology has. But derived from Paul's Jewishness, he confronts and engages his new context in a way that draws on three key elements of his native Jewish  world.

"The three categories are monotheism, election, and eschatology: one God, one people of God, one future for God's world" (46). Paul approaches his world from these three theological peaks, with creational monotheism at the center of his thinking. The either-or distinctions of the past focus on the valleys between rather than the key vantage points.

Reflections
You can easily see that Wright's desire to be all-encompassing has resulted in significant complexity. He is doing his best to take into account all the pitfalls of past discussion, and the result is indeed like a collection of puzzle pieces he has mixed together on a table--maybe even a mixture of several related puzzles. One of the most instructive aspects of the chapter, if you can see it, is the way he has tried to avoid every extreme.

So he does not want to treat Paul as just a thinker or a practitioner. He wants to take into account "thick descriptions" and "social imaginaries" of worldview and distinguish them from culture and individual mindsets. He does not want to limit Paul to his Jewishness or to Hellenism. He wants to avoid the old, "Is it justification by faith or participation in Christ" dichotomy. He wants to avoid the mistakes of so much "center of Paul" debates, choosing instead the more complicated model of peaks, ridges, and valleys.

All of this prolegomena is to get us ready, and we will see how it plays out. You wonder how this chapter would have been written if he wasn't, to some extent, bound by frameworks he set up twenty years ago. For example, he is too far along to shift comfortably from his earlier language of worldview to Charles Taylor's more sophisticated "social imaginary" (cf. 28, n.80).

It is ironic to me that while he recognizes and criticizes the pitfalls of idealism (27), of reducing reality to a set of ideas or privileging ideas over "real life," he still has a strong tendency to treat ideas in abstraction from the real world in which they are meant to help us operate. He does well to speak of thick descriptions and such, but in my opinion he still ultimately treats the structures of his method as more than heuristic tools. He tends to treat them as realities-in-themselves.

Nevertheless, Wright arguably has all the pieces here, in all their complexity. His categories are far superior to a lot of worldview talk that must surely be considered incredibly superficial and two-dimensional.  A lot of talk of ideas is really about social groups and traditional practices. As Wright implies, ideologies often emerge only when those traditional boundaries and practices are attacked or called into question.

Symbols, practices, stories that provide the significance of those symbols and practices, or the answers to the questions our group asks--these are all part of our "worldviews" and "mindsets." But the ideas are not primary. They are abstractions from our lived-lives in the world. They are the way we anticipate what is to come and how we process change. Ideas are the scaffolding some of us build from which to engage our world. Others simply climb the walls of the world without much scaffolding.

Wright: Starting with Philemon

Looked about a week ago at the Preface to N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Now the book begins.

Chapter 1: Return of the Runaway?
1. A World of Difference
Summary
Wright begins our journey with the small letter to Philemon. To begin, he gives the classic background text, a letter from Pliny the Younger in which Pliny advocates for a slave who had come to him because his master was angry with him. Wright's goal is to show that, while there are some superficial similarities between the two letters, the worldview and way of life that informs Philemon is quite different from that which informs Pliny's letter.

A brief look at Pliny's letter gives way to a brief analysis of Philemon and its issues. Was Onesimus a runaway slave or just a slave with which Philemon was angry?  Wright favors a runaway slave.

Did Onesimus run into Paul by chance or did he seek him out? Wright thinks it more likely that he had sought him out, trying to be reconciled to his master. Wright also considers it now the majority opinion that Paul was imprisoned at Ephesus when he wrote Philemon and dates the letter to not long before Paul leaves and writes 2 Corinthians.

For what is Paul asking? Mere forgiveness for Onesimus? For Philemon to send him back to help Paul? For Philemon to set Onesimus free? Forgiveness, yes. To send him back, probably? Freedom? Wright does indeed think so. He brilliantly sees an ironic allusion to Exodus 21:2-6 where a slave could decide to be a slave forever. Philemon can receive Onesimus back forever in a quite different sense.

But Wright is Wright. He will not be satisfied with less than abstracting some exquisite and eternal truths from this interaction. Indeed, that is why he has started here. If only he could distinguish between his theological ponderings and exegesis of the text. Philemon and Onesimus are now members of the messianic family, and the central symbol of the Christian worldview for Paul is unity (11).

Philemon is about attempting a new way of life (6). The order things come in the letter (poetic sequence) is not as important as the implicit narrative (the referential sequence) (7). Faith generates and defines fellowship (17). Fellowship is an "energizing principle" that produces the reality of which it speaks.

And here it comes--Wright's signature--"Two thousand years of history, from the call of Abraham to the time of Jesus, are collected up like light in a prism and focused onto the royal representative in whom their meaning and purpose is fulfilled" (17). "Messiah" is something like a collective noun--"Messiah-and-his-people." This is what is in the bubble above the word Messiah, and when Paul prays that the fellowship of Philemon's faith might be active in the knowledge of every good among them "into Christ" (1:6).

Reflections
Insert the usual comments on Wright's pensive style and cute chapter titles. I deeply appreciate Wright's sense that "Sometimes it is better to get your hands dirty at once rather than approach a topic with lofty generalizations" (6). Of course we get to the lofty generalizations quickly enough.

I'm sympathetic to Ephesus as point of origin, but if it's late in Paul's stay, he doesn't do what he said and come visit. After Ephesus, Paul heads north toward Macedonia. I do wonder if Paul's quick departure from Ephesus in Acts 18:19 hides a quick, initial imprisonment after he first arrived there. He would then have gone on to visit Colossae. Obviously this is complete speculation.

It seems like there is often a point in Wright where the historical grasp on the balloon is let go and it floats away into dreamy abstraction. One wonders, in the end, whether Wright will ever be able to really get Paul because Paul was far too grounded in the end, and Wright can't help being contemplative. The referential world behind Paul, the one Wright seeks, was not an ideological system.

Was unity the center of Paul's worldview? If you mean the inclusion of the Gentiles, then the answer is probably yes. But notice the difference between "unity," which tends toward the abstract, and "the inclusion of the Gentiles," which is a concrete missiological problem. Did faith generate and define fellowship? Shared faith did provide common ground.

Did fellowship relate to a world in which both Philemon, Paul, and Onesimus were all "in Messiah"? I suppose so, theologically, but I suspect we would need to explain what we are saying to Paul. Wright is the king of theological overload. Paul is merely saying that Christian family fellowship entails some things, including the fact that Philemon needs to forgive Onesimus. These dynamics take place in the light of Christ. There are concrete truths here on how we should relate to one another, yes.

As for Christ incorporating Israel, I have yet to see any exegetical evidence that Paul thought in those terms. This is the spark of Wright's early brilliance and the pariah he has never been able to shake. It is brilliant theology, but most scholars remain unconvinced that any of the New Testament authors thought of Christ in this way.

Tom Wright Cometh...

I finished the Preface to N. T. Wright's long expected, 1500 page Paul and the Faithfulness of God. At 30 pages a week, that's at least a year of blog reviewing yet to come!!

Preface
Wright begins his 1500 page two book tome with an outline. He has arranged it in somewhat of a chiasm! A chiasm is a literary structure where the first element (A) corresponds to the last (A'), the second (B) to the second to last (B'), and so on until you reach the middle element. So chapter 1 correlates with chapter 16, chapter 2 with 15, and so on.

Wright does warn us, however, that it is not a perfect set up. While chapter 5 does correspond with chapter 12, the intervening chapters do not relate in that way. Part 2 (chaps. 6-8) gives us Paul's mindset within the worldview of his communities, but Part 3 (chaps. 9-11) gives us Paul's uniquely invented theology. "My proposal is that Paul actually invents something we may call 'Christian theology'" (xvi).

It seems hardly a coincidence that the heart of the book is chapters 9-11! Must not the Great Bishop mean us to think of Romans 9-11? Indeed, he mentions Romans 9-11 a little later in the preface as chapters Paul had in mind from the very beginning of Romans.

Wright also justifies taking a more synchronic approach to Paul rather than a diachronic one. A diachronic approach might have proceeded through Paul's letters and then synthesized them into a theology. Wright prefers a synchronic approach, one that looks at Paul's letters more or less as all teaching the same thing and thus, in a sense, Wright, treats them somewhat as a single text. He does not put it in this way, but he comes close when he says, "We should therefore expect to find that Paul says briefly and cryptically in one place what elsewhere he spells out in more detail" (xx).

Wright rejects charges that he first invented a picture, a "controlling story," and then superimposed it on the early Christian writers (xviii). Rather, he insists he has developed his understanding in constant dialogue with the primary texts.

The rest of the preface is filled with the sort of thing you might expect. He will presuppose his work in the earlier volumes--The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, The Resurrection and the Son of God. He thanks all of those who reviewed parts of the project. He gives some of the story of the writing. And, of course, he dedicates the book to Richard Hays of Duke Divinity School.

Reflection
So much of these brief pages are exactly the picture of Tom Wright that we have come to know, love, and occasionally poke fun at. He has designed this project in the form of a chiasm! Brilliant!

I regularly tell my students that anyone who sees a chiasm of this scope in a biblical text is just plain wrong, that there is a certain personality that loves to go chiasm-hunting and they are always wrong. The massively complex and extensive chiasms some interpreters see in great swaths of biblical text are a sign of the brilliance of the interpreter rather than of anything the text itself was likely to mean. What original reader or hearer would have caught such complexity? Such interpreters unknowingly reveal that they are not really interested in the text as real communication between one person and another but as a mirror of their own ingenuity and as a canvas on which they might paint timeless truths.

So any chiasm someone sees in a text that is more than a couple verses, or more complex than two or three steps, is almost certainly wrong... that is, unless they are Tom Wright and they tell you up front! His is a beautiful mind. I have often humorously remarked that Wright is sometimes more brilliant than Paul himself. :-)

I did not have to read anyone else's critique to think that Wright sometimes reads an overarching story into Paul that goes beyond any metanarrative Paul himself conceptualized. There is no question that Wright has spent a lifetime in dialog with the texts and that he knows them absolutely. It is nonetheless still possible that, like so many scholars, Wright has throughout his career played out the great spark about Jesus being Israel that he had back in his Oxford days.

If you had asked me whether Wright would pick a synchronic or a diachronic approach, I would have guessed correctly.  Of course Wright is more interested in a coherent, even if complex ideological system than in a more historically particular and variable Paul. Wright is both theologian and exegete, and perhaps history will eventually tell us which he is more. What we know is that he is brilliant.

But don't let this fun-poking come off as disparaging but rather as the kind of jabbing a friend might make to another whose idiosyncrasies are beloved. A group of friends are sitting at a coffee shop together with a famous friend who is the center of everyone's attention. You know at some point in the brilliant conversation the quirk will emerge. Wait for it; wait for it.

It comes. Smiles come across the faces. Knowing looks are exchanged. And everyone continues listening.