Christocentric Rhetoric in Colossians

The more I think about it and look into it, the more I think Paul was centrally gripped by the narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection – which he understood according to categories suggested by the Hebrew Scriptures… and this central narrative creatively shaped the flow of his thought and writing.  Lately I’ve been reading and re-reading Colossians (the Greek is surprisingly easy), and below is the way I hear the flow of this letter: I’ve tried to represent rhythmic/rhetorical movement by the use of indentations and terminology…

1:1-2:5: Christ in You; You in Christ

Christ in You

1:3-8: The mystery of the gospel, growing & bearing fruit throughout the world

You in Christ

1:9-14: The knowledge of him, growing & bearing fruit in the Colossians

Christ in You

1:15-20: Christ supreme in creation & salvation (in the cross)

You in Christ

1:21-23: Christ sufficient for Colossians’ salvation (in his body)

Christ in You

1:24-29: Paul continues suffering on behalf of Christ’s body, proclaiming Christ

You in Christ

2:1-5: Paul’s concern for the Colossians – that they might know Christ

2:6-4:1: Walking in Christ

Recall Christ, the Head of the Body

2:8-19: Don’t be carried away by human philosophy, but grow into Christ

Dying with Christ

2:20-23: Don’t seek to restrain the body with worldly restrictions

Rising with Christ

3:1-4: Set your minds on that which is above, where Christ is

Dying with Christ

3:5-11: Put to death those bodily members that are worldly: Bodily immorality & (relational) sins of the mouth

Rising with Christ

3:12-17: Clothe yourselves with relational virtues & love, exhibiting the grace of Christ, the peace of Christ, the word of Christ

3:18-4:1: Exhibit the submission and love of Christ in household relationships

4:2-18: Service of Christ in the World and the Church

Proclaiming the Mystery of Christ

4:2-6: The word of Christ before outsiders

Slaves of Christ in the Church

4:7-18: Tychicus, Onesimus, Aristarchus, Mark, Barnabas, Justus, Epaphras, Luke, Nymphas, Archippus, Paul

Classical versus Theological Rhetoric in Paul

As part of my research, I’m wanting to evaluate and push forward discussion of rhetoric in Paul.  I think that classical rhetoric has been pushed too far in terms of trying to explain the movement of Paul’s letters, and that other influences (such as Paul’s Hebrew heritage) need to be given more consideration.  Here are my current thoughts, as this applies to 1 Corinthians:

Michael Gorman identifies four patterns of reversal in Scripture and Jewish tradition, which could have provided Paul with a background for “a narrative pattern of reversal”:

 

God’s exaltation of the humble, God’s vindication of the persecuted and of righteous sufferers, God’s ultimate resolution of messianic “birth pangs” in the new age, and God’s raising of the dead.[1]

 

It is more precise and helpful to consider this narrative pattern of reversal as two closely related patterns, one of death followed by resurrection, the other of humiliation followed by exaltation.  Both patterns clearly preceded Paul and also survived after him, but few early Christians exploited them as fully as did Paul.[2]

 

At the heart of my thesis is the contention that 1 Corinthians may be attentively heard as expressing the fundamentality of identification with Christ in his death and resurrection, in order to move the Corinthian church from presumptuous autonomy to dependence on God in Christ.  I think it can be argued that this rhetorical arrangement makes good sense both in terms of Paul’s history and Paul’s literary-rhetorical environment.

 

I suggest that for Paul himself, the Damascus Road experience involved repudiating a model of religiosity characterised by (retrospectively presumptuous) zealous cleansing of Israel, and adopting a model of religiosity characterised by dependent participation in the identity of Israel’s crucified, risen, and presently hidden Messiah Jesus.  Thus Paul’s formative experience of Jesus, as one whose resurrected Lordship had been startlingly hidden by the outrageous shame of his crucifixion, created in Paul a heightened sensitivity to what he perceived to be effectively presumptuous/autonomous religiosity, and provided an obvious antidote: The necessity of identification with the Messiah who is surprisingly found in the cross, and who will one day be revealed in glory.

 

In responding to perceived presumptuous/autonomous spirituality in Corinth, then, Paul was able to creatively draw on the “apocalyptic” rhetorical movement from emphatic present hiddenness and apparent humiliation through to future revelation and vindication, thereby emphasising the necessity of sharing in Christ’s death – and hiddenness – before sharing fully in the manifestation of Christ’s resurrected glory.

 

This may perhaps be thought of as “theological rhetoric”, because Greco-Roman patterns of argumentation are not adhered to in a straightforward way, but are put into the service of a chiefly theological arrangement.

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[1] Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), page 305.

[2] Gorman (2001), page 313.

The church participates in the death of Christ

the life of the church lived in constant participation of the death of Christ produces a martyr-church.  It shares in the death of Christ through baptism and renews this when it breaks bread.  It admits the paradoxes of its own existence: its life is death-made, the bread it breaks is infinitely creative.  It affirms that Jesus cannot be the first Chrstian martyr, since there are no Christian martyrs except those who die the death of Christ. (p79)

I’m currently halfway through a really thought-provoking book: To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church, by Craig Hovey (2008).  It’s a theological reading of the gospel of Mark, showing how this piece of Christian scripture calls the church to a life of cruciformity.

My own thinking is that this is precisely what Paul is doing in 1 Corinthians: Calling the Corinthians to inhabit the cross in the present, as they look ahead to participating fully in the future resurrection.  This means an orientation of dependence upon God, which will be expressed ethically in (at least) surrendering my own defiant sense of bodily ownership, and forgoing the exploitative exercise of my own rights in relation to others within the body of Christ.

In other words, the knowledge that our identity is tied up with Christ means that we can have confidence that when HE is revealed, WE too will finally share in the fullness of his glory.  This frees us up to pursue the pattern of the cross in the present: Thoughtfully, creatively, utterly giving ourselves up in the service of God and others… labouring to transform this world, knowing that “in the Lord, our labour is not in vain” – because God raises the dead (1 Cor 15:58).

Anyway, the book by Hovey is short, well-written, provocative, and worth a read.  I’ll finish with one more quote:

To identify with Christ in his death and resurrection is to identify with the church.  But this also makes sense only if the church is a martyr-church.  What does this mean?  It means that the church is characterized by the life of the resurrection only insofar as it undergoes the pain of the cross.  (p27)

Thoughts on Paul and Judaism

Could one say, “For the nineteenth century German, and thus for Marx, the exchange of money for goods was seen as straightforward and essentially fair”?  If not, why should one be able to say, “for the first-century Jew, and thus Paul, living by the Torah was a response to God’s grace, rather than an attempt to merit it”?  (Maico Michielin, SJT 61/4 (2008) 427, emphasis mine)

 

Critiques of free-market capitalism are not generally grounded on sociological evidence that consumers understand themselves -and present themselves – as greedy exploiters of the poor.  Rather, critiques generally aim to argue that consumers are effectively participating in a system that can be – or ought to be – viewed in this way.  Similarly, any critique by Paul concerning Judaism and the works of the law should not be expected to be calmly expressive of the median self-understanding of first century Jews, but rather expressive of Paul’s crisis-driven conception of what it effectively means to be a participant in this religious system, which for him has become forever transformed by his encounter with the risen Messiah.  Might Paul, for example, have come to the conclusion that his fellow Jews share a “false consciousness” regarding the function of the law, which can only be understood and remedied by starting with the solution of Christ?

 

A related point of interest is that, whether or not Paul perceives it as discontinuous with his former Judaism, he considers that the necessity of divine grace must be emphasised to the Corinthians, whose problems constitute an effective denial of dependence on God.  Is it possible that, as a former “zealous” Pharisee, Paul now holds to a general human inclination toward soteriological autonomy?  In order to understand Paul on this point, the need is not simply for a sociological reconstruction of first-century Judaism, but for attentiveness to the theological perspective of Paul the Pharisee, who had turned from his “earlier life in Judaism”, in which he “was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.”  (Gal. 1:13)  It is this Paul who now characterises humans as effectively attempting soteriological autonomy – an attempt which must be countered with the soteriological accomplishment of God in Christ.

 

Anyway, these are just some rambling thoughts, “in process”…

Paul and Post-Modernism

A couple of people (Bryan and Jeff) have recently had posts related to biblical hermeneutics in a post-modern setting.  Today I had the opportunity to sit in on a seminar led by Anthony Thiselton with a visiting group of theologians & students from a German University, on the topic of Paul and Post-Modernism.  There were some interesting points made about biblical hermeneutics along the way.

Thiselton approached the massive topic of post-modernism by choosing to speak about a few key figures and their main contributions: Michel Foucault and truth-as-power; Roland Barthes and language as disguise; Jacques Derrida and deconstruction & deferment; Francois Lyotard and powers & worldviews; and Richard Rorty & Stanley Fish and pragmatism.

Thiselton prefers to think of post-modernism as a “mood” with a mix of the above features, rather than as a period in history.  He was able to ask then about how Paul, and the Christian faith, might find compatibility and incompatibility with this sort of mood (which he thinks characterised first-century Corinth just as much as twenty-first century Europe & America).  He found certain elements of this mood valuable and compatible with Christian faith, such as a reaction against a positivist and scientific worldview and a distrust of surface-grammar.  He found other elements to be highly suspect to a Christian worldview, such as Lyotard’s rejection of grand narratives.

Towards the end of the session Thiselton was asked a question about undergraduates who come to biblical studies classes claiming that it has been proven that nothing has any meaning.  His response was helpful.  For one thing, he suggested that this represented a misunderstanding of Deridda, who was more nuanced than that, and who particularly aimed for his contribution to apply to poetic texts.  Furthermore, he pointed out that there is great variety in Scripture; and that we can reach a sort of “pragmatic” closure on certain issues: For example, if we read “Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate”, we can be confident enough of a straightforward interpretation of this statement to say that we’ve reached pragmatic closure on it.  (That’s my attempt at encapsulating what he said, so it’s not his actual phrase.)  In other words, it’s not as though there are two options open to us – perfect comprehension or total mystification.  Biblical hermeneutics is a viable enterprise!

Paul as Letter Writer

Over the last 15 years, there has been a refreshed interest in Pauline Studies on the nature of letter-writing.  Of course, over the last century, there has been a lot of scholarly discussion about epistolary forms and conventions – but the newer direction in Pauline Studies involves the consideration of the practicalities of first century letter-writing – tools, locations, editing, drafts, secretaries, copies, etc… and the implications of these things for our understanding of “authorship” and the production of Paul’s letters in particular.  This new direction is important, and will become more prominent in the coming few years.  Here are a few resources that you might like to follow up if you’re interested in this topic…

Greek and Latin Letters: An Anthology with Translation, by Michael Trapp

 

This is a useful collection of ancient letters in the original greek & latin, along with a discussion of issues related to the production of the letters.  For example, Trapp states, in relation to the use of secretaries: “[W]e can make at least some headway with the question of who did the writing: the presence of particularly skilful hands, and of changes of hand between the main body of the letter and the final salutation, suggest just how often the bulk of the work, or all of it, was done by secretaries (for the affluent) and (for the less well-off) professional letter-writers.” (p8)

 

Paul the Letter-Writer: His World, His Options, His Skills, by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor.

This book explores three areas: Practical issues related to writing a letter; Theoretical issues related to creating the content of a letter; and issues related to the collecting of ancient letters.  Unfortunately his consideration of the ‘content’ of letters relies too much on Rhetorical Criticism, but this is a great little book.  He notes, for example, that secretaries/professional letter-writers (as mentioned by Trapp above) would generally have been employed not only to write the letter to be dispatched, but also to write a copy for the sender to keep, “both for control and perhaps future use” or perhaps because one’s letters “were shared with friends” (p13)

Books and Readers in the Early Church, by Harry Y. Gamble

Gamble argues for the collection of Paul’s Epistles as canon, a canon sufficiently long that it needed to be kept together using the format of the Codex – explaining the early Christian preference for the codex over the roll.  He covers a number of interesting issues along the way.  For example, he applies the insight that ancient letter-writers kept copies of their letters (as mentioned by Murphy-O’Connor above) to Paul: “A dossier of Paul’s letters would surely have been useful to Paul and his coworkers: it can hardly be supposed that each letter immediately had its intended effect, required no further clarification, and generated no new issues.  The letters themselves are proof to the contrary.  The tangled correspondence of Paul with the Corinthians, if not typical, certainly indicates that Paul needed to and did keep track of what he had written.” (p101)

Paul and First-Century Letter Writing: Secretaries, Composition and Collection, by E. Randolph Richards

This is a great overview of the issues in the title.  For example, Richards considers ancient letter writers’ use of secretarial copies of their letters (as mentioned by Gamble above), and writes: “From the evidence we can infer that material was recycled from one letter to another in two common scenarios.  First, if a writer had written a lengthy account and then later wanted to send the information to another recipient….  A second common reason for reusing material in another letter was when the writer wanted to send a well-written passage to another.”  (p160)  Obviously, this sort of insight might be fruitfully examined in relation to the letters of Paul – perhaps in terms of a possible relationship between Ephesians and Colossians… perhaps in terms of a possible relationship between 1 Thessalonians & 1 Corinthians…

Theology & Scripture

Department of Theology and

 Religious Studies

Dialog Postgraduate Research

 Seminar

 

‘Theology and Scripture’

 Monday, October 13^th, 2008

 4:30pm – 6:00pm

 Trent Graduate Centre Seminar Room

 Matthew Malcolm

‘Paul: Letter-writer and Theologian’

and

Jeffrey Olsen Biebighauser

‘Genesis, Ontology and the Platonic Tradition’

My talk above will be related to the exploration of 1 Thessalonians & 1 Corinthians that I had a post about recently.  I’m not sure what Jeff will be speaking about, but he has a quite ground-breaking inquiry into the Messianic aspirations of Gumby here…  I’m hoping for more on this topic next Monday.

 

A Treatise Concerning a Possible Relationship Between the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians and the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, As Investigated by a Humble Sinner

Section	1 Thessalonians (NRSV, modified)	1 Corinthians (NRSV, modified)
Salutation	To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ	To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus
Thanksgiving	We always give thanks… remembering your work of faith and labour of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ	I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus… you are not lacking in any gift
Foundational Issue: The Gospel Message and its Impact	Our message of the gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit   Just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts   You became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets….   We wanted to come to you… I sent to find out about you, and Timothy has now come and told us that you remember us	My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries….  But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court….  It is the Lord who judges me… who will disclose the purposes of the heart Already you have all you want!  Already you have become rich!  Quite apart from us you have become kings!…  I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death… we labour, working with our own hands….  I appeal to you, then, be imitators of me I sent you Timothy, who will remind you of my ways… I will come to you soon, if the Lord wills
Ethical Exhortation, Following Paul’s Usual Ethical Flow	Abstain from sexual immorality;… control your own body [skeuos] in holiness and honour, not with lustful passion like the Gentiles;… Don’t be greedy or wrong a brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger God did not call us to impurity but in holiness.  Therefore whoever rejects this rejects not human authority but God, who also gives his Holy Spirit to you Now concerning love of the brothers and sisters…	It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among the Gentiles… Brother goes to court against brother!… The… greedy… will not inherit the kingdom of God Shun fornication!… Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God   Now concerning food sacrificed to idols… knowledge puffs up, but love builds up
The Gospel and the Plight of the Dead at the Eschaton	We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died….  For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing	Now I should remind you, brothers and sisters…. Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died… as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ   For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed Therefore… be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord
Closing	Respect those who labour among you in the Lord The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you	Obey those who labour in the service of the saints The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you

The Uneven Nature of Paul’s Ministry

This week I’ve received a copy of a publication that’s hot off the press: Trinity Working Papers, Volume 1, August 2008.  It is published by Trinity Theological College in Western Australia and contains a few papers that were presented there last year.  This edition focuses on Paul and includes three papers: ‘The Argumentation of the Main Body of 1 Corinthians with Particular Regard for the Placement of Chapter 15′ (by myself); ‘What’s Right With Wright’s Perspective on Paul?’ (by Rolf Van Wollingen) and ‘The Life of Herod Agrippa I and His Significance for the History of Early Christianity’ (by Rory Shiner).

My paper is 37 pages long and goes into my reading of 1 Corinthians in some depth – as at July of last year.  My views have undergone some development since then, but the picture is still (perhaps surprisingly) extremely representative of my current thinking about the letter.

I haven’t yet read Rolf VW’s paper, although I will be interested to go through it, as I’m currently reading Francis Watson’s book Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective…  I’m interested in hearing other evaluations of the contributions of the New Perspective on Paul.

But I’ve just finished reading Rory Shiner’s paper, about Agrippa’s significance for early Christian history – and I’ve found it quite fascinating.  Here’s a little taste:

The significance of Agrippa’s rule and death may shed light on one particular puzzle of early Christianity – the uneven nature of Paul’s ministry.  Our sources compel us to put Paul’s period of ministry into two uneven sections: a period of thirteen or fourteen years from his conversion in circa AD 34 to circa AD 47, and a shorter ten year period of aggressive church planting in the west of the Empire….

Into this context, Agrippa’s death, and its effect on Judea in general and Judean Christianity in particular offers itself as an important piece of data.  The post-44 situation, as we have argued, provided the necessary circumstances for the Judaizing mission that was to pursue Paul.  It seems likely, or at least highly plausible, that this changed situation also provides the context for Paul’s activities post-44.  On the one hand, the Judaizing mission seems to have bolstered Paul’s conviction that the coming of Messiah Jesus necessitated the mission to the Gentiles.  And, on the other hand, the frenetic nature of Paul’s post-44 mission may indicate that he himself read the post-44 in apocalyptic terms.  The difference is that for Paul the apocalyptic mood resulted in a radical inclusion of the Gentiles rather than a radical defence of Jewish privilege (Rom 9-11:32, 15:8-12, 15-22).

Interesting stuff… The more I work on my research, the more I think we really need to be attentive to these sorts of questions in trying to understand Paul’s writings.  The publication is available from Trinity Theological College for AUD $15 (about $15 US).

Ethics… A question of nature???

Over the last couple of days, our TV and internet at home have not been working – they still aren’t…  so we’ve been reduced to going back to the dark ages and reading newspapers and the like.  So today, I read an interesting article in the Sunday Times: Minette Marrin comments on the situation of Gary Glitter, the child abuser who has “done his time” and is now being rejected from country after country.  Her article points to something of a crisis in modern morality/ethics…

Scientific evidence seems to be growing by the month to suggest that people are not equally responsible for what they do.  Individual biology has a large part to play in destiny, as do environment and the complex symbiosis of the two.  Some people’s brain structure and brain chemistry may make them less able to control their impulses, more inclined to aggression, less able to understand their own motives or less able to understand the feelings or even the objective reality of other people.  This may be compounded by bad childhood experiences with damaged parents which themselves alter brain pathways.

If so, the foundation stone of western morality – the idea that we are all equally responsible for what we do and all equally culpable for our crimes – is being eroded by biology.  This process of erosion has begun fairly recently and is gathering speed.  It is profoundly alarming….

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) lists paedophilia as a mental disorder and the US Sypreme Court has upheld the idea of paedophilia as a mental abnormality.  However, there are those – both respectable experts and paedophile apologists – who argue that paedophilia should be removed from this list of mental disorders, hust as homosexuality was removed in the 1970s.  There is, apparently, some evidence that between 20-25% of the supposedly normal male population feel sexually attracted to children, according at least to a discussion in the US Archives of Sexual Behaviour of 2002, and react to “paedophilic” stimuli.  This might suggest that there is nothing so very abnormal about paedophile desires, just as other fantasies of violence and revenge are common….

Some studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain suggest that paedophilic men tend to have several differences in brain structure from other men and have one or more neurological characteristics at birth that could increase the likelihood of paedophilia.  However, for every one of these studies there is a crowd of experts to desagree with it….

Whether [Glitter] can’t or won’t control his taste for children, others will have to control it for him.  But it is wrong, given how little we understand about personal responsibility, to treat him harshly and to vilify him, just because we are anxious about that very lack of understanding.

 This raises a bunch of interesting questions for consideration/disagreement/reflection etc… and I’ll just cut to two issues that I think are worth considering:

1) I think some Christians are far too confident when they argue that something is ‘unnatural’ or ‘against nature’.  Whether homosexuality or anything else, I don’t think we adequately understand the post-fall mix that we find ourselves in, in order to be very clear here.  The only place I can think of where Paul talks about something being contrary to nature, it’s the issue of which sex should have which hair-length… and that hardly seems to be an argument that we can comprehend in scientific terms! 

2) The other side of the coin: I don’t think the possibility that something is ‘innate’ means it is excusable.  Again, whether homosexual desire, heterosexual desire, paedophilic desire, polygamy, or whatever else, I don’t think we can confidently say that because I have a ‘leaning’ in that direction, I should have a license to exercise that leaning.

Any thoughts?

Oh… another thought: Paul does, of course, talk in Romans 1 about humans ‘giving up’ natural use of their bodies… but I see this as a theological statement rather than a ’scientific’ observation…