Hip Hop Theology: Reclaiming the Prophetic-Poetic Tradition

“The day will come when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’ language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power.”

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Introduction

These prophetic words of Bonhoeffer, penned from a prison cell in Nazi Germany, come from the depths of his anguish and despair over the German church’s utter loss of credibility during his time.  Though on the surface they continued their liturgy and baptisms, they had sold their soul to Hitler and the Nazis and failed to live as authentic disciples of Christ.  When God is honored in name during worship services, but injustice, hatred, violence, racism, and oppression go unquestioned and unchecked by those claiming to be God’s people, the prophets boldly announce God’s hatred of our worship and reiterate God’s call: “Take away from me the noise of your songs…but let justice roll like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:23-24).  Amos shows us that when our words about God (theo-logia) become worn-out expressions, emptied of practical meaning and ethical consequences, not only is this displeasing, but God actually hates this (v. 21).  Thus, when this happens, God raises up prophets to speak the Word anew, powerfully and profoundly addressing the pressing concerns of the current time.  This is why prophecy is so intimately connected to poetry—it becomes a vehicle for transcending language through language itself, of getting beyond the restrictive rigidity of common and conventional expression and point to a greater truth and to pronounce God’s word anew.

Thus, there is much more at stake in the theological exploration of hip hop than merely a way of making theology more “relevant” to contemporary youth, reaching the “unchurched,” or using its aesthetic idioms simply as an evangelistic tool and a ready-made cultural container into which we can insert church doctrines and scripture verses.  While these approaches represent the vast majority of previous attempts by the church to engage hip hop culture, they are insufficient because they fail to truly listen to the community they seek to reach out to.  What is needed is an approach that hears and accepts the voices of the hip hop community in their own right.  To do this, we must first understand that hip hop is more than just a kind of music, a subculture, or a set of aesthetic principles; it is all of that and more.  We must explore the poetics of hip hop how all of these aspects are interwoven to construct meaning and intelligibility.  Only then can we begin to grapple with its theological content.  I will begin by outlining a basic understanding of the essential historical, cultural, and poetic roots of hip hop. After establishing the hermeneutical context of hip hop theology, I will articulate three key aspects: God’s solidarity with the suffering of the oppressed, the prophetic denunciation of hypocrisy in contemporary Christian worship, and the prophetic denunciation of the dominant American culture.  Each section will include direct examples of contemporary hip hop artists who take up this prophetic-poetic tradition to speak to contemporary circumstances.

Part I: Defining Hip Hop

Hip hop is, in a sense, a cultural dialectic; it functions as a bridge to merge contrasts in aesthetic and cultural convention. Theodore Adorno defines art as “a critique of praxis.”

Hip-hop, in this sense, is a critique of conventional linguistic, cultural, religious and aesthetic practices.  The dialectic of hip hop is fundamentally acheived in the “mix”—a re-contextualization of the artist’s surrounding elements, including musical and nonmusical sounds, religious and philosophical ideas, conventional and subversive language, popular culture, politics, history, and community—all of which are “sampled” from their disparate sources and mixed together into a new cohesive unit.  The new context of these elements is aimed at deconstructing conventional dichotomies through juxtaposition.  This juxtaposition is what allows hip hop to function as a dialectic of literary and musical tradition, of sacred and profane, of noise and music, and of originality and reproduction.  While hip hop is, in a sense, a part of Western culture, it is imperative that hip hop be understood primarily as a specifically African-American type.

Its unique situation in both the local community and within the wider context of musical and cultural tradition creates the hybridized dialectic through which hip hop critiques convention and constructs new meanings out of sampled material.

If hip hop is ever to be properly understood academically, then a convergence of multiple disciplines is need—these include musicology, history, sociology, economics, political science, theology, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies.  Any one-dimensional academic approach will fall short of a full account of what hip hop truly is.  For example, Music theory, in its attempt to focus solely on the musical aspects of hip hop, will also neglect the way that historical and cultural themes are so deeply saturated into the music itself; and even music history will run the risk of reducing hip hop to a postmodern musical development out of a linear progression instead of seeing it as a musical dialogue between past and present.  Though exceedingly difficult to define, hip-hop is primarily about finding a crossroads, or a convergence somewhere in the mixture of differing elements.

The greatest composers of hip-hop are master synthesizers; artists who are able to create harmony out of sounds and ideas that seem to have no interrelationship.  Thus, to fully understand them will require a thorough explication of their “poetics”—here taken in the widest possible sense, so as to include any meaning constructs, whether musical, linguistic, or otherwise.

African-American Language tradition

It is often said that hip-hop is a hybrid form. Much of what is called hybridization in hip-hop arises out of the unique cultural dynamic resulting from the tension between a minority African-American subculture and the dominant mainstream American and Western culture.  In 1903, African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term “second sight,” in order to depict this unique intra-cultural dynamic.  Du Bois asserted that the black minority understood the white majority to a much higher degree than the obverse; often, according to Du Bois, the minority even understands the majority better than they understand themselves.

The concept of second sight can be applied to many aspects of African-American culture as a means of understanding its intersection with the majority culture.  Second sight opens the possibility for a discursive subtext, wherein the dominant culture can be challenged and subverted without the majority’s comprehension.  An extremely significant manifestation of such a subtext is the usage and development of African-American Vernacular English.

Linguistically, it is an admixture of Southern English with some grammatical elements remaining from the West African language family, and the incorporation of continuously formed slang expressions.  Its origin is in preserving some degree of linguistic autonomy from slave masters; African-American vernacular culture has always been, and continues to exist as a discursive challenge to dominant cultural forces.

For AAVE to continuously function as a medium for cultural identity and subtext, it relies on the constant invention of new words and phrases as older expressions become absorbed by the mainstream.  While new words preserve a degree of obscurity on a grammatical and semantic level, AAVE harbors much greater cultural depth as a discourse based on how African-Americans use language, what they use it to say, and what verbal routines are used in this communicative practice (Perry, 25).  The way in which AAVE remixes conventional linguistic expression into a creative trope to heighten the meaning imparted to those familiar with this process is at the aesthetic core of hip hop.

Thus, more must be understood about African American linguistic practice than a merely semantic comprehension of slang terms.  The distinction between literate and oral dissemination of linguistic culture is also important.  The preference for oral culture gives African American language a uniquely performative character.  The use of print in literate tradition tends to freeze concepts as they are written, whereas oral tradition, by virtue of its “actionality,” maintains a much looser paradigm for communication and perception alike.  Barbara Christian elaborates in her essay “The Race for Theory,” that, “people of color have always theorized, but…our theorizing…is often…in the play with language, since dynamic, rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.”

Though often judged and misunderstood by those outside the hip hop community, the use of coarse and abrasive creative language to avoid physical violence has long been important feature of African-American culture.

Henry Louis Gates identifies one example, which he dubbed signifyin’ —a form of verbal affront distinguished by the use of an indirect sub-textual delivery through double-entendre and metaphor. Signifyin’ is further characterized by its use of humor, irony, rhythmic fluidity, subtly didactic imagery and wordplay to introduce the semantically or logically unexpected.

In keeping with the Du Boisian concept of second sight, signifyin’ can be used in two basic ways: it can be directed at a fellow minority who understands its implications, or it can be used more subversively to target a member of the dominant class so that the minority group understands the insult, while the receiver remains ignorant.  Hip hop similarly employs these techniques of subversive poetry, which requires artists to constantly coin new words and idioms so they never lose their poignancy.

Hip Hop Is Born

In the mid 1970s, a time of marked economic downturn, there was very little funding for musical education in inner-city school districts.  As disco clubs also began to decline, due in part to their negative association with gang violence, there was a glaring absence of musical opportunity for young African-Americans. The youth of Brooklyn, New York began to fill this artistic void with an emerging outdoor block party scene.  They would plug in to light posts outside to play recorded music and dance.

As it became evident that the dancing crowds loved the highly syncopated drum breaks of funk records more than the rest of the music, DJs began the practice of looping these drum breaks.  With two turntables, a DJ could either use two copies of the same record to loop a break as long as was desired, or he could superimpose two records into one sound.

The techniques of these early DJs effectively transformed them from mere consumers of recorded music into creative producers in their own right.

Thus, from its inception, hip hop has been a community-centered movement devoted to liberating and empowering marginalized and disenfranchised young people and to give a voice to the voiceless.

Hip Hop’s Poetics

There are several ways in which the poetic conventions of hip hop create and strengthen bonds of community and identity among its marginalized progenitors.  Most immediate is an MC’s “flow”—the rhythmic delivery of rhyming lyrics. Flow is an admixture of originality (without which an MC would be dismissed) and stylistic convention (without which an MC would fail to identify with an established listening community).  In the hip hop community, for example, the rhythmic style of flow by itself can inform listeners of its historical period and geographical origin.  Since identity is an immensely important aspect of hip hop music, locality must be explicitly manifested in an MC’s style.

The emphasis on identity construction in particular local communities is thus underscored by the fact that sound characteristics that may be authentic and accepted in one city may be considered disingenuous or unpleasant in another.

Community representation thus occurs at a purely aesthetic level, as mediated by cultural interpretation, in addition to what the MC alludes to in the lyrics of a song.  Such emphasis on cultural authenticity, or realness in hip-hop is unprecedented in other forms of popular music; not because other popular musics are inauthentic, but because authenticity is less critical to the creation and reception of the music.

This is evidenced by the fact that, from the perspective of hip hop artists and listeners, there

appears to be more poetic/stylistic variation along regional lines than any other means of classification.

Another aspect of hip hop poetics and construction is “sampling.”  It is simultaneously one of the most important and controversial elements of hip hop.  One of its functions, and precisely the reason for this controversy, is to contest conventional capitalist notions of property and proper citation.

It is the use of samples that gives hip hop music its unique dynamism, by allowing contrasting, and often quite disparate sounds to converge in a musical dialectic.  These sounds are brought into dialogue and archived within a hip hop composition, so that the historicity of the sampled sound is both contrasted against and brought into a contemporary context, calling into question conventional concepts of authorship, creativity, and originality.

The intersection of the aesthetic and economic implications of sampling have problematically led many to dismiss it as a means of recycling old material.  This conclusion, however, ignores the role sampling has of disseminating material to a new audience, as well as the heightened semantic poignancy achieved by using literal sounds in addition to mere allusion or reference.  As rapper Chuck D describes it:

Our music is filled with bits of information from the real world, a world that is rarely exposed.  Our songs are almost like headline news.  We bring things to the table of discussion that are not usually discussed, or at least not from our [urban African American] perspective.

Evoking a sense of realness, and giving a voice to an often neglected and marginalized life experience is central to hip hop; sampling as such is a highly useful means of bringing pieces of reality into the music.

Part II: Hip Hop Theology

This emphatic insistence on realness and authenticity, when manifested as a window into the violent and unjust conditions of inner-city life, has led to its unique admixture of the sacred and profane and its inclusion of imagery that strikes the dominant culture as offensive, grotesque, and perverse.  Yet, as Daniel White Hodge demonstrates in his own hip hop theology, the Bible itself bears witness to a history of God engaging, embracing, and working through profane contexts in order to love and liberate the marginalized.

Consistently, the biblical injunction is for us to redirect our disgust and righteous indignation from “sinners” to the conditions which lead to their sinfulness.  Hip hop theology, then, becomes a way for us to recover the profanity and hostility of our scriptural tradition which boldly calls the circumstances of injustice into question, and reintroduces us to the Jesus who embraced and uplifted prostitutes, drunks, diseased people and tax-collectors and rebuked those who ignored and disdained these profane people.  It will indeed be a vulgar theology, because, as the etymology of that word indicates, it is a theology of and for the common people.  In this sense, it is precisely the theologies which are not vulgar that are perversions of the gospel.  Hip hop theology seeks to offer a valid alternative to the problem in contemporary American Christianity that, as Hodge puts it, “We continue to want a G-rated savior in an NC-17 world.”

Since Hodge has already profoundly articulated a theology of the profane, in which biblical exegesis is brought into conversation with the hip hop cultural context, I will attempt to cover new territory and explore hip hop as a prophetic-poetic theological type.  This will take on three important assertions of hip hop theology: announcing that God identifies with the oppressed, marginalized and downtrodden, denouncing the hypocrisy of dominant Christian theology and practice, and denouncing the injustice and lack of freedom in this “land of the free.”

Rap as Prophecy

As Walter Brueggeman thoroughly demonstrates in Out of Babylon, the struggle of the poetic-prophetic tradition primarily concerned community and identity; the poetic idiom in which the prophets uttered God’s word anew was a way of preserving their local community’s identity in the midst of the challenges posed by living under the oppression and powerful influences of exile in the empire.  He relates this preserving poetic capacity of the Hebrew people in Babylon to the contemporary need to recovery this capacity to maintain allegiance to Christ in the midst of the demands to pledge allegiance to the American “empire.”  He argues, “The task is not simply to reiterate old poetry, but to learn from its cadences what now needs to be uttered.  Both the distorted chosen people and the imperious empire run roughshod over such utterance.”

Thus, the poetic-prophetic tradition Brueggeman describes is intimately connected with each of the three key aspects of hip hop theology.  Furthermore, the prophets, like rappers, were “uncredentialed utterers with no social standing,” whose authority thus came exclusively from “imaginative, playful utterance…facts on the ground connected to human bodily reality, and the claim to be connected enough to speak the truth of YHWH.”

Though hated and killed by their contemporaries, these poets are vindicated by God for their boldness and courage to speak truth where and when it was desperately needed (cf. Lk. 6:22-3).  In hip hop theology, as in the biblical prophetic tradition, this poetry is not merely an aesthetic convention, literary art form, or flight of imaginative fancy.  On the contrary, the  very articulation of the poetic imagination is liberating, both in speaking and in hearing.  Over against the dominant picture of reality which reinforces the injustice of the status quo, “It imagines otherwise; it invites its listeners to walk boldly into the world it creates. It authorizes courage, summons defiance and lines out resistance, all in the interest of legitimating the compelling force of the local tradition.”

This imagination and liberation, however, can only be available to those who maintain an authentic identity rooted in the local community; it is lost on those who have “sold out” to the prevailing imperial reality and ideology.

Similarly, in hip hop music, legitimacy and authenticity can only be maintained by “representing” (sometimes abbreviated “reppin’”) and staying true to the ‘hood from whence you came.  This is why one of the most serious charges that one rapper can lay on another is that of being “fake,” when one’s ‘hood identity is overcome and lost through the preoccupation with one’s own wealth and success.  The “commercial” rappers who parade on MTV and BET with expensive cars, jewelry, mansions, and women are often accused of leaving and forgetting the downtrodden ghetto communities they were raised in and for exploiting their previous experiences for personal profit.  A few lines from the opening verse of Common’s song “Chi-City” suffice to illustrate this trend:

Too many rape the culture

Leave rappers with careers and they faith over

It’s a war goin’ on, you can’t fake bein’ a soldier

In the basement, listening to tapes of Ultra-Magnetic,

to the fact the messiah is black

I’ll turn the TV down, we can take it higher than that

I wonder if these whack niggaz realize they whack

And they the reason that my people say they tired of rap

Represent

The main question of God in hip hop theology concerns who God “represents.”  Hip hoppers have not found a place in the church, because they do not hear about a God who loves them and identifies with their struggles there.  What they need to hear, as the rapper Nas says in his song “God Love Us,” is that, “God love[s] us hood niggaz/Cause next to Jesus on the cross was the crook niggaz…Cause he be with us in the prisons/And he takes the time to listen.”

Nas echoes the familiar strain of liberation theology with the final words of the song, “Our lives are the worst, on top of that, we broke/That’s the main reason why God love us the most.”  The clearest example of who God represents in hip hop theology, however, comes out in the spoken word poet Malik Yusef’s song, “I Spit.”  To “spit” means to rap, or to prophecy poetically, but it also conveys the image of speaking out with so much vulgarity, vigor, and passion that spit issues forth from the mouth.  The whole song is thus a passionate manifesto of solidarity, and a declaration of the specific local community who has access to the poetic-prophetic imagination:

I spit for the benefit of those who was told they was never ever gonna be shit

I spit for all those that wish to God they could just ball legit

I spit for every little ghetto boy and ghetto girl that have to beg, cry, fight and pray for each and every thing he or she get…

I spit for those that can’t speak without cursin’,

puttin’ body piercin’s and tattoos on they person,

who wanna talk to you, but them things do all the conversin’…

I spit for babies born as “pimps” and “soldiers”,

little black kids with no money, but big-ass chips on they shoulders,

I spit for those at fed joints fightin’ time,

and that’s the reason I’m writin’ rhymes

and recitin’ lime-green nouns and verbs

and slangin’/slingin’ that shit like pounds of herb just to elevate you

…

so outa all the gods claimin’ to be God, Yusef is the closest;

I spit the most lovely to the most ugly, the most beautiful to the most atrocious…

Life’s a gamble—we just roll the dice,

prayin’ that we don’t blow the heist

and if we do, let us go to Christ

and come back to raise our seeds as poltergeists

Here we get the clear picture that solidarity with the marginalized and voiceless is very important for hip hop theology.  Hip hop identifies with the Jesus who cared less about his own reputation than about loving and embracing sinners and Samaritans—who were, as Hodge puts it, “the ‘niggas’ of Jesus’ day.”

Like the Hebrew prophets, the hip hop community uses poetry to create bonds of solidarity and to partake of what Brueggemann terms “emancipitory imagination.”  Solidarity is a ministry of presence that loves and affirms the other as he or she is and which humbly listens to others in their own terms.  Hip hop can be a tremendous vehicle for this ministry of solidarity which fights the individualistic tendencies of our culture by building community.  As rapper Lupe Fiasco says, “You see the tears of fire run out my cryin’ songs/Now the world’s shoulders is what we cryin’ on…‘Cause it’s never cyclops; it’s never I alone/I’m tellin’ you story wherever I perform.”

The laments and cries that once fell upon deaf ears now have a global audience, thanks to hip hop.  The challenge for rappers like Lupe Fiasco is to continue to represent these folks by “keepin’ it real” and telling their stories.

Denouncing Religious Hypocrisy

One of the major reasons that the church has had difficulty accepting hip hop has been the perception that rappers are irreverent, sacrilegious and even blasphemous.  Even in African-American churches, hip hop is often seen as something to convert out of, rather than something to dialogue with.

Many Christians simply do not want to encounter the deeper messages of hip hop music, and perhaps rightly so; at the core, they will likely find a critical denunciation of their own tightly held theology and ideology.  Hip hop is vociferously critical of the “white Jesus” of American Christianity and the images of Jesus as an authoritarian figure, a judgmental moralist, and a timidly docile and unquestioningly obedient son—images that have been used either overtly or subliminally by the church to control and maintain the status quo.

While this domesticated Jesus imagery demands acceptance of an unacceptably unjust status quo, hip hoppers reject it in favor of a less tame and more hostile gospel—the gospel of the Jesus who is so enraged at what is going on that he violently throws over the tables of the moneylenders in the temple.  Talib Kweli, as a matter of fact, takes up this theme in his song appropriately titled “Hostile Gospel.”  The repeated chorus of the song sums up quite well:

This is the hostile gospel

I’m reaching through the fire (please deliver us)

I’m preaching to the choir (please deliver us)

Just keep it real with us, you scared to spill your blood

Your words rung hollow, we need someone to follow

In fact, Kweli’s entire Ear Drum album is wrought with this kind of prophetic address, clearly illustrating that the criterion for differentiating between the real, “hostile” gospel and the “hollow” one being preached in the churches is whether and to what degree solidarity is established with the marginalized people of the ghetto.  Thus, in another song, he says:

I’m not a judge, but I’m handing out sentences

To political prisoners, regular inmates with no visitors

Niggas in the streets outside to reach up for ministers

Not those that say they spiritual but actual parishioners—rap listeners

Kweli’s words here are reminiscent of those of Jesus Matthew 25, where he chastises those who call him “Lord” but fail to love and serve his people.  Far from being irreverent or blasphemous, the prophetic denunciation of Christian hypocrisy in hip hop is akin to Christ’s own words, “Woe to you…hypocrites!” in Matthew 23.

Kweli’s song “Give ‘Em Hell” summarizes the denunciation of religious hypocrisy far more poignantly than anything I could offer:

Every Sunday dressin’ up, catchin’ gossip at its worst

Couldn’t see the difference in the Baptist and the Catholic Church…

If we all God’s children then what’s the word of the reverend worth?

Taught early that faith is blind, like justice when you facin’ [jail] time

If we all made in God’s image, then that means His faces is mine

Wait, or is that blasphemy? It’s logical, it has to be—

If I don’t look like my father, then the way I live is bastardly

Naturally, that’s confusin’ to a young’n tryin’ to follow Christ,

Taught that if you don’t know Jesus then you lead a hollow life,

Never question the fact that Jesus was Jewish, not a Christian

Or that Christianity was law according to politicians…

They say Hell is underground and Heaven is in the sky

And they say that’s where you go when you die, but how they know?

We know that what we reap we sow

But we forget how low we can go

You think it’s bad here on earth but if we can’t get to heaven it’s hell…

So it all sound the same to me

That’s why when they say one [religion] is right and the other’s wrong

It just sound like game

to me

It’s like God skipped past the church and came to me

No, that ain’t vane to me; it’s just a particular way that I came to see…

The poem’s divine ‘cause it coincide with the growin’ tide

Of those who lookin’ for God, knowin’ to go inside

Livin’ in mass confusion, lookin’ for absolution…produce the last solution

Based on an interpretation of what the words were sayin’

Tryin’ to get to God but ended up doin’ the work of Satan,

Religion create[s] division: make the Muslim hate the Christian,

Make the Christian hate the Jew,

Make the rules of faith that you conditioned to and gotta follow

Or God forbid, you go to Hell,

But if you ever walked through any ghetto, then you know it well…

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,”

Just because the Lord is my shepherd don’t mean I gotta be no sheep

You feel me?

More blood is spilled over religion than anything in world history

We sayin’ the same thing

Kweli’s narrative is interwoven with numerous scriptural idioms, which he turns inside out into a critique of the vanity of contemporary religiosity.  There is no place for a holier-than-thou, judgmental theology or for fire and brimstone condemnations in the ghetto Kweli comes from; it is hard to instill a ‘holy fear’ of going to Hell in a group of people who already live there and “know it well.”  Thus, Kweli and those whom he represents, since they already live in Hell on earth, look for their liberation in a Heaven that is also on earth.

Denouncing Empire and Injustice

Perhaps the most central and prevalent prophetic mode of hip hop concerns the denunciation of the social and political structures of oppression.  Having come from the ghettos and inner-cities of this nation, hip hoppers are well aware that American imperial ideology is rooted in lies and half-truths.  The “American dream” and the promise of economic prosperity have never been a reality for the ghetto.  In fact, since the 1980s, economic inequality has dramatically increased, as the wealthiest Americans continue to be the profiteers of the wars and economic crises that plague the rest of the nation.  This the background out of which Lupe Fiasco says:

Your child’s future was the first to go with budget cuts

If you think that hurts then wait, here comes the upper cut

The school was garbage in the first place, that’s on the up and up

Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust

You get it then the move you so you never keepin’ up enough…

Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist

Gaza Strip was gettin’ bombed, Obama didn’t say shit

That’s why I ain’t vote for him, next one neither

I’m a part of the problem, my problem is I’m peaceful

And I believe in the people

On the same album Lupe Fiasco expounds on his critique of the American media—both its empty messages and propagandistic tendencies in a song called “State Run Radio.”  In his view, the corporate interests that control American media are hardly different from the government-controlled media of oppressive regimes.  Though the title alone is perhaps indicting enough, he elaborates:

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special message ‘bout the forecast:

The future’s cloudy and it’s rainin’ on the poor class

The roads to peace are closed and the traffic’s on the war paths

Love is ballin’ on a budget,

the military’s stressin’

‘We need more cash to keep fighting for your gas’

Keep us in our ‘hoods and hope we never explore past

‘Stay inside of your half, believe the lies you learn in your class,

That there’s no treasure in/and your/you’re

trash,

And the ceiling has the same feeling the floor has,

And that’s where you should stay,’

This is what they play…over again, and over again, and over again…

The thrust of his argument is thus that there are no uplifting messages for the downtrodden people of the ghetto in mainstream American media, in spite of the fact that their destitution is the result of a process that profits the few and impoverishes the many.  Similarly, Brueggemann suggests that the best way to understand the liturgy of prophetic poetry is to contrast it to the traits that predominate in the empire’s own liturgy, which is “all doxology, all praise, all celebration, all self-affirmation, and all victorious confidence.”

Such propagandistic self-delusion is loudly trumpeted in an attempt to drown out the dissenting voices.  In Fox News tells us they are “fair and balanced” enough times, while we actually believe them?  Nas thinks not, and explicitly seeks to call Fox and other American mainstream media out in his song “Sly Fox.”  Disgusted with the double-standards and hypocrisy of the media, Nas says, “I watch CBS and I see BS…make a nigga wanna invest in PBS.”  In the same song, he is especially critical of the way in which the American media demonizes hip hop and African-American culture by labeling it gratuitously violent:

They say I’m all about murder murder and kill kill,

But what about Grindhouse and Kill Bill?

What about Cheney and Halliburton—the back door deals on oil fields?

How is Nas the most violent person?

In his song “America,” Nas further elaborates on the hypocritical double standards:

The hypocrisy is all I can see

White cop acquitted for murder, black cop cop a plea

That type of shit make me stop and think we in chronic need

Of a second look at the law books, and the whole race dichotomy—

Too many rappers, athletes, and actors,

But not enough niggas in NASA

Who give you the latest dances, trends, and fashions?

But when it comes to residuals, they look past us;

Woven into the fabric, they can’t stand us

Even in white tee’s, blue jeans, and red bandanas…

Assassinations [=] diplomatic relations,

Killed indigenous people [to] build a new nation [with] involuntary labor…

Ain’t we in the free world?

Barbarity…how far [are] we really from third world savagery?

When the empire fall, imagine how crazy that’ll be,

America…this is not what you think it is

Conclusion

Only recently are theologians and academics of the mainstream beginning to catch on to the prophetic validity of such criticisms that have prevailed in hip hop culture for over two decades.  Nas’s closing questions in “America” give us ample food for thought.  While it is easy to sell our allegiance to the empire in order to gain wealth, status, and notoriety, the historical and the prophetic witnesses tell us that all empires crumble.  To what will we hold fast?  Where does our true loyalty lie?  With whom shall we identify?  These are the questions that hip hop theology will not allow us to evade.  We can no longer retreat to a “safe” gospel and the domesticated Christ who protects the interests of the privileged, but then again, we never really could.  After all, it was Christ himself, and not any contemporary rapper, who first warned us that we would have to take up our crosses, and lay down our lives.  Whether or not hip hop constitutes the way of speaking God’s word that will change and renew the world, as Bonhoeffer hoped for, it cannot be disputed that it is a “quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’ language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power.”

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Ramsey Jr, Guthrie P. Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop. Chicago: Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, 2003.

Salaam, Mtume ya. “The Aesthetics of Rap.” African American Review (1995): 303-315.

Discography

Common. Be. Geffen, 2005.

Lupe Fiasco. LASERS. Atlantic, 2011.

Nas. Nastradamus. Sony, 1999.

_____ Untitled. Def Jam, 2008.

Yusef, Malik. The Great Chicago Fire: A Cold Day in Hell. Ark 21, 2003.

Kweli, Talib. Ear Drum. Warner Brothers, 2007.

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The Dao, the Truth, and the Life: Jesus and Laozi in Ethical Dialogue

February 11, 2011

Preface — All Theology Is Contextual and Autobiographical

In recent years much ink has been spilled to delineate what has been called Contextual Theology.  Implicit in this characterization are many strains of theological contexts that are bracketed off with adjectival labels such as Asian, Black, Latin American, African, Liberation, Feminist, and many more.  Certainly the openness of such theologians to claim their cultural, ethnic, and social heritage as a theological starting point has marked a step forward from modernist pretense of neutrality and pure objectivity.  The problem is that such bracketing has had a tendency to reduce the scope and voice of theologians labeled “contextual” and has thus become the basis for continuing to marginalize their viewpoints.  This is because the project of contextualization has not fully reached and absorbed the mainstream of dominant group theology: Caucasian Western European and North American Male Theology.  It must finally be admitted that this too is a subjective theological context that limits neutrality and objectivity and conditions viewpoints.  In this spirit, I can only begin my own religious and inter-religious investigation here with a brief word of autobiography—of claiming and owning my own theological context.

My own encounter with the Daodejing (DDJ)

has been inextricably bound up with my religious journey.  Though I was raised within the tightly knit cultural religious and ethnic fabric of the Dutch Reformed tradition, my academic explorations as an undergraduate student of music and history led to a radical schism from my religious past.  The religious symbols and theological ideas I had grown up with seemed cold and dead; what had furnished meaning for my childhood understanding of life and the universe seemed no longer to make any sense.  Even worse, all of the other philosophies, cultures, and religions, which as a child I was forbidden from even exploring, suddenly began to reveal new vantage points and perspectives that seemed far more valid than I was ever told. During this crisis of meaning and faith in my life, I had to take a self-guided course in the major world religions through which I encountered for the very first time the DDJ.   While devouring its 84 chapters, I experienced the only moment in my life that I could honestly describe as a religious conversion.  What this experience did, far from exporting me even further from my Christian roots, was reignite the seemingly tired and dead voice of the divine in the Holy Bible.  Suddenly it began to make sense to me as this ancient Chinese text began to breathe new life into Christian theology.  Every paradox-laden verse sent flashes through my mind of similar verses in the Bible that spoke to the same theme of reversals—so much so that it felt, for me, as though Christ himself was speaking to me through these ancient Chinese verses and beckoning me back to faith in his Way.  From the very first verse of the DDJ came the affirming acknowledgement that words are inadequate to fully contain the fullness of the Dao and that when it is put into words it is reduced and ceases to be the true Dao—this had echoed my reservations with the anthropomorphic imagery of God in the Christian tradition and its utter inadequacy to fully attest to the fullness of divine reality.

Throughout my subsequent studies in Christian theology, my understanding of the DDJ has constantly shaped and challenged my perspective and reconstituted my hermeneutical approach to my own faith.  It has shifted my theological context to the margins, in between two scripture and faith traditions.

Though I can only claim to identify with the Daoist tradition as one reading Daoist texts from a Christian perspective, I am nevertheless rooted in both traditions.  Because of my inter-religious experience, something has been added that cannot be taken away; I can only read the Bible with the DDJ in the back of my mind, and I can only likewise read the Daoist texts with the Bible in mind.  Inter-religious dialogue is not merely a rigid external discipline of encounter between two absolute and insoluble others; it is a transformative process of interpenetration that is equally, or perhaps even primarily, internal.  What follows is an attempt to give voice to this inter-religious dialogue from within and to bring other voices and perspectives—in particular, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, and Asian-American theologian Jung Young Lee—into the conversation.  I have chosen Moltmann because the cultural and theological background from which he encounters the DDJ are similar to my own, and Lee because of his different background in East Asian philosophy and religion and his unique and bold attempts to ground his own Christian theology in Daoist concepts.  Both theologians, furthermore, express reservations about the inadequacy of grounding Christian doctrine and biblical interpretation on the presuppositions of Greek philosophy, and both go to considerable length in their writings to question the degree to which reading the Bible through a Hellenistic hermeneutical lens has distorted true Christian doctrine and contributed to the inability of Christian theology to solve some of its most persistent problems.  What follows is an attempt to lay the groundwork of an encounter between Christian theology and the Chinese philosophy of Daoism which will furnish a new vantage point from which these areas of Christian thought can be reassessed and illuminated.

One final precautionary note is necessary regarding theoretical uniformity.  It cannot be assumed that any given culture can be summed up as a theoretical unit such as “Chinese philosophy” or even “Daoism.”  The closer one looks at the borders between one culture and the next, the blurrier the lines become.  Nevertheless, to avoid slipping into the paralysis of sheer relativism, suffice it to say that when terms such as “Chinese philosophy” or “Daoism” are used in this investigation, they should be understood in the most inclusive sense possible as dynamic traditions with their own internal diversity, and which cannot be reduced to any one particular articulation or manifestation.  Far from making dialogue impossible or fruitless, it is precisely this internal diversity and difference within a single tradition that makes possible the interaction with the differences and diversity within another tradition.

Part I: Understanding The Daodejing

Introduction 

The aim of this paper is to initiate a theological (if such a Christian term may be permitted) dialogue between Christianity and Daoism.  If this dialogue is to be of any real significance, then it must consider the dimension of praxis—the ethical implications of the texts and teachings.  The mutual ground on which Daoist-Christian dialogue must be founded lies in the commonalities and cross-fertilization of Daoist-Christian ethics.  Dialogue is only fruitful if both parties are enriched by the encounter with the other; it will call for a move from a Daoist ethic and a Christian ethic toward a Daoist-Christian ethic.  I will begin by considering the most primary and central texts for each tradition: the teachings of Laozi in the Daodejing (DDJ) and the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.  After a thematic analysis of the predominant ethical concepts and symbols in these texts will follow a reflection on the theological and ethical implications of the dialogue.  Finally, I will pose some concluding considerations for further comparison that is beyond the scope of this introductory dialogue.

Ancient China In Context

Before examining the content of the text it is critical to establish a basic understanding of its context. Understanding the full context from which the DDJ was written requires awareness of the religious and philosophical history of ancient China over as vast an expanse as that of the Judeo-Christian and Hellenistic historical backdrop for the New Testament.  In a rudimentary way, however, the relationship between Daoism and the dominant religion of ancient China—namely Confucianism—can be summarized as analogous to that of early Christianity and Judaism.  Each pair had a shared history of religious and philosophical concepts, symbols, and language, and both Christianity and Daoism grew out of a reinterpretation of their respective traditional contexts. Daoism crystallized during a period dominated by two opposing schools of thought: Confucianism and Mohism.  Both were structured ways or courses (dao) of action and behavior that were designed to cultivate certain skills and virtues (de).

The way that Confucian and Mohist texts used dao might best be translated as “guiding discourse.”  Once these practices were mastered and internalized, one would be said to have “attained” the course, and this attainment was called de (virtuosity or virtue).

Thus there were many daos, many ways or courses.  There was the Confucian dao which affirmed the goodness of human nature and venerated the family unit, and there was the Mohist dao which sought to cultivate all-inclusive love through calculating a utilitarian formula to ensure maximum benefit for all.

The movement which would later be called Daoism emerged in this context, articulating a new position associated with a benevolent sage called Laozi to whom the text of the Daodejing is attributed.  The significance of this text, according to Brook Ziporyn, is that it “marks a major break, indeed a deliberate 180-degree turnaround, from the understanding of dao found in the Confucian and Mohist schools, developing a new and profoundly different ironic meaning of the term dao.”

The Daoists perceived that the Confucian dao and the Mohist dao, though diametrically opposed to one another, were both equally flawed; both schools erroneously thought that their dao could be systematized and formulated in such a way, through rules and a legalistic mindset, that they could be made to cultivate the proper de.  For the Daoists, no amount of human striving through practices and adherence to rules could possibly cultivate true virtue, so they began using dao to mean the exact opposite of the traditional sense: the true Dao is what is free of purpose and specified guidelines.

Rather than prescribe yet another alternative dao to follow, the Daoists began to speak of the one eternal, ineffable, and unnameable Dao that is the way of nature and the whole cosmos.  Like the other daos, the Dao influences us by shaping our perceptions, desires, and behavior, but unlike any other dao, this Dao cannot be contained, understood, or followed by any human effort.  It is only through abandoning focus on human activity and conscious moral knowledge and reorienting oneself to the spontaneous and free guidance of nature that one might attain (de) this Dao. Thus, the DDJ begins to speak quite paradoxically about this Dao from the very first chapter: “A way that can be walked is not the Way.  A name that can be named is not the Name” (ch. 1).

In Chinese, dao can be translated as both the noun ‘way‘ and the verb ‘walk’ so the ironic sense of the Daoist wordplay immediately jumps into the foreground of these opening words: “A dao that can be daoed is not the Dao.”  This is a stark acknowledgement of the limited ability of language to express the full reality of what is being called Dao, which seems to suggest that this Dao transcends all thought and therefore cannot be spoken of; and yet the following eighty chapters go on to do just that.  This paradox-laden wordplay is the result of the extensive critique of legalism that is central to Daoism, and which certainly has its counterpart in Christian tradition.

Where other daos proscribed specific behaviors, Daoists laud the benefit of wu-wei (not-doing).  It is as if they left the entire Chinese philosophical system intact and simply turned it upside-down.  Perhaps the most subversive example of this is the way in which the DDJ lauds the female imagery of the Dao as mother and nurturer; the very characteristics for which women were marginalized in patriarchal Confucian society here become the prime examples of the Dao itself. Nevertheless, the Daoists shared essentially the same metaphysical and cosmological foundation as the Confucians and Mohists, rooted in a text so ancient it preceded all three movements.

Chinese Cosmology and Metaphysics

The earliest Chinese “classic” (Ching) revered as a religious and philosophical text is the I Ching, the “Book of Changes.”  The I Ching is based on a series of symbols that date back to 3000 B.C. and is considered to have been completed in its present form at the time Confucius added his commentaries on the symbols during the 5^th century B.C. It has belonged without question to the orthodox philosophical canon of China since the 2^nd century B.C.

The I Ching is the source of the metaphysical and cosmological presupposition that the most basic reality which is the ground of both existence and nonexistence is the principle of change.  The Chinese character for I (change) is comprised of the ancient symbols for ‘sun’ and ‘moon’—corresponding to the relation of yin and yang which characterizes the endless change all things undergo from days to moon cycles and on to the four seasons.

It is based on one of the world’s oldest natural theologies.  Ancient Chinese sages observed the interrelationships between all beings in the cosmos and discovered the universal principle that all of existence is in a perpetual process of change.  Thus, “Change is absolute and certain; only the principle of change never changes.”

Even though very different schools of thought eventually emerged from this starting point, they all share common ground in their ultimate goal: to achieve a harmonious balance and unity with the ever-changing natural world.  Only this harmony of interrelationship, this unity-in-diversity, could produce longevity and benefit for the whole cosmos; disharmony of the whole inevitably means disharmony for each individual being.  Though the Chinese disagreed about how best to achieve this harmony, they all held to this essentially holistic cosmology and inclusive logic.

The Starting point: Anthropology vs. Cosmology

The essential difference between Chinese and Western cosmology is their starting points.  As Lee observes, “While the West is interested in an anthropocentric approach to cosmology, East Asia is more interested in a cosmocentric approach to anthropology.”

While it may first appear to be minute, the difference has led to vastly different understandings of human nature.  In contrast to starting in anthropology, Chinese philosophy has negated the possibility of understanding the human being in isolation from the rest of the cosmos.  This leads to a relational worldview characterized by relativity; the human being can only be understood as a being in relation to the cosmos and all other beings.  Such a starting point renders the type of atomistic individualism endemic to American culture inconceivable.  By taking a cosmocentric view, Chinese philosophy is oriented toward inclusive and holistic ways of thinking, as opposed to the mutually exclusive and atomistic ways of thinking that result from either-or logic.  Thus, Korean-American theologian Jung Young Lee argues that “since everything changes, change itself is the most inclusive reality,” and a theology based on change “is a theology of fulfillment for all…it deals with the wholeness of cosmos and the totality of ecosystem in which human beings are a part.” In short, The essentially relational view of Chinese cosmology can lead us into a theology that is more holistic, ecumenical, and ecological, and thus better equip us to address the pressing issues of our time in a more relevant way.

East of Athens: Inclusive Both/And Logic

What sets Chinese thought in stark contrast to its Greek counterpart is its ultimate grounding in the metaphysics of change.  Greek thought was preoccupied with a static ontology that saw ‘being-itself’ and not ‘change-itself’ as the ultimate ground of reality, whereas for Hebrew thought, becoming is the most basic category. Western philosophy has scarcely moved beyond the Aristotelean either/or logic of the excluded middle.

This logic has been used “to maintain strict categorical distinctions regarding all issues and as a separatist tool to marginalize those who are different.” The problem is that either/or thinking inevitably lapses into an irreconcilable dualism resulting in many philosophical and theological problems that have gone unsolved for centuries.

While this exclusive, dualist logic can be a means of privileging the dominant central group to the exclusion and marginalization of others, inclusive both/and logic does not.  “In other words, exclusivist thinking excludes inclusivist thinking, but inclusivist thinking includes exclusivist thinking.”

As Robert Allinson demonstrates, the two great sages of Daoism—Laozi and Zhuangzi—like Wittgenstein did centuries later in the West, would deliberately use the “art of circumlocution” to expose the limits of language and the inherent flaw in either/or dualistic logic:

“We are using language to make distinctions where no distinctions are to be made. In this sense, as Wittgenstein, we leave everything as it is. We hide the world in the world, but not quite. We now understand that understanding takes place between the words. What we understand has no distinctions. Language makes distinctions where none are to be made. That which we understand has no dual nature, but when we put it into language, we have made subject and object of it. Its reality is not subject and object; but our mode of description is subject and object. We do not understand anything with subject–object language, but it is the only language that we know. What is reality is not divided up into subject and object, but we are forced to use the subject–object language to describe it.”

One reason that Laozi and Zhuangzi were able to get around these limits of language is that the ancient Chinese language functioned much differently than modern English.  It is a conceptual language formulated on pictorial representations without grammar. The original text of the DDJ seldom differentiates the subject and object and is not clearly divided into lines and sentences.

Due to the different, namely analytical character of modern English, much of this original openness of the Chinese text instantly vanishes in translation because English demands a subject-object distinction.  Nevertheless, even in translation one still gets the sense of thought transcending the limits of linguistic expression by way of allusion.  Laozi had no name for the Nameless, so he called it Dao; Jesus could not describe the Kingdom of God directly, so he compared it to a mustard seed.  In both cases language is made to express more than it really can, and in both cases, paradox is used to express a greater unity that lies just beyond the seeming contradiction.  In this way, the paradox becomes the emblem of the unifying character of both/and logic.

Because of the more flexible character of its original language, Chinese thought offers an extremely valuable alternative to exclusive either/or logic.  In both/and thought, opposites are seen as complementary and coexistent; there is no room for the enmity between the one and the other as in the logic of either/or—such logic is based on the flawed assumption that the one can exist in isolation.  In contrast, Laozi suggests,

Everyone recognizes beauty

only because of ugliness

Everyone recognizes virtue

only because of sin (ch. 2)

Logic of Relationality: Yin and Yang

Chinese both-and philosophy is based on the fundamental concept of change which produces yin and yang.  Yin and yang are complementary opposites; yin represents the passive principle that is receptive, dark, and empty whereas yang represents the active principle that is energetic, light, and overflowing.  The difference  between the ying-yang philosophy of opposites and Aristotelean either-or logic, however, is that they are seen as mutually interdependent and value neutral because both arise together only because of change.  They represent dark and light only in the more literal sense of the changes from day to night and vise versa; they never carry the same value-oriented sense that dark and light often do in Western thought in which dark represents the qualitatively evil and light represents the qualitatively good.  It would make no sense to say that yang is better than yin because in yin-yang thinking, both represent one reality.  Further, the symbol of the Great Ultimate, the metaphysical symbol of change (Figure 1), illustrates the mutual dependence of yin and yang as interpenetrating opposites-in-unionrather than as mutually exclusive and dualistic absolutes:

Figure 1.                  Symbol of the Great Ultimate

The dots in the symbol above represent the mutuality of the ying-yang relationship because there is yin (dark dot) in yang and yang (light dot) in yin; the two can never be fully separated and isolated because they exist together in the relationship of ultimate change (the whole circle).

The Way, Truth, and Life of Laozi

Though the true origin and authorship of the ancient text of the Daodejing is as fiercely debated and uncertain as that of many Christian texts, there are a few facts that are generally accepted as accurate: the present form of the text is not the singular work of the traditional author, Laozi, but is rather a collection and redaction of the wisdom and insights penned by generations of Chinese sages from the period between the 7^th and the 2^nd centuries B.C.

However, the legend of how the DDJ was written is perhaps just as revealing of the text’s nature and purpose:

During the time of Confucius (around 500 B.C.) Lao-tsu practiced Tao and Te (the Supreme Way and its Expression) and focused his teachings on humility and being nameless.  He was keeper of the royal archives in the state of Chou.  After he foresaw that the state would fall into decay, he packed his belongings and decided to leave through the Western gateway.  The gatekeeper, Yin-hsi, seeing that this great sage was about to leave the world said, “Master, you are about to renounce this world, please compose a book for me.”  Thereupon the “Old Master” came down from his oxcart, took out his pen and ink, and began to compose a book of two parts, discussing Tao and Te.  Several hours later, 

Lao-tsu handed the finished text of slightly more than five thousand characters to the gatekeeper and then departed toward the West.

The setting of the story and the identification of the text’s recipient as a “gatekeeper” symbolizes the fact that the text serves as a key to open up a new understanding.  The fact that Laozi “came down” from his oxcart to write the entire text in reply to a simple request demonstrates his humility, kindness and generosity.  Since he composed it entirely in one sitting, Laozi proves himself to be focused and one-pointed, and the fact that he was departing “toward the West” symbolizes the universality of his message and wisdom, which was intended to be shared with all people.

These traits attributed to the figure of Laozi represent those of the “Sage” spoken of throughout the text: humility, kindness, generousity, and openness to all people.  From these values emerges the teaching of a Way to live in harmony with the Dao and the universe by humbling the self and embracing all others.  It is based in the inclusive logic of both/and, which leads to a fundamentally holistic and relational view of the world.  Laozi’s Way is to live by a radically inclusive love, which denies selfishness in order to accept others.  It is to become marginal in order to embrace rather than dominate the marginalized and to embrace all so inclusively as to love even the enemy.

Part II: Conceptual Analysis and Comparison

Though the historical, cultural, and religious worlds of Laozi and Jesus were quite different from one another, what is truly striking and instructive is that there should be any similarity at all between the “way” that each taught and adhered to.  We have seen a minute degree of contextual similarity between the crystallization of Daoism and Christianity as both product of and reaction to their respective religious milieus, but what is truly astounding is the degree of similarity in the thematic content and ethical values of the two traditions.  Thus, the ideal place to initiate dialogue is the investigation of these themes and values.

The Sage and Paradoxical Reversals

The paradoxical reversal is by far the most commonly recurring theme in the DDJ.  This theme also resonates throughout the words of Jesus in the New Testament, for example, “So the last will be first, and the first last” (Mt. 20:8).

Similarly, Laozi uses these reversals to turn conventional morality and values upside-down:

The low is greater than the high

The still is greater than the restless

The low country wins over its neighbor

The still female wins over the male…

The Sage bows to the people

The people bow to the Sage (ch. 61)

When Laozi speaks of the “Sage” he is describing the qualities of the good leader in contrast to the values normally associated with leadership.  For Laozi, true power is in humility, not aggressive self-assertion.  This leads him to the paradoxical association of true leadership with servanthood.  In that same sense, Jesus said, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you…whoever wishes to become first among you must be slave of all” (Mk. 10:42-44).  Laozi echoes this thought:

He who wishes to rule over the people

must speak as if below them

He who wishes to lead the people

must walk as if behind them…

The Sage stays low

so the world never tires of exalting him

He remains a servant

so the world never tires of making him its king (ch. 66)

In the DDJ, the personal embodiment of the paradoxical reversal is the Sage.  The Sage (sheng jen) refers literally to a “holy person” and the symbolic meaning of the two characters “suggests a direct hearing, without interference, between the holy man and the Absolute.  The holy man hears the pure voice of Tao; the holy man acts in perfect harmony with the universe.”

The ultimate question for Daoist-Christian dialogue thus emerges: what is the relation between the Sage of the DDJ and Jesus Christ?

St. Paul speaks of the κενωσις (emptying) of Jesus in his epistle to the Philippians: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave…Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him a name above every name” (2:5-9).  Laozi, when contemplating the truth of the ancient saying, “Surrender brings perfection,” says this about the Sage:

So the Sage embraces the One

and becomes a model for the world

Without showing himself, he shines forth

Without promoting himself, he is distinguished

Without claiming reward, he gains endless merit

Without seeking glory, his glory endures (ch. 22)

According to Laozi, the Sage rules with true power, which is peaceful and not coercive; this is what sets him/her apart from all others.  Because of the Sage’s extreme humility and self-sacrifice, s/he possesses this power,

that guides without forcing

that serves without seeking

that brings forth and sustains life (ch. 10)

Laozi goes on to say that whoever has this power “brings Tao to this very Earth” and that although “he can triumph over a raging fire,” he nevertheless will come to rule the world “with the gentleness of a feather” (ch. 10).  The metaphor Laozi uses for this gentle power is that of water, which despite being the most soft and yielding thing on earth, patiently erodes deep canyons and valleys to profoundly change the landscape (ch. 78).

In this ultimate example of reversal, what appears to be unshakably hard and unchanging (rock) is completely overcome by the power of what appears to be the most innocuously soft and yielding (water).  Given these observations about the upside-down values associated with Jesus and the Sage, the next step is to consider their ethical implications for disciples.

Wu-Wei and Non-Resistance: Ethical Considerations

The central ethical model in the DDJ is the concept of wu-wei, which is translated as inaction, non-action, non-coercion, or acting naturally—none of which encapsulates the full sense of wu-wei as Laozi uses the phrase.

It first appears in ch. 2 of the DDJ along with the first appearance of sheng jen (Sage), who “acts without acting and teaches without talking.”  The emphasis of this wordless teaching is that it is a teaching carried out in deed—it can only be enacted and imitated.

This calls to mind the old Christian adage, “Preach the gospel always, and if necessary, use words.”  It underscores the inseparability of Tao-logos and Tao-praxis, word and deed.  The primary danger in interpreting and enacting the ethic of wu-wei lies in the ease with which “act without acting” can be taken to mean “do nothing.”  The true sense of what is meant by wu-wei can only be understood as the symbolic power of water mentioned above. Lee uses the example of ripples moving out from the center of a pond toward the margins, the shore, and then returning to create more powerful waves.  “What made the margin powerful was not its reaction but its inaction…marginality uses reception rather than dominance to change the world.”

Non-action, in this sense, cannot mean “remain indifferent to injustice.”  Its true meaning is that the only way to properly overcome the rock of injustice is through the gentle, patient, but persevering power of water eroding canyons and valleys.  Resisting the impulse to react to injustice, wu-wei calls for embracing love as a response to it.  Thus, “Tao-praxis exercises true strength, not violent power, to change evil at a deeply personal as well as societal level,” and does so by challenging “the sin, offenses, and wrongs committed by offenders through integrity, kindness, gentleness, and persistence.”

The greatest and truest power (de) comes from the attainment of the Dao through wu-wei—that is, this power is only available to the one who does not seek power and does not use force.

In a way, wu-wei is simply being natural by yielding to the natural way of things (ziran) that is the very root of the Dao.  Yet there is a paradox: if it truly is natural and effortless, then why should we need to formulate the concept?  Underlying this paradox is the insight that somehow for humans, being natural does not come naturally.

Here, wu-wei can shed light on the relationship between grace and works in Christianity.  Wu-wei, like grace, is a way of giving up our striving for perfection by giving in to the Dao/God, which then acts through us and naturally yields the fruits of the Spirit.

There can be no striving for the fruits of the Spirit, and the works of the Spirit in and through us can never be forced; only by yielding to the Spirit, doing nothing on our own, and not expecting a reward do the fruits manifest.  Thus, Paul says, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).  Laozi seems to be getting close to Paul’s tension between grace and legalism:

When the greatness of Tao is present

action arises from one’s own heart

When the greatness of Tao is absent

action comes from the rules

of “kindness” and “justice”

If you need rules to be kind and just,

if you act virtuous,

this is a sure sign that virtue is absent

Thus we see the great hypocrisy (ch. 18)

The Christian ethical doctrine of non-resistance is also similar to the concept of wu-wei both in terms of its value for guiding ethical behavior and in its potential to be misinterpreted and thereby lost.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Mt. 5:39).  The danger here lies in interpreting this as a command to tacitly endure abuse and violence, and even worse, to willfully seek it out.  Instead, as the water metaphor above helped to elucidate, Jesus is advocating a way to “act without acting” or to “resist without resisting.”  Rather than to resist evil in such a way as to transfer the same abuses and violence on the perpetrator, Jesus is pointing toward a way of resistance that does away with all violence and abuse.  Thus, he goes on to say, “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt. 5:44).  Paradoxically, the only viable reply to the hatred and injustice of the world is to respond with unconditional love and generosity.  Non-resistance and wu-wei can both be understood as ways of acting without expecting to be rewarded, because both are founded on the idea of selfless love.  As Laozi summarizes, “Love vanquishes all attackers” (ch. 67).  Although the truth expressed here by Jesus and Laozi seems to be paradoxical, Motlmann eloquently suggests that “it only sounds paradoxical in a perverse, untrue world of injustice and violence directed against human beings and against the earth.”

Love and Generosity 

While love is quite explicitly central to the teachings of Jesus and the Christian understanding of the life of discipleship, the role love plays in the DDJ is more subtle—to the point that many readers and interpreters of the DDJ miss it entirely.  To understand how love functions in the DDJ, it has to be seen in connection to the other values that predominate in the text.  Laozi says,

I have three treasures that I cherish and hold dear

the first is love

the second is moderation

the third is humility

With love one is fearless

With moderation one is abundant

With humility one can fill the highest position

Now if one is fearless but has no love

abundant but has no moderation

rises up but has no humility

Surely he is doomed (ch. 67)

First, Laozi explicitly states that love is the most primary of his most cherished “treasures.”  Then he illustrates how love is interwoven with the other two treasures of moderation and humility.  All three of these treasures are embodied by the Sage, who “sees everything as his own self” and thus “loves everyone as his own child” (ch. 49).  Since this love is unconditional and makes no distinctions, it reflects the character of the Dao.  Likewise, the Sage “treats with goodness” both those who are good and those who are bad, “because the nature of his being is good” (ch. 49).  True goodness, like true love, does not make any distinction and thus reflects the character of the Dao. Goodness manifests in humility, as seen above, as well as in generosity.  Laozi says that, “A knower of the Truth…gives without keeping an account,” because s/he understands the underlying truth that “giving and receiving are one” (ch. 27).  In this way, generosity also reflects the Dao which is both “the mother of the universe” which gives all things their existence, as well as “that to which all things return” (ch. 25).

Jesus makes a similar connection between the character of God and the ethical mandate to practice God’s love, humility, and generosity.  Luke’s account summarizes this well, “But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.  Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Lk. 6:35).  Like the nature of the Dao and the actions of the Sage, here we see that God’s love and generosity make no distinction.  Seeing all as one, the striving for virtue fades and the fruits of the Spirit begin to appear:

To give without seeking reward

To help without thinking it is virtuous—

therein lies great virtue…

The highest virtue is to act without a sense of self

The highest kindness is to give without condition

The highest justice is to see without preference (ch. 38)

Such traits are evidence of the dao of the Dao; the way of the Way.  They are the external signs of an internal reality that precedes them.  Only because of the Spirit’s presence can the fruits begin to show.  The internal reality is self-emptying and all-embracing.

The One

We have seen that the nature of Dao and God is characterizes by love and generosity that make no distinctions.  What emerges is a sense of oneness in which the narrow preoccupation with the self is transcended by the greater truth of the self in relation to others.  Oneness is essentially what makes life possible.  Consider the example of an ecosystem

—it is only because each individual species is able to fit together in mutual relation as one ecosystem that each can live at all.  Thus, Laozi is correct in a very literal sense when he says that without the One, “all things would go lifelessly upon this earth” (ch. 39).  It is a holistic way of viewing all of creation through interrelationship:

By realizing the One

kings and lords become instruments of peace

and all creatures live joyfully upon this earth (ch. 39)

Yet this is unity in diversity, not a mystical union in which all the particulars are dissolved into the undifferentiated whole.  Rather, each part, though distinct, only finds meaning because of the whole:

The pieces of a chariot are useless

unless they work in accordance with the whole

A man’s life brings nothing

unless he lives in accordance with the whole universe

Playing one’s part

in accordance with the universe

is true humility…

If you accept your part with humility

the glory of the universe will be yours (ch. 39)

The Bible does give voice to a view comparable to this profound sense of the oneness and interdependence of all creation, and such passages have been foundational for eco-theology and other theologies that take seriously the relationship between humanity and nature.  Unfortunately, however, this voice is easily drowned out by the loudness with which these words of God ring out throughout Christian history: “fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over…every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28).  The way in which the DDJ foregrounds the need for a harmonious coexistence between humans and nature makes it a valuable hermeneutical lens with which we can recover the marginalized voices of the biblical text, lifting them from their silence and obscurity.

Part III: Implications for Christian Theology

Christian ethics demands a life of following Jesus in both word and deed.  While Christian theology certainly has adequate language for understanding the former, its understanding of the latter has been lacking.  Thanks to the prologue in the gospel of John, christology has been able to identify the eternal Word (λογος) with Christ.  What the encounter with Daoism offers is an equally viable way of understanding Christ as the Way (Dao) precisely in the ethical sense—the ability to understand Christ and discipleship in terms of both word and deed.  This move does not require any kind of harmful syncretism or careless appropriation and assimilation of another religion’s concepts; the work has already been done.  The Dao has already come into the midst of the Christian community because the Chinese New Testament uses the dao to translate the word λογος in the prologue of John.

It is because Chinese Christians have already benefited from the understanding of Christ that is facilitated by the usage of Dao that the concept can now be extended to the Christian community at large.  The Dao cannot remain confined to Chinese contextual theology for Chinese Christians alone, because every contextual theology is at once also directed to the whole community.

Of course, the notion of the “Way” has been a part of Christian tradition since long before the Bible was translated into Chinese.  McCasland’s careful reading of the book of Acts reveals “that Way as a name for Christianity is at least as old as Church.”

In fact, the concept of the way or path is a nearly universal human phenomenon found in nearly every world culture, philosophy and religion.

It is a metaphor that enables us to make sense of something abstract and difficult to understand (like God, and the meaning of life) by making reference to something concrete and readily comprehensible.

The benefit of such a metaphor is its ability to address us ethically because at the core, bodies are what are on paths.

Such an embodied concept helps us move beyond the body-spirit dualism that has long haunted Western thought and led to the denigration of the body.  Instead, what is offered is the restoration of both body and mind into proper harmony as we move along the Way.

Personal vs. Impersonal 

As Moltmann suggests, Western Christians will be tempted to ask whether the Dao is either personal or impersonal in order to see whether or not the Dao is comparable to a personal God.

The question misses the point because it fails to see that the Dao is beyond personhood and is therefore neither personal nor impersonal.  Christian theology in the west has followed Greek philosophy in trying to understand God in terms of Being, and fails at this point to grasp the Dao that is both being and non-being.  Since Christians have found that the essence of Being is impossible to grasp or contain with any human thought our concept, all our names for God derive from God’s actions as we experience them (not from God’s essence).

Thus, “All human utterances about God are no more than analogies.”

On the other hand, Moltmann argues,

The non-being being, the nameless name and the unutterable utterance of Tao is fundamentally speaking more consistent than the category of analogy, which mediates between similarity and dissimilarity, for Taoism binds together contradiction and correspondence—indeed actually brings correspondence about through contradiction.

What confronts us at first sight is the fundamental difference between the concept of a more-than-personal Dao as elucidated by Laozi, and the conventional Christian concept of the personal God.  In spite of the obvious foundations for conceiving of Jesus’ “Abba” God as a deeply personal deity, however, the Christian tradition has still affirmed that God is also beyond just a personal being.  Yet the dominating metaphor for God in Christianity is still that of the personal Father figure which drastically overshadows any imagery (or non-imagery) of the sense in which God is more than personal.  It is at this juncture that the dialogue with the Dao concept is particularly fruitful, for with it Laozi supplies us with a way of conceiving of Dao/God; as both personal and non-personal or supra-personal.

Male vs. Female

Another way in which the dialogue with Daoism confronts and challenges Christian theology is the question of gender.  In Christianity, it is the male image of God the Father that has dominated to such an extent that God has come to be viewed by many, if not most Christians, as exclusively male.  Here again the Daoist understanding supplements the imagery of a male God who “created” with that of the mother who “gives birth” to all things.

As Moltmann correctly points out, the feminine imagery of the DDJ is an integral aspect of the Daoist understanding that “the life-giving power sustains the living, but does not dominate it.”

Thus, through dialogue we gain a vital resource that challenges us to question the gender associations in our theological language.  We also gain a new hermeneutic that questions imagery of domination as opposed to imagery of nurture and sustenance.

Creation vs. Evolution

The significance of this Daoist imagery reaches beyond gender issues alone.  While the image of the mother is certainly a beneficial complement to that of the father, the motherly concept of life-sustaining is also an important complement to the conventional Christian understanding of creation “in the beginning.”  It helps us to reinterpret “in the beginning” outside of a static view of the world so that we can learn afresh that God is not the proverbial “watchmaker” but that God is at work here and now.  As the dialogue with Daoism begins to push Christianity toward a more dynamic view of the world, the doctrine of creation is dusted off from the shelf of “in the beginning” and is reinterpreted in terms of God’s ongoing creative activity as intimately bound up with God’s work of reconciliation.  Perhaps then Christians will begin to find the vocabulary to address the evolutionary worldview of modern science so that both can engage in a mutually enriching dialogue.  When Christians and scientists engage in this way, they can move from the stale dichotomy of either creation or evolution to a greater understanding and greater unity.

Conclusion

End vs. Beginning

Finally, the Daoist perspective allows us to speak not only of salvation of humanity, as we have traditionally tended to do, but also of the salvation of all creation.  The schism between the Christian doctrines of creation and soteriology are reunited and reconciled to one another in the inclusive concept of ongoing creation.  Here the dynamic unfolding of God’s creative work is also seen as the source of our hope in the transformation of this fallen order and the harmonious one that is to come.  The primary rooting of theology in cosmology rather than anthropology helps us to locate the Kingdom of God in cosmic harmony, which is inclusive of, but not reducible to anthropological harmony; the pouring of the spirit on all creation (which in Joel is explicitly connected to the non-human creatures such as animals and even the very soil) and not just on all humans is in view.  Thus, even though it has often been neglected and forgotten, this inclusive cosmology of the DDJ is in many respects quite close to biblical cosmology.  Far from being harmfully syncretistic, the dialogue with the texts of Daoism proves to be a helpful spotlight for illuminating aspects of Biblical theology which have often passed into the shadowy background of Christian theology.  It will force us to look at our own text from a new vantage point which can only enable us to discern the truth of the Word of God in greater depth.

The End Is the Beginning

Since all dialogue involves taking part in an essentially open-ended conversation, there is no ending.  Instead, there is a time to pause for reflection and contemplation of where the conversation has taken us and where it might take us in the future.  The preceding study has barely begun to etch a mark into the vast blank slate of Daoist-Christian dialogue.  What has begun to emerge, however, is the sense that Jesus and Laozi are not bringing us a new religion to follow, but a new Way of living together in community, of respecting our interconnectedness with the universe, and of abiding in infinite, undifferentiated love.

Bibliography

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Bai, Tongdong. “How to Rule Without Taking Unnatural Actions: A Comparative Study of the Political Philosophy of the Laozi,” Philosophy East & West 59, no. 4 (October 2009): 481-502.

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Clooney, Francis X. Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders. Chichester, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

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Huang, Alfred. The Complete I Ching. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1998.

Khoo, Kay Keng  “The Tao and the Logos: Lao Tzu and the Gospel of John,” International Review of Mission 87, no. 344 (January 1998): 77-84.

Lee, Jung Young. The Theology of Change: A Christian Concept of God in an Eastern Perspective. New York: Orbis Books, 1979.

_____ Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

_____ The Trinity in Asian Perspective. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996

Slingerland, Edward. “Conceptual Metaphor Theory as Methodology for Comparative Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 1 (2004): 1-31.

Liu, Xiaogan. “Wuwei (Non-Action): From Laozi to Huainanzi,” Taoist Resources 3, no. 1 (July 1991): 41-46.

McCasland, S. Vernon. “The Way,” Journal of Biblical Literature 77, no. 3 (1958): 222-230.

Moltmann, Jürgen.  “TAO – The Chinese Mystery of the World: Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching Read with Western Eyes,” In Science and Wisdom. trans. Margaret Kohl Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Park, Andrew Sung. “A Theology of the Way (Tao),” Interpretation 55, no. 4 (October 2001): 389-399.

Wei, Henry. The Authentic I Ching: A New Translation. North Hollywood, CA: Newcastle, 1987.

Ziporyn, Brook. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009.

Additional Resources

Bidlack, Bede. “Qi in the Christian Tradition.” Dialogue & Alliance 17, no. 1 (2003): 51-59.

Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Trinity and Religious Pluralism. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004.

Kim, Heup Young. “A Tao of Interreligious Dialogue in an Age of Globalization: An East Asian Christian Perspective.” Political Theology 6, no. 4 (2005): 487-499.

Lee, Pauline C. “Engaging Comparative Religion: A Redescription of the Lunyu, the Zhuangzi, and “A Place on Which to Stand”.” Journal of Chinese Religions 35 (2007): 98-133.

Lockett, Darian. “Structure of Communicative Strategy? The ‘Two Ways’ Motif in James’ Theological Instruction.” Neotestamentica 42, no. 2 (2008): 269-287.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. “Reader as Producer: Jonathan Z. Smith on Exegesis, Ingenuity, Elaboration.” In Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, 311-339. London: Equinox, 2008.

Moore, Stephen D. Post Structuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.

Ni, Peimin. “Exploring the Root and Seeking for the Origin: Essays From a New Round of Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7, no. 4 (2008): 473-476.

Nulty, Timothy J. “A Critical Response to Zhang Longxi.” Asian Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2002): 141-146.

Paden, William E. “Connecting With Evolutionary Models: New Patterns in Comparative Religion?.” In Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, 406-417. London: Equinox, 2008.

Park, Ynhui. “The Concept of Tao: A Hermeneutical Perspective.” Vol. 17. In Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue Between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 203-213. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984.

Robinson, Gnana. “‘Mission in Christ’s Way’: The Way of Which Christ?.” Exchange 35, no. 3 (2006): 270-277.

Seeley, David. “Deconstructing the New Testament.” Vol. 5. In Biblical Interpretation Series. Ed. Alan

Culpepper and Rolf Rendtorff, New York: E.J. Brill, 1994.

Sun, Key. “Using Taoist Principle of the Unity of Opposites to Explain Conflict and Peace.” The Humanistic Psychologist 37, no. 3 (2009): 271-286.

Thatamanil, John J. The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament: An East-West Conversation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006.

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. “Does the Trinity Belong in a Theology of Religions?.” In The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Won, Yong Ji. “From/To Logos-Paradigm To/From Tao-Paradigm.” Concordia Journal 21, no. 2 (1995): 164-172.

Xie, Wenyu. “Approaching the Dao: From Lao Zi to Zhuang Zi.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 27, no. 4 (200): 469-488.

Appendix

Partial Concordance of Daodejing References by Theme and Chapter

Femininity: 1, 6, 10, 20, 25, 30, 52, 59, 61

Paradoxical Reversals: 2, 5, 7, 13, 27, 31, 34, 38, 44, 48, 49, 51, 57, 73, 77, 79, 81

Being Natural: 3, 8, 17, 19, 29, 31-32, 38, 46, 68, 72

Nature: 8, 15, 23, 29, 30-31, 65, 76

Contentment: 3, 29, 33, 44, 46, 79, 80

Selflessness: 3, 9, 24, 27, 38, 41, 66, 72

Harmony: 3, 31, 32, 37, 39, 49, 54-55, 60, 69

Love: 13, 16, 28, 38, 49, 61-62, 67, 72

Sage: 10, 22, 23, 27, 30, 34, 49, 58, 61, 66, 72

Water: 8, 15, 32, 34-35, 45, 61, 78

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Pauline Theology Revisited: An Exegesis of Hope and Salvation in Romans 8:18-25

April 26, 2011

Romans 8:18-25 (NRSV)

¹⁸ I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. ¹⁹ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; ²⁰ for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; ²³ and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴ For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Introduction

  Since Martin Luther, no scripture has been more fundamental for the Protestant doctrine of justification than the book of Romans.  Before questioning whether this in itself is justifiable, we must first ask whether these doctrines have done justice to Paul’s own theology.  More than any other epistle in the Pauline corpus, the seemingly generic tone of Romans lends itself to abstract theologizing, far removed from the context in which it was written.  Many Christian commentators have marveled at the complexity of Paul’s rhetorical structure in the development of the themes of grace and the Law, salvation, justification, and the opposition between the “flesh” and the “spirit” with which Paul struggles, and have come to view the letter as a summary of Paul’s theology rather than a letter addressing a concrete situation.

Following Luther, many Protestants have gleaned from Romans a doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide), as opposed to the works that prevail in James’ “epistle of straw.”  They have located salvation in the redemption from our bodies and this fallen creation, and a retreat from the corrupted flesh to the pure spirit.  Most strikingly, all of these notions have developed into a doctrine of personal salvation through the individual’s faith relationship to God which ignores the relationship of the individual believer to the community, to humanity at large, and to the rest of creation.

The inadequacy of such readings of Paul’s theology becomes readily evident when our attention is directed at one of the most climactic passages in the epistle: 8:18-25.  By examining this pericope in its social, historical and scriptural context, it can become a new hermeneutical lens for the epistle as a whole, as well as a vital corrective to many of the misguided and harmful trends in Pauline theology.  In it, Paul challenges us to expand our individualistic hope for personal spiritual fulfillment to an all-embracing hope for the redemption of our very bodies and the liberation of the entire earth from the futility of suffering and decay.  During this time of unprecedented devastation, degradation, and destruction of life in all forms, these challenging yet hopeful words of Paul perhaps resound even more poignantly than in his own time.

Literary & Redaction Criticism

Authorship

There is nearly unanimous agreement within serious biblical scholarship that St. Paul is the genuine author of the Epistle to the Romans. The only remaining question concerning its authorship and redaction is the precise role played by Paul’s secretary, Tertius, in producing the final written form of the letter (cf Rom. 16:22).  Cranfield identifies the three possible solutions to this question:

” (i) that he wrote the letter in long-hand to Paul’s dictation, or (ii) that he took it down in short-hand as Paul dictated it          and then subsequently wrote it out in long-hand, or (iii) that, acting as a much more independent secretary, he himself        composed the letter in accordance with Paul’s instructions.”

Most commentators more or less agree with Cranfield’s subsequent conclusion that, of these, (i) and (ii) are the most plausible given the painstakingly deliberate complexity of Paul’s rhetorical construction, and, by implication, the weight of the letter’s importance to Paul at the time he wrote it.

Genre and Purpose

Romans was most likely written sometime during the mid 50’s C.E. (Jerome Murphy-O’Connor narrows more precisely to the winter of 55-56), while Paul was still in Corinth. At the conclusion of Paul’s mission in Asia and Greece, he was preparing to return to the church in Jerusalem with the collection he had taken up—a rather risky endeavor considering the mounting tension throughout Paul’s missionary work between the Pauline cohort and the so-called “Judaizers.”

Due to the increasing hostility of the group of Pharisaic Jews (to whom Paul had formerly belonged) toward the now Gentile-infused Jesus movement and the ultimate frustration of his recent missionary attempts, Paul was ready to open a new chapter and a blank slate. Returning to Jerusalem with the collection was his only lingering obligation before he could begin a new mission to Spain.  The adversity attested to throughout his correspondence with the churches in Galatia and Corinth make it easy to understand why Paul was so ready to move on. This also explains the thematic and theological continuity between these letters and Romans: since Paul was beginning his blank slate by eliciting the support of a church he had neither founded nor visited, and thus was implicitly unaware of its specific situation and problems, Paul laid the groundwork by expounding the very problems that plagued his most recent missionary efforts.

Since his aim was to make such an impression as to win the support and assistance of the Roman church with his planned mission to Spain, Paul makes full use of his extensive philosophical, scriptural, and rhetorical education (both Jewish and Greek) to create his strong argument that God both desires the salvation of all creation and has enacted the very plan that will make make it happen.

Because he does not know what or by whom the Roman Christians have been taught, and since the house churches in Rome contained both Jews and Gentiles, he frames this argument in an all-encompassing narrative whereby God redeems the whole of creation. Though the narrative itself draws deeply from the Jewish scripture tradition, Paul also uses the Greek philosophical genre of diatribe—a dialogue written to both censure and persuade its audience.

Form Criticism

After an epistolary introduction and four chapters of bringing the Jewish and Gentile addressees into the dialogue, Paul develops the theological implications of his argument in chapters 5-8. The first four chapters describe the captivity of all humankind, Jew and Gentile, to the power of sin and then the righteousness of God, who has already made a way for all to be liberated from sin’s destructive power through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The section in chapters 5-8 develops the “already” but “not-yet” completed plan of God’s redemption by rooting the hope of future reconciliation in the context of enduring present suffering.  Paul refers to the particular Jewish traditions of Adam’s sin and God’s promise of redemption to Israel to make a universal argument: Adam’s sin represents the need of all humankind to be renewed and conformed to its true identity, of which Jesus is the true image, and thus the promise of restoration made to Israel applies to all people.  This section comes to a climax in chapter 8 with the conclusion that it is the presence of the Spirit which enables the “firstfruits” of the new humanity God is calling together to overcome the devastating power of sin in this life (vv. 1-17) and which gives the future hope of the glorious redemption of God’s whole creation (vv. 18-30).  In this framework, the pericope of verses 18-25 is concerned in particular with explaining why the present condition of suffering and abuse endured by the entire created world is a source of hope rather than hopelessness.

There is an introductory thesis that relates present suffering to future glory (v. 18), followed by an explanation of the wider cosmic context of God’s creation suffering at the hands of fallen humanity but nevertheless groaning together with humankind in expectation of God’s new creation (vv. 19-23), after which the hope of this unseen future glory is again contrasted with the present existence of suffering in an unredeemed world (vv. 24-25). In the verses that follow, the groaning of creation and the children of God is related to the groaning of the Spirit who intercedes on their behalf (vv. 26-30), and who ensures the finality of their hope for redemption (vv. 31-39).

Textual Criticism

While scholars have identified as many as 15 different forms of Romans in the manuscript tradition, the essential integrity of 1:1 to 14:23 is virtually unquestioned. The multiplicity of variants primarily concerns the relationship of chapters 15 and 16 to the rest of the epistle.

The pericope of 8:18-25 is thus part of the earliest strata of Romans attested to in the manuscript tradition.  This is evidenced by the fact that it exists in its entirety on P46 (circa 200 C.E.), which is regarded as one of the earliest and most reliable extant manuscripts.

The majority of variations in the early manuscripts appear to result from either a scribal visual error (replacing the original with a similarly spelled word, such as the replacement of κτισεως, creation, with πιστεως, faith, in one manuscript) or from an attempt by the scribe to add grammatical clarity.

One possible exception which bears on the interpretation of the text is the debate about whether the first word in verse 21 was originally οτι (“that”), as it appears in P46, and as followed by the Nestle-Aland text, or the causal διοτι (“because”) as argued compellingly by Cranfield and Jewett.

While both options still yield essentially the same overall meaning, the latter variant gives greater weight to the preceding words of verse 20.  Nevertheless, most disagreements of interpretation among commentators concern how best to translate the passage into English.  Of these, the most problematic has been the debate concerning what is and is not included by the word κτισεως (“creation”) beginning in verse 19.  Barth argued that the term means “in the first place and above all man in general,” and, though he concedes that it can also be inclusive of all creation, he concludes that since “the world was created for the sake of man, to be dominated by man,” Paul’s use of the term in Romans 8 applies primarily “to man as the center of God’s creation.”

Most recent commentators have diverged from this interpretation, arguing that since creation’s groaning is addressed separately from that of humankind, and in parallel fashion, it makes the most since to assume Paul means specifically non-human creation. Furthermore, the structure of the pericope gives primacy to the groaning of the creation, and not that of humanity, which further erodes the plausibility of Barth’s position.

Source Criticism

  The overarching theme of present suffering and future glory, as well as the contrast between the seen and unseen in this pericope exemplify the thematic continuity between the issues Paul took up with the Corinthians and his letter to the Romans (cf. 2 Cor. 4:16-17).  Additionally, the connection between αποκαραδοκια (“eager longing” in v. 19) and bodily redemption (v. 23) is reminiscent of the same connection Paul makes in Philippians 1:20, the only other time he uses this word.

The most significant source for Paul’s material here, however, is rooted in the understanding of creation and redemption developed in Genesis and the prophetic books.  On face value, the use of κτισεως (v. 19) refers to God’s ordered creation in Genesis 1-2, as opposed to the Roman personified understanding of Mother Earth, but Paul’s contrast is more subtle.  He does, in fact, use personification, but in a way that specifically contradicts the Roman understanding: in contrast to roman depictions of Mother Earth as relaxed and reclining, Paul shows the creation leaning forward and craning the neck in “eager longing” of redemption (v. 19-23).

These verses make it abundantly clear that the “glory” in verse 18 does not envisage a future immortality for individual Christian believers; in continuity with the Jewish tradition, it refers to both the restoration of God’s presence with the people and the redemption of all creation (cf Isa. 6:3; Num. 14:21; Ps. 72:19).  The notion in verse 20 of the creation’s unwitting subjection to futility is deeply rooted in biblical tradition.  The most obvious source for this is the curse in Genesis 3:17, but this need not be taken as a ‘fall’ of creation; instead, the text shows that the ground is cursed because of Adam’s sin.

This explains the connection in the preceding verse to the “revelation of the children of God”—since it was through human fault that creation was subjected to futility (cf Eccl. 1:2; 2:1-17; Job 31:38-40), the creation longs for the restoration of humankind to its true calling: caring and preserving creation (Gen. 2:15).  The link between the “groaning” of nature and human sin can be seen in Joel 1:5-20, in which the earth suffers at the hands of human indiscretion and laments the humans’ iniquities long before they themselves began to suffer and repent.  This resembles the primacy of creation’s groaning and subsequent human groaning in Paul’s construction.  In opposition to the Roman myth that a human being attempting to play God (Caesar) can restore the world to an ideal state, Paul invokes a Jewish tradition (Gen. 3:17-19) in which humans attempt to play God and subsequently ruin their relationship with God, each other, and nature.

One further connection can be drawn between the structure and content of this pericope and Paul’s situation in Corinth.  The subordination of humanity to creation in sequence and by the implication of “but not only…but we ourselves” (v. 23) seem to deliberately contradict the sort of exceptionalism and enthusiasm of the fabled spirit people in Corinth.  Here, Paul associates the Spirit and the “firstfruits” of glory, however charismatic they may be, with the context of vulnerability and suffering. This is also highly significant for Paul’s audience in Rome who were suffering at the hands of the same Caesar who was revered and glorified as divine by the Roman civic cult.

Social-Historical Criticism

The elaborate interweaving of Jewish scripture tradition with Greek and Roman themes is no accident; it is Paul’s deliberate rhetorical strategy aimed at bringing together the Jews and Gentiles of the Roman churches.  Apparently, the early followers of the Jesus movement in Rome sparked so much agitation amongst the city’s Jewish population that the emperor Claudius was moved to expel an unspecified number of Jews from Rome in 49 C.E.

Regardless of how serious and extensive this expulsion was, the very fact in itself testifies to the potentially tense atmosphere between Jewish and Gentile converts a few short years before Paul wrote his letter.  To accomplish his goal of bringing both camps together (cf. Gal. 3:28), Paul had to steer between the Scylla of uncritical appropriation of Jewish and Roman-Gentile themes and the Charybdis of excessively harsh and alienating rhetoric which would only multiply the tension and augment opposition to his mission.  Nevertheless, it must be recognized that Paul’s main polemic is directed against the “gospel” of the Roman Caesar-cult, not against the Jewish faith.  Thus, Paul’s thesis in verse 18 declares that the glory is to be revealed “to us” as opposed to the imperial claim of glory for Caesar alone.

The allusions to Roman cultic beliefs in this pericope are manifold. The context of the “suffering” referred to in verse 18 and onward is the suffering of the Roman underclass who experienced harassment and deportation every day, and the idea that nature is suffering and “groaning” runs directly counter to the Roman cultic view of nature as idyllic.

Furthermore, the location of Paul’s redemption as a future event is designed to contest the argument, put forth by Virgil, that Augustus had fulfilled a sort of messianic expectation to reclaim Roman prosperity and usher in a golden age for the whole world.  As Jewett summarizes, “Paul cuts thru this propagandistic nonsense to refer directly to the παθηματα (“passions, sufferings”) suffered by Roman believers…in following a suffering Christ.”

The “futility” to which creation has been subjected was brought on by the military conquests and economic exploitation of Caesar that led to ruined cities, barren and torched fields, cleared forests, and polluted streams. Paul’s other reason for hedging against such imperial claims is that he is trying to recruit the support of the Roman churches for his subsequent mission to Spain; he is attempting to persuade Romans to submit in loving service to the “very barbarians that Rome believed it must subdue in order to bring about the golden age.”

Though this makes the Romans seem like an odd choice for Paul to seek out for assistance, he had little choice.  Since there were scarcely any diaspora Jews in Spain, and very few Greek speakers, Paul needed the Romans as a cultural and linguistic liaison; he could truly accomplish very little there without their help.

Praxis

This pericope hedges against any individualization of Pauline justification by demonstrating that for Paul, salvation is inconceivable without a whole new creation.  The fate of the entire created order is inextricably bound up with that of the human beings to whom God has entrusted the earth’s care.

Though this hoped for redemption will be consummated in the future, the life of the redeemed children of God can be entered even now.  As these children learn to how to live in God’s family, “their altered lifestyle and revised ethics begin to restore the ecological system that had been thrown out of balance by wrongdoing (1:18-32) and sin (Rom. 5-7).” The call to this life and its commitment to an unseen hope may be even more crucial today than in Paul’s own time.

Bibliography

Barth, Karl. A Shorter Commentary on Romans. Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1959.

Braaten, Laurie J. “The Groaning Creation: The Biblical Background for Romans 8:22.” Biblical Research 50 (2005): 19-39.

Cranfield, C.E.B. Romans: The International Critical Commentary. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark Ltd., 1975.

Jewett, Robert. Romans: A Commentary. In Hermeneia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible, ed. Eldon J. Epp, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

Lawson, J. Mark. “Romans 8:18-25—The Hope of Creation.” Review & Expositor 91, no. 4 (1994): 559-565.

Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. Paul: A Critical Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Newman, Barclay M., and Eugene A. Nida. A Translator’s Handbook on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. New York: United Bible Societies, 1973.

Schreiner, Thomas R. Romans: Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998.

Toews, John E. Romans: Believers Church Bible Commentary. Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 2004.

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Will the Real Saint Paul Please Stand Up? — Recovering the Liberating, Community-Building Insights of a Misunderstood Apostle

March 22, 2011

Introduction

What Paul Really Said…

The most essential question for followers of Jesus to ask about Paul is: what is the relationship between Paul and Jesus?  If Paul is found to be incompatible with following Jesus, or his theology was thought to be different from that of Jesus, then Christians ought to dismiss him altogether and brand him a heretic.  If, however, the opposite is true, that Paul really was a disciple and a follower of the Way of Jesus, then we must re-approach his writings carefully and seriously.  This task raises the challenge of determining, as the titles of works by N.T. Wright and John Bristow suggest, what Paul really said.

The problem for many people in the twenty-first century—scholars, clergy, and lay people alike—is that certain Pauline and Deutero-Pauline texts  as they have traditionally been interpreted, seem to be ethically amiss on the particular issues of gender relations and slavery.One can easily conclude that Paul has strayed from the ethical stance of Jesus toward women and liberation, citing certain Deutero-Pauline texts that seem to baptize the very status quo Jesus had prophetically and emphatically denounced.

At this point it would be convenient to dispense with all but the undisputed Pauline corpus and move on, but this cannot be done easily.  For one thing, issues of authorship aside, all of this material is nevertheless canonized as holy scripture.  Typically, those who have tried to remove texts from the canon wound up being themselves removed from the church—in any case, it is counterproductive.  Furthermore, as Murphy-O’Connor demonstrates, even the issue of authorship itself cannot easily be shrugged off; the early acceptance of the authenticity of Pauline authorship cannot be explained away without at least “a very solid link with Pauline circles.”

In short, the problem is twofold: on the one hand, we must address the ethical charge that certain Pauline (in the wider sense of the term) texts should be questioned because of their position on slavery and gender equality; but on the other hand, we cannot easily ignore or dispense with these texts altogether because they are canonical.  The function of taking the canon seriously extends far beyond merely satisfying continuity with an established tradition; it is for the well-being of the ecumenical community that we avoid reinforcing the very sectarianism that has been endemic to Christian history.  As I will demonstrate, no greater violence could be done to Paul than to deal with his writings in a way that destroys rather than builds Christian community.  In fact, if we could identify one reason above all others that Paul wrote at all, it would be the purpose of building and preserving communities.  What is needed, then, is a more nuanced approach that seeks to understand the Pauline corpus in its original context—to acknowledge as Crossan and Borg put it, that we essentially are “reading someone else’s mail.”

In What Paul Really Said About Women, Bristow attempts to take on the task of setting Paul’s words about gender issues in their proper context.  Through his detailed analysis of historical practices and attitudes toward women in Greek, Roman, and Jewish life, paired with his grammatical and etymological expertise in koine Greek, the original language of Paul’s writing, Bristow is able to cast Paul’s most controversial words about women in a new light.  Yet as a pastor primarily addressing other pastors and laypeople, his historical critique is consequentially more sensitive and nuanced in its handling of traditional beliefs and interpretations. In this method of contextual analysis, he is able to respect the original text and confirm its authority as scripture while at the same time he addresses important ethical challenges by debunking and dismissing false interpretations of the texts rather than the texts themselves.

This is merely one example that beautifully illustrates how sending Paul’s mail back to its proper context enables us to understand Paul’s real message. By understanding the communities to and about whom Paul wrote, we are enabled to discover how Paul addresses our own communities as members of the same Body and Spirit.

Jesus and Paul

The Ladies’ Men?

What Bristow’s analysis brings to light is the essential continuity of the roles played by both Jesus and Paul to empower and embrace the women in their communities, even as their particular attitudes and responses varied according to the specific situations and cultural contexts in which each operated. While evidence abounds from the Gospels and Acts that Jesus’ movement was very inclusive of women during both his earthly ministry and at Pentecost, the evidence that Paul held a similar stance is buried under centuries of poor translation and interpretation.

Bristow thoroughly demonstrates how passages such as Ephesians 5, as well as undisputed Pauline passages such as 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, have been translated and interpreted in ways that reinforce patriarchalism and the oppression of women, concealing Paul’s original meaning and intent.

The greatest source of this interpretive error is the reinterpretation of Paul’s writings by subsequent generations of Christians in light of Hellenistic and specifically Aristotelean categories and values which has made Paul’s words endorse the exact opposite of the values he lived and stood for. When Thomas Aquinas, the great champion of Aristotelean Christianity, was canonized by the Roman church, the revolutionary egalitarian Paul was finally eclipsed by the conservative, patriarchal Paul.  Passages like Ephesians 5 and 1 Timothy 2 have drowned out the liberating voice of Paul found in other places.  We can, however, be released from this hermeneutical snare of mistranslations and catchwords when we remember a phrase from one of Paul’s undisputed letters which epitomizes what Paul really did say about women and slaves: “There is no longer slave or free…male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:28-29). These words reveal who Paul really was, and who he believed Jesus to be. In these words lies the ultimate significance of Paul’s message and its implications for the community of the Church.

How They Role…

What emerges from the attempt to understand Jesus and Paul from the perspective of gender equality is that to really understand what they have in common we must understand the roles they played within their own context. Thus, the real question about their relationship has much less to do with the content of their teachings than the unique role that each felt he was playing in the context of Jewish salvation history.  It turns out that the most obvious commonality between Jesus and Paul, though often overlooked is also one of the most significant: they were first century Jews.

Within this contextual framework, N.T. Wright poignantly argues, the thesis that Jesus and Paul are fundamentally at odds—because the former proclaimed the Kingdom of God whereas the latter proclaimed the Lordship of Jesus Christ—is essentially untenable. By thoroughly examining the distinctive elements in the social-historical contexts of both men, Wright finds tremendous continuity between the roles that Jesus and Paul played within Jewish monotheism.  The shift in emphasis to the roles of Jesus and Paul reveals, Wright contends, that within the context of his Jewish religious-historical consciousness, Paul would have been utterly incomprehensible if he had said and done the same things as Jesus.

Instead, Paul’s message, as understood through the hermeneutical lens of his divine calling by the one God of Israel, occupies its own proper place in Jewish salvation history.  For Paul, the climax in the narrative of Jewish salvation history had already been reached at the death and resurrection of the Messiah; with the Messianic age ushered in, there was a complete paradigm shift—the world had been quite literally turned on its head.  Politically it meant that Christ and not Caesar was Lord.

In the words of Jesus, blessings and curses have been reversed (Mt. 5, Lk. 6).  Paul, too, interprets the reversal of the curse, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Gal 3:13).  The analogy that Wright is led to draw of the relationship between the two is that of the relationship of a composer to his conductor.

The weakness of this analogy, however, is that there seems to be a slight confusion of roles.  For, unlike a composer who diligently transcribes his musical revelation into detailed notation for the conductor to read and perform, Jesus never wrote a single word; Jesus himself was the performer.  On the other hand, the copious writings of Paul in correspondence with early churches and other epistles penned in his name make up nearly half of the New Testament.  Even literature composed by early Christians about Jesus’ words and deeds—the Gospels and presumably the sayings collections from which these drew—comprises a minority of Christian scripture by comparison to the works and tradition of Paul.  Thus, it seems that a more proper analogy may be made that Jesus was the virtuoso, the musician and performer.  The Gospel writers, then, were the compilers of the original score, and Paul was the transcriber, sometimes even the transposer of the score into a new key to catch the Gentile ear, and always the recruiter of new players into the community of transformed performers.  Though there is nothing wrong with Wright’s analogy, this alternative construction seems to get us closer to his own well-articulated point that Paul’s role was “to call into being, by proclaiming Jesus as Lord, the worldwide community in which ethnic divisions would be abolished and a new family created as a sign…that new creation had been launched.”

Thus, the roles of Paul and Jesus are united in the shared narrative framework of salvation history which Jesus had brought to its climax, and to which Paul’s words and works stood as a testimony to all nations.  The reality of the Kingdom of God that Jesus announced and initiated is what Paul invited others to participate in as “heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29).  Neither Jesus nor Paul, then, ought to be understood primarily as founders or teachers of a new religion; instead they both fulfilled their specific calls to action on behalf of Israel’s God whose saving action was manifest in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In light of this understanding of Jesus’ and Paul’s unique roles and their Jewish context, we can finally take up the discussion of Paul’s words about Jesus (christology), and the implications of this teaching for Paul’s work in forming and fostering Christian community.

Paul’s Communal Christology

Jesus is Lord

We have seen that what Jesus did was what mattered to Paul and that it was the catalyst for what Paul ultimately did and said.  Jesus inaugurated the Kingdom of God in his life, death, and resurrection and thus, Paul proclaimed, Jesus alone is the Lord to whom all things are subject (1 Cor. 15:27-28) and in whom the fulness of God’s glory is revealed (Phil. 2:9-11; 2 Cor. 4:6).  These bold statements constitute a very high christology along the very same theological premises for which Paul had once zealously attacked the Jesus movement (Phil. 3:6; Gal. 1:13-14).  It is even likely that Paul was mocking his own anti-Christian arguments when he cites the application of Deuteronomy to imply Jesus was cursed by God in his death on the cross (Gal. 3:13).

This begs the question: what sparked Paul’s radical paradigm shift from zealous persecutor of the church to zealous founder of church communities?  Paul alludes to a profound experience of the risen Christ which he interpreted as a divine revelation that turned his entire interpretive framework upside down (1 Cor. 15:8; Gal. 1:12-16). It was not a conversion, in the sense of an exchange of one religious identity for another; it was a revelation of what Paul felt to be the true way of understanding and living as a Jew.  In light of this revelation, Paul speaks of his vocational change, using language reminiscent of God’s call to the Hebrew prophets of antiquity, as a unique call from God to share the euangelion, the good news of this revelation with the Gentiles (Rom. 1:5; 15:17-19).  As a Pharisee, Paul had previously held that the Torah alone was the norm, which meant that he was not able to accept the claim of Jesus as Lord.  Thus, argues Luke Timothy Johnson, “It was the experience of Jesus as the powerfully risen Lord that put Paul in a state of cognitive dissonance.”

This is the point at which the discussion surfaces about Paul’s tension between affirming the truth and validity of the Law in some statements while taking a markedly antinomian stance in others.  This debate, however, misses the point of what this christology really meant for Paul: the Lordship of Christ represents a the true way of being human in community.    It is significant to note that Paul does not ever outline a fully systematic and comprehensive christology; what can be called Paul’s christology is in reality a constellation of fragments distilled from Paul’s writing (and thus, divorced from their context) and compiled by scholars to evaluate systematically.

Paul’s christology is really not understood at all if his statements are removed from their immediate context which always revolves around the building and nurturing of Christian community. When Paul affirms Jesus as Lord, he is simultaneously speaking about the redemption-community which is the sign, or in Paul’s words, the ‘firstfruits’ of the new creation inaugurated by Christ (Rom. 8:23).  In short, because Jesus is the true Lord of all creation, the church is the community of redemption in which creation is beginning to be subjected to its rightful ruler.

The Real Son of God

The statement of authority in Paul’s proclamation reaches its peak when Paul gives Jesus the title Son of God.  While the use of the titles Lord and Son of God certainly do imply that Paul believed Jesus to be divine, it should be recognized that they are at least as important as declarations of who is not the divine lord and son of God. When Paul proclaimed Jesus as Lord, it meant that Christ, not Caesar, is the true Son of God.  At this point, sharply divided along lines of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ scholarship, most interpreters have fallen into two equally narrow camps: on the left side, it is recognized that Paul hailed Jesus of Nazareth over Caesar, so it is concluded that Paul was essentially making a radical political statement to denounce the empire’s false claims of ultimacy; on the right, this dimension is either denied or ignored and Paul is seen as simply the source of the true religious doctrine, essentially stating a system of beliefs one must hold to obtain salvation.  Such a lack of integration of Pauline insights has led to the tired dichotomy between preaching the gospel and social action that essentially misses the point: for Paul these were inseparable.

While the christological language of Paul’s gospel certainly resonated deeply within Jewish religious tradition, the very same language is oozing with radical political criticism.  This is easily overlooked until we recognize that Paul lived in an empire whose lord was venerated as a son of God, and which proclaimed itself the ultimate source of freedom, justice, peace and salvation for the whole earth—indeed, even labeling these proud proclamations as euangelion, the gospel, the good news.

We cannot ignore that this was the political landscape “within which Paul went about declaring the ‘gospel‘ according to which Jesus of Nazareth, crucified by Roman soldiers…was the world’s true Lord, claiming universal allegiance.” It is thus no accident that among the locations where Paul worked most arduously to proclaim this counter-imperial gospel were the most thoroughly Roman cities in the Greek world—namely Philippi and Corinth—and the capital of Rome itself!

This contextual analysis makes clear the extent to which certain Pauline passages that have been made to endorse a status-quo of slavery (Philemon and Eph. 5) or reinforce subservience to political domination (Rom. 13) have been misunderstood.  On the contrary, these statements are simply instances in which the radical Paul was attempting to prevent Christians from succumbing too easily to any political ideology or movement “that merely reshuffles the political cards into a different order.”

No political change can be revolutionary enough for the community whose citizenship belongs to an entirely new and transformed creation!  Paul was far beyond a radical ideology, or party affiliation—what he championed was a radically new existence.  This new way of being human, along with the hope for a new creation under a new authority was for Paul the real gospel, the real good news, and the salvation offered by this gospel is to be found exclusively in the community it inaugurates.

Paul’s Christological Community

A New Way to be Human

For Paul, Christ’s death and resurrection is the climax of God’s mission of salvation and reconciliation because Jesus was the revelation of a new way of being human as a sign of the dawn of a whole new creation.  We have seen how Paul’s christology is developed in the context of its implications for the community he felt God was calling him to bring together and nurture.  This call was aimed at the incorporation of Jews and Gentiles, males and females, slaves and free men and women into the salvation-community of the Church, which Paul literally refers to as Christ’s body (Gal. 3:28).

Indeed, one might be led to ask, along with Johnson, whether Paul understood the church to be the real bodily presence of the resurrected Jesus. It is unfathomable that any thorough reading of Paul could lead to an individualistic and systematic soteriology.  On the contrary, Johnson notes, “It can be argued that for him soteriology is ecclesiology; all of his language about salvation has a communal rather than an individual referent.” Johnson goes on to demonstrate that the real reason circumcision became such an important theme in Paul’s writing was not for antinomian or anti-Jewish polemical concerns, but because if some in the community were circumcised it would mark an obvious division between the Jewish males and the Gentiles and women of the community.

Perhaps the most revealing of the many metaphors Paul uses to depict the church community is that of the family.  In this family, God is the Father (Rom. 1:7) and Jesus Christ is the Son (1:4), but he is the firstborn of many children (8:29).  Here it is crucial to note that Paul deliberately refers to the community members to whom he writes as adelphoi—brothers and sisters. In this family it is adoption in Christ, and not ancestral blood that constitutes legitimate membership.  It is the community in which the Holy Spirit dwells (Rom. 8:9-11), the very Body of the risen Lord (1 Cor. 12:22; Rom. 12:4-5).  The many gifts given to the family’s individual members are to be used solely for the ‘building up’ of the whole community (1 Cor. 14:26) into the true temple, the oikos in which God dwells and reconciles all of creation anew.

Conclusion 

  In the end, it turns out that what Paul really did—that is, what he felt uniquely called by the one God of Israel to do—holds the key to truly understanding what Paul really said. The question of what Paul really said is less a question of which epistles are genuine and which ones are pseudonymous—it is a matter of grappling with the true essence of Paul’s life and work.  What all of this points to is that Paul was, in his own words, one of God’s oikonomoi, or household managers (1 Cor. 4:1-2).

He encountered the risen Jesus, the firstborn of a new family of reconciliation and he responded to God’s personal call to welcome all of humanity into this family to which it truly belongs. In all things, he put the needs of the community ahead of his own personal desires, even when it led to being ‘afflicted in every way,’ ‘perplexed,’ and ‘persecuted,’ because even in the midst of these struggles he was “not crushed…not driven to despair…not forsaken” (2 Cor. 4:8-9). Why endure all of this hardship?  Because for Paul, the community was truly the end in itself, the embodied result of God’s reconciliation. This is what enabled him to affirm with the whole church that “we do not lose heart,” no matter what “slight momentary affliction” we may endure (4:16-17).

Bibliography

Borg, Marcus J., and John Dominic Crossan. The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon. New York: Harper, 2010.

Bristow, John Temple. What Paul Really Said About Women: An Apostle’s Liberating Views on Equality in Marriage, Leadership, and Love. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.

Dunn, James D. G. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, 1-15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Hurtado, L. W. “Paul’s Christology.” In The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, 185-198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. “Paul’s Ecclesiology.” In The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, 199-211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Levine, Amy-Jill, and Marianne Blickenstaff, eds. A Feminist Companion to the Deutero-Pauline Epistles. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003.

Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. Paul: A Critical Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Winter, Sara. “Philemon and the Patriarchal Paul.” In A Feminist Companion to Paul, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff, 122-136. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2004.

Wright, N. T.. Paul: In fresh Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

_____ What Saint Paul really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997.

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Beyond Stewardship: Immanent Theology and the Redemptive Mission of Life

God’s Mission is nothing less than the sending of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son into this world, so that this world shall not perish but live…For the Holy Spirit is ‘the source of life’ and brings into the world – whole life, full life, unhindered, indestructible, everlasting life.

– Jürgen Moltmann

 

Introduction

Notions of Stewardship

The concept of stewardship has a long history of application to the context of Christian understandings of the relationship between human beings and the natural world.  Thus, there is no singular or all-encompassing concept of what stewardship specifically means; there are many interpretations.  As is the case for virtually every biblically-derived notion, proponents of stewardship have often misinterpreted or abused their scriptural sources and consequently developed unacceptable concepts.  The most prevalent text for understanding human stewardship of the natural world is the second creation narrative in Genesis 2, which states that God placed the original human being in the garden “to work it and keep it” (v. 15).  In the same account, God creates all of the animals to be in community with the human being and with each other, and then consummates the created community by giving ha adam (the earthling) an ezer kenegdo — a human companion and counterpart to share the task of working and keeping and sustaining God’s garden (2:18).  Now the harmonious community of creation was complete and it was good, just as God intended.  Though not explicitly mentioned, this passage is foundational for a concept of stewardship that entails the work of maintaining the harmony of God’s creation by working to sustain the relationships among creation in three spheres: between humans and God, between humans and each other, and between humans and the other creatures God has made (vv. 18-19).  So far, this is a healthy conception of stewardship that is rooted in solid exegesis.

 

Problems and Critiques of Stewardship

The problem with the idea of human stewardship of the earth is not found in the text of the Bible itself, but rather in the abuse of the text in its employment for the justification of corrupt and sinful human constructs.  The twin creation narratives of Genesis have been abused in such a way as to confound the proper biblical understandings of all three aforementioned spheres of relationship.  In the first place, it has been forgotten that the first humans were not simply land managers for an absentee landlord-God. On the contrary, the Lord God was present, dwelling and walking with them and the other creatures in the garden (cf. Gen. 3:8).  The immanent presence of God in creation cannot be neglected; it is the God’s ruach, the breath and Spirit of God, which animates and sustains all living creatures and renders them mere dust when it retreats (Ps. 104:29;146:4; Job 34:14).  When God is seen as wholly transcendent and absent from creation, stewardship quickly devolves into an anthropocentric view that appropriates the charge to dominate and subdue the earth (Gen. 1:26) and ignores all of the biblical constraints on this privilege.    Yet, when this critique is carried to its logical extreme, the result is a pantheistic view that ultimately also loses the fundamental basis for respecting the natural world—that it is God’s creation and we, as God’s creatures, are answerable to God for how we interact with it.  Furthermore, when God is characterized and caricatured as exclusively male, the sense of domination takes on a sexist dimension and finds in Genesis 2-3 evidence for the primacy and superiority of males over females (cf. 1 Tim. 2:9-15). The only way to resolve these problems and begin answer their critiques, then, is to reclaim a panentheistic theology that realizes God is beyond gender, recognizes both God’s transcendence and immanence and which respects God’s creation, affirms God’s ownership and lordship over creation, and sees God as both the preeminent source and indwelling sustainer of all life.  The benefit of panentheism is that it can hold God’s well-attested transcendence and often neglected immanence in tension, affirming the fullness of the divine nature without reducing God to one or the other extreme.  After surveying the foundational scriptures for such a theology, it will become abundantly clear that the missio Dei, God’s work for the redemption of creation, is at its core a missio vitae, a mission of life.

 

Old Testament Foundations

Ruach: The Spirit of Life

All that exists is created through and sustained by God’s ruach, the very breath

of life.  It enveloped the entire earth when God began to speak created life into being (Gen. 1:2), and still fills the world and holds all living beings together (Isa. 34:16).  So dependent is all life on the immanent presence of God’s ruach in creation that Job says, “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust” (34:14-15).  It is through the denial of God’s presence in creation that human sinfulness brings about the violation and destruction of life—both human and non-human.  For if, by the breath of the Spirit, Godself is present in creation, indwelling and supporting all life, then there can be absolutely no basis for an anthropocentric worldview.  If the very Creator is here, and not somewhere else, then it matters what we do and how we interact with God’s creatures.  It is no accident, then, that in the very same passage in Job, the presence of God’s spirit leads him to proceed directly to talking about justice!  Throughout the Old Testament the knowledge of God as Creator is inextricably bound up with God’s presence on earth, and that is precisely why justice is among God’s most fundamental concerns; in a very real sense, a violation of creation or creatures is simultaneously a violation of the Creator. More specifically, sin and injustice are essentially violations of life—all of the violence, deprivation, vulnerability, suffering and oppression that characterize human sinfulness are connected with death in that “they are all something death steals from life.”

 

Sin, Injustice and Death

That the Old Testament writers connect justice with God’s life giving immanence in creation becomes abundantly clear in the writings of the prophets, in which the concrete victims of human sin and injustice are depicted in the crying out of creatures both human and non-human.  One clear example of this occurs in Joel, where the prophet declares that because the “fields are destroyed, the ground mourns” (1:10).  He goes on to exclaim, “How the beasts groan! The herds of cattle are perplexed because there is no pasture for them; even the flocks of sheep suffer” (1:18).  The ground itself, and the creatures that depend upon it are said to “pant for [the Lord] because the water brooks are dried up” (1:20).  In the vulnerability of embodied suffering, non-human creatures, both plants and animals, know to cry out for the God upon whose Spirit they depend for their very life; it is the humans in this passage who are the last to realize this need, and it is they who are to blame for the suffering endured by all the creatures.  The desolation of the earth is “because of its inhabitants, for the fruit of their doings,” says Micah (7:13), and the ensuing punishment is brought upon this terrestrial dwelling place because humans “fill their master’s house with violence and fraud” (Zeph. 1:9).

 

The Household of God and the Missio Vitae

All of God’s creatures are linked by their mutual sharing of life in God’s household, the community of creation, as we have seen in Genesis 2.  The scientific word for the study of this intricate and interconnected community of creation is ecology, which comes from the Greek root oikos and refers literally to the household shared by all living organisms.  Wilderness ecologist Aldo Leopold once said, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”  Thus, we see that the underlying premise of the science of ecology, despite its basis in evolutionary biology rather than creation theology, is very close to the central emphasis of cosmology in the Jewish and Christian scriptures: God’s creation is a fundamentally relational community of life.

The other connection made by the prophets with regard to the injustice of human sin as a violation of God’s oikos is an economic one: the sin of slavery, oppression, and economic exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. While the first part of the word economy comes from oikos, the second part comes from another Greek word: nomos, which refers to laws or regulations.  In the oikos of God, ecology and economy are inextricably linked.  Thus, when Jesus ‘cleanses the temple’ in Mark 11, he quotes from two prophetic texts that speak to this connection: the first is a statement by God about the nature of God’s house and who it is for—”a house of prayer for all nations” (Is. 56:7)—and the second deals specifically with how humans have profaned God’s house by making it “a den of thieves” (Jer. 7:11).  We might ask, in what way was God’s house made a den of thieves?  Of course, we only need to turn to Jeremiah 7:5-10 to discover the reason: the people do not execute justice with one another but instead they “oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood” (vv 6-7) and God refuses to allow the doers of such domestic violence to dwell in God’s house, so God asks, “Will you…then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered!—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house…become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it” (vv 9-11).  The sheer volume of prophetic writings pertaining to the indivisibility of executing justice and worshipping God make it impossible to drown out the biblical cries of the poor and oppressed.  Injustice everywhere elicits the cry of the ecological community, as we saw in Joel, as well as the cry for economic liberation from the poor and oppressed.  Therefore, we do not understand the prophetic witness to God’s divine judgment at all unless we understand that “the judgment is for the cleansing of the world, not is demolition.”

These lamentations and God’s judgment, however, is not the end of the story, for God listens lovingly to the cries of creation’s suffering and detests the empty worship of those who call to him but do not practice justice; and to both parties, God offers the same solution: “Seek me and live” (Amos 5).  In the fallenness of the Godforsaken world of human sin and injustice, we suffer and cry out in the feeling that there is not enough to sustain us; death is everywhere encroaching on our very existence.  This is not the end of the story, as Moltmann eloquently suggests, “But if God is not far off, if God is near, if God is present among us in the Spirit, then we find a new, indescribable joy in living…we are at home.”  The prophets affirm that God does indeed dwell in this very cosmos, and that God is with us, neither far off nor cordoned off in the brick and mortar of the temple (Isa. 66:1).  Joel looks forward to the time when humans will join the earth and the animals in praising God, the giver of life, when God says, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh” (2:28).  For now, the “palace is forsaken,” says Isaiah, but only “until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field…then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field” (32:14-16).  After God’s redeeming work to restore the household community of creation, when God’s missio vitae is fulfilled, God says, “My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places” (32:18).  In this beautiful prophetic vision, not only is humanity liberated, but so too are the animals set free from economic bondage, for God also says, “Happy are you who sow beside all waters, who let the feet of the ox and the donkey range free” (v. 20).

 

New Testament Appropriations

The Immanence of God in the Incarnation

We have seen the firm Old Testament foundation for a panentheistic theology that affirms God’s life-breathing presence in creation and its implications for understanding the missio Dei as a missio vitae, a mission of redeeming and restoring life.  In the New Testament, these scriptural traditions are not only affirmed; they are radically recontextualized; God not only pours the Spirit on all flesh—through the incarnation of the Jesus Christ, the Son and second person of the Christian Trinity, God has indeed become flesh!  This is not seen as simply a symbol or merely a doctrinal suggestion; the only heresy explicitly described as such in the entire New Testament is not believing precisely that extreme statement: that God has become flesh in the person of Jesus Christ (1 Jn. 4:2-3).  At the incarnation, the immanence of God is revealed in a new and more profound way; it is Emmanuel, God with us.  The one in and through whom all of creation has come into being, according to John, “became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:14).  In the same Gospel, Jesus later says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (10:10), and after the resurrection, he tells his disciples, “Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (14:19).  Thus, for Moltmann, the fourth Gospel states quite directly what it is that God has brought into the world through the incarnation—life—and this leads him to state that, “God’s mission is nothing less than the sending of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son into this world, so that this world should not perish but live.”  Through Christ, then, we understand that the beginning of the pouring of God’s spirit anticipated by Joel and Isaiah has indeed entered the world, this very world, and that it is sent out to us by Christ himself.

 

Reconciliation in Christ

The apostle Paul connects the notion behind John’s words about Christ with the imagery of God’s nature in Isaiah 34:16 in his epistle to the Colossians: “all things were created through him and for him…and in him all things hold together” (1:15).  Having brought together the Old Testament understanding of God’s creation and life-sustaining activity and the incarnation of God in Christ, Paul goes on to speak about what was accomplished in this miraculous event, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven” (vv. 19-20).  God’s reconciliation, says Paul, is not just for all humans, or all animals, or all life; it is for the entirety of creation.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul strikes this chord even more eloquently, speaking of the “hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (8:21).  Before speaking about our own hope, Paul speaks of the hope of creation crying out in yearning for God’s Spirit, just as the ground and the animals did in Joel 2.  For the fate of the earth is not merely to be the staging ground for human salvation; with the earth, from which we were made, our own fate is inextricable bound up.  Thus, Paul goes on:

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.  And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.  For in this hope we were saved (vv. 22-24).

Here we get a new image of life in the redeemed household of God: family.  In Jesus Christ, the firstborn, we have the hope of life and adoption into the very family of God.  We do not get the idea that we will escape this world, nor our bodies; instead we are promised the “redemption of our bodies.”

 

 

 

The Body of Christ

It is not uncommon to hear the church called God’s house in Christian circles, but what is significant is that the imagery of God’s house in scripture is not of brick and mortar (Is. 66:1) but it is rather imagery of living flesh: the Body of Christ.  It is after building this embodied image of the church that Paul goes on to mix in the imagery of God’s house:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God…In [Christ] you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Eph. 2:19-22).

In the reconciliation through which God is bringing us back, the relationship between humanity and God is mended mutually; we are allowed back into the house as family members, while at the very same time, we are opening up to allow the Spirit of God to dwell in us!  But what can this mutual indwelling possibly mean?  How can this help us to understand the nature of the church and to find our place in the midst of God’s project of reconciliation?  To understand all this, it must be remembered that the same trait is at the very core of the biblical imagery for God, creation, human beings, Jesus Christ, and the church: they are all alive. Moltmann says that we have failed to understand the role of the church in the missio Dei because we have fundamentally misunderstood the mission of Christ: “Jesus didn’t bring a new religion into the world.  What he brought was new life.”  Thus, as we read the accounts of Jesus’ earthly mission in the Gospels, we discover that, “Where Jesus is, there is life…sick people are healed, sad people are comforted, marginalized people are accepted, and the demons of death are driven out.”  According to the bible, the signal of the Spirit’s presence is vitality and the true end of history is completion of the missio vitae wherein all relationships are indwelled by the Spirit and taken into the community of the triune God.  To us, the firstfruits of God’s redeemed household have been entrusted.  It is in this sense that we, who by grace have been allowed back into the house, indeed even welcomed in as actual family members, can conceive of ourselves as oikonomoi—stewards.  Such an understanding is not hierarchical, nor does it seek to dominate the household in the place of an absentee Master; it is ecumenical.  For the literal sense of the word “ecumenical” is of all the inhabitants of the household living together as a family.

 

The Church and the Missio Vitae

Home Economics 101

As a church that exists within an insatiable human economy in which there is never enough, we are called to be a community that confesses the good news of God’s economy: there is enough.  Those of us who come into the church from places of privilege humbly admit that God is the liberator of the poor, oppressed, marginal, and downtrodden.  Those who come into the church from a position of material poverty must also admit that spiritual poverty is also a very real affliction.  For those of us who are wealthy, we must recognize that most of the wealthy people who come to Jesus in the Gospels found him to be too difficult to follow.  There is, however, one counterexample which we are challenged to follow: Zacchaeus, who gave half of everything he owned to the poor and paid back everything he took fourfold (Lk. 19:1-10).  Zacchaeus was committed to reconciliation and accordingly worked very hard to restore the relationships he had violated and broken.  In God’s economy, money is not in itself good or evil; what matters are justice and community.  In the New Testament picture of God’s community of the church, there are both rich and poor members, but what is important is that they are nevertheless a community of equals who are dedicated to sharing with one another and meeting the needs of the community (Jm. 5, Act. 4).  In fact, it is precisely this kind of diversity—the rich and poor communing together—that is essential to how God’s economy works.  It is precisely by bringing the rich and the poor together into relationships that the resources of the rich can be directed to meet the needs of the poor–both spiritually and materially.  That is because “the opposite of poverty is not property.  The opposite of both poverty and property is community.”  In this community of sharing, it becomes possible to speak, like Arias, or “evangelization by hospitality.”

Homecoming

The household of God is the community that is marked by the ethic of the

Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7), and its mission must reflect this ethic.  This community’s vocation within the holistic project of God’s missio vitae is to be the people who have returned home to the house of our true Father.  In this oikos, we have all been the prodigal sons and daughters who return from estrangement glad even to be readmitted into our Father’s house as domestic servants but unimaginably surprised by the grace of being accepted warmly and lovingly, though certainly undeservingly, as sons and daughters (Lk. 15:11-32).  Our challenge, however, is to remember this as we call all our other long lost siblings back into the household, lest we should be like the brother in the parable and start to hate our returning brothers and sisters out of entitlement and jealousy.  We know that as the family grows, it will also change in ways that may make us uncomfortable.  Such are the challenges to the oikonomoi, the stewards of the household.  Where these attitudes of fear, insecurity, and self-preservation surface in the community, they will be corrected by an affirmation of the good news of God’s economy: there is enough for everyone!  Then and only then will we be equipped for our role in reconciliation: to continue the homecoming by welcoming all who will enter into God’s ecological and ecumenical household.

 

The Missio Vitae in Context

The Stewardship of Life

We have expanded our view of God and the church in order to glimpse the

missio Dei in a new lens: the life-affirming activity of God on behalf of all creation.  As disciples of Jesus who are welcomed into the family life of God’s household, we are stewards of life called to participate in God’s mission, whose aim is the abundance of life (Jn. 10:10).  “If we could start from that premise,” Douglas Hall argues, “The despondency that now so often clings to our discourse on mission…would be exchanged for a new sense of being needed.”  It is the grounding in the missio vitae that finally enables us to get beyond stewardship as a flawed framework, dismissed by economic and environmental activists as archaic and oppressive, and shrugged off by the church as a periphery slogan and biblical euphemism for shrewdness.  Instead, the stewardship of life becomes “a way of designating the very core of our faith. In a time given over to the courting of death, the gospel means: stewarding life!”  Throughout the Old Testament, from Deuteronomy to the prophets, God’s people have been confronted with a choice: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.  Therefore choose life” (Deut. 30:19).  In the New Testament, we learn that in Christ, God has personally brought this life into the world.  On the cross, Christ took upon himself the world’s response to the charge in Deuteronomy 30, in order to transform the world’s opting for death into the possibility and promise of new life.  Hall poignantly remarks, “I am interested in rediscovering the mission of that Jesus; and I suspect that it doesn’t have very much to do with getting people to say, ‘Lord, Lord.’”

Lest we should fall into a form of Christian legalism and merely solicit the empty cry of ‘Lord, Lord,’ we must remember the task to which we have been called.  As Johannes Nissen reminds us, “Mission is not only about verbal proclamation but healing action as well, and it strives not just for church growth but for the wholeness of creation.”  To be a community of healing, we must seek out and identify with vulnerable and suffering creation.  What we need is “compassion so that we enter into the suffering of the earth…In sharing its wounds, we will become participants in the healing of the earth.”

 

Implications

What does it mean to be a community of sharing justice and peace in God’s household?  For starters, we must recognize that the basic unit of God’s salvific mission is not the individual, or even simply humanity; it is the whole of creation.  “Justice, biblically, is the rendering, amidst limited resources and the conditions of brokenness, of whatever is required for the fullest possible flourishing of creation.”  The primary advantage of beginning to adopt this point of view for the concern of evangelism is that it entails truly good news for everyone.  What agent for centripetal mission could be better than being known as the community that is dedicated to the fullest possible flourishing of all creation?  Who could possibly find in that goal any bad news?  The sheer universality of this claim identifies it with the very heart of the gospel itself and also opens up a vital starting point for dialogue.  In a postmodern world in which models of authority and conquest are distrusted and abhorred (and for good reason!), the humble goal of upholding all life and identifying with the most vulnerable members of creation will open more doors than any other missionary model.  Jesus did not lay down his life so that we could avoid our responsibility, and the cross that we must take up in our own time is that of affirming life in a world in which it is always and everywhere threatened.  If we send missionaries to Iraq or Afghanistan alongside the troops whose bombs and bullets are killing and destroying their lands and people, what success could we possibly expect?  Yet if there are Christians in those places, risking that their own lives may be caught in the crossfire, to stand alongside Iraqis and Afghans in the name of Christ, what better witness could be asked for?  How can the Christian mission reach those people who are already laying down their lives for the life of the world today, but who do not know the Lord for whose mission they work?  As Hall points out, “Those who are really giving their lives for the world’s life today are too altruistic to be concerned primarily for their own salvation.”  But what if the message of the Gospel and the hope of salvation is not just about me?  Then, I suppose, there would be a mission worth joining, a God worth serving, and a community—indeed, a household and family— truly worth participating in.  Then, we might actually have some good news to proclaim to a world numbed and deafened by the ceaseless drone of bad news.

References Cited

Attfield, Robin. “Environmental Sensitivity and Critiques of Stewardship.” In Environmental Stewardship, Edited by R.J. Berry, 76-91. New York: T & T Clark International, 2006.

 

Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Translated by Phillip Berryman. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997.

 

Conradie, Ernst M. “The Whole Household of God (Oikos): Some Ecclesiological Perspectives.” Scriptura 94 (2007): 1-9.

 

Dyrness, William. “Stewardship of the Earth in the Old Testament.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth, Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 50-65. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.

 

Edwards, Dennis. Jesus the Wisdom of God: An Ecological Theology. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995.

 

Gottfried, Robert R. Economics, Ecology, and the Roots of Western Faith. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.

 

Hall, Douglas J. The Stewardship of Life in the Kingdom of Death. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985.

 

Jegen, Mary E. “The Church’s Role in Healing the Earth.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth, Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 93-113. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.

 

Knights, Philip. “”The Whole Earth My Altar”: A Sacramental Trajectory for Ecological Mission.” Mission Studies 25, no. 1 (2008): 56-72.

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

 

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission. Grand   Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978.

 

Nissen, Johannes. New Testament and Mission: Histonrical and Hermeneutical Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007.

 

Palmer, Clare. “Stewardship: A Case Study in Environmental Ethics.” In Environmental Stewardship, Edited by R.J. Berry, 63-75. New York: T & T Clark International, 2006.

 

Park, Rohun. “Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son for Decolonization: Luke’s Reconfiguration of Oikos in 15:11-32.” Biblical Interpretation 17, no. 5 (2009): 507-520.

 

Rasmussen, Larry L. “Creation, Church, and Christian Responsibility.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth, Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 114-131. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.

 

Van Dyke, Fred, David C. Mahan, Joseph K. Sheldon, and Raymond H. Brand. Redeeming Creation: The Biblical Basis for Environmental Stewardship. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1996.

It would be nearly impossible to cite the biblical references to the theme of economic justice exhaustively, but here is a short list: Is.1:2-4, 56:4-8, 58:6-7, 59:13-15; Jer. 11:13-16, 22:4-5,13-17; Ezek. 9:9, 12:2-3, 14:11, 37:10-14; Hos. 4:1-3; Joel 1:9-20, 2:12-16; Amos 3:15; Mic. 7:13-17, Zep. 1:9; Hag. 1:4; Hab 2:8-20; Zec. 3:7

 

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Jesus of Nazareth: Historical Sketches

10/26/2010

Introduction

Before conducting a historical study of Jesus, it must first be remembered that he lived in a time, place, culture, and religion which are different from our own.  The task of the historical study is thus to allow this particular situation of the man Jesus of Nazareth to speak to us out of this very particularity.  At the same time, however, we cannot deny that the only reason history has recorded the words and deeds of Jesus is because of the conviction of his followers that this man revealed the nature of God in a way that profoundly spoke to them in their own particular situation(s).  The very reason for trying to understand and locate Jesus in his own historical context is to attempt to discover how he can relate to and speak to us in our contexts.  The universal significance of Jesus Christ has as its foundation the particular significance of the first century Jewish man from Nazareth in Galilee.  Through all this, we must humbly admit that Jesus of Nazareth speaks to us solely through the voices of others, and that this fact itself contributes an important insight into what manner of man Jesus himself was.  These other voices constitute the earliest attempts by communities of Jesus’ followers to articulate how this historical human being is at once the living Christ, present to their own communities and cultures which differed both from one another and from that of Jesus himself.  In this sense, the Gospel accounts are not historical records of the man who worked miracles and taught in parables, but are themselves parables that attest to the miraculous experience of Jesus as Emmanuel, God with us.  John Dominic Crossan’s understanding of both parables of Jesus and parables about Jesus sums this point up quite well:

 

Here is another principle well understood in parables by Jesus, but often forgotten in

parables about Jesus. What if the audience, having heard the Good Samaritan parable,

unanimously chose to debate its historicity. “I think,” said one, “it is history, for I was on

that road only yesterday.” “I think,” said another, “that it is parable: did you really think his

Sower story was about agriculture?” “I think,” said a third, “that whether it is parable or his-

tory, the point is the same: what if the alien is kinder to us than we are to each other?”

 

 

The point is well made: we cannot afford to get lost in debate over which accounts are historical fact and which ones are myth, because either way we risk missing the point of what it all means.  The truth of Jesus’ parables clearly withstand the historical judgment that they are fictional constructs because their historicity is not the point; in the same way we risk losing the very fabric of our faith if we pin the truth of the Gospels on their historicity.  In the end we must confess that the truth of the scriptures is not of the sort that can be proven right or wrong by historical inquiry.  Once we relinquish these fears, we may then open ourselves up to the truth of a renewed understanding of who Jesus was, and thereafter begin to understand in a much more profound way who Jesus is.

Identity & Context of Jesus

Essential to any scholar’s effort to elucidate the historical mystery of Jesus of Nazareth is a method that seeks to establish to the best degree possible the context in which he lived.  However, as historians begin piecing together the frail fragments of the past, widely variant pictures emerge.  There are, it seems, as many historical Jesuses as there are Jesus historians.

In itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing, for there is a considerable diversity of images of Jesus within the New Testament itself.

What is needed is a way of seeing the underlying unity of this diversity.  In short, the best method is the one that can account for the widest variety of sources and integrate them into a more holistic understanding of Jesus of Nazareth and the communities of his followers.  Such an explanation would need to account for how Jesus was both situated within his own context and at the same time distinct enough from his context to have begun his own movement.  In his book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Crossan depicts a Jesus who is sufficiently revolutionary, but is he intelligible enough to his contemporaries to have garnered as many followers as he clearly had? Paula Fredriksen’s Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews is thoroughly Jewish, but is he original enough to have cast the seeds of a movement cohesive enough to break free from mainstream Judaism even under the circumstances of harsh imperial backlash?  The truth, as usual, must be somewhere in the middle.  If Jesus was so indistinguishable from his peers then there is little to explain why we are still talking about him; yet if he was unintelligible to his peers there is no indication why anyone in his day would have taken him seriously enough to listen to him, much less execute him as an incendiary figure.

Ultimately, the historical study of Jesus must take account of the precious few facts that are beyond dispute.  Of these, the most solid fact is that of his death: he died by crucifixion, a political execution carried out as a public address by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem on or around the time of Passover.

We also know that while Jesus was executed as a political criminal, his followers were not—they continued to live in Jerusalem for years after Jesus’ death.

Any historical account must tackle the question of how this Galilean Jewish religious figure came to be executed as a political insurrectionist despite being considered harmless enough not to warrant killing or even persecuting his closest and most immediate followers. To attempt to answer these questions by appeal to the scriptures alone is insufficient, for the New Testament accounts were written during a time when the very center of the Jewish faith, the Jerusalem Temple, had been destroyed in a war with Rome, and when the Jewish communities that had come to be known as Christians were increasingly at odds with another Jewish sect, the Pharisees, and were also increasingly incorporating Gentiles into their fellowship.

While it is instructive to examine how the writers of the New Testament related Jesus to their own contexts in order to see how we might understand him in light of our own situation, this tendency in scripture makes it difficult to see past the post-Temple, and even more importantly, post-Resurrection consciousness of Christian faith into the thoroughly Jewish life of Jesus.  Yet aside from a small handful of outside (but by no means neutral) sources, the Gospels comprise the largest and most useful source of information about Jesus.  One cannot discount the veracity of the New Testament texts without accounting for how and why any given piece was created by the scripture writers; if a tradition about Jesus is not historically accurate there must still be some historical reason for its creation and circulation, as well as for its being identified with Jesus—all of which tells us more about who Jesus was.  From a historical standpoint, the more attested a particular datum is by independent sources, the more reliable it is.

According to a consensus of scholars, the earliest strata of independent sources under consideration are the Epistles of Paul, Mark, and the theoretical source Q which comprises the shared material of Matthew and Luke that is not taken from Mark.  Crossan adds to the list the extra-biblical sayings Gospel of Thomas, which he presumes to be similar in both form and content to they hypothetical Q source.

Fredriksen emphasizes the importance of John for an alternative to Mark’s dramatized Galilee to Jerusalem trajectory, suggesting that John’s account of Jesus’ back and forth movement between Jerusalem and Galilee can better account for the circumstances of Jesus’ death.  What all the sources agree on is that Jesus was from Nazareth in Galilee, and that his ministry began and generally stayed in that region after Jesus had met John the Baptizer, and came to an end when he was crucified in Jerusalem under the authority of the Roman prefect Pilate.  How we interpret who John and Pilate were will ultimately shape how we view Jesus and his ministry.

The Question of Divinity

To make sense of how, when, and in what sense Jesus became aware of his divinity, one is hard-pressed to make any conclusion based solely on New Testament evidence.  Even if we take the use of “Son of God” as literal expression of his divinity, the Gospels could give the impression that Jesus’ divinity was rooted either in his resurrection and exaltation (Mk. 13:32; Lk. 1:32; 1 Cor. 15:24; 1 Thes. 1:9), or at his baptism (Mk. 1:11; Mt. 4:3-6; Lk. 4:3-9), or at birth (Lk. 1:32-35), or even from eternity (Jn. 1:14-18; Rm. 8:3; Gal. 4:4; Col. 1:15).  How do we make sense of this?  We must remember that these passages do not reflect the self-consciousness of Jesus himself, but instead they are reflections of Jesus’ followers whose profound experience of Jesus as risen Lord led them to search their culture and tradition for words and symbols to articulate what this experience meant for them.  The more we retroject this post-Easter consciousness back onto the pre-Easter Jesus of Nazareth, the muddier and less plausible the historical picture becomes.  The sense in which Jesus may have thought himself divine, then, must be grounded in his own pre-Easter context.  To that end, we can learn much more about who Jesus was by examining precisely who he was not.

From Mark 6:3, Matthew 13:55, and Luke 4:22 we learn that Jesus was, by family trade, a tekton which is usually translated to mean carpenter.  In the context of first century Palestine, we learn that the word carried a derogatory connotation of one who had to work with his hands; in a Roman world that was sharply divided between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ this would place Jesus squarely in the latter category.

Leaving the question of Jesus‘ literacy aside, we must at least admit that this distinction identifies Jesus with the peasant class.  This is what makes the suggestion of Jesus‘ divinity so shocking.  We know from history that the concept of divine sonship and even virginal conception are by no means unique to Jesus; both had, in fact, been attributed to Caesar Augustus by Virgil.

Crossan cites the pagan philosopher Celsus to make the point that what made Christianity so shocking in the ancient world was not so much the application of divinity or divine sonship and virgin birth to a human being, but rather the specific human to which these were applied.

To say such things of Caesar made perfect sense, but to say the same of a Jewish peasant was vulgar as far as Celsus was concerned.  What is enlightening about this element of context is that it casts Jesus’ divinity in terms of power and authority as defined against both Caesar and Rome on the one hand and against the Jewish priests and religious authorities in Jerusalem on the other.  In this sense, Jesus seems to have become aware of this authority after his baptism, when he subsequently began to exercise it in his ministry.  Since we cannot see inside his mind, the best we can do is look for evidence in Jesus’ words and deeds–all of which commence after his baptism by John (Mk. 1:9; Lk. 3:21; Mt. 3:13-15).

Jesus’ Message

The predominate theme of Jesus’ earthly message is without a doubt his proclamation of the Kingdom of God, or, as it is called in Matthew, the Kingdom of Heaven.  In the synoptic Gospels, this phrase is used a total of 123 times, and it appears five more times in John.

The question is whether and to what extent Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom was apocalyptic.  It is clear that Jesus’ Kingdom message came right on the heels of the ministry of John the Baptizer, who was himself clearly an ascetic apocalyptic prophet.  Did Jesus continue on after John as an apocalyptic prophet?  Fredriksen points to the urgency, impracticality, and intensified ethical teaching of Jesus’ Kingdom message to assert that it ought to be understood apocalyptically: “the fervent conviction that redemption was at hand served as incentive for the intensification and extension of the teachings of the Torah.”

Thus, she goes on to dismiss “its sheer impracticality.  No normal society could long run according to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.”

In making this point, however, she ironically gives credence to Crossan’s alternative appraisal of Jesus’ message.

Crossan cites Matthew 11, Luke 7, and Mark 2:18-20 as evidence that Jesus broke away from John’s movement of apocalyptic asceticism, which leads him to conclude that “Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet like John the Baptist, but he was a world-negating eschatological figure.”

Thus, according to Crossan, the message about the Kingdom needs to be interpreted in the same matrix of power and authority as Jesus’ divinity. For Crossan, the Kingdom simply means “what the world would be if God were directly and immediately in charge.”

When Fredriksen candidly admits that no usual society could run on Jesus’ Kingdom principles, she is quite right; that is precisely Crossan’s point about how utterly scandalous and revolutionary Jesus’ ministry was.  This Kingdom of God, which Jesus enacted through his boundary-shattering ministry and the practicing of what Crossan terms “open commensality” and “radical egalitarianism,” is in fact “more terrifying than anything we have ever imagined, and even if we can never accept it, we should not explain it away as something else.”

 

Crossan’s elucidation of the social and political dimensions of the Kingdom seems to explain the biblical record better than the strictly apocalyptic characterization of Fredriksen.  For if the Kingdom teaching was the central theme of Jesus’ teaching as the synoptics clearly suggest, then it had to have been a theme revolutionary enough to have so polarized its hearers that Jesus would at once be revered as Christ and crucified as a criminal.  In addition to the obvious fact that the phrase itself is couched in thoroughly political terms, the biblical references to Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God only further substantiate such an understanding.  It is first and foremost the Kingdom of the poor (Mt. 5:3; Lk. 6:20; James 2:5), which is to be received as a child (Mk. 10:13-16; Mt.18:1-4; Jn. 3:1-10), and which is characterized as both an obnoxiously invasive weed (Mk. 4:30-32; Mt. 13:31-32; Lk. 13:18-19), and a dinner party for social outcasts (Mt. 22:1-13; Lk. 14:15-24).  These things Jesus came to announce within an empire that devalued and oppressed the poor, which regarded children as expendable nobodies, and in whose society there were rigid mores about who ought to eat with whom.

Jesus’ Ministry

It is often pointed out that the controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees, especially poignant in Matthew, is better accounted for by the context of the Gospel’s writer than the historical Jesus.  The need to distinguish and define the community over against the Pharisees and the now destroyed Jerusalem Temple comprise the polemical concerns of Matthew’s community much more than that of Jesus.

This does not, however, rule out altogether the notion that Jesus was involved in a religious conflict with his contemporaries.  Indeed, one of the most salient features of the Judaism of Jesus’ day was that there were many competing interpretations, held as firm convictions, of what constituted the correct way to be Jewish.

What put Jesus’ interpretation at odds with that of his contemporaries seems to be his way of subverting hierarchies and power relations.  The Kingdom he announced was open to all without distinction; the only requirement was that they be open to hear and see the work God is doing to enact the Kingdom in present reality.  This Kingdom erased boundaries and undermined those who make them.  Thus, we see Jesus dine with tax collectors and sinners (Mk. 2:14-17), unclean lepers (Mk. 1:40-45), women (Mk. 1:30; 5:25-34; 12:41-44; 14:3-9; 15:40-41), and children (Mk. 10:13-16).  Even if we disagree with Crossan’s way of eschewing the literal factuality of all Jesus’ healing stories as “intervention into the physical world,” we must accept his analysis of their significance as “intervention in the social world.”  For through healing Jesus was directly undermining the boundaries of ostracizing the unclean.

None of this implies that Jesus was not Jewish, or that he was adamantly opposed to the Judaism of his time; what it does imply, however, is some tension between Jesus the boundary-breaking Galilean peasant Jew and the aristocratic Jerusalem priestly Jews.

 

Reconstructing how this ministry led up to his crucifixion is no easy task.  Fredriksen discounts the entire chronological sequence of Mark and its emphasis on the  scene with the money changers in the Temple as the cause of Jesus’ execution, because it fits in all too well with Mark’s aforementioned anti-Temple polemic.

Instead, she points to the Triumphal Entry as the occasion that riled up a potentially dangerous crowd.  The way in which Jesus came into Jerusalem announcing the Kingdom of God, she argues, would have led them to associate Jesus with the messianic figure who would usher in the rule of God.  Since they were not familiar with Jesus’ mission of nonviolence and healing, they were not aware that Jesus could not be this messianic warrior; since they could easily become unruly during such a sensitive time as Passover, Jesus had to be killed as an example.  This, then, explains why only he and none of his followers were killed.

Crossan, on the other hand, dismisses the Triumphal Entry as another instance of “prophecy historicized” because of the way the evangelists seem to go out of their way to identify Jesus’ actions with obscure Old Testament prophecies which render the entire story, in his view, historically implausible.  Instead, he argues, it was indeed the incident in the Temple that leads to Jesus’ execution.  Such an event is attested to by Mark (11:15-19), John (2:14-17) and the Gospel of Thomas.

Even though John places the scene near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, John nevertheless clearly associates it with Jesus’ death, so he merely placed it at the beginning of the story, Crossan argues, to cast a shadow over the rest of what follows.

 

This construction would certainly indicate why Jesus had upset many of his contemporary Jews, but why, Fredriksen asks, would this have anything to do with the Romans who ultimately executed him?  If the issue of Temple cleansing exists between Jesus and the priests, why should Pilate intervene?

Yet, while attempting to discredit the Temple scene as the decisive event that provoked Roman action, Fredriksen ironically concedes that based on the layout of the Temple, among the few people who would have had a good enough view to even witness Jesus’ actions were the Roman soldiers watching from above.

Though this fact is entirely incidental of Fredriksen’s intentions, it could perhaps explain precisely why the Romans did get involved with Jesus’ execution.  And why should they need to execute any of Jesus’ followers if it was only himself performing this disruptive deed?  Crossan seems to make a good case that this was the only trip Jesus made to Jerusalem, at least during his period of ministry, and that the evidence of the scene at the Temple seems most compelling in its ability to explain the circumstances of Jesus’ death.  But Fredriksen is also right in asserting that the crowds in Jerusalem also had to play a role—after all, death by crucifixion was a kind of sadistic public service announcement, and the Jerusalem crowds were its intended audience.

It seems plausible, then, to combine both reconstructions: Jesus was speaking and acting out a provocative and controversial prophetic statement both on the way to Jerusalem and in the Temple which provoked the priests, alarmed the Roman guard, and elicited messianic expectations among the crowds.  Fearing that Jesus’ authority would undermine their own, the priests would have good reason to plot against him; appealing to the delicate and tense situation of Passover in Jerusalem, Rome would have had every reason to stamp out the situation and make Jesus an example to the crowds by publicly crucifying him.

Conclusion

The story of Jesus is one of both historical particularity and eternal universality.  We have no exact portrait of who Jesus was; what we have are interpretations.  The Gospels themselves emerge as a unique literary genre: lengthy parables centered on the meaning of Jesus’ life and death, the elements of which are recast in the image of the intended audience’s context to provide meaning for the difficulties posed by the historical particularity of each community.  Out of this emerges the universal Christ— grounded in the particularity of the historical man Jesus of Nazareth, yet indifferent to the particular situation of the actual man in order to remain relevant to communities different from the one he inhabited.  The fact that these diverse images of Christ come from the particular and concrete individual Jesus of Nazareth grounds Christ’s universality in his particularity.  We relate to what Jesus meant for his peers by extending an analogy or metaphor to make him our peer.  He asks of everyone to answer the question: “Who do you say I am?” The answer is not so much concluded as lived.  One lives one’s life in response to Jesus’ question, searching for glimpses of the coming Kingdom and carrying on his work as a community of healed healers.

Personal Implications of Historical Jesus Studies

My personal reflection on the significance of this study for my own life and ministry must reflect the nature of my life and ministry.  Since I am first and foremost a poet, I will thus conclude with two poems:

 

The Real Jesus

Who is the real Jesus,

after Christ became Caesar?

Who can be our humble king,

After the cross was co-opted by Constantine?

Or should we keep clamoring on about his death

Only to ignore what he said with each breath,

To be the children of patristic church fathers

Instead of Jesus’ Abbah Father?

 

What happens when we get harshly critical

Of harsh critics?

Do we then transcend them or get them to rescind?

Or does neglect and disrespect reckon

Us equal to that which we object?

 

For what do we exist?

Is it to insist,

Or to resist,

Or to consist,

Or to persist or subsist,

Or is it to assist?

Or is it to define oneself as some other -ist?

 

If you get the gist of this list,

Seeing the truth through shrouded mist,

Like one breaking out of the literalist’s cist

Whence life and death coexist,

The dualist must desist without grist

And hold his whist–

 

For the twisted wish to be an -ist,

Whether atheist or a theist,

Is inconsistent with

The fact that all of us exist betwixt

The “is” and “am”

Imprisoned, dammed,

And in need of a fix…

…and this,

This is Christ

 

 

On Easter Sunday

 

On Easter Sunday

I went to worship

But the message of Resurrection

Was painted poorly in story,

With tainted inflection;

 

No more do they preach–

They teach

Empty theory presented in hollow speech,

Asking me in faith

To accept the dispersion

Of a latter gospel version

Forensically,

When it was penned as a myth

To be understood intrinsically,

And lived out with each breath

As we unite with the divine

To defeat death

 

And it’s hysterical

How Truth’s become clerical,

Hijacked from meaning

By religious fanatics, combatants

More eager to judge and sentence

Than to trade a grudge for repentance

 

Father forgive them,

For they know not what they do

Grant grace and forgiveness

For making an unholy idol of You

For no one needs Resurrection and new life

More than we “Christians” do

On Easter Sunday

 

Hope is Christ

Hope is alive,

it survives, and thrives

In new life

Died not dead

Bleeds not bled…

 

Salvation is suffering

Salvation from suffering;

Was not

Once and for all,

Is always

With us

Because no Caesar

Can be our leader,

Not from above

He must be with us and love

He must be with us

So we are one

 

Christ is not crystallized

He is alive

Christ is our chrysalis

His promise is

To mend our many weary scattered

Caterpillar legs

Weaving them into wings

Then peal them back in sacrificial openness

So we can be born again

Free

 

Bibliography

 

 

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. New York: HarperOne, 1994.

 

Crossan, John Dominic. “The Parables of Jesus.” Interpretation 56, no. 3 (2002): 245-319.

 

Fredriksen, Paula. Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

 

Horning, Estella B. “Who Is Jesus? Christologies in the New Testament.” Brethren Life and Thought 41.1 (1996): 20-28.

 

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Upside-Down Ethics in the Sermon on the Plain: Luke 6:20-38 as Crash Course in Gentile Discipleship

December 6, 2010

Luke 6:20-38

²⁰Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. ²¹“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. ²²“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. ²³Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. ²⁴“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. ²⁵“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. ²⁶“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

²⁷“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. ²⁹If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. ³⁰Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. ³¹Do to others as you would have them do to you. ³²“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. ³³If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. ³⁴If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. ³⁵But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. ³⁶Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. ³⁷“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; ³⁸give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

Introduction

Compared to the rest of the third Gospel, Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Plain (SP), as it has traditionally been called, has received little critical scrutiny and still less appreciation.  Until recently, scholars and theologians have assumed that this passage was merely a shortened, less accurate, and ultimately less insightful Lucan summary of the much preferred Sermon on the Mount (SM) from Matthew 5-7.  These scholars believed that the two accounts were different versions of the same speech, and thought that Luke omitted important parts of the SM and redacted according to his own ideas and theological bias whereas Matthew merely reported accurately what Jesus had actually said.

Thus, scholarly attention was diverted from the presumably inferior SP in Luke to the superior and more detailed SM in Matthew until the emergence of the two source hypothesis—that both Matthew and Luke used Mark’s account and a second hypothetical source called Q—which suggested that both writers used and edited the same or similar source material independently.  If this is true, then the SP must be taken into account in its own right as an independent passage with its own structural integrity and purpose unique to its setting in Luke’s Gospel.  The purpose of the following exegesis, then, will be to illuminate the salient features of the beatitudes and ethical exhortations of Luke 6:20-38 and shed some much needed light on the setting of this teaching within the two overarching purposes of Luke-Acts as a whole: to depict Jesus’ mission in the context of God’s Jubilee, and to show that Jesus came both to reclaim the lost sheep of Israel and to be a light to the Gentiles.

Literary Criticism

The pericope is found within the two volume work known as Luke-Acts.  The author of Luke-Acts is anonymous and there are no explicit clues about its authorship within the text itself.

Due to the tendency of ancient writers to write pseudonymously in the name of a particular figure’s school or tradition, the anonymity of Luke-Acts must be respected.

Nevertheless, the only clue we have about the author’s identity is that the church tradition ascribes both volumes to an educated gentile named Luke, the ‘beloved physician’ and companion of the apostle Paul (cf. Col. 4:14).

In any case, the writer displays a brilliant command of Koine Greek and is extremely well-regarded for his dramatic compositional technique.

A variety of dates for the composition of Luke-Acts have been offered (as early as 60 c.e. and as late as 110), due mostly to the uncertainty of the age of Luke’s sources, but the most widely accepted round date is 80 c.e.

The precise location of the composition and the community for which it was composed are also subject to a wide range of speculations, but what is fairly certain is that Luke wrote from an urban church community in the Hellenistic world.

That the religious and ethnic background of Luke’s audience is primarily Greek and gentile can be readily deduced from Luke’s consistent efforts to portray Jesus’ identity in Greek cultural notions.

The SP is used by Luke as a summary of Jesus’ message that combines the forms of beatitudes (blessings) and woes with exhortations for his disciples that are adapted by Luke to make sense to a primarily Greek audience.

In this way, the traditional designation of the passage as a sermon is misleading as pertains its specific genre.  Hans Dieter Betz argues convincingly that it ought to be identified as an example of a Greek epitome, a presentation of Jesus’ teaching in a particular selection of sayings organized systematically for the specific purpose of educating and training gentile Christian disciples.

The point of the epitome is to confront its audience with the need to be hearers and doers of Jesus’ word by casting it in the concrete terms of identifying with the poor as opposed to the rich (vv. 20-26).

Form Criticism

The narrative structure of Luke-Acts as a whole is aligned geographically with a progression of Jesus’ ministry and revelation that starts in Judea in the Gospel and ends with the apostle Paul in Rome in Acts.

Within this scheme, the SP falls within the  section of the Gospel that is centered in the villages of Galilee (4:14-9:50).

Like Matthew’s SM, Luke places the SP right before the story of the healing of the centurion’s servant at Capernaum (Mt. 8:5-13; Lk. 7:1-10).  The difference is that in Luke, Jesus has called the twelve apostles before the SP, whereas in Matthew the SM precedes the calling of the twelve (Lk 6:12-16; Mt. 10:1-4).

Due to the lack of clear section breaks created by Luke’s use of “bridging passages” to splice subsections together and the eclectic thematic content of the SP, commentators are far from unanimous agreement on its overall structure.

Nevertheless, most commentators divide the entire passage into three sections: introductory exordium with blessings and woes (vv. 20-26), a main body of ethical teaching (vv.27-45), and concluding peroration (vv.46-49).

Within this structural scheme, the pericope under consideration includes the exordium and the first subsection of the main body (vv. 27-38), which entails the ethical conduct of disciples to others outside their immediate community.  The progression of thought is achieved more by an association of ideas rather than a close-knit argument, and the introductory beatitudes underscore the overall emphasis of both the particular pericope and the Gospel as a whole on Jesus‘ promise of God’s blessings for the poor and oppressed, and the consequential need for disciples to show the same love and mercy (v. 36).

Textual Criticism

The accuracy of the manuscripts for this passage is as certain as any passage in the Gospel.  The earliest manuscript that contains the entirety of the SM is the proto-Alexandrian papyrus known as P⁷⁵ which is dated around 175.

The scribe responsible for this manuscript copied the text letter by letter and primarily restricted changes to grammatical and stylistic improvements, in keeping with the Alexandrian tradition, with no major changes or systematic revision of the text.

The Alexandrian text, of which this manuscript constitutes the earliest phase, is regarded as the best ancient recension and the nearest approximate of the original text known to contemporary biblical scholarship.

The corruptions of the text that surface in later manuscripts, aside from attempted grammatical improvements, mainly arise from the desire of the copyist to harmonize the SP with the SM by adding “in spirit” to verse 20, transposing the beatitudes into the third person rather than Luke’s usage of the second person, and by omitting the temporal designation “now” in verse 21.

Redaction Criticism

Most scholars agree that the SM and the SP are based on one basic piece of tradition, held to be found in Q, upon which both authors subsequently expanded and edited for their own purposes, and contrary to what scholars before the 20^th century held, it is now believed that Matthew took more redactional liberties while Luke stayed closer to the original.

It is important to consider the notion that Q underwent a series of pre-Synoptic redactions of its own before being transmitted to Matthew and Luke in separate recensions, however, because solely appealing to the redactional activities of the Gospel writers themselves fails to adequately account for the differences in the Gospels’ respective usage of Q; it cannot account for why some Q material was worded identically by both writers whereas the rest appears quite different.

There are five possibilities regarding the redaction of the sermons in Q and the Gospels: 1) Q is closest to SP and the SM is a revision and expansion of Q-SP (most current scholars hold this position), 2) Q is closest to SM and the SP is Luke’s revision and reduction of Q-SM (no longer held by any scholars), 3) Q is not like SP or SM and both were the redactions and elaborations of Luke and Matthew who received the same Q source in different translations (evidence for this position is negligible), 4) Matthew and Luke received Q in two different recensions, one SP and one SM, and the main differences stem from pre-Synoptic redaction rather than that of Matthew and Luke (many scholars take this argument as a supplement to option 1), or 5) SP and SM were formed separately from Q and the writers later added sayings from Q to their sermons (which can account for why some of the SM material appears elsewhere in Luke).

The ethical content of the sayings also bears strong resemblance to the parenesis of the early church as seen in the writings of Paul, and the earliest section of the Didache (cf. Rom. 12:14, 17-20; 1 Thess. 5:15; Did. 1.2-5 and Lk. 6:27-28).

Luke’s personal touches can be seen in the juxtaposition of rich and poor in the blessing and the added woe statements (vv.20-26), a contrast which is very typical in Luke (see 1:53; 16:19-31).

The changes Luke made to his sources serve his goal of relating the primarily Jewish context of Jesus and his disciples to new gentile converts in Luke’s community.  It cannot, however, be conclusively demonstrated that these sayings do not trace back in some form to the actual teachings of Jesus, and this assumption should be held until proven otherwise.

Source Criticism

Luke borrows the scene for his SP from Mark 3:7-12, where Jesus is so overwhelmed by the crowds pursuing him to be healed that he retreats to his boat and addresses the crowd from the sea.  Luke preserves the details about the sort of crowd that was following Jesus—the poor, the crippled and the sick—which fit nicely within Luke’s overarching emphasis on the solidarity of Jesus and the socially marginalized (5:27-32; 6:17-19; 7:22, 37-39; 16:19-31), but he takes liberties with Mark’s actual scenery.  Where Mark’s focus is on telling about Jesus’ healing activity in detail and referring only anecdotally to his address, Luke reverses the priority by anecdotally referencing Jesus’ healings in the prologue to the sermon (vv. 17-19) to emphasize that the crowd came not only to be healed, but also to hear Jesus’ teaching.

Also important in verse 17 is the statement that Jesus came down from the mountain to a ‘level place’ or ‘plain’ in an action reminiscent of Moses descending from Mount Sinai (Ex. 34:29) which would seem to indicate the importance of Jesus’ forthcoming exhortation by analogy to Moses and the decalogue.

The symbolic action of Jesus’ movement from a high place to a level plain also serves as a performative enactment of the theme of reversal of fate for the rich and poor (1:53; 4:16-30; 6:20-26; 9:1-6; 10:1-12; 14:11).

The concrete identity of the “poor” who are blessed by Jesus in verse 20 should not be seen as contrary to the “poor in spirit” of Matthew 5:3 and both should be considered along with the others blessed in the beatitudes: those who mourn are the protestors of social evil (cf. 1 Cor. 5:1), and the meek are those who protest the loss or theft of their ancestral land (cf. Ps. 37).

Instead, the difference results from Matthew’s context of Jewish moralism wherein the world consists of the righteous (poor in spirit) and the unrighteous as opposed to Luke’s account which reflects the tendency of Hellenistic moralists to view the world in terms of the poor (good) and the rich (bad).

Yet Luke’s understanding is not unfamiliar to Jewish scriptures; in fact, his version of the beatitudes harmonizes more closely with the LXX wording of Isaiah 61:1-2, which fits with his consistent usage of this prophetic theme of Jubilee and aligns the SP with Jesus’ first ‘sermon’ in Luke’s Gospel where he directly quotes this passage (4:18-19).

Just as the Jubilee reversal of fate for the poor is invoked at the onset of Jesus’ mission, it resurfaces here as the introduction to Jesus’ ethical requirements for his disciples.  Furthermore, Luke’s reference to those who “weep” because of the fallen condition of the world and the suffering that results reflects Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem (Lk. 19:41, 23:28), and to “hunger now” is the immediate consequence of poverty in both the literal and figurative sense (cf. Is. 32:6-7; Job 22:7).

Luke’s Greek sourcing is further evidenced by the phrase “leap for joy” in verse 23, which comes from the Greek word σκριταω.  This specific word refers to the grotesque dances of the Satyrs which were a popular decorative motif for walls and vases in Greek antiquity; such a reference would have elicited a few grins from an audience of gentile Christians, where a more Jewish audience would have been repulsed (hence the lack of a parallel in Matthew’s account).

Another example concerns the phrasing of the four maxims in verses 27-28 to resemble Greek paradoxes, and their explanation in verses 29-38, which constitutes Luke’s attempt to illustrate why Jesus’ seemingly absurd exhortation to love even one’s enemies makes Greek ethical sense.

This unique exhortation was recognized early on as the main teaching that differentiated Christian ethics from traditional Judaism, as even Jewish commentators recognized that this saying is the only part in the entire SM that is completely without parallel in rabbinic literature.

It is best understood as Jesus’ interpretation and intensification of the biblical injunction to love the neighbor (cf. Prov. 25:21; Lk. 10:25-37).  Though Jesus’ commandments have their sources in both scriptural and cultural traditions, they are unique in that they are extended in every case beyond the usual limits.

Social-Historical Criticism

It is impossible to properly understand the meaning of the SP’s ethical implications for how disciples are to interact with the societies in which they live without first grasping the social and historical context in which Luke wrote.  Roman Palestine was an honor-shame society in which concerns about the acquisition or loss of honor permeated every aspect of public life and took on the seriousness of life and death.

Honor was seen as a limited good, meaning that honor gained was honor taken from someone else, and it was inextricably bound up with economic concerns such as the control of resources, land, crops, livestock, social status, marriage opportunities and political clout.

On the other hand, the shaming of one individual had the potential to destroy the well-being of his or her entire family.  To be shameless, then, was to lack proper concern for one’s honor.  In that light, the beatitudes could be better translated as “how honorable are you who are poor” (v. 20), and the woes could likewise be rendered, “how shameless are you who are rich” (v. 24).

The understanding of rich and poor needs to be understood in light of their relation to the system of honor and shame whereby economic deprivation and social ostracism are inextricably linked.  In an oral culture, honor-shame language functions as a social sanction on moral behavior and is perpetuated by gossip—the public record of one’s honor or shame.

Thus, in verse 26, the situation in which all speak well of someone refers to flattery; to be rich was to be surrounded by flatterers, and the problem with flattery is that it conflates the proper acquisition of an honorable reputation: the merit of one’s character.

The reference to clothing in verse 29 is also related to the notions of poverty and shame.  In the Galilean village context of this passage, most people only had one cloak (outer garment) and one tunic (undershirt) to wear under it; the poorest might have to forego the tunic, whereas owning two tunics was a sign of being relatively well-off.

Clothes were scarce among the poor and thus became a frequent object of robbery (6:29; 10:30).  Furthermore, to go without one’s clothes was considered shameful and ritually impure—a point of particular emphasis in Luke’s retelling of the Gerasene demoniac who “wore no clothes” (8:27), but once he was healed was found by the townspeople to be fully clothed (v. 35).  Thus, the ethical exhortation Jesus gives his disciples concerning generosity is one that comes at a very high cost, socially speaking.  It calls, as Luke frequently points out, for a stance of seemingly shameful solidarity with the outcasts of mainstream society.

In addition to honor and shame, the social life of Roman Palestine was also structured as a patronage system in which the low class (clients) had to have their needs met by the high class (patrons).

While patrons competed with each other for social position by accumulating as many clients as possible, the clients were required to provide all of the manual labor on the patron’s land and subject themselves to frequent humiliation and were given only one meal a day as payment—anything beyond that was considered generous.

While notions of hospitality and generalized reciprocity in which favors or food were given without any expected return, this was conventionally only true within one specific sector (age, sex, occupation, status).

Thus, the idea of giving without return in verse 35 entails the expectation that Jesus’ disciples should act as if they are the benefactors, or patrons, but they should do so without any of the usual social entitlements that come with this status.

Jesus justifies this charge by appealing to the very nature of God, the benefactor par excellence in Luke’s Gospel (v. 36).  In the top-heavy power structure of the patronage system, the vast majority of people were at the bottom and many were crushed by insurmountable debt, but Jesus announces that God, the Great Benefactor, will enact a dramatic reversal to uplift the over-burdened poor, and he charges his disciples to act likewise by forgiving debts themselves—a truly otherworldly way of acting.

Praxis

The two sections of Jesus’ teachings to his disciples in Luke 6:20-26 and 27-38 raise two important principles: the repudiation of privilege based on wealth and the refusal of retaliation that leads to violence.  The ethical stance inherent in these teachings is “diametrically opposed to the assumptions of the marketplace and the media that shape American culture: the wealthy are privileged and conflict requires that one show strength through retaliation.”

Jesus confronts his disciples with a simple choice about who they identify themselves with in solidarity: those who are comfortable with their excesses garnered from the degradation of others, or those who are themselves degraded, vulnerable, and marginalized by their society (vv. 20-26).  Jesus gives a clear alternative to the social practices that foster hostility and oppression (vv. 27-38).

While it may not mean the same thing for us to give away our shirt as it did when Luke wrote his account, we can carry on the spirit of the passage by thinking about the underpaid and often underage workers who toil to make our clothing so that we can afford to buy so much of it.  We should not, however, be fooled by the differences between our world and the world in which Jesus lived; the extreme gulf between haves and have-nots remains just as pronounced in most of the world today as it did then.  Luke’s account of Jesus’ teaching cuts across all barriers in his audience; whether we are closer to the blessed poor or the woeful rich, the sermon speaks to us directly and in concrete terms about who we are to have solidarity with.  That is why Damian Marley’s song “Stand a Chance” harmonizes so well with the motifs sounded by Luke’s Gospel.

Though he was born into privilege to the wildly successful reggae artists Bob Marley and Cindy Breakspeare, Damian Marley still seeks to uplift, identify with and be reconciled to the urban poor.  In the song, he refers to being born in “uptown” Kingston, Jamaica—the high-rise financial district of the city (where Halfway Tree, the title of the album, is located)—as opposed to “Trenchtown” which is the city slum and home of many Rastafarians, including his father.  Thus, he is saying that even though he was born into Halfway Tree, his heart has always been and will always be in the slums.  In the song’s refrain, the lyrics echo the contrast between rich and poor in verses 20-26 by juxtaposing the phrases “where there’s more hungry mouths than food to eat” and “where there’s more food to eat than mouths to feed.”

He then appeals for all of us to look up to the Creator, our source of light, so that we may shine again and show the world God’s love which beautifully echoes Jesus’ “light of the world” imagery that appears in the SM (Mt. 5:14-16).

Appendix

Stand A Chance

Where there’s, more hungry mouths

Than food to eat

It’s where the homeless

Roam the street

Where broken glass

And broken dreams

Are shattered and scattered

Amongst debris

Sufferation wrath

And still they laugh

And dream of a mansion

Above the half

No one to speak

Upon there behalf

Now tell me do they stand a chance?

Where there’s, more food

Than mouths to feed

Where you find those who

Claim to lead

Because of all their personal greed

They always want more than they need

They don’t help those

Below the half

Instead they stand aside and laugh

As if it’s all we’ll ever ask

When will they make a change?

Children lift your heads

To the one

Who create the sun

My children

And your light will come shinning again

Show the world

Jah love is okay

When we rise and greet the son

Lets give him thanks and praise

Illegal guns

They roam the night

In hungry hands

Waiting to bite

The first sign of

Any food in sight

Youths in the dark

Searching for light

Hard time they face

Is not a choice

Police curfew

Is no surprise

And with no one

To be there voice

Do they stand a chance?

Where there’s, more hungry mouths

Then food to eat

Where you find those who

Claim to lead

Because of all there personal greed

They always want more than they need

They don’t help those

Below the half

Instead they stand aside and laugh

As if it’s all we’ll ever ask

When will they make a change?

Its like a punk never check

Or dem did forget

Say a death

We nature naughty

Ah true mi go born uptown

Tell dem fools don’t cross me

That’s only where Cindy brought me*

And that’s why they can’t impress me

With no boasty car

Me know dat ah kill dem softly

And then they’re not

Really even who they think they are

They’re not really moving crafty

Mi get fi understand

Say them plan dem faulty

Well nuff a dem a twenty

And favor forty

Filthy rich big belly

And hearty

Di real Gideon will

Be arriving shortly

Rasta nuh beat Binghi

Drum we claatt it

We live longer

Cause we food nuh salty

We grow stronger

And dem can’t assault we

So haile Rastafari love

And exhalt it

Bibliography

Betz, Hans Dieter. The Sermon on the Mount: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Including the Sermon on the Plain (Matthew 5:3-7:27 and Luke 6:20-49). Edited by Adela Yarbro Collins, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

Bovon, François. Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1-9:50. Translated by Christine M. Thomas. Edited by Helmut Koester, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.

Cassidy, Richard J. Jesus, Politics and Society: A Study of Luke’s Gospel. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1978.

Comfort, Philip W., and David P. Barrett. eds. The Complete Test of the Earliest New Testament Manuscripts. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999.

Culpepper, R. Alan. 1995. Luke. In Luke and John. Vol. 9 of The New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. Neil M. Alexander, 1-149.  Nashville: Abingdon.

Danker, Frederick W. Jesus and the New Age: A Commentary on St. Luke’s Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988.

Malina, Bruce J., and Richard L. Rohrbaugh. Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Marshall, I. Howard. The Gospel of Luke. The New International Greek Testament Commentary, Edited by I. Howard Marshall and W. Ward Gasque, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978.

Metzger, Bruce M. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Moxnes, Halvor. The Economy of the Kingdom: Social Conflict and Economic Relations in Luke’s Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988.

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