Sermon Tone Analysis

Communion and Koinonia: Pauline Reflections on Tolerance and Boundaries

 

N.

T. Wright \\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

A paper given at the /Future of Anglicanism Conference,/ Oxford, 2002 \\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

* *

*Introduction: Paul’s Context* \\ \\ From the very beginning, the church was faced with the problem of different cultures coming together.

Even in the earliest days, when all Christians were Jews, there were Greek-speaking Jews and Hebrew (or Aramaic-) speaking Jews, and problems arose between them.

Even during the public career of Jesus, there were different reactions to him, including among his own followers, and we may suppose that these were sometimes to do with what we would call culture just as much as they may have been to do with personality, preference, temperament, level of faith, and so forth.

Once the Christian message reached the Gentile world, not least in a swirling pluralistic metropolis like Antioch, all the cultures of the Orient would be jostling together, and the impact of this rich mixture on the church was bound to be considerable.

Coping with a pluralist environment was not, of course, anything new for Jews, and early Christianity remained very firmly Jewish.

Diaspora Judaism had faced the challenge of the pagan environment for many centuries; nor was there an iron curtain screening off Palestine from pagan influences.

‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ may have been home to many zealous and Torah-observant Jews, but it also contained many Gentile institutions, and, ever since the time of Alexander the Great, Hellenistic culture had been the backdrop for ordinary life in the Middle East.

Sometimes this culture had forced itself on Judaism, as under Antiochus Epiphanes, persuading some to compromise their Judaism, to go along with the pagan ways, and others to take to the hills, plot revolt, and prepare for martyrdom.

The folk memory of this and other clashes were alive and well in the first century, not least among those who, like Saul of Tarsus, were ‘zealous for Torah’.

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

The problem of what counts as compromise, what is perfectly acceptable, what must be resisted at all costs, and what you may get away with for a while but should expect to tidy up sooner or later – all of this is therefore familiar ground to most Jews of the first century, certainly those who did any travelling.

And that, of course, is what Paul spent a lot of time doing, living for a while not only in Antioch but also in Ephesus and Corinth, with shorter stays in other places around the Mediterranean and Aegean seaboard.

He was thoroughly familiar with the different customs of different places, and with the problems of Christian behaviour that arose from them.

His letters, particularly those to Corinth, reflect exactly this set of questions, and are a goldmine for those prepared to work at finding out what he really had to say.

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

One theme of Paul’s letters, particularly those to Corinth and Rome, is his emphasis on the need to tolerate, within the Christian fellowship, those who have different opinions on contentious issues.

1 Corinthians 8-10 and Romans 14 stand out here; though, from a somewhat different angle, Galatians 2 is also extremely relevant, and as we shall see Colossians 2 and 3 need to be factored into the picture as well.

But it clearly will not do to simply say that Paul advocates ‘tolerance’ and leave it at that.

In the same letters there are a good many passages in which he shows himself robustly intolerant of all kinds of types and modes of behaviour.

How can we give an account of this?

Was Paul just inconsistent, trying to get people to put up with one another’s foibles but insisting that his prejudices at least were sacrosanct?

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

This highlights our central theme, which is koinonia, ‘fellowship’ or ‘partnership’, and what it means in practice.

Paul is our earliest Christian writer.

He preached the gospel in a radically plural world, with every variety of culture, religion, politics, and ethics.

He did indeed insist on justification by faith, and on the unity of Jew and Gentile, and by implication everyone else too, in Christ.

What did he mean by this?

What was the basis of his ‘tolerance’?

How do we explain the times when, despite urging tolerance and unity, he lays down firm rules, even to the extent of insisting that people who break them should be put out of Christian fellowship?

\\ \\ *Perspectives on Paul, the Law, ‘Tolerance’ and Ethics* \\ \\ As most of you will know, there has been a remarkable shift of opinion in Pauline scholarship over the last generation.

The massive though uneven work of Ed P. Sanders, mainly in his book /Paul and Palestinian Judaism/ (1977), heralded what was quickly called ‘the new perspective on Paul’.

The very phrase has become something of a red rag to several bulls over the last two or three years, and this is not the time to enter into the current debate in any detail.

I want to state two things very clearly: first, that the so-called new perspective on Paul, with its main exponents as Sanders and Dunn, has made two or three important, accurate and theologically fruitful points; second, that it has also got quite a lot of things wrong, and has in certain cases not followed through its own insights where they properly should have gone.

I am thus a critical insider to the New Perspective, supporting some of its main thrusts but remaining deeply critical at certain other points.

If you want to see how this works out in practice, read my new commentary on Romans in volume 10 of the /New Interpreter’s Bible/.

It simply won’t do to wave the New Perspective away, as some have tried to do, and to go back to Martin Luther as though he solved all our problems.

Luther got some things gloriously right and other things gloriously wrong.

If, for instance, you have to choose between Luther and Calvin in New Testament theology, in my judgement you should normally go with Calvin; that, in fact, was where I myself came in, wresting with Charles Cranfield’s essentially Calvinistic interpretation of Paul and Romans, knowing that it was superior to the Lutheran and evangelical commentaries I was used to, but discovering at an exegetical level it didn’t quite work.

It was in that context, in the mid-1970’s, that I read Sanders, and found that, though there was much I didn’t agree with at the time and still don’t, there was also much that was helpful in the essential task: allowing the text to speak for itself, instead of imposing our traditions upon it.

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

So what are the true insights of the ‘new perspective’, and how may they help us in thinking about koinonia, tolerance, and related issues?

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

The main thrust of Sanders’s work, which I endorse, is that first century Judaism was not a system of Pelagian-style works-righteousness.

First century Jews were not imagining that they had to earn ‘righteousness’, that is, basic membership in God’s people, membership in the covenant, through doing moral good deeds.

They did not regard the Torah, the Jewish law, as a ladder of good works up which they had to climb, with salvation as the reward at the top.

On the contrary.

As any good Calvinist could have told Sanders, they regarded the Torah as a good, lovely, God-given thing, not a ladder of good works for eager merit-earners, but the way of life for the people already redeemed.

God chose Israel; God redeemed Israel from slavery in Egypt by an act of sheer grace and power; and God then gave Israel the Torah, not to earn their status with God but to demonstrate it.

Now it is true, of course, that the Mishnah and Talmud, the codified commentaries and elaborations on Torah-keeping which grew up over the half-millennium after Paul’s day, do indeed look like the kind of casuistical law-mongering which many people think of today when they hear the word ‘legalism’.

But Sanders’s point here stands, despite many attempts to dislodge it.

The main motive for keeping the law in Judaism was not to earn membership in the people of God, or justification or salvation, but to express one’s gratitude for it, to demonstrate one’s membership, and ultimately to become the sort of person God clearly intended you to become.

In Lutheran terms, it was tertius usus legis.

In Calvinist terms, this was why God gave the law in the first place.

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

What then about the famous Pauline phrase, ‘works of law’?

Here is the second insight of the ‘new perspective’ comes into play, which I shall argue is the key one for discussion we need in today’s Anglican communion in discussions of koinonia, tolerance, and boundaries.

James Dunn has argued strongly, following the line of thought which I myself pioneered but taking it a stage further, that ‘the works of the law’ which Paul declares do not justify are not in general moral principles, a ‘law’ in that sense, but ‘the works of the law’ which marked out Jews from their pagan neighbours.

They are, in other words, circumcision, the food laws, and the sabbaths – the three things which every Jew in the ancient world, and many pagans in the ancient world too, knew were the boundary–markers between Jews and pagans.

The point in keeping these was to say, "We are Jews, not pagans outside the Torah.

We are God’s people; he has made his covenant with us; we are called to be the light of the world, and by keeping God’s law we will keep ourselves separate from the world and show the world who God really is’.

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

The third insight which I myself bring to, and take from the New Perspective has to do with Paul’s critique of Israel.

Paul’s critique of Israel is not that Israel is guilty of the kind of legalism of which Augustine criticised Pelagius, or Luther criticised Erasmus.

Certainly Paul is not accusing Israel of the half-hearted moralistic Pelagianism of which, it used to be said, the average Englishman was guilty of most of the time, doing a few good deeds now and then and hoping God would notice and give him a pat on the back at the end of the day.

(There aren’t so many people like that around today, as you may have noticed.)

Rather, Paul is criticising Israel, his own former self included, for saying that God was exclusively Israel’s God.

Israel, he says, is ignorant of God’s righteousness, and is seeking to establish her own, a ‘righteousness’ which would be for Jews and Jews only; whereas, in Jesus the Jewish Messiah, and by the cross and resurrection, God has thrown open covenant membership, ‘righteousness’, to all who believe (Romans 10.1-4) \\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

This very brief account of three points where I believe New Perspective has its finger on a key issue which is of enormous help exegetically and theologically.

It does not, as is sometimes suggested, mean losing anything from the cutting edge of the gospel as we have traditionally understood it; on the contrary, it sharpens it up.

But there is no time to develop this here.

Rather, I want to indicate the enormous gain, precisely for the debates which face us in the Anglican Communion, in understanding Paul this way.

The point is this: when Paul appeals for ‘tolerance’ in the church, the issues over which he saying there should be no quarrels are precisely the issue where there were cultural boundary-markers, especially between Jewish and Gentile Christians.

He is not being arbitrary in selecting some apparently ‘ethical’ issues to go soft on, while remaining firm on others.

The things about which Christians must be prepared to agree or disagree are the things which would otherwise divide the church along ethnic lines.

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

This point is sometimes missed because of the clever writing of the key chapter, Romans 14. Nowhere does Paul mention the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Gentile’, though it eventually becomes explicit in the next chapter.

He doesn’t want them to focus on the fact that some of them are Jewish and others of them are Gentile.

He wants them to say to themselves, ‘Some of us in this new movement are happy eating any meat at all, others prefer to stick to vegetables.’ (If all the meat you could get in a pagan city had been sacrificed to idols, and if all the cheap meat you could get was pork, obviously people with Jewish scruples, or with tender consciences of young ex-pagan Christians converted after years of assiduous idol-worship, might well decide to go the vegetarian route instead.)

‘Some of us’, he wants them to say, ‘like to observe special days in honour of the Lord; others of us are happy to treat all, days the same way.’

Then, in 1 Corinthians 7, he says, in effect, ‘some of us are circumcised and are happy to be that way; others of us are uncircumcised and should be happy to stay that way.’

In all these things he wants Christians to stop thinking of themselves as basically belonging to this or that ethnic group, and to see the practices that formerly demarcated that ethnic group from all others as irrelevant, things you can carry on doing if you like but which you shouldn’t insist on for others.

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

This, too, is what underlies the debate about justification and circumcision in Galatians 2. The question underneath the passage is not, ‘Do we have to perform good moral deeds in order to get to heaven,’ but rather, ‘Are Jewish Christians allowed to sit down and eat at the same table as Gentile Christians, when the latter have not been circumcised?’

For Paul this is a central issue; the heart of the gospel is at stake.

When Jesus Christ died and rose again he transformed the covenant people of God into a single, worldwide family for whom the only defining badge is faith, not just any old faith but the very specific faith that Jesus is risen from the dead as Messiah and Lord of the world.

This, indeed, is the meaning of ‘justification by faith’; that it is this faith, and this faith alone, that marks out God’s people in the present time.

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

Making this distinction between ‘works’ in general, ‘lawkeeping’ in general if you like, and the more specific ‘works’ which mark the distinction between Jew and Gentile, frees us once and for all from the tyranny of that vague liberalism which holds that Paul played ‘faith’ off against ‘law’ or ‘works’, and which then uses that as a way of avoiding the sharp edges of every ethical issue in sight.

If you want to know why Paul insisted on tolerating some differences of opinion and practice within the people of God, and on not tolerating others, the answer is that the ones that were to be tolerated were the ones that carried the connotations of ethnic boundary lines, and the ones that were not to be tolerated were the ones that marked the difference between genuine, living, renewed humanity and false, corruptible, destructive humanity.

This is my shorthand for a range of issues which he deals with in several passages.

I take one classic example, from Colossians.

\\ <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> \\ <!--[endif]-->

In Colossians 2 Paul insists that the Jewish law has nothing to say to you if you are in Christ.

If with the Messiah you died to the elements of the world, why should you submit to mere human regulations – touch not, taste not, handle not!

These, he says, all have an appearance of wisdom and of promoting ascetic discipline, but they are of no real value.

You don’t need Jewish law, particularly food laws, in order to define who the people of God are and build them up as God’s truly human people.