Browsing by Author "Campbell, Douglas A"

On the most general, theological level this dissertation explores the origins, ensuing articulations, and intellectual implications of what has been characterized as a new Christian "political-historical consciousness" (politisch-historisches Bewusstsein)&mdashthat totalizing reconception of history and ecclesial identity that enabled early Christians to imagine themselves as simultaneously new to the world in terms of revelation and yet also ancient with respect to God's eternal plan. On the more specific and descriptive level, I propose that a key to mapping the early development of this new historical consciousness comes via detailed analysis of a single term introduced by the apostle Paul into the Christian theological lexicon, the noun mysterion and the particular understanding of history and revelation that is commonly coupled with it, an understanding I refer to in varying ways as the "once hidden, now revealed" mystery schema. It is, I claim, the historical arrangement of this once hidden/now revealed discourse, and thus the comprehensive division of time into adjacent eras of concealment and revelation, that provided Christians of the first two centuries with the intellectual architecture and concomitant discursive schema that formulated and then further legitimized some of the most original claims of Christian theology. Among these claims are, most notably, ecclesiological propositions regarding the status of the Gentiles among the people of God, hermeneutical propositions related to the revisionary Christian readings of Israel's scriptures, and christological propositions about the unified identity of the newly revealed Christ and the creator God of Israel. Insofar as such propositions were named as mysteries--which is to say, as realities newly revealed but eternally known by the God of Israel--and yet were argued independently of, if not in contradiction of, Torah and other authoritative Jewish writings (see chapters five), or on the basis of Jewish scriptures but without any obvious presence in their "plain sense" (see chapters six and seven), or by appeal to what had become a textual field of authoritative Christian writings (see chapter eight), some sort of new intellectual apparatus was needed to articulate these novel claims. The notion of an eternal mystery previously hidden but recently disclosed to the world, provided just such an apparatus. A detailed lexical analysis of "mystery" in Paul and other early Christian authors should thus provide a helpful constraint for analyzing these larger and less tangible subjects of early Christian thinking about divine revelation and the structure of history.

To be clear, in training my attention on the word and the "once hidden, now revealed" discourse, I am not presuming some sort of idealized concept-in-word equation (or, in this case, a discourse-in-word equation), the error of nomenclaturism as Saussure termed it. Nor am I suggesting that mysterion had any sort of fixed meaning, much less a totality of meanings to be smuggled into every occurrence. The linguistic axioms that words and things share no inviolable, one-to-one correspondence, and that sentences (or more complex syntactical strucutres), not individual lexemes, are to be regarded as the fundamental units determining meaning should by now be truisms. My focus on mysterion is simply motivated, first, by the observation that when this signifier is used by early Christian authors it most frequently refers to some theological or hermeneutical claim that was previously hidden but is now currently disclosed and thus, second, by the practicality of treating this word as a limiting heuristic for analyzing the more nebulous hidden/revealed discursive formation. This is not to confuse the word for the discourse. Rather it is to use this particular word, which so often appears to be a near technical term for the discourse, as an entry point into it.

This dissertation offers a solution to several interpretive problems arising at the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Romans, particularly from Rom 1:18–3:20. Why do these chapters evince a distinct account of the knowledge of God, of the natural law, of sin and human capacity, and of salvation by works of Law. And why do they define a “true” Jew differently from what is found in the rest of the letter? Building on the earlier work of scholars who recognize key dialogical features in Romans that signal the presence of an authorially constructed interlocutor, I analyze these problems in light of the ancient rhetorical conventions for speech-in-character. I argue that the conceptual tensions generated by this text over against what Paul says elsewhere—extending at times to the level of contradictions—were categorized by ancient readers as διαφωνία prompting them to seek a “solution from the character” (λύσις ἐκ τοῦ προσώπου). The reader resolves the tensions, that is, by determining which material was appropriate for each character in a dialogue. This analysis results in (1) a coherent dialogical script for 1:18–3:20 that conforms to the criteria and conventions of ancient dialogues and that resolves the besetting tensions scholars have long wrestled with in this text; and (2) a more reliable body of evidence for the identification of Paul’s interlocutor, the one who “calls [him]self a Jew” (2:17), as a distinctively Philonic Jewish teacher who may also be a proselyte. Numerous Philonic details are recognizable within the argument, and these function in support of the dialogical script proposed.

This dissertation begins a conversation between "apocalyptic" interpretations of the Apostle Paul and the contemporary revival in "virtue ethics." It argues that the human actor's place in Pauline theology has long been captive to theological concerns foreign to Paul and that we can discern in Paul a classical account of human action that Alasdair MacIntyre's work helps to recover. Such an account of agency helps ground an apocalyptic reading of Paul by recovering the centrality of the church and its day-to-day Christic practices, specifically, but not exclusively, the Eucharist. To demonstrate this we first offer a critique of some contemporary accounts of agency in Paul in light of MacIntyre's work. Three exegetical chapters then establish a "MacIntyrian" re-reading of central parts of the letter to the Romans. A concluding chapter offers theological syntheses and prospects for future research.

This dissertation addresses a long-standing but rarely discussed problem in Pauline studies: given Paul’s understanding of how God has acted in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit to overcome death, how do we explain the ongoing existence of death? Through an examination of the Pauline letters, particularly Romans, this dissertation offers two interrelated explanations, one causal and the other teleological or purposive. From the causal perspective, it is argued that sin in the form of the sinful passions remains connected to the body even of Christians, which allows sin to exercise an ongoing corrupting influence on the body. From the teleological or purposive angle, it is contended that God uses the mortal condition to deepen the divine-human and intrahuman relationships.