Browsing by Subject "Paul"
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Item Open Access A More Excellent Way: Dispute Resolution and Community Formation in Paul's Corinthian Ministry(2015) Maguire, Brian DanielSt. Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth provides an important resource for the work of dispute resolution. The letter reveals Paul’s unique approach to conflict. Using modern categories of alternative dispute resolution borrowed from the legal sciences, one can identify the structural approaches to conflict: negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and adjudication . These categories help a reader to peer behind Paul’s rhetoric to examine his method. Faced with particular conflicts in Corinth over divided factions in the community, disagreements about sexual conduct, and differences regarding food, Paul has many strong opinions. However, he never imposes those opinions on the Corinthian congregation. Paul never adjudicates, arbitrates, or even mediates between the parties. Instead, Paul undermines traditional understandings of power and authority in dispute resolution by demonstrating a new, cross-shaped, power-subverting approach to conflict. In addressing disputes, Paul articulates a new social ethic of solidarity based in love and points the community towards a new goal that transcends winning or losing, namely growing into the body of Christ as an organic whole. Through this process of formation, Paul seeks to both empower members of the congregation to negotiate disputes among themselves and to build up the community as whole.
Paul’s approach to conflict contrasts sharply with contemporary and traditional alternatives. Jewish practice, as evinced in the Septuagint, the New Testament, Josephus, and the Tractate Sanhedrin of the Mishnah, focused on adjudication or arbitration by an authoritative body of elders, the Sanhedrin. The Jerusalem assembly described in Acts adopted this approach to resolving disputes. Similarly, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus appears to adopt this traditional authoritative approach. Roman magistrates, in their exercise of imperium, readily adjudicated disputes backed with the threat of force. This consistent assumption of the power to adjudicate disputes is demonstrated in their correspondence and the New Testament. In adopting a cross-shaped approach to conflict, Paul turns away from the traditions of both the Sanhedrin and Roman law as he unsettles assumptions of power and authority.
Many modern churches adopt the authoritative methods of the Sanhedrin and Roman magistrates to resolve disputes today. This focus on arbitration, judgment, winning, and losing, corrodes community and solidarity. Paul’s unique approach to conflict provides a potentially transformative alternative that needs to be reappropriated today.
Item Open Access Liberation in the Midst of Futility and Destruction: Romans 8:19-22 and the Christian Vocation of Nourishing Life(2014) Burroughs, Presian ReneeIn an era of ecological upheaval that has led some scientists to declare that human activity has inaugurated a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the apocalyptic theology of the Apostle Paul speaks a timely word of ethical and practical import. In his letter to the Roman Christians, Paul calls for a conversion of behavior that resonates with and lends theological substantiation to the urgent calls of ecologists, climatologists, and others concerned for the wellbeing of the entire ecosphere. With a fundamental belief in the God who creates, sustains, and resurrects life, Paul's message in Romans 8:19-22 urges Christians to align their lives with the liberation that God intends for creation and that Jesus Christ has inaugurated through his life, death, and resurrection.
This dissertation examines Rom 8:19-22 in its literary, theological, imperial, and ecological contexts in order to illuminate the implications of Paul's thought for contemporary Christian living. Laying a biblical and theological foundation, the first chapter delineates the ways in which Old Testament texts assume a "relational pyramid" in which Israel, the nations, and nonhuman creation relate with one another and with God in ways that affect the wellbeing of all. In this vision, the conditions and destinies of human and nonhuman members of creation interdepend. Presupposing such a view of the world, Paul indicates throughout Romans, and especially in Rom 8:19-22, that creation's slavery to destruction results from human sin and that its liberation depends upon God's liberation and glorification of humanity, an argument developed in my second chapter. While this interpretation parallels common understandings of Rom 8:19-22, the frequently muted voice of creation is magnified when we recognize that the nonhuman creation too acts as subject, aligning itself with God's purposes, expectantly awaiting the resurrection of humanity, and collectively groaning and laboring towards that resurrection, the apocalypse of the "sons of God." Chapter three turns to relevant features of ancient Rome's religious, political, and agricultural traditions. Like Paul, the Roman imperial mythos maintained that human activity affected the health of creation. Yet, in contrast to Paul, it declared that Augustus, the divinely favored son of god, had established an age of peace and had brought fertility and abundance to the natural world. This "Golden Age" depended upon military power and the exploitation of conquered people and land, as an investigation of the Roman grain trade reveals. By placing Roman rhetoric and practice in conversation with Paul, chapter four demonstrates how Paul's vision of liberation subverts the Roman imperial mythos. The Epistle to the Romans insists that the empire's practices are among those that enslave creation to destruction and that the fulfillment of God's liberation will be established by Jesus Christ, the true Son of God, who will share his inheritance with his siblings, the children of God from all nations. In accord with their allegiance to Christ, his followers should live in ways that honor their relationships with human neighbors and also alleviate the destruction of creation, promote the flourishing of life and biodiversity, contribute to the wellbeing of creation's vulnerable members, and render thanksgiving to God. Exhibiting Paul's practical theology of creation and its powerful political bite, the fifth chapter examines and criticizes American industrial agriculture, particularly the growing of wheat in the Great Plains. In ways that parallel the Roman imperial myth, modern agriculture presents itself as liberating the world from famine through industrial power even as it masks the ways in which it binds creation to destruction. Inspired by the message of Romans, however, Christians find themselves called to unveil the powers of oppression and nurture sustainable communities of liberty, peace, and flourishing in harmony with creation. They may begin to do this by supporting local, organic, and perennial forms of agriculture with the hope that farmers may rely less on fossil fuels, toxic chemicals, and expensive seeds. In so doing, humans presage the liberty and flourishing of the New Creation as they mitigate the epoch-shifting and life-destroying events of climate change and species extinction.
Item Open Access Mystery and the Making of a Christian Historical Consciousness: From Paul to the Second Century(2014) Lang, TimothyOn 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.
Item Open Access Powerful Practices: Paul's Principalities and Powers Revisited(2012) Moses, Robert EwusieThe concept of principalities and powers is crucial for understanding Paul's theology and ethics, since for Paul the powers pervade all aspects of existence. We contend that Paul's conception of the powers is unintelligible without a developed account of the practices he advocated for the early believers. Thus, this study proposes "practice" as a category for understanding Paul's powers. A detailed study of Paul's letters reveals that there are certain practices that Paul believes guard believers from the dominion of the powers. Other practices, however, expose humans to the work of powers of darkness. We have labeled these practices as "powerful practices," activities that guard believers from the dominion of the powers or make believers and unbelievers vulnerable to the powers.
To achieve our aims in this study, we present other models offered for understanding the powers, embodied in the work of four Western scholars: Clinton Arnold, Rudolf Bultmann, Hendrik Berkhof, and Walter Wink. We show how each of the models represented by these scholars is inadequate for understanding Paul's principalities and powers, not least because each proposed model of the powers inhabits modernity's unfortunate dichotomy between theory and practice. This study hopes to move beyond this modern divide and to contribute to the conversation on how theological conviction is embedded in Christian practices.
We, thus, draw on two contemporary accounts of practices--in the works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Pierre Bourdieu--to shed light on a practical understanding of Paul's theology of the powers. Next, we investigate Paul's letters for "powerful practices." We show that Paul offers practices such as baptism, preaching, and ecclesial discipline as ways for engaging the powers. Paul also forbids such practices as idolatry and idol sacrificial meals, because these practices expose believers to demonic powers.
Finally, since the study of the powers cannot be isolated from context and context-driven questions, we provide a cross-cultural perspective to our study by investigating how the powers are interpreted in the African context in light of African traditional religious beliefs and practices. We draw on Paul's powerful practices to respond to contextual issues that arise within the African context.
Item Open Access Reading Galatians As Rhetorical Parody: Paul's Reinterpretation of Scriptural Demands for Obedience to the Law and the Implications for Understanding Faithfulness and Apostasy(2012) Dawson, Kathy BarrettVastly different opinions exist within New Testament scholarship regarding the relationship between Paul's ethical exhortations in Gal 5-6 and the theological portions of the letter. In an attempt to argue for the cohesiveness of Paul's argument in the letter as a whole, numerous commentaries outline the letter according to the principles that are described in the ancient handbooks on Greco-Roman rhetoric. Although outlining Galatians according to the typical parts of an ancient speech does provide a way of viewing the correspondence as a coherent argument, studying Galatians from the standpoint of Paul's adherence to the conventions of the technical rhetorical handbooks has produced problems of its own. First, there is no consensus as to whether or not Paul actually had obtained the highest level of rhetorical education in which the handbooks were studied. While some commentaries on Galatians (e.g., those written by Hans Dieter Betz and Ben Witherington III) propose that the apostle exhibits a rhetorical strategy in the letter that follows the conventions described in the rhetorical handbooks, other studies (e.g., the one by R. Dean Anderson Jr.) that compare Paul's letters with ancient rhetorical theory have concluded that Paul most likely had no knowledge of the principles of the rhetorical handbooks of his day. Another problem with minutely analyzing Galatians in terms of the conventions described in the ancient rhetoric handbooks is that Galatians is a letter, not a speech. Although ancient letters did usually follow the conventions of ancient epistolary theory, de Boer has most recently pointed out that efforts to classify Galatians as a particular type of rhetoric are misguided since ancient letters were freer compositions than ancient speeches. J. Louis Martyn has proposed that Galatians should be understood as an apocalyptic sermon and, therefore, since Paul was a divine messenger in preaching the gospel, the letter does not actually follow the conventions of a particular classification of ancient rhetoric. However, even scholars who propose that Paul had no technical knowledge of the rhetorical handbooks admit that certain rhetorical principles of speech and letter writing were ubiquitous in the Greco-Roman world.
This dissertation argues that one of the rhetorical principles that was prevalent in the first-century Greco-Roman world was the device of rhetorical parody. Although the word "parody" is usually associated today with the connotation of burlesque or absurdity, a type of humorous parody that did exist in the ancient world, ancient rhetorical parody should be understood as either an altered quotation of a recognizable text or saying or a newly created saying that closely resembles a recognizable one. Also, ancient rhetorical parody should be understood as a stylistic rhetorical device that was designed to add vividness and polemical intensity to an argument by way of incongruity. In an effort to persuade an audience, a recognizable text or saying was transformed and given a new meaning, one that might be quite incongruous with its original meaning. While this type of rhetorical device was discussed by ancient rhetoricians, its use was common in the everyday conversations of a literate person in the first century. Therefore the ability to use the device of rhetorical parody did not require a rhetorical education in which one studied the handbooks. Rather, it was a process by which a person altered an existing saying or text, possibly one that had been used by one's opponent in an argument, in order to gain an advantage over the opponent. Ancient rhetorical parody differs from irony in that irony presents a meaning different from the normal meaning of the words spoken. Irony, therefore, does not require an underlying saying or text.
After determining a definition of ancient rhetorical parody, this study investigates whether or not an understanding of Paul's use of rhetorical parody in Galatians might clarify some of Paul's puzzling statements. The investigation is limited to the statements that Paul made in Galatians and does not attempt to understand the letter via Paul's other letters. This study seeks to determine if Paul's scriptural quotations and allusions might be a parodic reinterpretation of Scriptures that demanded Torah-obedience in order to dissociate obeying the Mosaic law from faithfulness to God. The study is not limited to the Scriptures that were later canonized by the Church, but it is limited to the Greek text of writings since rhetorical parody is a play on the words of the hypotext.
A comparison of Galatians with Scriptures that demanded obedience to the Mosaic law or praised individuals who championed the law reveals that Paul parodically reinterpreted scriptural passages in order to dissociate the rejection of the Mosaic law from the curse of the law. The curse of the law is shown to refer not only to slavery, but also to spiritual death. This study also reveals that the law-free Galatians were being excluded from the faith community on the basis that they were unrepentant sinners. Additionally, Gal 3-4 is best understood as Paul's argument against the confluence of the covenant with Abraham and the Mosaic law.
This dissertation concludes that understanding Paul's use of rhetorical parody not only clarifies several puzzling statements in the letter, but also demonstrates that Paul's exhortations in Gal 5-6 address the Galatian situation just as much as the theological sections do.
Item Open Access Revealing the Power: New Creation Epistemology for Adolescent Girls(2015) PeckMcClain, Emily AnneAdolescent girls need a meaningful and liberative theological lens for interpreting their lives. I argue that a close reading of Romans 6-8 offers this lens because of Paul’s apocalyptic understanding of the present time, the implications of the crucifixion of Christ, and the promise of the coming new creation. I additionally argue that critical liberative pedagogical strategies enable girls to see from this new perspective with the help of adults, particularly adult women, in their communities of faith.
Adolescent girls are subjected to different layers of oppression in the United States. They are given no voice and no vote in the public sphere. Their silence is assumed by their churches as well. Additionally, all girls struggle against sexism. Racism, classism, sizism, and heterosexism also impact some girls. Girls experience prejudice related to all these areas of oppression in their lives in personal ways. Pauline apocalypticism offers a way to understand these experiences and how they occur in order to liberate girls from taking responsibility for the ways others objectify them.
Using conversational interviews based on the work of Elliot Mishler, I spoke with 24 girls who are active in United Methodist Churches in the New York Annual Conference. I then did a close exegetical reading of Romans 6-8, and put the interviews into conversation with that reading. Emerging from those interviews were specific themes especially important to these girls. Some theological insights from Romans 6-8 are particularly pertinent to those themes. The conversation between Romans 6-8 and the interviews with girls led to pedagogical suggestions for how to help girls see from Paul’s perspective and interpret their stories and their lives in real time according to that perspective.
Girls need to be included in the full life of the church, something that is theologically supported by Paul’s understanding of the individual as always in relationship. The church is a corporate body of those participating in Christ by means of their baptism. When girls see with a new perspective, a “new creation perspective,” they can see the powers of Sin and Death manifesting in their lives through these oppressive systems. Girls need mentors who will form an alliance with them for the interpreting of their own lives from an apocalyptic perspective and against the powers of Sin and Death as they manifest in girls’ lives both in and outside the church. These mentors should be women who can share their own stories from a new creation perspective, welcome girls’ stories, help girls interpret their stories, and work to help the whole church be a welcoming community of co-interpreters for girls.
Item Open Access Rewritten Gentiles: Conversion to Israel's 'Living God' and Jewish Identity in Antiquity(2014) HicksKeeton, JillThis dissertation examines the ideological developments and strategies of boundary formation which accompanied the sociological novelty of gentiles’ becoming Jews in the Second Temple period. I argue that the phenomenon of gentile conversion influenced ancient Jews to re–conceive their God as they devised new ways to articulate the now–permeable boundary between Jew and ‘other,’ between insiders and outsiders. Shaye Cohen has shown that this boundary became porous as the word ‘Jew’ took on religious and political meanings in addition to its ethnic connotations. A gentile could therefore become a Jew. I focus on an ancient Jewish author who thought that gentiles not only could become Jews, but that they should: that of Joseph and Aseneth. Significant modifications of biblical traditions about God, Israel, and ‘the other’ were necessary in order to justify, on ideological grounds, the possibility of gentile access to Jewish identity and the Jewish community.
One such rewritten tradition is the relationship of both Jew and gentile to the ‘living God,’ a common epithet in Israel’s scriptures. Numerous Jewish authors from the Second Temple period, among whom I include the apostle Paul, deployed this biblical epithet in various ways in order to construct or contest boundaries between gentiles and the God of Israel. Whereas previous scholars have approached this divine title exclusively as a theological category, I read it also as a literary device with discursive power which helps these authors regulate gentile access to Israel’s God and, in most cases, to Jewish identity. Joseph and Aseneth develops an innovative theology of Israel’s ‘living God’ which renders this narrative exceptionally optimistic about the possibilities of gentile conversion and incorporation into Israel. Aseneth’s tale uses this epithet in conjunction with other instances of ‘life’ language not only to express confidence in gentiles’ capability to convert, but also to construct a theological articulation of God in relationship to repentant gentiles which allows for and anticipates such conversion. A comparison of the narrative’s ‘living God" terminology to that of the book of Jubilees and the apostle Paul sets into relief the radical definition of Jewishness which Joseph and Aseneth constructs — a definition in which religious practice eclipses ancestry and under which boundaries between Jew and ‘other’ are permeable.
Item Open Access Sexing the Jew: Early Christian Constructions of Jewishness(2008-12-10) Drake, Susanna LaingMy dissertation analyzes early Christian representations of Jewish sexuality and explores how early Christian writers attacked opponents by depicting them as subjects of perverse or excessive sexual desires. Beginning with the New Testament, I examine how Paul employed sexual stereotypes to distinguish the community of believers in Christ from the wider Gentile world. In the decades after Paul, Greek writers such as Justin Martyr and the author of the Epistle of Barnabas turned accusations of sexual licentiousness and literalist interpretive practices against the Jews. Origen of Alexandria, moreover, utilized accusations of carnality, fleshliness, and sexual licentiousness to produce Jewish-Christian difference; he drew on dichotomies of "flesh" and "spirit" in Paul's letters to support his argument for the superiority of Christian "spiritual" exegesis over Jewish "carnal" exegesis. Examining the writings of major Christian writers such as Origen and John Chrysostom, I argue that Christian sexual slander against Jews intensified as Christian exegetes endeavored to claim Jewish scripture for Christian use in the third and fourth centuries. My research examines these literary constructions of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings of Greek Fathers and illuminates how these constructions function in relation to the development of Christian biblical hermeneutics, the formation of Christian practices of self-mastery, and the expansion of Christian imperial power. By exploring how early Christian writers appealed to categories of gender and sexuality to produce Jewish-Christian difference, I aim to contribute to recent scholarship on the variety of strategies by which early Christians negotiated identity and defined Otherness.