This
is part four in an ongoing series of chapter summaries of N.T. Wright’ book,
Paul in a Fresh Perspective. Today we summarize chapter 4: Gospel and Empire.
Paul was a Roman citizen and we cannot
ignore that point when we seek to enter into the worldview and perspective of
the Apostle. For Wright, Paul’s Roman-ness is a key part of the way he writes
and what he says. He does not merely proclaim the coming of Messiah in a
vacuum, but rather does so with a keen eye to the politics and society that
have indoctrinated his audience. So much of what Paul has to say in his
collected letters and messages is in response to a creeping and pervasive
ideology that has come from the Roman state and in particular the Emperor Cult
that has commanded the worship of it’s citizens. In this chapter Wright seeks
to lay down Paul’s critique of Caesar and help his readers to understand that
this Gospel that Paul preached was a message that challenged the very heart of
what Rome was and what it stood for in his day.
The first thing Wright does is to warn the
reader that Paul is not like us. We are culturally, and epistemologically,
products of the enlightenment. We see the world through the lens of that
revolution and in particular are trapped by the enlightenment categories of left
and right on the political spectrum. Wright wants to insist to the reader that
Paul does not live in this world and that our cookie-cutter political
categories do not apply to him in any useful way. (p. 60)
He then goes onto talk about allusion
within Pauline writings, particularly subversive ideas that criticize the empire
and how we can properly detect them within a broader corpus of work. Using
Richard Hays’ criteria for finding echoes of Scripture, Wright applies the same
methodology to the search for political subversion and advocates that readers
do likewise through assessing the seven criteria of: Availability, volume,
recurrence, thematic coherence, historical plausibility, history of
interpretation, and satisfaction. (p. 61)
“We perhaps need to comment that, though
this seems complex and cumbersome, it is only so for us, not for the first
century writers and readers we are attempting to understand. If, two thousand
years from now, a historian were attempting to understand the writings of our world,
he or she would deed to work back, with labour and difficulty, into a universe
of discourse where minor characters from soap operas jostled with small time
politicians, alluding to weapons inspectors on the one hand and boat races on
the other, where and echo of Shakespeare might not be recognized though a line
from an Elton John son probably would. We move effortlessly in this world, but
others would have to reconstruct it inch by inch. That is the kind of thing we
are trying to do, with very limited information, with Paul and his world. The
one thing we can be sure of is that it was more complex and many-layered than
most of our attempts at reconstruction can ever be.” (p. 62)
Wright then shifts gears to tell the
reader’s digest version of the story of Rome and particularly the history of
the cult of Caesar. All of the pro to-Christian language is there along with
the nuance and the names that today seem like the have always been ours to
command within the church. There is the story of salvation, the son of God
leading his people, there is the essence of euangelion - the gospel, there was
even the story of the chosen people who had risen to a place of being the great
hope of the world. (p. 64) Yet none of these stories or ideas were created or
dreamed up by the church, this is the language of the Empire, and the imperial
cult - the worship of Caesar was the fastest growing religion in the
Mediterranean world.
So what was Paul’s response to the gospel
of Caesar? Well Paul was not a trailblazer by any means in resisting the
influence and power of a pagan empire. The Jewish people have a long history of
that, one that even predates Rome itself. Paul was simply another faithful Jew
resting the overtures of a pagan king who saw himself as more than he was and
who sought to come between the one true God and his chosen people. One
important point that Wright wants to hammer home however is that rejection of
pagan authority by the Jews (and Paul in particular) does not equate (as modern
thinkers might be wont to do) with anarchy. Yahweh is still a god of order and
still “wants the world to be ordered, to keep evil in check, otherwise
wickedness simply flourishes and naked power and aggression wins. But the
rulers of the world are themselves answerable to God, not least at the point
where they use their pose to become just like the bullies the are supposed to
be restraining.” (p. 68)
So having established the world in which
Paul was living, ministering and speaking to, Wright takes a stab at outlining
what he calls Paul’s counter-imperial theology. In many ways this theological
manifesto is merely a summary of the previous two chapters on Creation-Covenant
and Messiah-Apocalyptic but now for the first time Wright starts to pull back
the curtain on Paul’s worldview and shows the reader how these beliefs get
worked out in Paul’s very real ministry.
“According to Paul’s view of creation, the
one God was responsible for the whole world and would one day put it to rights.
According to his covenant theology, this God would rescue his people from pagan
oppression. His messianic theology hailed Jesus as King, Lord and Saviour, the
one at whose name every knee would bow. His apocalyptic theology saw God
unveiling his own saving justice in the death and resurrection of the Messiah.
At every point, therefore, we should expect what we in fact find: that, for
Paul, Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not.” (p. 69)
Along the way Wright camps on some key
counter-imperial texts, none more so than Philippians 3. It is in the third
chapter of Philippians that Paul gives his most clarion call to live out the
real gospel in the face of the empire. To choose Jesus over Caesar and to
choose citizenship in heaven over citizenship in empire. (p. 71) This is
nothing particularly revelatory to anyone who has spent time reading
Philippians but Wright does a good job of highlighting the nuances that could
easily be missed - what did come as shocking though was that Wright connects
this counter imperial sentiment backwards to the Christ hymn of Philippians 2.
Drawing on the work of Peter Oakes, Wright highlights four important
connections between the language of the hymn and the “regular rhetoric in which
Caesar’s rule was legitimated.”
First, Wright insists that Paul in
Philippians 2 is drawing on the imperial critique of Isaiah 40-55 to make a
counter-claim about Jewish monotheism. Second, that monotheism is wrapped up in
a high christology as Paul ascribes to Jesus the title kyrios (Lord) knowing
full well that in the LXX (the Greek Old Testament) kyrios is translated as
YHWH - the name of God. What Paul is claiming about Jesus is a direct challenge
to imperial theology. Third, Paul draws focus through the way he constructs the
poetry of the hymn to the phrase ‘the death of the cross’, which is a direct
challenge to imperial power by taking one of the great symbols of Roman might
and turning it against the empire in a highly subversive claim. “It took genius
to see that the symbol which had spoken of Caesar’s naked might now spoke of
God’s naked love.” (p. 73) and fourth, the oft-misunderstood instruction to
‘work out your salvation with fear and trembling’ is a direct call to “work out
in practice what it means to live by this salvation rather than the one their
culture is forcing upon them.” (p. 74)
In the end, for Wright this political
aspect to Paul’s theology is the door that is opened with the key of the
previous four themes he addressed in chapters 2 and 3. This is Paul at his most
strident and confrontational - adamant in his belief that God’s kingdom is here
and that means that the old kingdoms need to tremble and fall to their knees.
Rome is being put on notice in what Wright once again identifies as inaugurated
eschatology.
“Paul comes to Rome, ‘not ashamed of this
gospel’, as he says in 1.16, because - and here, clearly every phrase counts -
the gospel is God’s power (that word
again) to salvation (that word again)
to all who believe, in other words,
all those who are faithful and loyal; because in it, God’s dikaiosynē, God’s iustutua,
God’s saving covenant-based justice, is unveiled for all, the Jew first and
also the Greek. Through the gospel, in other words, the one true God is
claiming the allegiance of the entire world, since the gospel itself caries the
same power which raised Jesus from the dead, unveiling the true salvation an d
the true justice before a world where those were already key imperial
buzzwords.” (p. 77)
This is the real good news!
Thus ends the first section of the book. In
the next post we will begin the shift from themes to structures as we continue
to examine Paul in a Fresh Perspective with N.T. Wright.
No comments:
Post a Comment