Taking a Second Look at Paul

Three years ago, we had a group meeting at our church, mainly men – not that the women were uninterested in Paul, but apparently they were not interested in us! We called the group “Raw Paul” reflecting our method of reading and trusting our intuitions for clues as to how to interpret these texts. At the same time, we looked at some of the new work being done by the next generation of critical scholars and found that we were well advised to be careful as we repeat some of the bigger generalizations that have emerged over the years. Presently, I am focusing my attention on Mark (see link below). I have decided that my next study following Mark, which will probably take another six months at the rate I am going, will be Hebrews particularly because folks are so ready to proof-text from it. Perhaps at that point, I might revisit Paul.

Today, I just wanted to share a couple of comments that I made to a colleague recently as he began to engage in his own study of Paul's letters. I hope this helps you as well. It is popular to speak of Paul as the first Christian missionary. I find that more and more problematic. Instead, I think Paul might be more appropriately called the last Jewish apostle. There really wasn’t a Christian church (gathering) at the time Paul is working with his cadres. Paul’s discussion of Gentiles being grafted to Judaism seems to make this point. While some writers talk of Jewish Christians, it seems to me more correct to speak of Christian Jews.

You will not be surprised that I am hesitant to draw generalizations about “the Law,” especially when it is used to mark a contrast with a Christianity that supersedes traditional Judaism. As you get into seminary, I would suggest that you look up Krister Stendahl’s study of these matters found in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Most contemporary scholars trace the new questions about Paul that they are seeking to answer back to Stendahl’s work.

Recently, I attended a public lecture by Julie Galambush, The Reluctant Separation, where she points out that in the Judaism (Judaisms) of the day, most folks found the claim by this new apocalyptic group about Jesus as messiah problematic, especially as they venerated Jesus, who was executed - more accurately lynched as a political subversive. Such a proclamation did not meet the expectations of what the messiah would be (and they were right) but also speaking of such revolutionary matters was dangerous. It is the proclamation that Jesus was the messiah that was a stumbling block to Jews, not the Law.

Galambush pointed out that the sect that I have designated as Christian Jews had two factions – both believed that the time had arrived for Gentiles to gather around Israel as many prophets had longed for, but whether these folks needed to become Jewish split the group. We know this, but don’t spend a lot of time dissecting the implications. Obviously, Paul is in the faction that argued that Gentiles need not (or perhaps could not?) become Jews and therefore they should not be circumcised. Timothy, who indeed was a Jew by birth, was circumcised. The New Testament was written by this anti-circumcising faction. We get hints of the presence of their opponents, but there are no remaining writings. Perhaps, we meet these folks later in the so-called Ebionite movement. Of course, this stand by Paul and others put his Gentile followers in a difficult position. Paul seems to have taken good pagans and turned them into bad pagans. They must turn away from their Gods and their associated civic duty, but since they were not Jews (and according to Paul can not become Jews), they did not have the protections that Jews had won for themselves in relation to Roman worship responsibilities. Paul clearly thought that everything was going to end very soon; I don’t think his counsel to endure could have been sustained without this assumption.

Certainly some folks who want to tell women to shut up in church (most likely translated today as don’t pursue ordination), or tell homosexuals to go away, find some of their justification in texts and writings attributed to Paul. As a “progressive,” I find in Paul a willingness to re-image theological notions in light of current experience. For example, Paul was willing to develop a much broader notion of righteousness that certainly included Jewish participation in the law, but also included a kind of analogous faithfulness for Gentiles and that could also be defined as righteousness. It seems clear to me that this was grounded for Paul in the personal experience that he could not finally deny of genuine hope and love among Gentiles. In that light, orthodoxy can be rethought.

As I read Paul, he thinks that any expression of sex beyond the missionary position is an act of pagan decadence. Not withstanding Paul’s first century viewpoint, I believe that today he might find in the gifts and graces for ministry regularly demonstrated by our GLBT colleagues evidence that some more limited past notions about who should be ordained need to be re-imaged.

I take it that if Paul came back today and saw how a few of his letters had been elevated to Holy Scriptural glory, he would have been absolutely speechless. If he showed up in a seminary library and discovered shelf after shelf of commentary on those same pieces of correspondence…well, I don’t know.

Grace and Peace!

John

Visit my most recent post on 7 Villages about Mark: Bible Study

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Photo Used with Permission: TexasMary

Headlines Tell the Story

Now I'm not one to obsess about news coverage. In this political season, I am looking at the Washington Post more than the New York Times. Different news organizations have their own perspective. To deny this is foolish and to not take responsibility in the midst of this fact is to be irresponsible.

In another cyberspace discussion recently, I found the headline of the Christian Post about the HighPoint church that in the end denied a fellow member rights to celebrate the life and death of his brother because he was gay particularly telling. The article spoke of "Harrasment" of the congregation, although here was none reported in the text of the story. The Christian Post is a ultra-right wing rag associated with Pat Robinson's Regent University. We should not be surprised.

I would be interested to hear how writers at the Post might report on the story out of Columbus where members of the so-called Minutemen [sic] United are disrupting Sunday morning worship services in a couple of "open and affirming" churches!

As an Atlantan, I can not help but reflect on the reporting about the recent death of Richard Jewell. The NYT headline read about the death of the Olympic bombing hero. AP (now who owns that?) reported that the former suspect of the Olympic bombing had died. Finally, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who had been in a decade long litigation about their faulty reporting in 1996, simply reported that Richard Jewell had died. They reported the story on the internet only one time. Michael Vick made the headlines over and over again.

In the end, Jewell was finally lauded for professional police work that di save many lives. He was a hero, but he paid a terrible price.

As Christians, we must learn to hear the news behind the news, the sub-texts and indeed the distortions. Such caution must even be with taken with the Good News that we study and proclaim as well.

Hey, I didn't mention Fox News with its fair and balanced reporting once.....oops!

Saad is worried about Egypt and I am worried about Saad

I first met Saad Eddin Ibrahim at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. I was a sophomore sociology major and he was the exotic new Egyptian professor joining the faculty after earning his doctorate from the University of Oregon. In several ways he rocked my world. Those were heady times, protests against Vietnam, struggles with fraternity integration, radical religious thinking, drugs, sex and love! I still remember how he introduced me to “power-dependency models” and a friend and I did a joint research paper about how students who had more personal power over their finances or whatever demonstrated more independence from their parent’s views.

I always remembered Saad because he was so supportive of the students. Back then I was an emerging folk singer – he was at every one of my performances at our local coffee house, the Fluttering Duck. He supported others as well.

After I left school, I began to work with international development issues. I later learned that Saad had moved back to teach at the American University in Cairo. At that time, my spouse and I were involved with local village projects across the world and while we were working in Micronesia, we learned that he had been very supportive of our team in Egypt.

Hey! I knew that guy.

Back in the United States, one night I was watching Ted Koppel’s Nightline and sure enough, there was Saad being interviewed about pending elections in the Middle East.

In his capacity at the University, Saad formed a democracy research think tank, the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, which monitored various elections throughout the region and promoted the process of change.

Some 7 years ago, after Saad would not publicly support the future succession of Mubarak’s son, Gamal, he was arrested in the middle of the night by armed security forces and spent the next couple of years in prison. Last Tuesday, Saad recalls this time in a chilling Washington Post article. He writes,

Between 2000 and 2003, the center's offices were ransacked by the State Security Agency, and 27 employees were jailed. It took three years, multiple trials and three tours in prison -- where my health deteriorated -- before Egypt's Court of Cassation, the country's sole remaining independent court, acquitted us of all charges. The egregious nature of the case led the court to rebuke those responsible, citing abuses emanating from the presidency.

Many of us worked in conjunction with Amnesty International and other groups to put pressure for Saad’s release and we all celebrated in Greencastle in 2003 where he and his wife, Barbara Lethem Ibrahim were able to join students from those early days. We recreated the Fluttering Duck and I even dusted off my guitar and sang a couple of songs from the 60s. I especially chose Alan Comfort’s telling lyrics –

One man’s hands can’t tear the prison down,
Two men’s [sic] hands can’t tear the prison down,
But if two and two and fifty make a million…..
We’ll see the day come round,
We’ll see the day come round.

Saad’s op-ed piece reveals how worried he is about his home country Egypt. He writes:

This month marked the fourth anniversary of the disappearance of Egyptian journalist Reda Hilal. Rumors about the involvement of a secret government death squad tasked with silencing detractors of the ruling Mubarak family in this and other disappearances -- such as that of Libyan dissident Mansour Kikhia in Cairo in 1993 -- have spiked in recent weeks.

On Aug. 8, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights reported that it had confirmed more than 500 cases of police abuse since 1993, including 167 deaths -- three of which took place this year -- that the group "strongly suspects were the result of torture and mistreatment." The organization previously found that while Egypt's population nearly doubled during the first 25 years of Hosni Mubarak's regime, the number of prisons grew more than fourfold and that the number of detainees held for more than one year without charge or indictment grew to more than 20,000.

Egypt has become a police state. Human rights organizations have reported about torture in Egyptian prisons. In 2006, the annual budget for internal security was $1.5 billion. This is larger than the country’s national health budget. The Egyptian security forces are four times the size of the nation’s army.

Saad fears for his country, yet I fear for Saad – he is worried as well. Again he writes,

Sadly, this regime has strayed so far from the rule of law that, for my own safety, I have been warned not to return to Egypt. Regime insiders and those in Cairo's diplomatic circles have said that I will be arrested or worse. My family is worried, knowing that Egypt's jails contain some 80,000 political prisoners and that disappearances are routinely ignored or chalked up to accidents. My fear is that these abuses will spread if Egypt's allies and friends continue to stand by silently while this regime suppresses the country's democratic reformers.

I have been doing a study of Mark’s gospel and the narrative draws a picture of large crowds gathering as Jesus preaches, but also small groups conspiring to destroy him. It becomes clear, not by any power of clairvoyance, but by a reading of the signs of the times, that it is not going to go well for Jesus. There is no atonement in Mark, just the lynching of God’s herald. Like others Jesus dies as a martyr.

I hope my friend does not return to Cairo – but he is a stubborn man. We must find a way to transform the Middle East – our present policies in Iraq are destroying whatever capacity to lead we had as a nation. The neo-cons are daily feeding articles beginning to build a slow drum beat of a third war in Iran.

Please join with me in praying not only for peace and democracy in the region, but for my friend, Saad Eddin Ibraham.

Read whole Washington Post article - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/20/AR2007082001500.html?referrer=emailarticle

On Church and Cell Phones

This summer, I have been visiting the "contemporary" worship services of a variety of Methodist churches in the Atlanta area. I suppose that I am a spy for our worship commitee. While I have found a lot to appreciate and perhaps even to appropriate, what irritated me the most was one place where before the service began, a series of "religious ads" flashed through their cycle on the big screens inviting people to sign up for Wednesday night supper or Disciples Class or the latest mission trip. I had the distinct feeling like I was at the local cinema watching "The 20" before my movie played. I suppose what nailed it for me was the message that flashed on the screens saying "Please Turn Off Your Cell Phones!" So much for a time of personal prayer and worship readiness.

Actually, I took in the Simpson's Movie this weekend, and sure enough during "The 20" I was asked several times to "Turn Off My Cell Phone." At least this was done with creative ads.

By the way, the movie is great - about halfway through, the scene flashes to the local Springfield church. On the marque noting the sermon title were the words, "Please Turn Off Your Cell Phone!" Hello - !?!?!###!

I subscribe to "Christianity Today" online - mainly to read their humor column. Two entries caught my attention recently. First, if you are preaching, what should you say when a cell phone goes off? Announce to the offender - "If it is God, tell him, I am busy right now." And second, I hear that some Contemporary Christian Publishing Companies are marketing a new ring tone for use in church - it sounds like a baby crying!

I'll say something soon about the Simpson's. I've got to go now, my phone is vibrating!

Photo Used with Permission: Scorpion26 - (c) Murat Bayson

Who's killing our troops?

I keep noticing out of the corner of my eye neo-con fed articles that report how new bombs and bomb making materials from Iran are being supplied to insurgents to kill American troops. Incredible as it seems there are still people who would like to see us invade Iran - how did that song go when McCain sang it? "Bomb, bomb, bomb - bomb Iran."

The problem is that we are getting additional reports that point to the Pentagon as the best supplier of weapons to the Iraqi insurgents. What are the numbers? 110,000 AK-47s and 80,000 pistols!

Are we nuts? It's time to start beating those swords into plowshares.