Pauline Understanding of Gospel in the Context of a Diaspora Existence

Pauline Understanding of Gospel in the Context of a Diaspora Existence

Since we have selected one of the prominent Pauline passages as the scriptural basis of this theme, I’ll be developing the thoughts by drawing insights from the Pauline theology articulated through his letters to the churches especially to the one in Corinth. I would like to split the arch theme into three for the better understanding or an in-depth study of the topic. 1) Understanding gospel in a diaspora context, 2) Evangelization as sharing of the life spaces in the diaspora reality and 3) Salvation as God’s intention to reconcile the world to God. We will be dealing with each of these subthemes in each three sessions planned in this conference.

1. Understanding the gospel in a diaspora context

Paul’s understanding of the “word” or the “gospel” is very complex and nuanced. Paul uses at least five terms to refer to the content of his proclamation namely, 1) gospel (euaggelion), 2) word (logos or rhema), 3) Preaching (akoe), 4) proclamation (kerygma) and 5) witness (martyrion). The term gospel is used 48 times in his writings. Paul might have inherited the idea from the early Christian traditions. The early Christian community used to preach about the death and resurrection of the Lord. At the core of Paul’s understanding of the gospel also was the profound experience of death and resurrection of Jesus (Rom. 1: 16-17).

1.1. The background that influenced Paul’s understanding of Gospel

1.1.1. The Jewish World

We know Paul as a Jew brought up far away from his home land in a place where there were many religions philosophies and worldviews. He was one among the diaspora Jews who were widely scattered across the Roman Empire. Jews were living in a lot of conflicts as they found it difficult to keep their faith alive in such a context. But as we read from the scriptures, Paul was brought up in very strict traditions of Jews. He always very much affirmed this background whenever his authority as an apostle or itinerant preacher of the church was questioned. In that sense the transformation he experiences at the city gate of Damascus was not simply a total turning around experience from these traditions, but it was an experience that further illuminated his understanding of God and God’s ways. The jewishness of Paul’s theological understandings were not really altered by his conversion to Christianity. His reflections remain Israel oriented. His understanding of the gospel therefore had a great bearing on the doctrine of divine election which the Jews considered as the primary marker of identity in any given context. But he reworked the core symbols of his Jewish world in radically christological terms. Jesus becomes that eternal principle of God’s redeeming presence in the world that interprets the experience of salvation for the world. For Paul the social marker of God’s Israel was the public confession that Jesus is Lord (Rom 10:9, because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved). All the writings of Paul can be very well identified as a conversation with the scripture of Israel with Christ experience as the interpretive centre of such conversations.

Paul’s vision of the gospel was further influenced by his pharisaic heritage. Pharisaism was originally emerged as a lay movement, engaged in all matters of the town square and market places. Therefore for Paul the practical account of Christian faith extends God’s rule and grace to every nook and corner of the community’s life. It does not mean that he blindly appropriated everything pharisaic into his practices of the gospel. He rejected the teachings of purity of Pharisees when he strongly advocated the acceptance of gentiles into the church. But his teachings on eating in 1 Cor. 8-11 are very much rooted in the social world of pharisaism. “How” and “what” they eat forms a social marker of their solidarity as a people belonging to God. As there are many restrictions in Pharisaism regarding the food one eats, the Pauline Christianity in Corinth also places certain values on meals. The intention would have been twofold as to deliberate on the internal union of the community and also to avoid conflicts with other communities outside.

1.1.2. The Greco-Roman World

Another importance influence on the understanding of gospel of Paul came from the influence of the Greco-Roman world in which he lived. Rhetoric was the disciplined art of speaking intended at influencing the hearers into something intended. Gospel in this sense was understood as an art of public speaking intended to persuade the readers into repentance and faith. Though he discredits his ability to bring out good attractive rhetoric to influence the people through the preaching of the gospel in his writings, he was a man professionally trained in the art of rhetoric in Tarsus his home town. Paul’s understanding of the dynamic of rhetoric comes useful while narrating the gospel story artfully to his hearers.

1.2. A Conflictual Existence Guarantees Clarity of the Gospel

Jews of the diaspora in Corinth were caught up in two extremely different worlds. The dominant world of the two was the non-Jewish and syncretistic world which always demanded compromise and assimilation of the minority faith and practices of the Christians. On the other hand though being a very weak minority the Christians understood themselves as a people called by God to remain separate and distinctive as a witness to truth. Conflicts were very real in their lives as they lived in that non-Jewish world, where conformity to the dominant culture was always rewarded and any deviance was severely punished. But the Jews like Paul’s family, as Roman citizens, were some way or other skilled in moving between these two worlds.

There can be a number of areas identified from where we can draw parallels to the world in which we live. In Paul’s time Corinth was a commercial and religious hub. It was known for its artisan products of bronze and earthenware etc. Corinth geographic location was unique and it ensured religious diversity. Sailors and travelers brought and planted their religions. Greek, Egyptian and Roman imperial cults co-existed in Corinth. The superficial cultural life prompted the writers of the time to call it the “sin city”. The abuses of the poor by the wealthy and partisan strife were the challenges the apostle Paul was called to address. This shows how much the world outside had affected the diaspora community in Corinth. The congregation at Corinth reflected the socio-economic and religious make-up of the city. It was a mixture of few rich and more poor people.

1.3. The tension between the “roots” and the “routes”

The Community in Corinth as in most of the Pauline churches is to be taken as a mixed bag of Jewish and gentile Christians. The sense of a called out community in the midst of ungodly ways life in the empire was because of their link with their Jewish roots they kept over. Moreover the community was suffering from a weak link with its parental community. It posed a serious challenge to its being as a called out community in the midst of the multiple faiths and cultures. Paul taught the Corinthians scripture and traditions of Israel to reinforce them in their convictions of being God’s people representing God’s will for the world. Furthermore Paul successfully resocialized the gentiles to make them think of themselves as a part of ancient notion of the people of God in a new way in new contexts of life.

Therefore the implications of the gospel in a diaspora context is all about rediscovering the unique call as the people of God to resist the tendencies of assimilation and submergence in the prevailing, dominating syncretic cults. It is about the proper mixing of the “roots” and the “routes” of the diaspora community without one being swallowed up by the other. It speaks about the sense of belonging one need to develop in this context. “Being” is both about being from a place and being in a place of arrival. Therefore it is not about simply belonging to a distant ethnic group, but it is also about being faithfully part of the life in the place of arrival. The bridging of these two realities is done by the values of the gospel. It is not a simple submission into the new superficial culture of difference losing one’s identity altogether but it is more about making our identity multivocal to make it conducive to relate with the different realities of life around.

2. Evangelization as sharing of the life spaces in the diaspora reality

2.1. Body as the sphere of sharing of the gospel

For Paul, “sharing of the gospel” was another word for the living of Christian faith in communities. For him, body is the sphere in which the following of Christ becomes real. In this sense the totality of one’s behavior is to be taken as a public statement of his/her faith and it has a missionary potential as a witness. In Romans chapter 12 Paul puts it nicely as “presenting bodies as living sacrifice to God”. As an apostle we see Paul as moving across all the ethnic, religious and cultural groups of his world without containing himself to a group of people with any special sense of belongingness. But it does not mean that his life was a life that was compromising with any reality that is encountered outside. The tensions of Christian life in a non-christian and non-jewish world was managed and stabilized by his strong convictions about the gospel. He always felt a very compelling inner urge to live or embody that gospel in his life-world.

2.2. Evangelization as setting the relationships right

Christian faith for him is evidently lived in a community of differences. He had two catch words namely, “faith” and “love” to order that life in any given situation; the former was used to express the right relationship with God and the latter to express the right relationship with the fellow beings. Here the responsibility to others does not come to him as an option, but a necessary requirement of faith as he understands himself as the ambassador of God’s redeeming love to the world. For him it is none other than Christ remains as that eternal agency of God, who extends God’s love to the world. As gospel is God’s initiative through God’s son, it is to be made available to all without any discrimination. In his own words, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

2.3. Gospel is not ‘because of us’, but ‘in spite of us’

Paul understands gospel as a self propelling movement initiated by God. He repeatedly speaks about the power of the gospel that influences the people to repentance and faith. He often speaks about his limitations as an itinerant preacher who can’t simply attract people through the art of rhetoric as the Hellenist preachers of his time did. He also sharply criticizes people who add to the gospel to make it more attractive and appealing. But for Paul, gospel makes its appeal through the power and conviction of God’s spirit (1Thess. 1:5, because the message of gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction).  But this knowledge of the power of the gospel is not making Paul to resign from his responsibilities. He himself acknowledges the role of the people like Ananias, Peter, Barnabas, other apostles etc in equipping him to understand that power. He often “boasts” the way God has made use of him to share the good news with people who were usually considered as people who were out of the boundary of God’s salvation. But yet it is the power of the Holy Spirit that helps a person to see the life giving power in the seemingly foolish utterance of the gospel (1 Cor. 1: 18).

2.4. Sharing as a combination of obligation and freedom

Paul often boasts of his apostleship, the God given responsibility to be the bearer of the good news. The apostleship is not about having his free way about matters of life. But apostleship is a sort of captivity as it is freedom on the other hand. Paul understands himself as a captive to his call from God, but at the same time he is very much conscious of his rights as an apostle to move around the territories of his churches to preach the gospel. As J. Paul Sampley puts it, “Paul is a combination of necessity and freewill.” The preaching of the gospel comes to him as an obligation (1 Cor. 9:16). He is totally clearing out the possibility of the exercise of his freewill in dealing with the gospel (1 Cor. 9:18), because for him it is the point of contact with God. But the point where he makes the contact with the people he experiences the freedom of exercising his rights. Here Paul speaks about the principle of accommodation as the fundamental method to live the gospel (1 Cor. 9:22). Paul’s idea of freedom draws much gravity in the context of his theologizing; as the stoics, an important school of philosophers of the time, thought of freedom as a choice of withdrawal from all “worldly things” without risking too much to make one vulnerable. But Paul’s understanding of freedom countered this and it imagined freedom as the freedom to act. His choice of engaging with the world makes him more vulnerable. His exercise of this freedom was done by making him weak to win the weak and all things to all people (1 cor. 9: 19-23). But in relating with the culture of the context of sharing of gospel, Paul very deliberately maintains a creative ambivalence with that culture. At times we see him embracing the cultural conventions and other times he is seen as distancing himself from the culture. In other words the Pauline statement of “becoming all things for all people” did not signify an all out compromise to all things that he encountered in that culture. Such ambivalence were necessary in those contexts as Paul decides not to lead his believers to a Qumran like isolation from the rest of the world. Paul was especially critical of the way power was used in the culture as it was seen concentrated on a few elites of the society and even in the church. He was very much critical of the use of power and status by the elites to get their way in the community of believers. His concern was always about the weak as their rights in the community were feared to be thrashed by the self-contained ways of the powerful. Therefore to counter the self-assertive ways of the elites what he suggests as a value of the gospel is endurance. The church needs to endure so that “the gospel may not be hindered” (1 Cor. 9: 12).

2.5. Gospel is to be allowed to penetrate all aspects of our existence

Most persons, however educated they may be, have blind spots in their convictions. It means that there may be areas in their lives where their convictions of the gospel have not fully penetrated to. Every nook and corner of the personal and communitarian dimensions of life needs to be penetrated by the spirit of the gospel to embody the gospel in its fullest potential. Hence the believers are urged to live their faith within the world even though the forms of that life are passing. They need to maintain a creative ambivalence with the culture around in finding themselves within the culture yet transcending it through their convictions of the gospel. Paul takes all his life’s experiences whether it is pain or comfort, rejection or acceptance in the light of this understanding. He wants to transform all such experiences as means by which he can advance the message of the gospel to the people through his and his community’s life.

3. Salvation as God’s intention to reconcile the world to God

Salvation should not be taken as a gracious extension of some merit from the church to the world. But the Pauline idea of salvation is something that speaks about the divine initiative to reconcile the world. It is not about a translocation of life to a different extraterrestrial level, but it speaks about the transformation of the terrestrial realm into something that God intends it to be. Reconciliation appears as the unique Pauline metaphor for describing God’s saving act in Christ. Reconciliation as a root image to explain salvation had emerged from his experience of reconciliation on the Damascus road (2 Cor. 5: 11-21). Thus it has both personal and communitarian dimensions. We will be dealing with some of these aspects of salvation as personal and corporate in this session.

3.1. Paul’s reworking of the concept of salvation

His proclamation of the salvation was intended to counter the existing notions of salvation in two folds. Firstly, he feels an obligation to deliver his fellow Jews from the confidence in the Law as a way of salvation. The whole idea of justification by works in conformity with the Law is replaced by the justification by faith in the risen Christ. Secondly his gospel of salvation was countering the idea of salvation, peace and order propagated by the gospel of the Caesar. The Crucified Jesus is put as the Lord to the imperial Caesar. In a territory where the Roman imperial values dominated the proceedings, to organize a community around a “crucified political criminal” would have at any count considered as a great folly (1 Cor. 1: 21). The one crucified by Rome now is the Lord of the universe and will subject all things presumably including the Roman rulers (1 Cor. 15: 24-28)

Andrew Walls drawing insights from the Pauline writings speaks about the Ephesian Moment in the early church; it is nothing but the great occasion in the church, where the Jewish and gentile Christians came together as a community to worship Jesus. According to Paul this reconciliation between two historically separated communities and the breaking down of the wall of separation brought about by Christ’s death (Eph. 2:13-18, But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Jesus). It is such a momentous occasion in history where Christ’s full stature becomes real and visible. It is expressed by the institution of a meal table and it became the hallmark of Christian living and hope of a salvation.

3.2. A Christocentric reworking of salvation

Paul’s understanding of salvation is much Christocentric, as it is perceived as life, resurrection and exaltation with Christ (Eph. 2: 1-10). Paul’s proclamation of salvation is in a schema that has a few components to it. Firstly it speaks about the former sinful condition in which the people lived (Eph. 2:1, “You were dead through the trespasses and sins”). In that state of living people find with a lot of walls that separate them. Paul puts Law as a wall that created enmity and separation between the people. Then it speaks about the change that has happened through the gracious granting of new life through Christ. Christ is presented as the rich mercy and great love of God for the world (Eph. 2: 4-5). Christ is presented as the counter principle to the Law who unites the separated communities into a common life experience. Therefore without undergoing death and resurrection in one’s own body the believer is granted the experience the joy of salvation in the here and now in Christ. This can be called as the realized eschatology. Thirdly it speaks about the effect or nature of salvation the said change brings to the life of the church.  There is change from “you” to “we” while Paul addresses his hearers in the letter to the Ephesians, signifying the experience of unity to which this vision and experience of salvation brings the people.

3.3. Salvation as eschatological fulfillment and a realized eschatology in the here and now

Therefore the Pauline understanding of salvation necessarily had two important dimensions. On the one hand it spoke about the immediate physical changes like unity it has to be wrought in the life of the people. On the other hand it also spoke about an eschatological fulfillment of salvation for which the church with the world waits for. Thus going to the extremities of any of these dimensions in understanding salvation is dangerous. Salvation should at the same time be real and something that is hoped for. Christians, always, are called to live in this tension of ‘already’ and ‘not yet’.

3.3.1. Salvation as the tearing down of barriers

Salvation is repeatedly pictured as an outcome of the total reliance on the saving power of God. Moreover salvation is a loving initiative of God for the world. It also affirms God’s sovereignty over all things and God’s purpose in salvation. The believer’s salvation should not simply remain as a matter of individual pride. But salvation needs to be understood as God’s design for individuals to participate in God’s plan for the world by living a life of good works. The good works are intended at reducing the distance between God as well as fellow humans to experience what Paul calls “nearness” in relationships. It has both vertical and horizontal dimensions of nearness with God and the nearness with the people. Christ’s cross is described to have that reconciling power to bring together the warring opposites to an experience of oneness. Paul’s message of salvation is crystal clear that it suggests the removal of all barriers between all people in Christ as it leads to an experience of oneness.

3.3.2. Salvation is reconciliation with the whole earth

The implication of the salvation of which Paul speaks is not something that can be limited to the realm of human. Paul’s understanding of salvation is not a simple redemption from the body, but redemption of the body (Romans 8: 23). It means a progression to the perfectness of body in its fullest bodily integrity. Human bodies are our solidarity with the rest of the creation too. Therefore the bodily redemption of the believers is always expected to be accompanied by the renewal of the whole world. As we know the life in its totality across the created order is suffering from death and decay. Most of the catastrophes affecting the creation are initiatives of the human.  Here one should not become presumptive in thinking that only human can mediate salvation for the rest of the creation. There are ample evidences in the Bible for the fact that the earth can directly correspond to the creator. But the fact is that as human are the cause of most of the sufferings the whole creation is going through, the redemption of the human has become a prerequisite for the redemption from the subjugation that is thrust up on the rest of the creation. Our connection and solidarity with the material world is not only in terms of the similarity in the nature of our material make up. But it is also in terms of the “hope” and “groaning” we share with the whole creation. Therefore as the people of God it is our responsibility to stand united in echoing the pain of the whole creation so that we can together be reconciled as God’s creation reflection the glory of the creator.