Identity - Lesson 8

Dr. James Houston

Identity

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The Apostle Paul’s Pastoral Contextual Identities

Lesson Transcript

The title of our third lecture is The Apostle Paul’s Pastoral Contextual Identities and by that we mean his own personal identity as well as the identity of the fellow Christians in the communities in which he ministered and wrote. As we’re seeing, each witness of the Christian faith has his or her own unique identity, while all are being identified in Christ. It was from this inner strength that Paul can speak and act as being all things to all men to win some for Christ. For the Incarnation is itself contextual, as Origen argues God becoming human to communicate with humans while still being the eternal Word of God. Likewise, Paul further acts contextually as being a good Roman citizen to benefit under Pax Romana with its effective Roman Law, its marvellous road systems and its multicultural acceptance of wide ethnicity which had incorporated ethnic minorities like no previous empire had ever embraced. This was all done peacefully so, as an effective judiciary requires.

Pilot attempts this in the trial of Jesus to distinguish how the Jews judge Jesus and how Caesar would judge Jesus. Paul himself has a similar bifocal series of trials as recorded in the latter part of the Book of Acts. Under Pax Romana, local deities were to be respected, while local communities were diverse in terms of their primary purpose as a military garrison like Thessaloniki on the Thracian border, or as a cultural capital such as Ephesus, or as a great metropolitan city of commerce such as Corinth, or indeed as a political capital of the Empire, Rome itself. Their founding histories are all different. The Apostle adjusts his message to meet each cultural context while pastoring each community to individuate each believer as a Christian to be and to live in Christ.

So after this introduction, our second point is how Christian individuality is individuated. It was characteristic of the Classical world to foster the didactic 00:03:08] personality, by which we mean self-perception is not, as in Asian cultures, socially contrived. Relationally requires this; whereas, our individualism today as pseudo or non-relational is vulnerable to collectivism. Following from the legacy of intimacy with Christ, as John the beloved disciple demonstrated throughout his Gospel, the text is replete with aphoristic sayings about the individual’s relationship with Christ.

Richard Bauckham has listed 67 sayings believing the one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who refuses to believe in the Son will not see life. This is in John 3:36. The one who loves me will be loved of my Father and I will love him or her and reveal myself to him or her, as in John 14:1. More frequently, are the sayings if anyone—14 sayings; everyone—12 sayings; and so on. Thus, the Gospel writers both heighten and deepen the privileges of knowing Christ and intensify the non-entity of the people or the crowd who do not. You might yourself explore how does the Apostle encourage you to be individuated.

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Our third point is that Paul’s message is to become persons in Christ. Albert Schweitzer, himself an idealistic, somewhat mystical medical missionary in Wes Africa in the early 20th century, famously stated, ‘This being-in-Christ is the prime enigma of the Pauline teaching: once grasped, it gives the clue to the whole.’ Paul uses [inaudible 00:05:30] or ‘in Christ’ some 166 times in his Epistles and, exceptionally, it’s also used by Titus and 1 Peter 3:16 and again in 5:10 and 14. Various scholars have categorised these differently. An early scholar Ernest Best, writing One Body in Christ in 1955, distinguished nine categories. And most recently, Kevin Vanhoozer, in his study ‘In Christ’ In Paul, acknowledges that yes, this implies what has been achieved for and given to the people of God. Believers’ actions in Christ, characteristics of those in Christ, faith in Christ, justification in Christ, new status in Christ and all the whole mystery of the Revelation in Christ. But Vanhoozer sums it all up to be or not to be in Christ, that was, for Paul, the primal question—new, urgent and ever relevant.

So let’s look at some of these. And first, in Christ as justification and sanctification. The role of the individual’s faith in Christ is a key in Romans 3:22. God’s righteousness has come through faith through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. Or again in Galatians 2:16, no one is justified by the works of the law, but by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. This is a textual reinterpretation reinforced by Galatians 3:26, which refers to faith as deposited in Christ Jesus. This exercise of faith in the person and completed work of Christ remains one of the foundational components of salvation and justification that distinguishes and contrasts Christ’s followers from conventional Jewish identity as marked by being keepers of the law exercising circumcision, food laws and the Sabbath.

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Then two, in Christ is a corporate reality. Anthropologically, many Biblical scholars in the 20th century were still puzzled as to what in Christ really meant. The best they could come up with was the sense of having a corporate identity or personality, as Israel was assumed to have. But recently, Richard Hays, in The Faith of Jesus Christ, has suggested four categories as belonging to a family, as belonging to a new citizenship or a new military identity, or participation in a new ecclesia or in a new covenant relationship, or indeed living within the story of Christ. As you can judge, I’m not fully satisfied by either Hays or N.T. Wright, as both are too ecclesial or corporate-minded. Piously, E. Stanley Jones, in his devotional In Christ, feeds one much more richly. It’s an amazing study to meditate on his little book In Christ. The emphasis of John Calvin is also richer in being related to Christ as participation and adoption in communion. The Eastern Church’s Orthodox participatory deification or [theosis 00:09:44] is also another rich approach.

Thirdly, what was Paul’s own identity as he was conscious of being in Christ? He recognises his authority to exhort others to conduct themselves as being in Christ because he himself lived in a manner that was consistent with his own teaching and calling. Thus he was their father, as he reminds the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 4:15. This was his authority to take corrective action, as he does in 2 Corinthians 2:17, or in 12:19. It was his confidence in the Lord that led him to expect the Galatians would begin to see things as he did and to act accordingly, as he describes in Galatians 5:10. It was because of his status in the Lord that he insisted the Ephesians no longer thought and lived like the Gentiles, as he mentions in Ephesians 4:17. Clearly, in all of these teachings, his own radical conversion, his own vision of Christ in glory, his many personal sufferings and sacrificial life are all inexplicable if Paul was not living in Christ. All his previous life he counted as worthless now in comparison to being in Christ, as he writes in Philippians 3:7–9.

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It’s fascinating for us all then to trace whether Paul himself is not growing more maturely in Christ as he progresses from one epistle to the other, as we shall now see. This is a theme that is first introduced to us by the Biblical scholar Origen in the 2nd century. For living such a life in Christ deepened Paul’s identity to also be crucified with Christ. His new passion grew as he became ever more progressively united in his life and death and resurrection with Christ, as he records in Philippians 3:10. It meant ongoing rejection of any pecuniary or honours awards, as he tells the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 2:17. Since all his glory came from the cross of Christ, it meant going on living and relating with others with integrity and godly sincerity as a constant dynamic in 2 Corinthians 1:12.

It meant maturing in an exemplary life, as could Paul then encourage his fellow Christians to imitate him as he was imitating Christ. This meant practising purity, patience, kindness, in all his and their relationships of behaviour: 2 Corinthians 6:4–10. At the same time, the exalted dignity of all humans have us created in the Imago Dei. This was clear in his teaching as he distinguished between the first Adam in his sin not expressing the likeness and the second Adam fully expressing both image and likeness, having overcome both sin and death. In Christ restores the Creator’s cosmic intent, as I Corinthians 4 expresses so eloquently.

So one of the things that we need to recover is the awareness that Paul’s identity as a Christian was not fixed. It kept growing and growing all through his life. And likewise, the tone of his Epistles, the context of those that he was writing to, were always changing. In some Epistles, he himself is a young man speaking to young Christians, like he does to the Corinthians. In other more mature Epistles, like that to the Romans, he himself has now become mature and he’s writing in a very different context of maturity. And when we find him in his old age, really mature as a Father of the Church, he’s also speaking to mature Christians in the Ephesian community, or indeed in Colossians that became the Epistle that was imitated to communicate, as Ephesians does.

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So now we turn then to Paul’s relationship with the churches as an ongoing dynamic. Even within the last five years, there’s a babel of scholarly voices that have confused this subject, biased by those who argue that Paul never lost his Jewish identity, others who ignore his Christology and whose own Christian identities are rather suspect. Rather, focus on the pioneer Wayne Oates, the first urban Christian, and his followers, who examine the archaeological evidence for the Roman distinctiveness of these Greco-Roman urban communities, which, like Ephesus, can be historically and culturally distinguished. The book edited by Todd Still and David Horrell in 2009 is also a very interesting source of study called After the First Urban Christians.

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Well, first of all, what about the Corinthian Church? With this context or series of contexts, Paul’s mission to the Corinthians was to accept both their particularities as Romans but now Christians in terms of religious background, their sex and class, their gender and race and social location. Their Roman identity was sill pre-eminent, as he observes in 1 Corinthians 7:11,14, 17, 24, but how it progresses or processes more as being in Christ is directed as it is becoming so in 2 Corinthians 5:17. So he’s writing much more maturely to more mature Christians in the second epistle. It’s a rich metropolitan, commercial city.

The Christian community represented many slaves, some of the merchant class, some state officials, all with a variety of immigrant groups, rather like the city of Vancouver I live in today. He’s exhorting them to stay in the social situations that they’re so diversely in. If one is an ethnic but nominal Jew then let that heritage, which Paul himself had shared, lead you to Christ. If one is an Orthodox Jew living under the Law then that should too be respected, as he writes in 1 Corinthians 9:10. If one was like the Pharisees, devout reformers as Paul had been in Galatians 3:5, that too was a narrative never to ignore. Indeed, Corinth was a hub of diverse groups all claiming to be Jews and given clemency as Roman citizens.

Clearly, Paul was addressing in the mid-50s AD a mixed group of Christians, not only socially, but spiritually, immature or mature, mixed up together. But we need to remember that this may have been Paul’s earliest epistle, writing as a young Apostle. And this was the view of Origen in his commentary on the Corinthian Epistles, in which he contrasted the later maturity of his ministry to Rome and to Ephesus. Origen reflects over 1 Corinthians 1:2 to the church of God in Corinth to those sanctified in Christ Jesus called holy with all those who dwell upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. In 1 Corinthians 1:4–10, Origen sees a mixture of sinners and righteous ones, admonishing his hearers to seek the spiritual gifts of the latter ones. Or again, in 1 Corinthians 4:1 the distinction is made between the servants of God and those who are the stewards of the mysteries of God. Again, the distinction is made in 1 Corinthians 4:15 for if you have [10,000 00:19:36] trainers in Christ, you do not have many fathers. So textually, Origen is seeing that much of 1 Corinthians is addressed to young Christians needing milk, rather than strong meat, as he talks in 1 Corinthians 3:1–3. Or again, he recites in 1 Corinthians 7, it is good for a man not to touch a woman, implying that to be celibate is more mature than marriage. But this is a special command about virgins which is not a universal command which is necessary for salvation. Rather, it is advice about further growth as a Christian.

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I’m a widower now. I have no intention of marrying again. And it’s not for any particular virtue. It’s simply because of the stage of my life. And that’s how Paul would argue. As a wise steward, Paul is not overloading all at once those immature. Truth is progressive. Again, their adoption may have been one cause for division among the immature Corinthian believers. Then there were those outside the law that Paul claims, but he says I became as one outside the law although I’m [not 00:20:58] free from God’s law, fulfilled as Christ’s law, so that I might win those outside of the law, 1 Corinthians 9:21. Visiting Gentile homes, Paul probably also ate taboo foods such as what had been offered to idols, which would shock his fellow Jews. Just as today, wine is taboo for an American Baptist pastor, or a beer is taboo for Württemberg Pietists. To all such, Paul would exclaim just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many that they may be saved: 1 Corinthians 10:33. For being in Christ never does mean being a legalist or a rationalistic personality.

Baptism was another central element of the Christian identity. It has been argued that it was another polemical device used by Paul since behind his social concern was the abuse of patronage at Corinth. The Roman baths were owned by patrons, while [inaudible 00:22:20] with its practice of pouring water for cleansing were practised. These customs were readily incorporated into early Christian baptismal practices, not to become an abuse. Indeed, their adoption may have been one cause for division among the Corinthian believers, which Paul also addresses.

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Again, when we turn to Ephesus as an imperial city, for the Christians there it is to be peacemakers. Roman imperial ideology, relying on the resources of the urban environment and imperial religion, the Roman judiciary all bound allegiance to the emperor, but also to protect the local and diverse expressions of Roman social identity. So the archaeological findings at Ephesus are almost as rich as those of Rome, revealing a high sophistication of Roman culture and of its governance.

Likewise in a moral not political context, Origen is constantly comparing Corinth and Ephesus, not as Roman cities, but as Christian communities. He sees the Ephesians as much more mature and therefore mature pastoral care has to be taught. But then Paul too had become more mature in his own ministry. Becoming the Gospel of peace is therefore the keynote of Paul’s message to the church at Ephesus, as it had been a political message under Caesar, for Acts 19 reports free evangelism had already been preached there by Apollos to the Jewish Reformed Orthodox believers, who had received the baptism of repentance of John the Baptist, but had not yet heard about Christian baptism. So later when Paul was in Ephesus for three months, he began by teaching in the synagogue how Jews should become Christians having a different identity, by arguing persuasively about the Kingdom of God. But some of them became obstinate. They refused to believe and publicly they maligned the way. So Paul had to leave them. He took the disciples and had discussions daily in the hall of Tyrannus. This went on for two years, so that all the Jews and Gentiles who lived in the province of Asia heard the Word of the Lord. Like the incidents of Pentecost at Jerusalem, so at Ephesus miracles followed, as narrated in Acts 19:11–20, and the name of Jesus was held in high honour.

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But just as Athena was the patron goddess of culture in Athens, so Diana was the goddess of Roman Ephesus. Her previous Greek name, Artemis, was one of the two daughters of Zeus, who had refused the wiles of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to abandon their virginity. Artemis cared instead for the cities of just men, while Athena cared about wars and construction and weaving. The Greek Theogony listed a brief catalogue of all the unions between gods and goddesses and mortals, but the Roman poet Virgil, writing in the century before Christ in his Aeneid, rewrites Homer’s poems of The Iliad and The Odyssey now from the moral perspective of Roman law and justice, for the Greek gods too can be punished as well as mortals.

And under the civic patronage of Artemis or Diana, a silversmith making silver shrines of Artemis aroused the mob to defend her worship. They were losing their trade by not buying her jewellery. They shouted against Paul’s teaching, shouting for over two hours: great is the goddess Artemis. In other words, great is the god of profit. The commercial motive of the silversmiths was only money, but the political motive of the magistrates was their fear of being viewed as weak governors of the imperial city. Paul knew it all, he saw it all, and therefore he leaves Ephesus and delegates to other missionaries to take charge.

God’s servants are never indispensable. We’re all disposable. And there are times when we get blocked in our ministry and it’s time to hand it on to somebody else. And so Paul now is able to return on his way back to Jerusalem, stopping off from his boat at Ephesus where now he can give mature teaching in his farewell address to the Ephesian elders concerning the whole counsel of God, which they now in their maturity can pass on to the Christian church there. It’s win-win for everyone. As Raymond Brown comments, among the Pauline teaching, only Romans can match, in the epistles of Paul, with Ephesians as candidates for those exercising the most influence on Christian thought and spirituality. Reread its sonorous cosmic tones immediately introducing the mystery of the Trinity, of being blessed in the heavenly realms, of being predestined before the creation of the world, of having redemption in Christ, of making known the mystery of his will, that we should be to the praise of the glory of his grace. Being dead in sin, we’re now made alive. Formerly being pagan Gentiles, once far off now we’re brought near by the precious blood of Christ. Now united in Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, we are all to live as the children of light in marriage, in family life, in civil life, in every human state that we may be in.

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Breathless as we read the Roman Epistle, what then is the key message of the Apostle? It’s all about the noun ‘peace’, which he uses eight times, with the verb ‘reconcile’. The letter is liturgically wrapped in peace, beginning and ending with it, as we see in Romans 1:3 and 6:23. The inner life of the Church is the relational environment of peace, of all being bonded together in the Holy Spirit: 4:3. The message of the Gospel is peace: 6:15. Peace to the whole community is the closing benediction of faith, hope and love, which might substitute that what hope is, is peace, in 16:23. What a contrast this is to all the mob violence aroused by vested interests, by greed and fear with which Paul had first began his ministry in Ephesus. Mob violence begins in the homes of the violent. So Paul urges in [Ephesians 00:30:58] 4:31–5:2 that their Christian community should reflect in their family Christian lives not letting unwholesome talk come out of your mouths. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, to be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other as Christ forgave you. Be imitators of God therefore as dearly beloved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

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To be such a peace-lived community begins with the specifics of family life that is described in 5:22–6:9. Don’t we all know all today that when there’s discord in the family, children grow up to be angry and full of discord as well. As is the child, so is the man, so is the woman. And Paul is teaching this. Peace in the community is sourced in peace in the family. But the ultimate source lies in the mystery of the Triune God of grace, Creator of the whole cosmos, as the first three chapters begins with revealing. It all issues from Christ’s body, the fullness of him who fills all in all and the cross of Christ. All hostility, all alienation, all separation, are abolished. As he says for in himself Christ is our peace, in 2:14. Now Paul is a proclaimer of this peace and its fervent pray-er. You can’t preach without being peace: Romans 3:1–21.

All this is a huge contrast to Pax Romana and of the magistrates’ nervousness to quell the street riots of the city of Ephesus. As a recent scholar, Gorman, puts it, ‘For Paul, to practice Christ-shaped peacemaking is to participate in the life and mission of the God whose very nature… is peaceable and peacemaking. To practice and to make peace is to partake of the very character of God, of the divine nature.’ As Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers for they are the children of God.

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Let’s then look more critically at the Roman Church. The historical background to Rome was that the Emperor Claudius, faced with a large population of resident Jews who were now quarrelling with the first Christians in Rome, expelled all the Jews from the in the early 40s. After his death and the young son Nero was now elected Caesar, the Jews were allowed to return. And the Christian community, still being too small to attract much attention, indicates that Nero was acting politically on behalf of the Jews.

Paul’s plan, as Luke tells us in Acts 18, was that having travelled as a missionary through the cities of Greece and Asia Minor, was returning to Jerusalem with every intent of one day visiting the Christians in Rome. But his plan was not to stay in Rome. His plan was then to go onto Spain, where it may be that he was actually martyred, not Rome. When you read James Romm Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, you realise Rome was perhaps the most dangerous city for any missionary to publicly proclaim the Gospel there with all the fears of the court intrigues surrounding a Caesar that was no older than a teenager. It’s reminiscent of somebody we know in North Korea today. He killed the family members all around him: his uncle, his mother, his stepbrother, even his long-time mentor, Seneca. Then he torched Rome itself in 66 AD, blaming the Christians when he simply wanted to clear away slums for a more grandiose palace. He was a monster. Who would ever want to be a missionary in Rome? It was a death sentence indeed, especially when the message was social justice for all humanity and probably three quarters of the population were slaves in a city of over a million inhabitants. We speak of mission impossible for one voice to carry. Yet, Paul’s single voice is I’m not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes: Romans 1:16.

This Key message, this divine participation that Christians have in the life of God, theosis, deification indeed. Christ became who we are, Adam, in order that we might become who he is, the true image of God, becoming the sons, the daughters, the children of God. All this happens when we die, as he was crucified that we might become alive in Christ. This was the utter contrast to Nero, who remained on the imperial throne by killing he feared dynastically as his rivals to go on being Caesar, becoming a god. For in antiquity, for both Jews and Christians, the purpose of discipleship or mentoring was to become godly, to become Christ-like, indeed, to recover the Imago Dei. As Irenaeus sums it up, ‘He became what we are so that we become what he is’.

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All the technical terms we associate with the Epistle to the Romans of salvation, justification, sanctification, righteousness, justice and glory, are all simply about becoming Christ-like, becoming godly. It should be noted that after the formal address of Romans 1:1–15, for the next 11 chapters Paul is not writing a letter, but a formal treatise like those written by Roman philosophers such as Seneca, Paul’s contemporary in Rome. Right under the nose of Nero, Paul’s intent was to spread in all the house churches in Rome, as enabled by the Holy Spirit, Christ-like communities as having been rescued from the power of darkness into Christ’s marvellous light. Now they were released for the praise of God in their communities.

Rome was all about glory. And a keyword in Romans is ‘glory.’ Glory in a shame culture as well as other Classical values were echoed in Paul’s use of the term. But more likely, he was echoing primarily several Jewish uses of the term, including the Shekinah glory of the temple, as described in Isaiah 6, but all is embraced in the splendour God has as being God, which we share in becoming godly. Yet like 2 Corinthians 4, Paul breaks in autobiographically to remind us that he, like we, also, have this treasure in earthen vessels, being like God as the facsimile of his image. And so in Romans 7: 21–8:4, he reminds us we’re still in this process of theosis. The Jewish believers too have their special context, to which he addresses in Romans 9-11. But providing a conclusion now for all Roman Christians, converted Jews or Gentiles, we all need to present ourselves a living sacrifice to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. This great paradigm change, this metanoia we might call it, is brought to us by the Gospel of Christ that he introduces in Romans 1:16.

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At the end, Romans 12–15 conclude with very practical daily expressions of what it means to be Christ-like and godly. Wherever we are, whoever we are, male or female, slave or master, all are one body, all are in Christ. So, he says, as Roman citizens don’t forget to pay your taxes to Caesar. And whoever should be respected in the hierarchy of Roman society, pay appropriate respect, for Christians are the best citizens. They’re the best workers. They’re the best husbands and the best wives, the best children. Yes. But they’re all immature, so treat them all lovingly. And pray for me too, asks Paul, as I face all these court trials in Judea, which keep me from seeing you now. Since love is exercised in recognition, Paul then names 15 women leaders in the churches of Rome as well as 18 men leaders with whom Paul had particular and personal reasons for gratitude. What does that tell you? It tells you that, for Paul, Biblical equality is the norm for male and female. We’re breathless when we think of what Paul is communicating this wonderful epistle.

So now for group discussions. First of all, how do you personally struggle to consider yourself a person in Christ? This is not some theological abstraction. It’s how am I in Christ every moment of the day with everybody around me.

Secondly, you don’t have a Christian identity. It grows. So reflect on the stages of life that you’ve already had. And you have had some experience of being very immature and now becoming more mature as a Christian. Share those insights with one another so that you encourage other Christians who are comparing themselves with you, but then, of course, they haven’t reached your level because they haven’t reached your age.

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Three, discuss Paul’s struggles to respond to immature Christians in Corinth. Think of the ways he agonised, as a father does with a wayward child. The fourth question: what evidences do you see Paul as addressing to a mature Christian community in Ephesus in spite of all the civic opposition there? How does he do it so wisely, so humbly? And the last question: why is Paul’s message of peace through righteousness so relevant to the Roman Christians?

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And all of this helps to show us, tragically, how dysfunctional all our church life is today, why we’re questioning the future of institutionalised Christianity. It was never intended to exist and it has no future.

Well, that’s all very controversial, I’m sure.