Living
Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Volume 11, Number 1
Summer 2006
What is the Tie That Binds?
What
Is the Tie That Binds?
A
New Testament Perspective
by
Edgar Krentz
Introduction
The
planners for this Festival gave it an interesting title: What is the tie that
binds? I take that formulation very seriously. When I first read the title, I
tried to figure out what it was about. Note that the formulators don’t say,
“What are the ties that bind?” Presumably they are asking for one
tie—singular, not plural. I like that. I take language seriously, so that’s
what we are going to consider today— not the ties, but the tie.
There
is an ambiguity in their question, whether intended or not, in the word “bind.”
“Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.” That means what
unites, what holds people together. So the question is asking, “What is the one
thing that fundamentally pulls the Christian community together?”
But
there is another definition of bind. If you don’t keep the oil in your car up
to snuff, after a while cylinders bind. They freeze; they become motionless,
and you’re in trouble. I am going to take the question today in both senses. I
will look at part of what the New Testament, or at least what part of the New
Testament, has to say about the tie that binds or unites, as well as the tie
that freezes.
The
Prevalence of Disunity
The
problem of divisiveness runs through many places in the New Testament, and in
the early church (1 Clement in the Apostolic Fathers, for example, or the
letters of Ignatius). I think of Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and
Philip-pians. Matthew’s Gospel is written because of
a problem with the Jewish community that refused to accept Christian Jews as
true members of Judaism. As you read the history of the later church in the
early centuries, there were many problems. You can name many of them if you remember
the confessions, e.g., Gnosticism, Donatism, the Quartodeciman controversy, questions of Christology, and
the like. There never was a pristine early church. Even Acts, which presents
the Jerusalem church as the central church of earliest Christianity,
“continuing steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship,” had fiscal
problems with Ananias and Sapphira and with equal
distribution of money to Greek-speaking widows, to say nothing of Simon Magus
and the problem of Gentile missions.
Paul
and Disunity at Corinth:
Baptism
as Problem and its Confession as Uniting
I’m
going to start with Corinth, a severely divided church that manifested division
in many different ways: Attachment to different mystagogoi
(the term is not in the letter), the people who initiated them into
Christianity, their baptizers, caused divisions in the community. “I belong to
Paul, I belong to Cephas, I belong to Apollos” (1 Cor 1:12). That’s one
cause of division that Paul discussed in chapters 1-4. Then the distinction
between the pneumatikoi, the spiritually
endowed people, and other Christians in the community led to a long series of
difficulties: incest (1 Cor 5:1-8), sexual immorality
(1 Cor 5:9-6:20—along with lawsuits in the Roman
courts), problems with the Lord’s Supper, based on a misinterpretation of the
power in it, as giving the ones who imbibed more wine security and certainty (1
Cor 10). Rampant individualism.
Liberty regarded as freedom to do whatever you damn well please. Freedom from
the body, already resurrected, living the life of the resurrected. A veritable Pandora’s Box of problems throughout I Corinthians.
It’s not surprising that Margaret Mitchell of the University of Chicago, in her
masterful book on 1 Corin-thians, says it is the
question of unity that dominates that book from beginning to end.1
Against
the Cult of Personality
1
Corinthians raises the question: What is the tie that can immobilize or freeze
the church? There are false bases for unity. The Corinthian church shattered
its unity when its members gathered around the people who had baptized them. It
was so severe that Paul said, “I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, in order that none of you might say you
were baptized into my name. Oh, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t know whether I baptized
anybody else” (1 Cor 1:14-16). That’s only one
household and two people, and Paul thanks God for that! Then comes this
absolutely amazing statement, “For Christ did not send me out to baptize, but
to proclaim good news, not in the wisdom of logos (rationality, or
logical argument) that the cross of Christ not be nullified” (1 Cor 1:17). Any pastor who tells the church council in our
time that she’s going to stop baptizing because she’s called to preach is going
to be in trouble! But Paul says it, because baptism as understood in Corinth
had become the tie that separated, not united. Even a sacrament can become the
occasion for disunity! This is different from the book of Romans, of course and
Galatians 3, where baptism into Christ creates a unity that transcends
ethnicity, social status, and sexual difference: “neither Jew nor Greek, slave
or free, no longer man and woman.”
Paul
responds to all of this in a number of ways, all of which flow from the central
fact that unites the church—the confession Kyrios
Iesous (1 Cor. 12:3, ironically a baptismal
acclamation). “No one can say that Jesus is the Lord except by the Holy
Spirit.” Or, as he puts it in chapter 1, the word about the
cross. When those who have knowledge express their freedom given by
eating a cultic meal in Greco-Roman temples, they cause problems for those who
don’t have such advanced knowledge. And Paul frowns upon them by saying, “For
the weak one is being destroyed by your knowledge—the very brother or sister on
account of whom Christ died.” (1 Cor. 8:11) The value of the death of Christ is
transferred to the individual Christian in baptism, and so to disregard the
weaker Christian is to disregard Christ. Thus the death of Christ puts a high
value on the weakest, most poorly dressed Christian that walks into your
church. We do not create unity, according Paul; God gives it in baptism. “One
Lord, one faith, one baptism,” as Ephesians 4:5 puts it in another, later
baptismal acclamation. But unity can be destroyed by the gifts of God, even by
baptism, if wrong inferences are drawn from it. True or false unity depend on
the emphasis we give a creed or an otherwise good action in the church.
The
Eucharist and Unity
Take
the case of the kyriakon deipna in 1 Cor 11:17-34 (the
phrase is in 1 Cor 11:20). I think all the
translations mistranslate this phrase. Kyriakon
does not mean “lord’s” as if it were a genitive noun
expressing ownership; it is an adjective. It means that the supper should correlate
with, not contradict its Lord. What does that mean? The lordly supper proclaims
the Lord’s death until he returns (1 Cor 11:26). The
body and blood in the dominical words are the body that died on the cross. But
the community of believers in Corinth, says Paul, is also the body of Christ,
since the Corinthians all eat from one loaf (1 Cor
10:17). The lordly meal does not create unity; it presupposes it. The Corinthians are one body, for all their individual
differences. So Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 12; the good-looking parts of your
body are not really very helpful; it’s the shameful parts that are the most
necessary—the ones you cover up. (You can lose your hair, and it doesn’t really
matter.) So you are first the body of Christ, and only after that an individual
(1 Cor 12:27). Divisive eating and drinking at the
lordly dinner, expressions of false individuality, bring condemnation,
weakness, sickness, even death (1 Cor 11:30). There
is power in the meal, and it can turn against you judgement.
Just as falsely eating meat sacrificed to idols can destroy the co-religionist
for whom Christ died (1 Cor 8:11), so any celebration
of the Eucharist that is divisive of the body of Christ does not correlate with
the body of Christ created by his death, and is ultimately heretical in its
root sense; it creates division.
That’s
mind-blowing! Unity is given, and that applies to the Lord’s Supper in I
Corinthians 10—the text that we usually don’t read about the Lord’s Supper. You
remember that wonderful chapter. It starts out by dealing with the fact that
there were Corinthians who thought that baptism and the Lord’s Supper made them
secure. They took it so seriously that they said the more you could drink and
eat at the supper, the more Spirit you got; they could experience it literally.
More wine, more spirit; Dionysos was powerful. (Read
the Bacchae of Euripides some time!)
Like Israel of old they had the pneumatikon
food and pneumatikon drink (1 Cor 10:3-4), and they interpreted the power of wine as the
gift of the Spirit which guaranteed their spiritual character and gave both
certainty and security.
Now
what does Paul say? He reminds them that there were people who were in the
cloud and went through the sea; they were baptized into Moses and had pneumatikon food and pneumatikon
drink. It doesn’t mean spiritual. It means food and drink that offers and
conveys the Spirit to you. That’s good! But they read it in such a way as to
say, therefore if we have the Spirit, we’ve got it made—“and there fell in one
day three and twenty thousand. Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, flee
idolatry. I’m talking to you like sensible people. Judge what I’m saying
yourselves. The cup of blessing, which we bless, is it not a participation in
the blood of Christ? The bread, the loaf which we tear apart, is it not a
participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, the many,
are one body, for we all share from one loaf.” Stop using wafers! I mean that
literally! You have destroyed the symbolism of the Lord’s Supper if you use
wafers. Besides which, they’re tasteless. You need real bread—I would use pita,
which leaves no crumbs behind as you tear it apart, and you all eat from the
one loaf, and therefore you are one body.
And
that’s the problem with the Lord’s Supper in Cor-inth,
some get there early and get well fed and drunk, and others come late. Paul
says what’s wrong with that is that you don’t discern the Lord’s body—and that
doesn’t mean the Real Presence. It means they act as if the community is not a
single body of Christ. And you will recall how drastic he makes this. If you
read the material that comes following it, in verse 27ff, it’s a great deal of
legal terminology. And he says what happens is, you will be judged, and he
agrees that there’s power in the Eucharist, and that power will turn against
you, which is why many are weak and sick and some have even died. Paul views
the Lord’s Supper as a lethal meal if you do not discern the body. And I’ll
repeat: in I Corinthians 11 it is not the Real Presence—which I’m in favor of,
by the way—that concerns Paul, but the body that is the church.
You
can understand why there’s such concern. Every good Jewish meal (this is what
got Jesus in trouble, by the way) every Jewish meal began with a berakah—Baruch atah Adonai Elohenu, melech ha olam…—“Blessed art
thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, because you caused the fruit to
grow, because you made the vine to grow.” Which means that
every meal was also a religious act. When Paul blasts Peter in Galatians
2:11ff. for not eating any longer with the Gentiles,
when those from James came from Jerusalem, it’s not just that Peter is not
being polite. He is breaking religious community. That’s what they accused
Jesus of – he ate with the wrong kinds of people, the tax collectors and
sinners, and so he was praying with the wrong kind. Jesus was quite inclusive.
It’s no wonder that Paul says in 1 Cor 11:33, “when
you come together to eat [the lordly meal], accept one another, wait for one
another.”
Now,
that’s all Paul has to say about the Lord’s Supper. No, not quite. For as often
as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until
he comes. It’s the word of the cross, again; the brother for whom Christ died
is the one who is there at the Eucharist.
To disregard somebody, to make the Eucharist a cause of division for the
church, is exactly anti-Paul, not because the Eucharist creates unity but
because it presupposes unity. That means
that (I’m glad my parish does it) anyone who is baptized—not carrying my
Lutheran brand name, but baptized—is welcome at the altar. That is Pauline
theology. The tie that binds leads to a community that has unity in variety.
The
Tie that Binds in Manifold Forms and Expressions
Some
years ago at the Society for Biblical Literature there was a seminar on Pauline
theology in which we read the letters one after the other, cumulatively, and
tried to find what is the unitive
Pauline theology. What we learned was, we
couldn’t do it, because every letter Paul writes is ad hoc and he fits
his message to the situation.
Let
me give you an illustration. In 2 Corinthians Paul is in trouble again in
Corinth because he doesn’t have letters of recommendation from Jerusalem, the
early church Higgins Road. He never was with the historical Jesus, his
opponents said. Now in 1 Corinthians he said that “the word about the cross is
the wisdom of God and the power of God” (1 Cor
1:23-24). But when he gets to the last chapter of 2 Corinthians, listen to what
he says. “For Christ was crucified out of weakness, but he
lives out of the power of God” (2 Cor 13:4).
His response in 2 Corinthians is to stress not the death of Jesus (as he did in
his first letter), which he did not personally witness, but the resurrection of
Jesus as God’s demonstration of power. That statement would have given aid and
comfort to the opposition in the first letter, but responds well to the new
opposition at Corinth. He fits his message to his audience.
Romans:
Unity in Variety
That’s
the case in Romans. There was no one, single Christian community in the church
at Rome. In the prescript to Romans (1:1-7) Paul does not address “the
church in Rome,” but the “to all those in Rome who are beloved of God, called
saints.” Peter Lampe, a German scholar, has written a marvelous book about the
early church in Rome. There were at least fourteen synagogues in the city of
Rome when Paul writes; as you know, the Christian community in Rome was not a
single community. Different groups of Christians probably were related to different
synagogues. If you read Romans 16 carefully, you will probably be able to
identify at least five house churches. And there was division among them. There
were strong people and weak people. The strong people ate meat; the weak people
were vegetarians.
And
there was another problem. You may recall that in 49 AD, shades of Acts 18, the
emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from the city of Rome. Whether that was 100%
I don’t know, but certainly the leadership left. We know that Prisca and Aquila were in Corinth because of that when Paul
arrived there in Acts 18. When Claudius dies in the year 54 AD, his edict dies
with him, which means, as Romans 16 makes clear, that Prisca
and Aquila can and have returned to Rome with the other exiled Jewish
Christians, such as Andronikos and the woman Junia, whom Paul describes as his kinsfolk, who were
“outstanding among the apostles” (Rom 163-7). Such Jewish Christians discover
to their surprise that the Christian communities in Rome had changed. In a
sense, the Roman church in those five years was the first predominantly Gentile
community; when the Jewish Christians came back they were shocked at what had
happened. The gentile Christians didn’t observe the food laws any more. They
didn’t eat kosher. And, just as bad, all that wonderful seafood that was
prohibited by Jewish law. Pompeii had beautiful mosaics which picture such
wonderful seafood. There’s a lot of shellfish that Jews can’t eat: oysters,
clams, mussels, lobster, and the like.
Control
via Ethnicity?
Those
Jews coming back were shocked, so much so that they could only eat the
vegetables at the meals. (I recognize that former Pythagoreans were also
vegetarians.) The Gentile Christians, calling themselves strong, said these
others were weak Christians; they don’t understand what Christian liberty is.
It’s a surprise when you read Romans 3:21-31 to note the strange syntax; “being
justified,” a participle, modifies “were sinning and falling short of the glory
of God (Rom 3:23-24): But now apart from Torah, the saving activity of God (dikaiosyne theou),
the righteousness of God, has been made clear, testified to, by the law and the
prophets, but the righteousness of God through faith of Jesus Christ (I would
translate it “through the fidelity that Jesus Christ manifested”) for all those
who have faith; for there is no distinction, for all were sinning and falling
short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift, etc.” When you parse the
sentence, you notice that Paul’s main point becomes a subservient participle, when
it ought to be a main verb with the adversative de. You know that in
Chapter 4 he is going to testify to this by the case of Abraham.
When
you read the English translation, they always pretty these things up. They turn
the dependent participle into a main sentence, actually changing the
syntactical structure of the Greek. (If you don’t believe me, sometime read the
first chapter of Ephesians. It’s only two sentences; each sentence is about 15
verses long, but they get broken up into about four or five and the result is
you don’t even catch what the main point is in Ephesians 1—what the letter to
the Ephesians is about.) In Romans 3:24-26 the main point is “being justified
by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put
forward as an hilasterion, a unique term,
through faith in his blood, for a demonstration of his righteousness through
the relaxing of the sins that have been committed earlier, in the forbearance
of God, for the demonstration of his saving activity at the present moment, in
order that he himself might be righteous and might make righteous the one out
of faith in Christ Jesus.”
Contemporary
scholarship, with which I agree, says what Paul does here is cite a Jewish
Christian creedal summary, which the Jewish Christians returning to Jerusalem
were using to try to regain control of the Christian communities. Paul cites it
and glosses it. Jack Reumann years ago wrote a
marvelous article on these two verses, in which he says that what they were
saying, these Jewish Christians, is that for you to participate in the benefits
of Christ, you have to be a part of the covenant people of God. Unity then is
determined by the Sinaitic Covenant. If you don’t
observe the Jewish laws, you don’t really participate in the blessings that
come with the Jewish covenant sacrifice of Jesus’ death. Now, when Paul cites
it this Jewish creedal statement, he inserts two things: the phrase “by grace”
(which appear redundant after “as a gift,” but interprets the word) and the
phrase “through faith” (which ruins the sacrificial statement about the blood).
Note the way he goes on. Where then is bragging? Locked out.
By what Torah? The one that has to do with works? No
way! Then comes this wonderful phrase, “but through the Torah of faith.”
In
Romans 1 Paul said that he was an apostle for the obedience of faith (Rom 1:5).
Both phrases, “obedience of faith” and “law of faith,” bring words together
that don’t belong together (oxymora). Faith is
obedience to God for Paul. If there is any torah, it’s a torah that has to do
with faith, not works. And so we draw the conclusion that a person is made
righteous by faith, without deeds of the law. Then he draws the conclusion that
relates to the division at Rome. Or is God only the God of Jews? No way! He’s
also the God of Gentiles, isn’t he? Yes, also of Gentiles, since there is Heis Theos—one God.
That is the Hellenistic Jewish summary of the Shema:
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one, and you shall write these words upon
your doorposts, bind them on your foreheads.” We just had a case here in
Chicago, where in an apartment they wanted to take down the Mezuzahs from the
door because they were religious items. The court said they could have it.
If
indeed God is one… You know, one of the things we Lutherans really have
problems with is preaching God. We are so fixated on Jesus that we often don’t
invite people to believe in God. Years ago, Nils Alstrup
Dahl called God the neglected factor in New Testament theology. In the
New Testament, in Paul, there are no doxologies to Jesus; there are only
doxologies to God. There are no prayers that Paul addresses to Jesus, he prays
to God. The only time we Lutherans tend to preach about God is on Trinity
Sunday, and then we’re trying to deal with the fact that God has three
personae, three persons. If indeed God is one, who will justify the
circumcision out of his fidelity, an Old Testament motif, then God’s
righteousness is demonstrated when God remains faithful to the covenant, even
though Israel has broken it—shades of Jeremiah 31. God will justify the
circumcision out of his fidelity and the uncircumcision
through faith. Every time we see the word pistis
in the New Testament, we tend to want to translate it “faith,” but it doesn’t
always mean faith. Sometimes it means evidence; sometimes it means fidelity;
sometimes it means proof.
Accept
One Another
The
Roman Christians were split between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians.
In the face of that Paul says “You’ve got it wrong: if there’s only one God
(Rom 3:30-31), that ought to unite you. Then he takes Abraham as proof. Romans 4 is an absolutely marvelous chapter. Paul defines
faith out of the Old Testament story of Abraham that we all know. Abraham
believed upon the God who justifies the pagans, the asebeis.
(Rom 4:5) It’s important to Paul to note that when God called Abraham, he was
an idolater. He did not know the true God. So faith, in one sense, is putting
oneself before God as the pagan, the idolater who needs what God does. But it
gets even better. He points out that when God called Abraham (Genesis 12), he
was not a Jew when he received the promise, since he wasn’t circumcised until
Genesis 17. Circumcision turned him into a Jew. So Abraham is the father both
of Gentiles and Jews (Rom 4:10-12). Now if you go to the great seven-volume set
Legends of the Jews by the Jewish scholar Ginsberg, Abraham is treated
in Volume One; Ginsberg summarizes the later Jewish tradition. According to
that, Abraham already before he went to Haran, was bawling his father out for having
idols in the house. He becomes a preacher of the truth. That’s not in the
Bible!
And
not only that, says Paul, Abraham received a promise of a child. He became the
father of many nations (Rom 4:17) because “he believed in the God who makes the
dead alive and who calls non-existent things into existence.” You cannot have a
better definition than that. Faith is ultimately putting one’s self in front of
God as a dead person whom the Creator God will make alive, as the non-existent
person whom the creator God calls into being. You know what that really means?
On Sunday morning at the holy hour, the congregation that gathers is the impii, the dead. Luther’s last words as he lay on
his deathbed were “Wir sind Bettler; das ist wahr.” That’s good
Pauline theology. We are beggars; that’s the truth.
It
gets even better, when Paul gets into the later chapters. Krister
Stendahl2 pointed out that Paul had two
major problems in his own life. The first major problem was why he had to
suffer so much, if he was God’s apostle to the Gentiles? Paul deals with that
in 2 Corinthians. The other problem is the unbelief of most of the Jewish
people, if Jesus really was the Messiah, the Promised One of the Old Testament.
That’s the issue he takes up in Romans 9 to 11. You remember how he argues in
Romans 11—he turns directly to the Gentiles. “And you Gentiles,
don’t brag over against the Jews. The tree into which you were grafted was the
Jewish tree. So you can’t brag over against the Jews.” It’s another argument
for unity in the Christian communities in Rome. And he ends up (shades of
Romans 4:3), “God locked everybody up into disobedience in order that he might
have mercy upon all.”
One
of the aspects of this Christ is revealed in the thematic statement of Romans:
“I am not ashamed of the gospel of God, for it is the power of God toward
salvation to every one who believes.” Verse 18 then says, “For the wrath of God
is being revealed….” The structure of verse 18 parallels that of verse 17. The
gospel of God becomes the thing that reveals idolatry. So it’s not surprising
that in Romans 2:16 Paul says “On that day God will judge all people according
to my Gospel,” which means that the Gospel becomes the criterion for judgment,
not the law. In Gal 2:14 Paul says Peter was not walking upright with respect
to the truth of the gospel. Let me repeat. It is that one fact, said in
different ways—the word of the Cross. Jesus is Lord. If you act to offend a
weaker brother, you destroy the brother for whom Christ died (1 Cor 8:11; Rom 14:15). In both cases one can do wrong even
when doing what is right! One’s co-religionist has the value of the crucified.
The Gospel is the standard by which one determines evaluates actions.
I
remember that when, I was a student, someone asked Richard Caemmerer,
our homiletics teacher, “Is the Sermon on the Mount law or gospel?” and he
said, “Yes.” And he was right! The worst thing you can do to anybody is preach
the Gospel and have him or her say “No.” According to Paul, that condemns them.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that when Paul says in Romans 10, “If you
believe that Jesus is Lord, and say in your heart God raised him from the dead,
you will be saved.” Have you ever noticed that in Paul’s certainly authentic
letters, salvation is always presented as lying in the future? “We were buried
with Christ by baptism into death, but like as he was raised from the dead, we”
were raised from the dead? No. We “shall walk in newness of life” (Rom
6:4). We shall be saved in the future (Rom 5:9-10). We tend to use the word
“Savior” for Jesus often, Paul only uses it once, in
Phil 3:20, where he speaks of the eschatological coming of Jesus as Soter at the end. “Our commonwealth is in the
heavens from which we expect a Savior.” The only time Luke uses it is in
the Christmas story (Luke 2:11). The term is too much tied to Roman ruler cult
for Christians to use it often.
The
surprising thing is that after all of this, when Paul gets around to the end of
his letter, he says (Romans 15:5ff): “Now the God of endurance and exhortation,
may he give you to think the same things with one another, according to Christ
Jesus, in order that with one accord, with one mouth, you might glorify the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 15:5-6). That’s unity. He goes on,
“Therefore accept each other, just as Christ accepted you for the glory of
God.” Accept one another. He does not say to the Jewish Christians in Rome,
“You’ve got to be Gentiles.” He does not say to the Gentile Christians in Rome,
“You’ve got to observe the Torah.” No, though they are divided between strong
and weak, he says they ought to be serving one another, welcoming one another,
just as accepted them for the glory of God. There is no push in Paul for
uniformity. Each letter urges unity, but not unity by agreement in everything.
Thus there is no single creedal summary that Paul urges on every Christian
community. So also Irenaeus of Lyons rejected the
attempt by Tatian to harmonize the four Gospels into
a single account without any contradictions. There is no push for uniformity in
the earliest church.
If
you really looked at the Easter stories, you would agree with Martin Luther’s
sermon in which he said they Easter accounts were completely confused (omnia inmixta).
There had to have been at least eight women who went back and forth to the tomb
a number of times. When you read the John 20 on Easter day this year, recall
that when Luther read that story, where John says that Peter went into the
tomb, saw the grave cloths and believed (John 20:8), Luther said it was impossible.
If he had not heard the Gospel, how could he believe? But then he went on to
say that the significant thing about Easter is what it really means; don’t get
all hot and bothered about these details. Luther was much less afraid of such
frank acknowledgement of problems in a biblical text in his preaching than most
of us are!
Galatians
and Forced Unity
Consider
how Paul respond in Galatians, when there is another attempt to create a false
unity. There, ethnicity becomes central—Jewish ethnicity that implicates
particular rituals. The Torah, with the concomitant demand for circumcision,
Paul says, is another gospel, which is no gospel at all. What unified the
people in Galatia is the liberty of the sons, the children of God, created by
the Spirit given in baptism (Gal 5:1). That’s the liberty that frees one to
carry the burdens of other people. Bear one another’s burdens and so you will
fulfill the law of Christ (Gal 6:2). The Spirit becomes both power and producer
of fruits. The Spirit is not separated from the Good News. The truth is made
clear in baptism. That’s interesting, isn’t it? In I Corin-thians
he said, “I’m glad I didn’t baptize any of you.” Now he says in Galatians 3
that it is baptism that makes all the Galatians, not just the Jewish Christian
Galatians, children of God. They all put on Christ. They all together become
the seed of Abraham in Christ (note that it is singular) because they are taken
into that one person who had been—remember seed is singular earlier, it must be
Christ (Gal 3:16)—but now you put on Christ if you are incorporated into
Christ, then you become also seed of Abraham.
And
what does that mean? It means that all the divisive things of society at that
time are no longer relevant. There is no longer an ethnic distinction. There is
no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer social distinction; there is no
longer slave or free. And there is no longer gender distinction; there is no
longer man and woman. But you are all one in Christ. Baptism incorporated you
into what Christ has done, removes all the distinctions that we tend to
make—social, political, ethnic, sexual. Unity is not made, but given in
baptism.
1
Peter and a Sense of Identity
Now that brings us to talk about one other important
way of creating unity. 1 Peter (I’m leaving Paul for a moment) describes
his readers or hearers as foreigners, paroikoi,
and resident aliens, parepidemoi—people
who live alongside the citizen population. The Christians to whom Peter writes
were really having problems. They were formerly Gentiles, with all that implies
about their former religious beliefs and activities, and now had become
Christians. They discovered in the process that the society around them was now
putting pressure on them to come back, to conform. What does 1 Peter do? He
creates for these people a new past. Remember how 1 Peter starts out? It is one
of the three letters of the New Testament that begins with a berachah (the others are 2 Corinthians and
Ephesians]: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ….” And he
points out in Chapter 1 how God had in mind from before history to call these
people his own.
Then
in Chapter 2 he appropriates for them the history of Israel. “You are a chosen
generation.” (that’s Israel), “A priesthood that is
royal” (that’s Israel), A holy people, a nation for a special possession, that
you should show forth the virtues, aretas, of
the One who called you. Then he plays off the prophet Hosea. Once you were lo
ammi, “not my people, but now you are my people.
Once you were lo ruhama, not receiving mercy,
but now you have received mercy” (1 Pet 2:9-10). He omits the name of Hosea and
Gomer’s third child, she’ar
yashuv, “a remnant that shall return.” That third
name was too much tied to Israel (recall Rom 11:5). The writer is creating a
past, a history for these people to give them status, at least in their own
eyes.
I
make a modern application. One of the tasks of ministry is creating an identity
for the people in a parish. And that becomes even more important when you have
a parish no longer made up of a single ethnicity or a single social class. Look
at the roster of names in your parish. How do you create a single identity, a
past in a parish that is shared by people of such variety? I think that is part
of the pastor’s task, the way the author of 1 Peter took it up. So what are the
ties that freeze people that prevent a common identity? Well, one is ethnicity.
That’s easy to see. It’s like trying to tie the early church to its Jewish
matrix. Or “I belong to Paul. I belong to Cephas. I
belong to Apollos.” I am in favor of pastors having
good personalities and being friendly and welcoming, but there’s a danger in
that, if unity is determined by clerical allegiance. And then the pastor leaves, and it falls apart.
Unity via Structure?
There
is also a false unity that can be created around structure. Two quotations:
“There
was at first in the Christian church no uniform constitution, no agreed canon, no one formula of confession.”3 Paul never tries
to get everybody to formulate the central fact about Christ with the same
words. He even allows for variety even in confession to the one Christ. And the
second citation:
The
church does not originate through order, nor live by right order, but solely in
the Spirit of Christ. If, however, it lives spiritually, then it is in order
and attains to order, then, through the Spirit of peace, it also sets right
order in its midst, without becoming a slave to this order.4
There
is no prescribed church structure for Christ-trusting communities in the New
Testament. Note what Jesus says in Matt 23:8-10. There is only one who is your
teacher, one who is your father, one who is your leader; you are not; you are
all brothers and sisters. Matthew’s church is egalitarian, without set-apart
leaders. Matthew warns against false prophets in Matt 7:15-23. You recognize
them by their fruits. “Not everybody who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the
kingdom of heaven. Many will say on that day, ‘Lord, Lord (the very early
Christian baptismal creed, 1 Cor 12:3), didn’t we
prophesy in your name? Didn’t we exorcise demons? Didn’t we do miracles? (the pyrotechnical deeds of faith)’ Then I will make this
confession against them. I never recognized you, you people who do that which
is contrary to the Torah.”
The
lists in I Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4 list first apostles and prophets,
then shepherds and teachers. Yet when Paul urges the Corinthians to accept the
leadership of Stephanus, he gives him no title at all
(1 Cor 16:15-16). Apostles and prophets did not survive
long. In fact, prophets became a major problem in the church. The Didache recognizes the prophets (see Didache
13:1-7), says that prophets should be allowed to pray as they please at the
Eucharist, but then gives rules for identifying a false apostle or prophet in Didache 13. “If he stays three days, he is a false prophet.
When an apostle leaves he should take nothing except bread until he arrives at
his night’s lodgings. If he asks for money, he is a false prophet.”5
The Pastoral Epistles give the criteria for bishops and deacons, but the terms
are not borrowed from religious officials (no priests or hierophants), but from
the secular political or military life of the city (just as is the term ekklesia) or from philosophy. Paul describes Euodia and Syntyche (“good
traveler” and “lucky,” slave names) as coworkers (Phil 4:2-4), Phoebe as a
servant (diakonos) of the church at Cenchrea and his own benefactors, Andronikos
and Junia, as outstanding among the apostles. In
short, the New Testament knows no consistent pattern of church organization or
structure—and unity does not depend on it or grow from it.
Unity
via Worship and Liturgy
In
the New Testament, worship is necessary, but uniformity of worship is not. In
fact, one of the striking things is that the early Christian church
appropriated none of the technical language of worship used in its world. The
only religious term that survives is prayer. Christians were regarded as atheoi. atheists,
understandably so from the point of view of the people around them. They had no
temples, no altars, made no sacrifices, had no
processions. They called themselves by a political name, ecclesia, an assembly. Not a theasos.
It’s not surprising that to the world around them they looked strange. Whenever
the language of worship appears, it is used of what is not cult. “I beseech you
therefore by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living
sacrifice” (Rom 12:1). That oxymoron is nonsense. A sacrifice is by definition
when you destroy. But Paul says that the Romans’ bodies become a living
sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is that leitourgia,
that service (that’s also, by the way, a political term in its origin), a leitourgia that corresponds with the basic
confession. When Paul calls this service logiken,
the term doesn’t mean “spiritual,” as so many modern translations have it. What
does it mean? That it correlates with the gospel, the basic logos, of
the Christian message. Because of that logos
one approves what is good and acceptable and perfect? Or Paul calls the
gentiles he converts his sacrifice to God (Rom 15:16).
Even
the passages that talk about hymnody surprise “Let the word of Christ dwell in
you richly as you teach and admonish one another with psalms and hymns and
inspired songs” (Col 3:16; cf. Eph 5:18-20). What’s the function of hymnody? To
teach and admonish! I wonder how much that played into the selection of the
hymns for the new hymnal. Do they admonish and teach “…as you sing and make
melody in your hearts to the Lord”?
Conclusions
I
think I’m going to summarize with only two points.
(1)
The New Testament says a lot less than the later church does, but it is very
clear on a couple of significant aspects of the tie that binds. The tie is the
action of God in Christ that happened primarily at the cross and resurrection,
actualized in baptism, lived out in everyday life’s activities, resulting in a
community in which people engage in mutual service; that’s the tie. It is both
theological and Christological.
(2)
It is equally clear that there is no demand for uniformity in the church. When
Romans 16:17 says tells the Romans to “note and avoid those that cause
divisions contrary to the teaching you have learned,” that means that the
people who cause divisions in the community are wrong. To use Romans 16:17 to
justify separation from those with divergent views or practices is a
misappropriation of the passage, provided the message of the gospel as the
power of God that moves to salvation is there. You must read Romans 16:17 in
the light of Romans 15:5-9—and if you do, you will be delighted if in your
parish there are black faces and brown faces and yellow faces and young faces
and old faces, and some people who come in off the street and kind of smell. In
Paul’s view you will accept them for the glory of God (shades of James 2:1-7).
Endnotes
1 Margaret M.
Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical
Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians (Louisville:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993). She stresses henotes
(oneness) and homonoia, unity of thought,
as the virtues Paul strives to inculcate.
2
Krister Stendahl, Final Account: Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995: 1-7.
3 Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen, “The
Problem of Order in Early Christianity and the Ancient Church,” pp. 123-40 in Tradition
and Life in the Church: Essays and Lectures on Church History
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968): 125.
4 Von Campenhausen,
124.
5 Didache 11:5-6, cited from The Apostolic Fathers,
edited and translated by Bart D. Ehrman (Loeb
Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) 1.435.