Category Archives: Pauline Studies - Page 2

Love is Fucking Stupid

Posted by on April 28, 2009 71 comments

First Corinthians 13 is one of the most famous of oft-quoted scriptures in existence. How often have all of us found ourselves at a wedding in which the folks getting married may not even be Christians in any sense in which this Scripture is movingly quoted? It’s everywhere. First Corinthians 13 is ubiquitous. Arguably, the apostle Paul never penned anything more marketable.

But seriously, has anyone ever stopped to examine this particular little Scriptural sonnet, let alone think about it? Seriously, who on earth do you know that is like this?

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

What is ironic is that just about anyone that I can think of that would match up to this description is any significant sense is really fucking boring, annoying, and dumb. Seriously, who do we know who “bears all things” or for goodness sake, who on earth “believes all things”? “Endures all things?” Please. Anyone who trusts so easily, who endures without flinching, who remains hopeful in face of hurt and betrayal is, quite literally, a moron. I mean, who on earth would actually thing think that loving means literally bearing anything that comes to you as a consequence of your love? The fact is that we all have limits that we’re not going to cross when it comes to loving others. There is some stuff that we just won’t bear. That’s how it is. If we try to deny this we are liars.

And yet, according to Paul, love, the love that defines who God is bears all things. How have we turned this into the kind of sentimental message that it now is in our popular romantic consciousness? How has the impossible task of bearing any and all hurts, wrongs, and terrors from another person come to mean nothing more than wedding day sentimentality?

Regardless of how this passage of Scripture has become coopted in this way, what is important is clear. If we take 1 Corinthians 13 seriously as a description of the kind of love that defines God and to which we are called as followers of Jesus, we have to realize that this love is fucking deadly. I don’t just mean some heroic notion that if we actually live like this the evil bad guys will want to try to kill us for being so loving. What seems clear to me is that if we love like this, we are going to wear the fuck out. We are going to be used up, depleted, empty, pathetic, gullible, dumb. If we actually believed in loving people according to this Pauline description we would die. Not because people would regard us as some sort of danger, but simply because we would be pathetic, losers, fools, awkward and unattractive imbeciles.

Who besides an imbecile would live a life that bears all things, that believes all things, that hopes all things, endures all things? It is completely unreasonable. It is completely stupid in its excessive irresponsibility. Only dysfunctional idiots endure all things.

Love, understood in this sense is the least attractive thing we can imagine. Love is fucking stupid. Love will kill you. And not in a heroic, self-validating sort of way. Love will kill you by rendering you pathetic, naive, and stupid. To love according to this Scriptural definition will inevitably result in the crucifixion of any successful and attractive mode of existence. The love that the gospel invites us into is one that does nothing less than reduce us to nothing. The gospel makes us pathetic, lonely, manipulable, vulnerable, empty.

In this is love, that we become pathetic nothings. Forlorn, forsaken, foolish, empty, and pathetic. Only so do we live. In any sense whatsoever. According to the gospel, the pathetic life of love is the only truth, the only way, and the only life.

Resurrection and Glory

Posted by on March 31, 2009 1 comment

In Romans 6:4 Paul states that “Christ was raised by the glory of the Father.” What would it mean to think a little more about what it means to say that Christ was raised by the Father’s glory? The context of the passage is centered on the theme of the superabundance of divine grace compared with sin (cf. 5:20). In keeping with this theme, the notion of Christ being resurrected by the Father’s glory seems to emphasize the superabundant luminosity of God. Christ descends into the fullness of death, but being the Son of the Father, he embodies the fullness of the divine presence in that very void, suffusing it with the inexhaustible life of God,the kabod of God.

The trinitarian logic that undergirds the Pauline claim here is one in which the glory of Trinity is understood as an inexhaustible plenitude of sheer life which cannot do other than invade the void that is death and transform it into utterly new life. God’s glory cannot do other than end in resurrection.

The Faith of Abraham

Posted by on March 31, 2009 Comments Off

Throughout Romans 4 Paul draws comparisons between the faith of Abraham and the form of faith that Christians are called to in response to the faithfulness of Christ. What is Abrahamic faith for Paul? According to 4:20 it seems to entail at least two things.

First, the text notes that “No distrust made [Abraham] waver concerning the promise of God.” The phraseology is interesting here. It does not simply say that Abraham perfectly trusted God, rather it says that no distrust caused him to waver regarding his commitment to believing God’s promise. Thus, Abrahamic faith is characterized by ongoing commitment in the face of uncertainty.

Second the verse goes on to note that “he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God.” Thus, Abrahamic faith is inherently doxological. Moreover, Abraham’s praxis of doxology is precisely what established and strengthened his trust in God’s promise.

Abrahamic faith is a nexus of commitment sustained through praise that persists in the absence of existential knowledge. This is, appropriately, an apt description of the faith of Jesus as well.

New Book – The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul

Posted by on December 10, 2008 7 comments

Well, here’s a book to look forward to from Eerdmans. This looks like yet another excellent addition to the recent work on the doctrine of justification, Pauline theology, and apocalyptic. Here’s the blurb from the publisher:

This scholarly book breaks a significant impasse in much Pauline interpretation today, pushing beyond both “Lutheran” and “new” perspectives to a new, noncontractual, “apocalyptic” reading of many of the apostle’s most famous and most troublesome texts.

Douglas Campbell holds that the intrusion of an alien, essentially modern, and theologically unhealthy theoretical construct into the interpretation of Paul has disordered the broader interpretation of his thought and created many of the difficulties that scholars now struggle with. It has, in fact, produced an individualistic and contractual construct, which Campbell terms “the Justification discourse” that shares more with modern political traditions than with either orthodox theology or Paul’s first-century world. In order to counteract that influence, Campbell argues that it needs to be isolated and brought to the foreground before the interpretation of Paul’s texts begins. When that is done, new readings free from this intrusive paradigm become possible and surprising new interpretations unfold.

Demonstrating in detail how prior positions in theological and political terms affect exegesis, how commitments to either lead to bad exegetical decisions at key points, shifting the theoretical implications of certain key texts, The Deliverance of God proves itself a unique and very important work for those looking for an accurate reading of Paul’s words.

Paul in One Sentence

Posted by on June 23, 2008 13 comments

In his wonderfully accessible book, Reading Paul (in the excellent Cascade Companions Series), Michael Gorman offers a wonderful one sentence summary of Paul’s gospel:

“Paul preached and then explained in various pastoral, community-forming letters, a narrative, apocalyptic, theopolitical gospel (1) in continuity with the story of Israel and (2) in distinction to the imperial gospel of Rome (and analogous powers) that was centered on God’s crucified and exalted Messiah Jesus, whose incarnation, life, and death by crucifixion were validated and vindicated by God in his resurrection and exaltation as Lord, which inaugurated the new age or new creation in which all members of this diverse but consistently covenantally dysfunctional human race who respond in self-abandoning and self-committing faith thereby participate in Christ’s death and resurrection and are (1) justified, or restored to right covenant relations with God and others; (2) incorporated into a particular manifestation of Christ the Lord’s body on earth, the church, which is an alternative community to the status-quo human communities committed to and governed by Caesar (and analogous rulers) and by values contrary to the gospel; and (3) infused both individually and corporately by the Spirit of God’s Son so that they may lead ‘bifocal’ lives, focused both back on Christ’s first coming and ahead to his second, consisting of Christlike, cruciform (cross-shaped) (1) faith and (2) hope toward God and (3) love toward both neighbors and enemies (a love marked by peaceableness and inclusion), in joyful anticipation of (1) the return of Christ, (2) the resurrection of the dead to eternal life, and (3) the renewal of the entire creation.”  (Michael Gorman, Reading Paul [Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008], 8).

I’d be hard pressed to find a more concise and thorough statement of Paul’s gospel anywhere else.  Anybody find anything Gorman’s missed here?  Seems pretty right on to me.

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