Hearing Paul's Voice

Insights for Teaching and Preaching

M. Eugene Boring

• Editorial: Eerdmans
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467458108
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Estudios bíblicos

Exegetical soundings in Pauline texts, illustrated by probes into 1 Thessalonians, Romans, Ephesians, and the Pastorals.

Until we grasp the meaning of the text on its terms, Scripture is little more than a sounding board echoing the religious interpretations readers, all the while supposing this is "what the Bible says."

Gene Boring offers those who preach and teach methods of understanding Scripture contextually in Hearing Paul's Voice. He begins by placing the reader in the position of a first-century believer, demonstrating how such a reader would understand the church and the letter we now call 1 Thessalonians. Our own culture, combined with familiarity of the Bible and church life, has conditioned us to suppose we already understand what the Thessalonian believer had to learn. Hearing the Bible through ears of a Thessalonians opens up the possibility of hearing it afresh in our own time. Boring also explores how Paul's message was interpreted and heard in later generations. The theme throughout is coming within hearing distance of the text, for those whose ears may have been numbed by cultural familiarity.

Hearing Paul's Voice combines careful and reverent critical historical study of the Bible, assuming its results, with theological perception and openness to hearing the Bible as Word of God. Written with clarity and simplicity, Boring illustrates the relevance of the biblical text and is ideal for preachers and teachers in the church who want to deepen their understanding of the canonical Pauline letters.

Chapter 1

Paul’s Theology: Grasping and Being Grasped

When, about 50 CE, Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy turned off the Via Egnatia and walked into the bustling city of Thessalonica, they were the first Christians in town. The members of the church they founded there were all new converts. Paul’s letter to them a few months after the beginning of the church is our earliest extant Christian text.

By contrast, the congregations represented by Revelation, 1–3 John, and the Fourth Gospel were already in their third generation of church life when those books were written. They were looking back on an extensive and conflicted history and looking out on a multicultural world with a variety of religious traditions. Most of the Johannine Christians had grown up in the context of church life and were steeped in its traditions. Many of us share this experience—the only church we have ever known has been around for a lot longer than we have—and we have much to learn from the spectrum of Johannine texts about communicating and interpreting the good news of Christian faith in our own time.

We also have much to learn from this earliest text in the New Testament. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul gives us a glimpse of his struggle to communicate the faith to newcomers who had become Christian believers with no Jewish or biblical background. For many of us who share Paul’s struggle to speak to sincere but secularized hearers and nurture them in the faith, 1 Thessalonians is nearer our own situation than any of the Johannine texts.

Theology: Faith Seeking Understanding

Paul is a theologian, and so are we preachers and teachers, every one of us, and so are most of the people in the congregations to which we belong. They may be hesitant to think of themselves as theologians, and we preachers—to curry favor with such good people—may sometimes be hesitant as well. All the same, we are theologians, and so is Paul, though he, too, never explicitly talks about “theology.” The church members who listen to us on Sunday mornings may need to be encouraged to think of their minister, their church school teacher, and themselves as theologians.

The noun “theology” (theologia) and the verb “theologize” (theologeō) were available to Paul. They had been used for centuries before Paul (e.g., by Aristotle) and were current in first-century religious discourse (see, e.g., Plutarch), but it is no accident that neither Paul nor any other New Testament writer uses any of the available vocabulary for “theology.” The author of Revelation is labeled “St. John the Theologian” in the title of later manuscripts of the New Testament, but otherwise theologia, theologeō, and related words are entirely absent from the New Testament.

Paul claimed to preach the gospel (the verb euangelizomai is used nineteen times, the noun euangelion forty-eight times, in the undisputed letters). He does not describe himself as conducting theological discussions. He rejected “lofty words . . . [of] human wisdom” in order, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to proclaim the crucified Jesus as representing the wisdom and power of God (1 Cor 2:1–5).¹ This datum has allowed some preachers and teachers to disdain theology as “human tradition” and “vain philosophy” and “wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening.” The Bible warns us against such people (Matt 15:6; Col 2:8; 2 Tim 2:14). It depends, of course, on what one means by “theology.”

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?,” a question supposedly debated by medieval scholastics, is often used to illustrate “theology” as inane frivolity or merely an irrelevant indoor sport. The illustration is not apt. The issue was whether the realities of the transcendent world of God can be thought of in terms of the space-time continuum of this world, which makes God a part of the universe rather than the transcendent Creator. Such questions that ponder angels in terms of “How much space does an angel occupy?” and “How much does God weigh?” were not posed in order to obtain answers but to point out the fallacy of reducing the world of God to the space-time categories of our mundane world.

We are using the term here in the classic sense of Anselm of Canterbury (eleventh century), fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.” So understood, theology includes the serious intellectual effort of believing scholars to examine the faith, an ongoing quest for a broader and deeper grasp of (or, rather, being grasped by) the truth of God made known in Jesus Christ. But theology is much more than the critical reflection on the faith by academic theologians. Theology is necessary in order to state what we believe in the first place, even to ourselves. Faith as trust is exercised by babies, but faith that is thought about and stated requires concepts and language, and is already theology. Thus, for adults, “faith” and “theology” are not alternatives but require each other. Primal faith is that personal elemental trust in God that calls forth the preconceptual, prelinguistic response of love and obedience to God, obedience-in-personal-trust. But as soon as one thinks about this faith and attempts to express its content in thoughts and words, faith is seeking understanding, and the result is theology. So understood, theology is not only intentional reflection on religious truth, not only philosophical and academic discussions of divine and ultimate things. Every statement of faith is and must be theological, for faith cannot express itself without having some conceptual and linguistic content. The church member, preacher, or teacher who may claim a bit smugly that “I’m just a simple believer; I don’t go in for all that fancy theology” may actually be articulating a true insight, expressing an authentic disdain for frivolous academic abstractions, but this cannot be a rejection of theology as such, whatever it be called. Whether believers are simple or sophisticated, every statement expressing faith is necessarily faith seeking understanding, that is, a theological statement. When one responds to the question of what one means by God, even if only in an internal monologue to clarify one’s own thinking, one is making a theological statement. Thus theology is not only the discipline that tests our preaching and teaching for its conformity and appropriateness to the gospel. The preaching being tested by critical, reflective theological thinking is already theology and, as the conceptual and linguistic expression of the faith, cannot be anything else. This is what I mean by claiming that all Paul’s statements expressing his faith, and all our sermons and church-school lessons, are theology. Whoever believes anything and attempts to articulate that belief in concepts and language is doing theology. This is first-level, primary theology. Only rarely does Paul indulge in second-level theology, which reflects on and attempts to explain the theological affirmations made at this primary level. Paul’s affirmation of the resurrection in the traditional creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 is first-level, primary theology; his discussion of the resurrection in the paragraphs that follow ventures into second-level theology. Every sermon, good or bad, simplistic or profound, is theology of one or the other sort. The only way to avoid theology is not to believe or not to think. To be sure, while faith causes us to think, faith generates more than thought—faith sings, confesses, rejoices, and suffers. Faith acts.²

We are not here attempting to reconstruct the “theology of Paul” in any comprehensive sense. Paul was not a systematic theologian. Not only does he not send theological essays on particular themes to his churches, but he does not have this worked out in his own mind in a systematic way. “Systematic theology,” in the sense of a comprehensive way of thinking about and stating the faith in ways that make some kind of sense in one’s own categories, is a necessary and valuable discipline. Theology is what we thinking believers, believing thinkers, do and must do, whether systematically or willy-nilly, in expressing the faith in our own categories: what we mean by “God,” “Christ,” “salvation,” “church,” “the meaning of history,” “the meaning and purpose of my own life,” and such. In this sense, everyone has a “systematic” theology, even if it is implicit, inchoate, undeveloped, contradictory, fragmentary, tentative. In this sense, it means simply “thinking about our faith, expressing its meaning as coherently as we know how or feel the need to.” In this elemental sense, Paul did have a “systematic theology”; if you had stopped him on the street in Thessalonica and asked him what he meant by “Christ,” “church,” and the “parousia,” he would not have been tongue-tied. Perhaps after a minute to collect his thoughts, he could have given a reasonable response. Though Paul was not a systematic theologian, his theology does have a systematic quality; it is not a hodgepodge of random or arbitrary ideas. Throughout the history of the church, Paul has been recognized as a theologian of great depth. But he does not have a comprehensive, consistent theological system always ready to hand, upon which he can draw and trot out particular segments to address each concrete situation as it emerges. He does not respond ad hoc but draws upon his core theological convictions. What these in fact mean sometimes first becomes clear as he thinks through the meaning of the faith for the particular situation. As we make some soundings in the “theology” of 1 Thessalonians, we are not attempting to reconstruct the “theology of Paul” the person, the growing and changing collection of ideas he carried around with him that expressed his faith. In preaching or teaching from a New Testament text, or merely trying to hear and understand it for our own edification, we want to get within hearing distance of a text in our (= the church’s) Bible, not reconstruct the whole theology of the person or community behind the text.

In the generations after Paul’s death, the church accepted and affirmed the extant Pauline letters as Holy Scripture. We preachers and teachers in the church want to shape our own theology in dialogue with the Bible, which means listening to its message in its own theological terms. In dealing with any text from a Pauline letter, we want to get a handle on Paul’s theology as a whole. But how can people today get their minds around this disparate collection of letters, which embed the gospel and Christian nurture in profound theology, combined with practical instruction, passion, politics, and autobiography? This can be done in two basic ways, each of which is both valuable and problematical. One can strive for a holistic, bird’s-eye view, assembling Paul’s statements on God, Christ, Holy Spirit, church, sin, salvation, faith, love, ethics, and the like into some sort of topical systematic statement. Or one can approach the letters one at a time in their presumed historical order, concentrating on the particular facets of Paul’s theology that surface in each letter. The synchronic-systematic approach attempts to summarize Paul’s theology as an organized whole; the diachronic-historical perspective aims at understanding the theology expressed in each letter as the context for preaching or teaching from a text in that letter. Needless to say, neither approach can be implemented afresh each time one studies a particular text; acquiring such a perspective must be part of the preacher’s or teacher’s overall long-term strategy of continuing theological study. Helpful books that adopt each approach, or combine them, are suggested at the end of this volume.

Paul’s theology is a work in progress, as is ours and that of the people who receive our preaching and teaching. His letters allow us to overhear the intense dialogues in which his theology is forged and shared. To each situation he brings the Scripture—the revelation of God in Torah, Prophets, and Writings—in which his mind is steeped and which he now seeks to understand in the light of God’s definitive revelation in the event of Jesus Christ. He brings tradition—creeds, songs, insights, and convictions from previous experience, contacts with other apostolic missionaries and teachers, including his own colleagues and associates, men and women who are his coworkers. He brings his conviction that his theological work as missionary preacher is guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Paul’s sense of his ministry is analogous to the preacher’s task today. Each situation tailors and reshapes what Paul brings and, in this matrix, also generates new insights, new content, so that he does not merely “apply” previous traditions and insights. Paul doesn’t always know what his theology is until what he brings to the situation interacts with it. He doesn’t always know what the answer is until the situational question brings it into being. Preachers who struggle to bring text and congregation together understand this.

Our procedure will be to adopt a historical perspective, beginning with 1 Thessalonians as the earliest extant Pauline letter, then working through Romans as Paul’s last and longest letter that summarizes the major themes of his theology. In each case we will ask how the readers would have understood the text of that letter, without importing all that we later interpreters might know from reading the rest of the Pauline corpus and other New Testament documents not available to them. Preaching or teaching on Christian hope in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, for example, would not use this text as a launching pad for a topical sermon or lesson about hope in general, a presentation, perhaps with good and helpful thoughts that could be attached to any biblical text containing the word or idea “hope.” Nor should a sermon or lesson on this text become a comprehensive treatment of Paul’s eschatology compiled from all his letters. The approach we adopt here is in step with Paul’s own preaching, the composition of his letters, and their formation into the New Testament canon, and is historical and particular rather than general and systematic. This is also the goal of our preaching and teaching, which aims at allowing the congregation or class to hear the testimony of a particular text. This does not mean, however, that we artificially and mechanically limit our reflection to the words on the pages of the letter before us, pretending when we read 1 Thessalonians that we have never read 1 Corinthians or Romans, as though we do not live in a church with nineteen centuries of experience or have never thought about the subject ourselves. Our preaching from a particular text can be authentically informed by what we understand of Paul’s theology as a whole. There are, in fact, items of information and insight not found in 1 Thessalonians that were known by the original readers that facilitated their understanding of the letter. We also are aware of some of these from our critical reading of other New Testament texts.

For example, in 1 Thessalonians, Paul never explicitly refers to baptism, the Eucharist, or creedal statements. However, in a letter to Corinth written four or five years later, he refers to baptism as presupposed for all Christians (1 Cor 1:13–17; 10:2; 12:13; 15:29), includes the eucharistic tradition he had received and passed on to the Corinthians (11:23–26), and cites the basic creedal statement he had presumably taught them when the church was founded, just after the church-founding visit in Thessalonica. None of this appears in 1 Thessalonians, but Paul does refer to having passed on traditional teaching to the new church in Thessalonica (1 Thess 4:1; cf. 2:13), and we have every reason to believe he delivered the same traditions in all his churches (1 Cor 1:2; 4:17; 7:17; 15:11). It seems we can and should read 1 Thessalonians with the assumption that the new congregation in Thessalonica understood the letter in the light of these traditions and practices Paul had established when the church was founded, traditions we can engage in 1 Corinthians or other letters of Paul.

On the other hand, 1 Thessalonians makes no reference to justification by grace through faith in contrast to “works of the law,” a matter that became crucial in his later letters to the Galatians and Romans. Nor is there any indication of the “body of Christ” imagery for the church that is central to the ecclesiology of 1 Corinthians and Romans, continued in different ways in the post-Pauline Colossians and Ephesians. We know these as important Pauline teachings in later letters. We should be hesitant to read them into 1 Thessalonians.

Theology as Personal: Paul, “Julia,” and Ourselves

Authentic preaching is not only theological but also intensely personal. The New Testament is not, of course, a book of abstract ideas and principles but deals with particular people—423 different persons are explicitly named, in addition to numerous individuals whose names are not given. Paul’s letters are addressed to churches—not to the church in general but to particular congregations composed of individuals whose names he knows, whose faces he sees as he writes. We will approach 1 Thessalonians as expressing the personal theology of Paul and ask how it would have been heard by a representative member of the congregation, whom we will call “Julia.”

Paul

“So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us” (1 Thess 2:8). Paul’s theology bears this personal stamp throughout. God’s revelation is supremely and definitively not in a book but in a personal life: that of Jesus of Nazareth (2 Cor 4:4). The revelation of God continues in and through the lives of those God calls, both Paul himself and the church people to whom he writes. Paul does not merely illustrate the gospel by anecdotes from his personal life; he believes the gospel itself has changed his life and is embodied in his own being, and he does not hesitate to recount his own experience as communication of the gospel (e.g., 1 Thess 1:5–3:13; virtually all of Philippians and Philemon; 1 Cor 1:4–4:20; 9:1–27; 15:1–11; 16:5–20; 2 Cor 1:3–2:17; 4:1–12; 7:5–15; Gal 1:1–2:21; 6:1–17). Even Paul’s last and longest letter, the profoundly theological letter to the Romans, the only letter written to a church he had not founded or visited, concludes with greetings to and from real people, a list of th...