Pauline Solidarity

Assembling the Gospel of Treasonous Life: Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, Vol. 3

Daniel Oudshoorn

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532675294
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Building on the themes established in the first two volumes of Paul and the Uprising of the Dead, Pauline Solidarity explores: (a) how the Pauline faction transforms relationships within the household unit in the new transnational family of God; (b) how dominant cultural conceptions of honor are rejected in the embrace of shame in the company of the crucified; (c) how vertical practices of patronage are replaced with a horizontal sibling-based political economy of grace; and (d) how the gospel of the Caesars is overcome by the lawlessness of the good news that is being assembled in an uprising of life among the left for dead. Along the way, many of the traditional themes associated with Paulinism (grace, justice, love, loyalty, sin, flesh, death, Jesus, spirit, life) are reexamined and understood as core components of a movement that was spreading among vanquished, colonized, oppressed, dispossessed, and enslaved peoples who were finding new (and treasonous) ways of organizing themselves in order to be life-giving and life-affirming, and in order to counter all the death-dealing structures of Roman imperialism.

1

Introduction: So What and Who Cares?

As I was concluding this project, I learned that a dear friend had died. Injecting opiates cut with fentanyl resulting in an accidental overdose is the suspected cause of death, but this is a dishonest conclusion. The actual cause of death was the law, which criminalizes certain kinds of drugs and certain ways of using drugs and then makes people who use those drugs or who use drugs in those ways the just targets of state-based violence. The so-called “opioid crisis” sweeping across the occupied territories of Turtle Island has killed several of my friends. Sometimes Death comes via an overdose. Sometimes it comes in other ways. For example, I recently had two other friends—two kind, gentle, loving men—die because they were discharged from the hospital even though they had very serious blood infections. The hospital would not provide them with pain relief because they were flagged as illicit drug users, and when they tried to find their own ways to medicate their pain, the hospital kicked them out—one to a rooming house, another to a homeless shelter. After these men died, the partner of one tried to sue the hospital for gross negligence, but once the hospital announced that the man was an intravenous drug user who was “red flagged” as a “drug seeking frequent flyer” and who was discharged from the hospital because he had been found injecting opiates into his PICC line (i.e., a peripherally inserted central catheter), she couldn’t get a lawyer who would take the case. The law and the law-abiding are killers but, it seems, they are never guilty.

Along similar lines, just to the south of me, across a border Europeans carved through lands they stole and transformed into private property, representatives of a dying empire are once again quoting Rom 13:1–7 and urging people to continue to obey the law, even if the cries of children torn from their parents and caged in kennels built in an old Wal-Mart make sensitive oppressors feel uneasy. Some of these children are dying. Some of them are being sexually abused. Many of them have simply vanished. But the state tells us not to be afraid or worried. The state proclaims, “We have done nothing wrong. We are justified by the law. And you are too. Just keep paying your bills. Keep going to work. Keep shopping. Vote.”

“And I, too, am justified by the law,” the world’s most famous pussy-grabber proclaims.

“I sleep the sleep of the just,” declares the founder of the world’s largest mercenary force.

“We did nothing wrong,” declare the hospital administrators and social workers who sent my friends to their deaths.

And on this side of the border, in territories colonized by my people, a prime minister weeps and apologizes to Indigenous peoples and talks a pretty talk about reconciliation, but he still forces pipelines down their throats until they choke on oil, he still refuses to recognize their sovereignty, he still refuses to stop discriminating against Indigenous children living on reserves, he still refuses to provide reserves with clean drinking water, he still refuses to address matters related to Indigenous peoples being massively over-represented in foster care and in prisons, he still refuses to address the matter of the staggering suicide rates among Indigenous teens, and, even as a self-proclaimed feminist, he seems to not care about the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canadian-occupied territories, or about the fact that his government is facilitating the sale of billions of dollars worth of military hardware to the Saudis to assist with a genocide in Yemen. Everywhere, it seems, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, those who are justified by the law continue to kill, and those who are not justified by the law continue to die or be left for dead. Even such sensitive colonizers as myself find ourselves in bondage to the law, and discover that we do not do the good we long to do but, instead, become complicit within and benefit from the very things that we hate. Wretched people that we are, how can we become liberated from this political economy, this body of Sin and of Death?

I have often asked myself these questions over the years. As a result, my interest in Paul and Paulinism (and this project) has waxed and waned. There was a time when it inspired me to wade into the struggle; there was a time when I viewed it like a ladder to be climbed and then kicked away; there was a time when I thought it was important; and there was a time when I viewed it as essentially meaningless. My friends are dying—my friends have always been dying ever since I joined the company of the abandoned and left for dead as a youth who was deprived of housing (i.e., made homeless) by his devout Christian parents—and here I am studying a few letters written by a self-proclaimed nobody almost two thousand years ago.1 Why bother? Indeed, for a long time I didn’t bother. I threw myself into the struggle—and when I was battered and broken and torn apart by conflicting allegiances (it took me some time to understand what loyalty to the crucified and left-for-dead looked like, and by then I was already enmeshed in various other commitments—which is precisely the kind of compromised and entangled situation imperialism tries to create in all its subjects), I threw myself into other things. I experienced the Spirit of Life and I experienced Death. I was filled with hope and I was filled with despair. All the while, Paulinism ebbed and flowed in and out of my life. Ultimately, it was only thanks to my children, Charlie and Ruby, my big love, Jessica, my brothers, nephews, and nieces, and the trees by the Deshkan Ziibiing that I found the strength, ability, and desire to return to this project and, after twelve long years, bring it to an end.

But why should anyone else care about this project? Well, I’m not sure that they should. In fact, the great majority of people whom I know who are gospeling in the ways I describe in this work have little or nothing to do with Paulinism or Jesus. In fact, a good many of them want nothing to do with anything associated with Christianity—which makes a lot of sense given the central role Christianity has played in the colonial history of genocide in these territories (a history that extends from the past up until the present day). I am not interested in converting these people to Paulinism, and I am also not interested in trying to redeem Paul (or Jesus) in their eyes. They do not need Paul or Jesus to do the amazing, difficult, inspiring, death-resisting, life-affirming, and life-giving work they are doing. The Spirit of Life is already their constant companion as they engage in an anastasis from the dead and assemble a body politic that is severed from and at war with the vampiric body of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and Death.

However, for those who care about Paul and his legacy, for those invested in these texts, I hope to offer a reading that inspires engagement in the war for Life and against Death. I hope to take texts that have been put in the service of Death and show that they are better suited to serve Life. After all, up until our present moment, the Pauline Epistles continue to be deployed in death-dealing ways. This needs to be changed, and I hope to contribute to that change. This does not mean that I think that the rulers and those who lick their boots will subsequently change their minds and repent and begin to serve Life. I believe that most of these people have already charted their courses. Regardless of devout professions of faith and virtue, their concern is not so much with what the texts say as with their own appetites (and so, as the Pauline factions says, their glory is their shame and their end is destruction). But I do hope that this text will help others to see how self-serving, violent, and inappropriate the readings imposed by the rulers and their servants are.

Furthermore, although this is a scholarly text, my primary audience is not the academy or scholars (who are probably not going to change any more than the rulers—they, too, have discovered the comfort that comes from saying pretty things while remaining almost universally uninvolved in any contemporary project that resembles Pauline gospeling). Instead, I write for students or those on the street, those already involved in the struggle, those who may be trying to create change but who are frustrated by the limits of their efforts, and those who are looking for other models of action. If this study of Paulinism is a useful contribution to the struggle to find Life in a Death-dominated context, use it. If it is not, discard it. After all, I am not urging loyalty to Paulinism per se—I am urging loyalty to the Spirit of Life and the left for dead in whose company the Spirit of Life moves like an anastasis. This loyalty is found not in the study of texts or the discussion of theories or in the logos itself, but it is found on the street, in the struggle, where one discovers one’s siblings among the oppressed, where one pursues a mutually liberating solidarity with the humiliated and crucified, where one engages in concrete actions of mutual care, and where one breaks death-dealing laws in the service of Life. Anyone who gospels otherwise—regardless of how comforting or cautious or clever or radical their language may be—is betraying the body of the Anointed as understood by the Pauline faction. To imitate Paul and his coworkers today means this: start organizing yourselves in ways that the most oppressed, most vulnerable, most abandoned, and most betrayed experience as liberating, life-giving, and loving. Do this where you can, with what you can, however you can. If you have to lie, cheat, and steal to do this, then lie, cheat, and steal. There is no moral code, no law, no police force, no code of conduct, no security guard, no veneration of private property, and no policies or procedures that has authority to trump the service of Life. Not only this, but beware of the wisdom of the bosses, the rulers, and the academy. It is the wisdom of this age and it seeks to broker compromises with Death-dealers. If you do not compromise, you will be branded as a fool, but you should not be fooled—Death is uncompromising. To the best of your abilities and knowledge, do not compromise with it. Fight it. Fight foolishly, fight vigorously, fight collectively, fight laughingly, supporting one another and being united in love so that each can rest and heal and live to fight another day, but fight. Only do not always remain fixated upon that which you are fighting. Remember what you are fighting for. Create enclaves of new life now in one another’s company. Abolish hierarchies of power between people. Let each give according to their ability and receive according to their need. Laugh. Play. Create. Be kind and gentle and tender with one another, and most especially with children.

And when my children are grown, I’ll see you again on the barricades.

Xoxo

Dan

February 2019

1. On “homelessness” understood as “housing deprivation,” see Willse, Value of Homelessness.

2

The Transnational Family of God

For freedom [the Anointed] has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

—Galatians 5:1

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the august ones and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the diplomatic envoys and prophets, with the Anointed Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

—Ephesians 2:19–20 (my translation)

Introduction: Deviating from Empire

In the next four chapters, I will examine the ways in which the Pauline faction handles the themes raised in the exploration of the ideo-theology of Rome that took place in volume 2. How do Paul, his coworkers, and the early assemblies of Jesus loyalists addressed in their letters go abou...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword by Ward Blanton
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: So What and Who Cares?
• 2. The Transnational Family of God
• 3. Embracing Shame in the Company of the Crucified
• 4. Rejecting Patronage within a Sibling-Based Political Economy of Grace
• 5. The Lawlessness of Good News in the Making: Justice, Jesus Loyalty, and Lovingly Organizing Treasonous Life
• Postscript by Dave Diewert
• Bibliography