The Practice of the Body of Christ

Human Agency in Pauline Theology after MacIntyre

Colin D. Miller

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630877095
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The Practice of the Body of Christ begins a conversation between "apocalyptic" interpretations of the Apostle Paul and the contemporary revival in "virtue ethics." It argues that the human actor's place in Pauline theology has long been captive to theological concerns foreign to Paul and that we can discern in Paul a classical account of human action that Alasdair MacIntyre's work helps to recover. Such an account of agency helps ground an apocalyptic reading of Paul by recovering the centrality of the church and its day-to-day Christic practices, specifically, but not exclusively, the Eucharist. To demonstrate this Miller first offers a critique of some contemporary accounts of agency in Paul in light of MacIntyre's work. Three exegetical chapters then establish a "MacIntyrian" rereading of central parts of the letter to the Romans. A concluding chapter offers theological syntheses and prospects for future research.

1

MacIntyrian Challenges to the Modern Study of Paul

Introduction

In 1981 Alasdair MacIntyre dropped a bomb on the emerging post-modern world. The effects of After Virtue continue to be recognizable not just in philosophical ethics, but across the humanities through the sciences and out into the non-university world.15 His claim was not just that the two main options in modern ethics, deontology and utilitarianism, were two sides of the same dead-end coin. His claim was no less than that the modern world had lost the ability to make sense of what it was doing or saying.

My claim is that, among these other effects, MacIntyre’s work raises significant challenges for readings of Paul. In particular, MacIntyre shows how notions of human agency and the moral life have changed with the abandonment of a classical model that spoke of human action in terms of virtues and vices, desires and passions, reason and intention. Thus, for instance, one obvious challenge for readers of Paul seems to lie in the most basic concept of virtue as a disposition of the person to consistently act in particular ways. Modern Pauline studies for the most part has no way of making sense of a notion of habit and the sort of human agency implied therein, and this creates insurmountable difficulties to understanding some central areas of Pauline theology. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate and illustrate this claim.

I proceed as follows. First, because MacIntyre does not think his challenge can be articulated except in the form of a story, we are involved in a selective retelling of MacIntyre’s narrative of the development of the highly intertwined topics of an “ethic of virtue”, grace and human agency, and the notion of the self or subject as they are pertinent to the study of Paul. I set out MacIntyre’s account in these specific areas rather fully since many New Testament scholars will be unfamiliar with this work. At points it will be helpful to fill out his argument by drawing on the work of others who have told similar stories with differences that are important for us. Second, I examine major trends in academic Pauline theology in light of MacIntyre. As will become clear, a history of the sort MacIntyre provides significantly illuminates the modern construal of Paul’s theology. A central purpose of my use of MacIntyre’s account is to show just how contingent and, often, arbitrary, most current work on Pauline theology in these areas is. Thus I argue that, because New Testament scholars tend to ignore such issues, they often end up reconstructing Paul in their own “common sense” modern grammar of human agency and the moral life. It is precisely the obviousness of this grammar and hence its appropriateness for reading Paul that I want to call into question. Beyond this, however, the review of contemporary scholarship in the light of MacIntyre’s work allows me to expose several errors in Pauline research regarding the relation between divine and human agency. The first is a reading of Paul usually ascribed to Luther in which Christians are saved in a state of sin and are more or less destined to remain sinners for the rest of their lives: on this view, justification happens only forensically, “before God.” The second sees Christians as transformed from a previously sinful state—and very radically so—by an invasive infusion of the Spirit that almost magically realizes the creation of holy lives. Both of these are hyper-Augustinian soteriologies and both, I will suggest, are unPauline. A third type, however, will variously insist that holiness is a part of Paul’s theology without insisting on magical moral change, but also without any explanation of how and why Paul should think such a change occurs. I argue that none of these three moves are able to make sense out of Paul because they lack any account of human action in classical terms. It is to the details of such an account that we now turn.

The Classical Tradition of the Virtues

MacIntyre uses “virtue” as a shorthand for a whole tradition. While sometimes scholars contrast a “virtue ethic” with an “ethic of obligation,” we will see that this is both too simple and does not go to the heart of the matter.16 Nor is it just the case that virtue names a moral philosophy in which account is made for the fact that people have certain dispositions to act in certain ways. Rather, for MacIntyre “virtue” names a particular way of talking about human action that is ultimately incommensurable with modern and post-modern accounts of the same. These differences come out below.

MacIntyre’s account of the virtues has to arise from and take place within a historical narrative because for him there can be no such thing as moral theory as such.17 Accounts of human action are always accounts of specific historical practice that arise within and as a part of concrete political, economic and social conditions (it is thus no surprise that he has learned much from Marxism). Action theory cannot fail to be part of such conditions, and it is because of this that it is helpful at times to read his account of virtue as a particular narrative account of the “self.”18 In other words, we are dealing here with moral psychology.

Aristotle

MacIntyre’s story about the development of what we are calling a classical account of the virtues begins, more or less, with Homer and “heroic society,” but it fits our purposes to begin with his important and substantial account of Aristotle. For Aristotle the central question is not just, as with Homer, about what it means to be good as father or craftsman or fisherman but what it means to be good as a human being. Answering such a question is the goal of the Nichomachean Ethics, which provides for MacIntyre’s a sort of archetype and point of reference for every other account of the virtues. Other accounts will continually orient themselves to this work, sometimes heuristically and sometimes evaluatively.

Aristotle says that every activity aims at some good since human beings naturally aim at some goal. The good is defined in terms of the nature of the goal. This teleological or means-ends reasoning that is simply a given part of human nature makes up for Aristotle what MacIntyre calls a basic “metaphysical biology.”19 Human beings are simply hardwired (biology) to pursue certain goods (metaphysics). The highest good is happiness (euvdaimoni,a), since happiness is that for the sake of which we do everything else and which we do not pursue for the sake of any other end. Virtues are then those dispositions that tend to the attainment of the end, and vices the contrary. Virtues are, however, not merely instrumental to, but constitutive of, the good life, since for Aristotle one cannot attain the good short of its practice.20 Thus virtues are part of the definition of the good life, and, as with Homer, actions are evaluable factually in terms of whether or not they do or do not contribute to the attainment of the end.21

The anatomy of Aristotelian virtue involves several essential elements. Virtues are dispositions of the soul (as the “form” of the body) to both act and feel in particular ways in particular circumstances. These habits of ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Forword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: MacIntyrian Challenges to the Modern Study of Paul
• Chapter 2: Gifted Obedience
• Chapter 3: Practicing Participation
• Chapter 4: Romans 12–15 as the Practice of the Body of Christ
• Chapter 5: Some Synthetic and Prospective Conclusions
• Bibliography