Paul's Non-Violent Gospel

The Theological Politics of Peace in Paul's Life and Letters

Gabrielson

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781498271073
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Rather than viewing the Apostle Paul's many references to peace and non-retaliation as generalized ethical principles drawn from Paul's background, Jeremy Gabrielson argues that peace and non-retaliation should be understood in relation to Paul's biography of being a violent persecutor of Jesus' followers. After his Damascus road experience, Paul zealously announced the gospel, but abandoned his violent ways. His apostolic vocation included calling and equipping assemblies of people whose common life was ordered by a politics characterized by peaceableness. This political dimension of Paul's gospel, in continuity with the earliest evidence we possess regarding Jesus and his disciples, stands in stark contrast to the politics of both the contemporary Roman imperial power as well as those who would seek to replace Rome by violent means.

1

Introduction

When Jesus exhorts us to love our enemies, he does not expect us to stop annihilating them. If they are enemies of God, they must be dispatched to the safekeeping of hell, and as rapidly as possible.1

Accounting for the genesis of one’s interest in a particular topic can be a difficult thing, especially when the origins of that interest are clouded by several years spent pouring over monographs and pecking at keys on a keyboard. Quotations like the one above, however, have a way of jogging one’s memory. Recent interest in the political setting of Paul and his letters has irrupted within the field of New Testament studies. Rhetorical and Jewish “backgrounds” have had and continue to have their turn in the limelight, but it seems that Roman imperial politics has now arrived to take its turn as the grounding for a growing number of Pauline studies. Neil Elliot wrote, “We have not yet seen a full-length exploration of Paul’s rhetoric in the wider contexts of imperial or colonial rhetorics, that is, the discourses shaped by the social dynamics of imperialism and colonialism, what James C. Scott has called the ‘great’ and ‘little traditions,’ or ‘public’ and ‘hidden transcripts.’”2 Having read dozens of fresh studies of Paul’s engagement with Roman imperial themes, I was struck by the repetitive portrayal of violence in Roman literature. With the violence of antiquity fresh in my mind, a warning in Elliot’s essay piqued my interest: “To continue seeking analogues to Paul’s letters in the classical rhetorical handbooks, without giving sustained attention to the publicly acknowledged relationship between rhetorical patterns of persuasion and the coercive force inhering in slavery and empire, would be profoundly inattentive to the sources themselves.”3 What struck me at the time was not so much that interpreters of the New Testament had failed to pay sufficient attention to the violence which was the counterpart of rhetoric, but that Paul himself had previously engaged in violent action and evidently had left that part of his life behind him after his Damascus-road4 experience.

As briefly and pointedly as can be stated, my argument is this: adoption of a politics of non-violence was, for Paul and the communities he established, a constitutive part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Rather than viewing Paul’s references to peace and non-retaliation as generalized ethical principles drawn from his Jewish background (though this no doubt contributes to Paul’s understanding of these concepts), these terms and their corresponding practices are linked to Paul’s experience of being a violent persecutor of Jesus’ followers whose violent life was shattered on the road to Damascus. Enlivened by the risen Jesus from this point on, Paul’s task of announcing the gospel to the nations involved calling and equipping assemblies of people whose common life was ordered by a politics (by which I mean, chiefly, a mode of corporate conduct) characterized by peaceableness.

In this introduction I will set some parameters for the following study by defining violence and politics as they are used in this work before outlining the direction of the remainder of the present study.

Defining Violence

It is perhaps best to begin by recognizing the challenge of offering a simple definition of violence. What at first seems so straightforward a task quickly becomes a conundrum. In the words of one introductory text, “Violence itself . . . defies easy categorization. It can be everything and nothing; legitimate or illegitimate; visible or invisible; necessary or useless; senseless and gratuitous or utterly rational and strategic.”5 In the light of such a slippery subject, it may be useful to offer a fixed point, and adjust the scope of the definition from there. The most convenient point of departure for a working definition of violence for this study is to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property; action or conduct characterized by this; treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom.”6

The importance of beginning with this particular definition is to focus our attention quite specifically on physical force. The aim in doing so is not to discount the possibility that non-physical action can be defined as violent, but to limit (not eliminate) our focus on that possibility in the field of inquiry for the present study. Despite focusing on concrete forms of violence, I will pay attention to the “boundary” between physical expressions of violence and their non-physical counterpart, that is, for instance, where verbal “violence” begins to carry over into forms of violence that are enacted in clearly physical ways. The presentation of Jesus at various points in the gospels, as well as certain points in the Pauline letters, are regarded by many interpreters as language which occupies the border between physical violence and verbal violence. So, although I will focus principally on physical expressions of violence, verbal attacks will call for my attention too, as indeed they should.

Another aspect of violence which is not captured by the definition offered, but that we wish to address throughout is that form of violence which is systemic (and sometimes indirect) rather than acute (and direct). This systemic violence will be traced in Paul’s context(s) by seeking to identify the sometimes “subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence.”7 I am more interested in the systemic violence perpetuated by those in positions of power in the cities in which Paul lived and worked, but Paul and the communities he established too have been scrutinized for the ways in which they inevitably create and sustain relationships characterized by coercion.8 I do not wish to dismiss such approaches to Paul and his communities, however, I want to focus instead on the way in which Paul’s (minority) assemblies lived and related in societies where “outsiders” maintained social control in part through structural/systemic violence.9

In short, the present study includes in its assessment of violence those actions and systemic/structural features that employ physically coercive behavior or the threat of using it to construct and maintain a particular political or social arrangement. Put differently, we will examine those practices and communal habits that orientate life in the Roman world around the concept of peace created and sustained through physical coercion.

Defining Politics

Politics too has a wide range of meaning. Rather than viewing politics or the political as only “the effort to sustain a hegemonic, territorial, sovereign entity, embodied in a physical collective of human beings and articulated to action for its own self-preservation,”10 I include aspects of human ways of relating to one another (i.e., practices/behaviors that create and sustain human community) which might normally be thought of as falling outside of the political realm. For instance, I will concentrate on multiple instances in which community admonition figures in Paul’s “political” order. The practices of mutual correction and forgiveness fall outside the political concerns of civic authorities in antiquity, but I show how these practices are part of Paul’s instructions to his communities that are meant to address the peculiar challenges of living peaceably in a world which too often settles disputes by violent means.

The sense of politics just outlined at any rate may better capture all that was thought to be included in politics in antiquity. A summary of Aristotle’s view of politics is worth repeating:

Aristotle’s use of the term political (politikos) is much broader than most modern definitions. . . . For Aristotle, the political includes all aspects of living together in a community . . . [which] includes marriage, family, and household relationships (oikos), friendships, economic relationships, and what we now call political relationships, such as being members of or leading the assembly. Aristotle considers the polis the highest form of community (koinonia) because it exists not for the sake of merely living together, but for the sake of living well. . . . In other words, Aristotle understands the political (politikos) to include other kinds of communities or relationships now labeled “social” rather than “political.”11

It is in this spirit that I will write of the politics of an assembly of people called together to engage in common practices which support them in living as a com...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The End of Violence in the Gospel of Matthew
• Chapter 3: The Memory of a Non-Violent Jesus in Paul’s Letters
• Chapter 4: Trajectories of Violence and Peace in Galatians
• Chapter 5: Supporting Evidence in 1 Thessalonians
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Bibliography