Tag: 06 Paul
The Priestly pattern of Creation and a fraudulent reading of St Paul: A Catholic reads some Pauline texts in the light of Mimetic Theory (Alison, 2009)
It is one of the best known of René Girard’s principles for reading certain texts – those of myths, those of Scripture and some early modern texts – that he asks how the text in question relates to an incident of persecution. Girard posits a real incident of persecution, a murder, a lynching, a mass expulsion of some sort which has structured the context within which the texts have come to be written. He then asks what the relationship between the real incident and the text is.
Ecclesiology and Ethics in 1 Corinthians (Hays, 1994)
Paul was a planter of churches (1 Cor 3:6-9), an organizer of far-flung little communities around the Mediterranean that united clusters of disparate people in the startling confession that God had raised a crucified man, Jesus, from the dead and thus initiated a new age in which the whole world was to be transformed. The letters of Paul that survive in the NT are his pastoral communications with these mission outposts. Though separated from them, he continued to offer them exhortation and counsel about how to conduct their common life “worthily of the gospel of Christ” (Phil 1:27).
These general observations about the Pauline mission merely restate common knowledge, but their implications for Pauline ethics have not been sufficiently appreciated. I would like to draw particular attention to their significance for interpreting the moral vision of the Pauline letters. It will be my contention that Pauline ethics is fundamentally ecclesial in character and that we begin to grasp his moral vision only when we understand that he sees the church as inheriting the corporate vocation of God’s covenant people, Israel. Apart from this foundational assumption, Paul’s ethic can only appear to be what many critics have thought it to be: a haphazard conglomeration of moral notions drawn eclectically from the commonplaces of his time.
Paul’s Christology of Divine Identity (Bauckham)
In my book God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (The Didsbury Lectures for 1996; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) I set out in broad outline a particular thesis about the rela ionship of early Jewish monotheism and early Christian Christology, which also entails a relatively fresh proposal about the character of the earliest Christology. My purpose in the present paper is to summarize the thesis of the first two chapters of
God Crucified, and then to focus in considerably more detail than I have done hitherto on the Pauline epistles, to show how the thesis is verified and exemplified in Pauline theology.
Weakness – Paul’s and Ours (Bauckham, 1982)
2 Corinthians has for a long time seemed to me among the most impressive documents of early Christianity