Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Daniel Kirk J. R.

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119 pages

English

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Readers of the Bible are often drawn to Jesus's message and ministry, but they are not as positively inclined toward Paul. What should people who love Jesus do with Paul? Here Pauline scholar J. R. Daniel Kirk offers a fresh and timely engagement of the debated relationship between Paul's writings and the portrait of Jesus contained in the Gospels. He integrates the messages of Jesus and Paul both with one another and with the Old Testament, demonstrating the continuity that exists between these two foundational figures. After laying out the narrative contours of the Christian life, Kirk provides fresh perspective on challenging issues facing today's world, from environmental concerns to social justice to homosexuality.

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 janvier 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441236258
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0634€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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© 2011 by J. R. Daniel Kirk
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3625-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture citations are the author’s own translations.
Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
Lyrics from “Love Love Love” are copyright © 2005 by John Darnielle and are used by permission.
For Opa
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Jesus Stories in the Gospels and Paul
2. New Creation and the Kingdom of God
3. Christianity as Community
4. Living Out the Jesus Narrative
5. Judgment and Inclusion
6. Women in the Story of God
7. Liberty and Justice for All?
8. Sex in the Plot of God’s Stories
9. Homosexuality under the Reign of Christ
10. Living Interpretations
Notes
Scripture Index
Subject Index
Back Cover
Acknowledgments
There are many people to thank, without whom this book either would not have come to fruition or else would be greatly impoverished.
I was aided and abetted by a veritable legion of readers. David Vinson faithfully read through the entire book, chapter by chapter, as it was being written, and thereby greatly improved both the content and the writing. Readers will never know how much in his debt they are. Other friends and colleagues have also provided invaluable feedback: Love Sechrest, Susie Flood, Pete Enns, Evan Curry, Alex Kirk, Brian White, Karyn Traphagen, and Mark Traphagen. Thank you all.
I want to thank John Franke, Scot McKnight, and Pete Enns for seeing the value in this project and connecting me with the folks at Baker Academic. And I wish to thank Bob Hosack for his encouragement on the project from day one. Special thanks go out to John Darnielle for permission to use the lyrics from “Love Love Love” that serve as the epigraph to chapter 9. Fuller Theological Seminary is my academic home, and I am thankful for its granting me a sabbatical in the fall of 2010 to complete work on this manuscript.
The energy to write the book has come from numerous conversations with people who love Jesus but have yet to meet a Paul who is largely in step with the Master. Thanks to all of you who have shared with me your intense and faithful wrestling with the biblical texts. In particular, thank you, Opa, for the conversations that gave me the passion to sit down and start writing. This book is for you.
Introduction
In a deconstruction, our lives, our beliefs, and our practices are not destroyed but forced to reform and reconfigure which is a risky business.
John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? [1]
Problems with Paul?
“Now that Paul is out of your system,” my grandfather said, “how about a book on Jesus, who actually got Christianity right, rather than writing about that rascal who mucked everything up?” I had just received a contract for my first book, a study of Paul’s letter to the Romans. And though my grandfather’s suggestion was playful, it also reflected genuine misgivings he harbors about Paul. Jesus preaches love of neighbor; Paul wants to expel the immoral brother. Jesus says, “Do unto others”; Paul is hung up on being a wretch.
My grandfather is not alone in these concerns. His consternation is likely due, in part, to the work of European New Testament scholarship from the early twentieth century trickling down from the ivory towers to the people on the streets. Scholars at that time gave more focused attention to Jesus and his proclamation of the kingdom of God. This led some experts on the New Testament to declare that a significant shift had occurred between Jesus and his followers. Although Jesus proclaimed the reign of God, Paul (and the early church more generally) proclaimed the reign of Jesus: “The proclaimer became the proclaimed.” [2] This perspective took root outside the walls of the academy in the World War II generation of Europe and North America.
In our own day there is a resurgence of attention being paid to the Jesus of the Gospels, especially among Christians who were raised in evangelical churches. In these circles, Paul has traditionally served as the primary mouthpiece for the gospel. But this new generation is discovering afresh what scholars wrestled with a century ago: Jesus came proclaiming the reign of God, and if this is the gospel, then we need to reconsider a good deal of what we thought we knew. Why is the arrival on the scene of a wonder-working Jewish prophet good news? What does it mean for God to be at work in Jesus? Why is the life of Jesus before Calvary a gospel to be proclaimed? In the process of wrestling with Jesus, and falling in love with the figure we meet on the pages of the Gospels, many have simultaneously lost their affection for Paul.
The apostle might seem to fall short of the Master on any number of fronts. Paul seems unconcerned with the stories of Jesus’s life. Related to this, some might see him as a thinker who spent too much time theologizing about Jesus’s death. Others might be drawn to the activist ministry of Jesus over against a faith-alone heart religion.
Still another challenge grows out of the history of American (and Western European) Christianity. Paul gave voice to preservation of the status quo during the era of American slavery. When he is juxtaposed with the Jesus who proclaims liberty to the captive, the contrast between the early preachers is stark. Thus, particularly in scholarly circles, Paul has struggled to find a voice among some segments within African American Christianity.
The issues of race and slavery might also be seen as simply one subject under a larger umbrella of justice where Paul falls far short of Jesus. And now we are right up against the vexing issue of homosexuality, where many Christians who are affirming find an ally in Jesus that they do not find in Paul, who condemns such practice.
So if you are someone who follows Jesus but have at some point wrestled with Paul or felt some dissonance between Paul and Jesus, you are not alone. Some people find Paul lacking in comparison with the Master; others simply find Paul distasteful, offensive, oppressive, exclusive, confusing, arrogant, or just plain wrong. This book is, in part, for folks who at times find themselves resonating with the statement, “Jesus have I loved, but Paul have I hated.” I have been there myself.
One of my earliest memories of reading the Pauline letters is a nettled encounter with 2 Corinthians 11–12. In these chapters, Paul is defending his work as an apostle, piling up language of boasting, through examples of acting foolishly, of glorying in disgraceful experiences, of weakness and visions of glory. As I read those chapters, Paul’s litany of irony and boasting struck me as truly foolish and arrogant. When I first met Paul I simply did not like him.
Even when I began to appreciate Paul, however, he still caused me problems. In college I began investigating some of the classic theological questions, including the subject of predestination and issues of church government. Now, finally, the letters bearing Paul’s name became my friends, because they addressed most directly the questions I was asking. But this new relationship was starting to cause discord in some of my old ones; specifically, my understanding of “the church” left little room for affirming my brother’s “parachurch” ministry, and my zealous affirmation of male leadership disrupted relationships with many women in ministry, including my mother, who was ordained while I was in this stage in my theological pilgrimage. And so my relationship with the apostle continued to be uneasy.
In the process of going through graduate school in New Testament I began to read Paul differently. Though there are still some tensions between us, I not only find myself more at peace with him, but I also find the apostle to be a challenging and theologically generative partner along the way of following Jesus. This book is an invitation to join me along the present leg of my journey.
Moving toward a Storied Paul
My current reading of Paul has its roots in several complementary factors. I have spent much more time with Paul’s letters and so have a broader understanding of those letters’ purposes and arguments. This has enabled me to see more clearly that the questions I was bringing to the text were not usually the questions that the text was written to answer (even if the assumptions that broke through in the course of a Pauline argument might still pertain to the issues on which I was seeking guidance).
A second, related factor placed Paul on a broader canvas, where he made more sense. My seminary taught what it called “redemptive historical” readings of Scripture. Such an approach involves continually asking how the work of God in Christ is connected to the prior works of God in the Old Testament. I began to see that Paul was assessing the work of Jesus and the lives of Jesus’s followers within a narrative that had its roots in Adam and Abraham, Moses and David. In this sense, even Paul’s didactic arguments evoke an indispensable narrative dynamic.
Such a positioning of Paul within the larger narrative sweep of Israel’s story prepared me for a third factor in how my reading of Paul has changed, and it is this facet