The Early Chrsitian Interpretation of Scripture

In addition to the two classes I anticipated taking this term (a Greek reading course on Acts and a course on the early synagogue), I am now also taking The Early Christian Interpretation of Scripture, with Dr. Widdicombe. I don't yet have any ideas for a paper topic, however.

All of these classes look really good and have relevance for my work on Paul: Acts, for obvious reasons; Synagogue, because I'm interested in Paul's impact on Jewish/Christian relations; and Interpretation of Scripture, because I'm interested in Paul's appropriation of Scripture. Of course, all these areas of study are interesting in their own right, as well. Their overlap with my primary focus is gravy, as they say.

And, finally, I will be a Teaching Assistant for a first year undergrad class, Introduction to World Religions.

An Autobiographically Conditioned Antithetic Hermeneutic: What I've Been Studying, Part 3

Having come to the end of this project (cf. here, and here), I am convinced that Paul’s autobiographical statements are carefully designed, multi-dimensional, and often theological in orientation. I think they reveal something very important about the impact of Paul’s experience on his theology, and I would like to illustrate that by describing how Paul’s hermeneutics reflect one of the same fundamental patterns embedded in his accounts of his past and present life.

Francis Watson (Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith) has convincingly shown that the Pauline antithesis between divine promise and demand, between grace and obedience is a scriptural hermeneutic. Within scripture itself Paul detects two fundamentally distinct modes of agency. Paul resolves this tension not in a synergism but an antithesis which privileges divine promise over demand and its predicated human obedience. Though he notes that this hermeneutic is distinct, Watson does not speculate as to how Paul came to read scripture in this way, apart from general reference to the Christ-event.

Paul’s autobiographical texts, such as Gal 1.13-17 and Phil 3.4-9, supply the answer. Paul contrasts his life of zealous observance of the law, which made him into a persecutor, with the gracious revelation of Christ. This enables Paul to speak of his past in terms of “my righteousness,” a righteousness constituted in part on the basis of one’s observance of the covenant, verses “God’s righteousness,” one which, both because and in spite of one’s sin, is received as divine gift (Phil 3.4-9; cf. Rom 10.3[!]).

It appears then that Paul’s antithetic hermeneutic is grounded in a profoundly disjunctive experience in his own life. The experience shapes the theology; in a sense, we can say his theology is a form of autobiography. One could argue the reverse, that Paul presents his past/present as having this sort of antithesis between divine and human agency because it suits his purpose of reading scripture antithetically in the context of the crisis over circumcision, but this runs into problems. There were more conventional grounds on which Paul could have argued for his “law-free” (a bit of misnomer) Gentile mission, such as we find in Acts 15.14-21. Thus, given that Paul’s hermeneutic and antithesis is so fundamentally unique (even within the NT), the hypothesis that it is grounded in the particular narrative events of Paul’s call/conversion has more explanatory power.

Moreover, when we combine these insights of the hermeneutically and autobiographically conditioned nature of Paul’s doctrine of righteousness by faith, we can explain its relatively late appearance in Paul’s career. Observing that it is a scriptural hermeneutic helps us to situate it in the context of the crisis over circumcision of Gentile converts. Observing its autobiographical component helps us to relate it to the effects of the Damascus experience.

If Paul’s reading of scripture has this autobiographically conditioned antithetical shape, and not just his understanding of righteousness, then the same framework should also be helpful for describing Paul’s understanding of the election, plight, and salvation of his compatriots, the Jewish people. John Barclay ("Paul's Story," in Narrative Dynamics) has already begun to explore the relationship between Paul’s story and the story of his people, as told by Paul. I think it would be worthwhile to expand his investigation and to add to it an explicit scriptural-hermeneutical component. This would give me the opportunity to substantiate my thesis concerning autobiography and antithetic hermeneutics and potentially to shed new light on an old debate, the problem of “Paul and the Jews.”

Pauline Autobiography: What I’ve Been Studying for the Last Year, Part 2

In the previous post I introduced my MA project on Pauline autobiography. What follows is a (very) brief outline of that project and some of the major questions that emerged.

I first looked at the nature and function of Pauline self-references. Some of the major questions to emerge here concern the occasion of these texts and Paul’s motivation for referring to himself. Is he forced to write autobiographically because his character is under attack and/or does he willingly offer-up his own experience? If the latter, what is his aim in doing so? These questions have implications for the relationship between experience and theology in Paul.

I next honed in on one issue in Paul’s self-references which seemed particularly prominent, his persecution of Christ-believers. Here I mapped out the different modes in which Paul’s motivation for persecuting Christ-believers has been understood (cf. this). Paul cites his own zeal for the law as motivating his persecution of Christ-believers. But is this simply the product of the retrospective self or merely a rhetorical ploy? Or perhaps both? I concluded there is no necessary contradiction between the emphases of the four kinds of explanations and that it seems historically plausible that Paul’s zeal for the law was a motivating factor in his persecution of Christ-believers. This, again, becomes theologically significant.

Finally, I looked into the manner in which Paul’s biography and autobiography has been related to his thinking on righteousness. Here a major fault line runs between those who detect a Pauline critique of the role which Jewish tradition attributed to human agency in securing life or righteousness before God and those who think that no such critique is to be found.

In the former scheme, the revelation at Damascus is a defining theological moment in the life of Paul for the judgment it rendered on the success of his attempt to meet the law’s conditional offer of life and the grace and salvation it freely and simultaneously bestowed on him.

In the latter, the revelation is typically regarded as more significant for the way it signalled to Paul a dispensational change from law to faith and their differing requirements for righteousness (Sanders). Alternatively its significance may be seen in the judgment it rendered on his zeal to protect Israel’s national boundaries, that is, her covenant status = “righteousness” (Dunn; cf. Wright) and the ensuing realization that Israel’s destiny had been fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah (Wright).

In either case, it must be explained why Paul’s language of righteousness by faith rather than works emerges relatively late in his career. (This gets rather complex.)

To keep this post from becoming over-long, I’ll finish this series in a separate post, where I’ll summarize how I would like to develop this research.

Pauline Autobiography: What I’ve Been Studying for the Last Year, Part 1

What have I been doing for the last year if not writing a thesis? In this and a following post, I’ll provide a very brief explanation and summary, with some reflection about the direction in which I could take this work.

In the religious studies department at McMaster University students of the MA program spend one year in seminars and have two options for their second year. They may either write a thesis or a project. Everyone knows what a thesis is. A project, however, is a review of research; the way I think about it is that it seeks less to advance “our” knowledge (but how often do MA theses succeed here?) than the particular student’s knowledge. I thought that maybe writing a project would be a “cop-out,” but my supervisor affirmed its possible advantages.

If I have a topic that has the potential to be a doctoral dissertation, the project provides, in effect, an extra year of full-time study on that topic. This is beneficial in our context especially since PhD students are encouraged to complete their degree within four years—including one year for course-work, one year for comprehensive exams, and two years for writing the dissertation. My impression...seldom does anyone actually finish in this amount of time. But the project can increase the likelihood.

(A point of observation, from what I know of the British and American systems, Mac’s PhD program falls somewhere between them. Across the Atlantic one typically begins on the dissertation immediately, has no mandatory course-work or comprehensives, and is given three years to finish. South of the border, on the other hand, PhD programs are often six years, including two years of course-work, comprehensive exams [?], and the remaining years for the dissertation.)

So what topic did I choose to research?

The title of the project was “Autobiographical Aspects of Paul’s Letters and Thought: A Review of Recent Research.” My interest in this topic sprang from the growing impression that Paul’s autobiographical texts served a strong ideological and rhetorical purpose and that they were characterized by similar themes and patterns that are found in Paul’s non-autobiographical texts. I wondered how these autobiographical texts had been used to help us understand two broad topics: Paul’s theology and the relationship of his experience to his thought.

In the next post I’ll provide a summary of how I went about seeking an answer to these questions and where I could take this research in the future.

Project Defence, Biblical Studies Carnival

I survived my project defence on Wednesday, which means I've completed all the requirement for my MA and am now ready to begin the PhD program at McMaster this fall. The title of the project is "Autobiographical Aspects of Paul's Letters and Thought: A Review of Recent Research." I may yet blog on where I could take this research in a dissertation.

On another note, don't miss this month's Biblical Studies Carnival over on Abnormal Interests. Duane Smith provides a fine selection of biblioblogging from the month of August.