Why and How Paul Invented "Christian Theology"

good afternoon everyone friends faculty staff of Duke Divinity School visitors who we have with us welcome for this occasion we're pleased today to have with us a distinguished visiting lecturer professor NT Wright he is the former bishop of Durham in the Church of England and he is now research professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of st. Andrews Scotland he's the author of many many books I'm not going to take any more time introducing him to you because I expect that would be superfluous for this crowd we have a very limited window of time here today he has another engagement at 1:30 and so we're going to whisk him away rather quickly at the end of this session we do hope that there will be time for a few questions and answers after his lecture today the lecture that he's giving to us today is why and how Paul invented Christian theology Tom welcome to Duke Divinity School thank you very much it's always a delight to be here and I'm especially grateful for the chance to say something about Paul yet again and particularly to set out very briefly what is actually the main thesis of the book which I published this time last year Paul and the faithfulness of God as not all reviewers have pointed out what the main thesis of the book actually is I thought it might be a good idea just to let you know so that's what you're getting today why and how Paul invented something which with hindsight we can call Christian theology two questions we must address right from the start introduction first what do I mean by this phrase Christian theology and second what do I mean when I propose the paul invented it to the first i am talking here primarily about an activity a vocation a task and exercise not in other words about the content of a dogmatic syllabus i am arguing here as in paul in the faithfulness of god that paul engaged in and reflected upon and did his best to inculcate in his hearers an activity which he believed was vital for the health and witness of the church what he wanted was that followers of jesus would in principle be learning to think in a new way this is of course at the heart of what some today refer to with the word apocalyptic paul believed that in Jesus Israel's Messiah and supremely in his death and resurrection Israel's God had unveiled his new creation he believed that Jesus followers recalls to be part of that new creation and that that meant a new kind of thinking the content of the thought of course mattered vitally but learning to think in the new way mattered above all and for Paul this vocation this activity which I loosely call Christian theology was load-bearing without it the church would not be could not be what it was called to be what was this new way for Paul it was a matter of learning to live within Israel's Scriptures and the overall story which they told the story which Paul believed had reached its Telos its goal in Jesus and had thereby exploded into new life it was a matter of learning to pray in the Jewish way now reworked around Jesus and the spirit it was a matter of learning to live intentionally in the new ways which had already been hinted at in the scriptures but were now made available to the larger company of Jews and non-jews alike who found themselves grasped by the gospel what I'm here calling Christian theology in inverted commas is the activity of the whole church thinking with renewed minds and hearts thinking scripturally prayerfully commonly about who the one God is who God's people are and what God's future is for the world those are the topics which I have argued in the book are central to the content of what Paul is proposing but I am here concentrating on the thinking itself to call this Christian theology is of course anachronistic Paul didn't call it that and nor did anyone till I think at least the third century might be wrong on that but that's my guess but my case is that in Paul we see the first beginnings the first stirrings of an activity which grows and swells and becomes utterly characteristic of the Christian movement as we see it developing in subsequent centuries the classic texts in which Paul outlines this task this vocation are well known in Romans 12 taking a deep breath after the strenuous exposition of chapters 1 to 11 Paul appeals for a life of total dedication to God the presentation of the whole self of the body in a new kind of living sacrifice and then he says do not be conformed to the present age but be transformed by the renewal of your minds so that you may discern and work out in practice what God's will is what is good and acceptable and perfect in other words the New Age had broken in the age to come which was spoken of by apocalypta stand rabbis alike and those who through the gospel found themselves caught up in this new age were called to a transformation of the mind in other words to a new kind of thinking it's interesting a paul has to tell them to be transformed in other words it doesn't happen automatically a point to a church will return no doubt he would say that the gospel and the spirit have done the basic groundwork but the follower of Jesus has to be intentional about learning to think not just to behave in accordance with the new age that is at the heart of Paul's inauguration of Christian theology the letter to the Philippians offers a sustained account of the mind of the new community I'll come back to this again but for the moment I just note that the well-known sometimes puzzling command in Philippians 2:5 have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Messiah Jesus if that's how to translate it this command is a command to do theology in this sense to think within the crystal logically transformed new creation the world over which the crucified Jesus already reigns as Lord other examples crowd in you may be thinking of 2 Corinthians 5 now a new sort of knowledge because if anyone is in the Messiah there is a new creation and in 1st Corinthians 1 2 3 we find another sustained exposition of the new kind of thinking which comes to focus in that breathtaking claim at the end of chapter 2 that we have the mind of the Messiah what I'm referring to as the beginnings of Christian theology is precisely the cultivation to rection and development of the messiah's mind my second introductory comment has to do with the claim that Paul invented something one might hear this claim in terms of the older traditional Jesus and Paul debates was Paul the true founder of Christianity and so on Paul himself says that the foundation is Jesus himself with apostles as people who build on the foundation Ephesians 2 is there something slightly different that's beside my present point when we see what Paul was trying to do in teaching the churches to think in the Messiah to think within the New Age he both was and wasn't doing something Jesus had done before yes Jesus challenged Peter to think not as humans think but as God thinks yes in Luke 24 Jesus opened the disciples minds to understand the scriptures yes all those parables Jesus was constantly trying to get his hearers to think differently about the kingdom of God there are many continuities there with the tasks Paul set himself but I think Paul was still doing something substantially new the newness of his task relates directly to his consciousness of the vocation to be the apostle to the Gentiles to be the one who would take the play which Jesus had written and would direct a large and diverse cast of actors in staging its production the task Paul had in mind was likewise in continuity with and in discontinuity with the Jewish world of his birth and upbringing the Jewish world knew many debates on many topics mostly they were not about who God was or who God's people were those were more or less taken for granted and the ongoing debates which Jews had about how God was going to bring his purposes to completion was as much a political as a theological topic Jews to this day have commented that Jews do not normally do theology in the way that Christians do they can ask and answer theological questions but theology as a task has never been seen as low bearing within the Jewish communities in the way it is and has been from the start within Christian communities so one might ask was Paul's sense then of this new task a matter of leaving behind the Jewish world where people didn't do that sort of thing and instead undertaking an alien or Gentile activity not at all the Greek word Greek world knew the word theologia but in Aristotle and elsewhere this refers to one sub branch of physics the study of whatever there is in nature uses Cicero's book on the nature of the gods and other similar works were again not load-bearing one could reflect on such topics without the reflection itself or the results one reached being a foundational or structural importance for one's community or daily living but for Paul the one God was not part of the world of Phocis nature he was its creator and Lord Paul could address the issues of physics and the two other ancient divisions of philosophy ethics and logic but in all cases he transformed them in a decidedly Jewish direction though doing things which no Jews had done before and it begins to look at least from this preliminary quick sketch as though the task that I'm calling Christian theology as undertaken by Paul and urged on his hearers was yet one more symptom of his belief that the people of God as redefined in and around Messiah and spirit were very Jewish when seen from a non-jewish point of view and yet also thoroughly transformed Paul would have said that this transformation had to do with the new age which for many perhaps most Jews of his day had longed and which he believed had been inaugurated by Jesus so though you could say that Paul was picking up this task from Jesus himself Paul was engaging in it in a new way Jesus had not tried to generate and sustain a Duplass Gentile community he had not as Paul said he was doing been taking every thought captive from the wider Gentile world to obey the Messiah Paul was implementing something which Jesus had accomplished and I'm suggesting that part of that implementation was precisely the developing and urging of this activity of learning to think in the Messiah it is of course possible my last note with in my introduction here that there were great teachers of theology in the church before Paul I don't regard that as likely they haven't left us any imprints true if the poems in Philippians 2 or Colossians 1 were pre Pauline then somebody with remarkable theological insight and linguistic versatility penned them very early but we don't know that and actually the use Paul makes of those poems is more explicit again in terms of teaching people to think in the new way anyway with these introductory comments I move to my two central questions if this is what I mean by Christian theology why did Paul invent it and how did you do so so why the central argument of my book is that Paul invented and developed both the tasks of Christian theology and its particular content to meet specific and pressing needs in the early church we don't find parallel movements in either the Jewish or the non-jewish world of his day these were new tasks my main argument goes like this in almost every letter we can see Paul urging two things upon his church's unity and holiness Paul is well known for the doctrine of justification but whereas there are three and a bit passages in Paul which deal with that there are dozens of Appeals for unity and holiness the post-reformation churches have caused some headaches here partly because the Reformation generated radical disunity --zz which will accept as part of the price of recovering the gospel and partly because the emphasis on justification by faith often meant a de-emphasis on holiness lest the pure faith be corrupted with works but unity and holiness were central for paul but how do you get there how do you achieve them unity and holiness are difficult in combination they often seem impossible it's relatively easy to work for unity if you don't care about holiness you just adopt and anything-goes strategy and it's comparatively easy to work for holiness if you don't care about unity you just go on splitting the church over every disagreement the trick is to get both at the same time how can that be done my poor line answer is that you do it by teaching people to think Christianly teaching them Christian theology as a task as a vocation as an assignment only if and when they're doing that will true holiness or unity be even thinkable but once they have been thought as part of that new mind new creation thinking process then they might just become a reality after let's be clear Paul was not trying to provide doctrine and ethics for every occasion he does not cover every topic he is writing on the principle give someone a fish and you feed them for a day teach someone to fish and you feed them for life Paul could give specific instructions when they were urgently needed but most of the time he's trying to teach his here as the difficult art of the New Age mental transformation the renewed mind he wrote in Colossians 3 that the new humanity is being renewed in knowledge according to the creator's image that was Paul's aim he would put up signposts to show the direction of travel but then it was up to his communities to go down the road in a settled and sustained act of theá-- quickly informed choice and will after all Paul couldn't possibly say everything in each letter the letters muster up represent not only miracles of composition but in parallel miracles of omission there must have been many things he longed to say to them for which there just wasn't space and time and in any case it wouldn't have made sense even had it been practicable for Paul to provide a first century version of Aquinas his Summa Theologica plus a similes similarly scaled work covering all possible ethical dilemmas after all that would have resulted in a church where all you had to do was to go to the shelf pull off the relevant volume and look up the answer Paul's aim was quite different of course that is what some Christians wish the Bible was and how they sometimes want to treat it Paul's letters like all the Scriptures aren't doing that they're saying here's where you start this is the direction of travel learn to think differently and figure out the route Paul is challenging his hearers to think theologically to do Christian theology as the shared task the scriptural prayerful task through which they will grow up into a maturity of thinking and hence of everything else as well as an excellent example of this in Philippians 2 - I've already mentioned Philippians 2 1 to 18 take it as a whole the command in verse 5 to tofurna to end human hawk I am Christo user holds together the introductory exhortation to unity in 1 to 4 and the remarkable poem of 6 to 11 how can one possibly obey those commands in Philippians do 1 - for so high as the sky demand of unity thinking the same thing being in full Accord and of one mind anyone has lived in the church for five minutes knows how difficult that is trust me I'm a bishop Paul's answer is you can only do it through the mind of the Messiah humility and self abandoning love is the only way to go but this needs to be worked out in a thousand situations for which Paul cannot possibly give precise instructions which is why he says in to 12 to 13 that they must work out their own salvation in fear and trembling because the one who has at work in them is God to do his good pleasure to will and to do his good pleasure what is this working out of salvation despite generations of anxious post-reformation readers when Paul says work out your own salvation this has nothing to do with a moralistic contribution to one's own grace given salvation that's not what he's talking about his point is this in the Messiah you have been given a Salvation a Soteria that comes from the eyes ioniq tradition reflected in chapter 2 but it goes way beyond anything thought of before Jesus and it confronts the Imperial propaganda which offered to Rome's subjects and to Caesars devotees a Salvation which functioned effectively as a global protection racket Paul did not have time in Philippi to teach the new church any details about what their kind of salvation would mean in practice he had set them a personal example as he refers to in chapter 4 verse 9 what they had learned and received and heard and seen in him that's how they were to do stuff but they faced many other issues and for all of them they had to learn to think for themselves to think in the Messiah and to engage in what with hindsight we could call Christian theology as the task of the whole church Philippians 2 continues in verses 14 to 18 with one of Paul's sharpest exhortation z' to holiness the community is to live as resurrection people with it within the as yet unreleased annual 12 and says that they are to shine like lights in a dark world that's as close as he comes anywhere actually to talking about the at least implicit evangelistic witness of the whole church that's another point but the whole longer paragraph two one 218 consists both of a sustained exhortation to unity verses one to four and holiness verses 14 to 18 and as it's Center and driving heart the dense expression of theology scripture soaked prayerful Messiah centered cross centered which provided the pattern for the unity and the energy for the holiness the Christ poem in other words is not a detached piece of theological poetry I don't know whether it was written by Paul himself or somebody else beforehand or by Paul himself actually maybe while writing this very letter we just don't know that but I do know that as it stands it serves exactly this double purpose if you want to generate and sustain unity and holiness learn to think with the mind of the Messiah back to the example from Romans twelve which makes the same point immediately after the opening flourish about being transformed by the renewing of the mind Paul launches into one of his variations on the theme of the churches the body of Christ here the one body in the Messiah that's the theme of unity and from there he goes straight into the beginning of the ground rules for Christian living part of my point is that he knows it's no good just giving people rules the rules make little or no sense within the old world just as the resurrection of Jesus makes no sense in the old world so many debates about the resurrection of Jesus in your country particularly where people try to do rationalist apologetics or rationalist counter apologetics is as though you got trying to fit the resurrection into the old world can't be done the resurrection is the beginning of the new world the shock of that is it it's not a different world it's the transformation of the old world from within unity and holiness are just the same they make no sense within the old world their action nonsense why would you try to do that but they are the hallmarks of the new world which has begun with Jesus resurrection and in the power of the Spirit and that's why if people are to live appropriately in the in-between times than now and not yet times they must be transformed by the renewal of the mind and again the point is this doesn't happen automatically part of the aim is that the Messianic and spirit driven new Humanity is precisely renewed humanity with the mind renewed to be fully awake and to take responsibility God wants people not puppets two key passages in first Corinthians exemplify the same framework 1st Corinthians 1 2 3 Paul deals with personality cults and underneath this he discerns different kinds of wisdom the wisdom of the world and the hidden wisdom revealed in the gospel the gospel is the message of the crucified and risen Jesus a scandal to Jews folly to Gentiles but to those who are being saved the Messianic power and wisdom of God Christian theology developed in the service of church unity is about embracing the foolishness of God which is wiser than human wisdom and being held firmly in place by the weakness of God which is stronger than human strength Paul is teaching the church to think Christianly and not only so but to think about thinking Christianly to reflect on what it is that they are now being required to do to think their way around the fact that there is a new form of wisdom to be dispensed among the mature and then a few chapters later Paul has a sustained piece of theological or meta theological teaching he is in first corinthians 8 to10 he is mounting an argument about me offered to idols and what he's doing is teaching the church to think theologically again in order to fund the ecclesial vocations of unity and holiness unity because if some Christians think it's okay to eat idle meat and others don't we're pretty soon gonna have a serious and sharp division but simultaneously holiness if Christians who agree with Paul that idols don't exist therefore you can eat the food that's offered to them well then they may decide that they'll find their way back into the idol temples and into the amoral subculture that goes with them and that will be the kiss of death to their baptismal profession and the consequent vocation to holiness and this is the context for some of Paul's most dramatic theological teaching but again my point is as much about his inculcating of the habit of thinking Christianly as it is about any particular dogmatic innovations i've elsewhere highlighted in chapter 9 of the book paul's rewriting of the jewish prayer the Shema in 1 Corinthians 8:6 but I mention that here to remind us that Paul's very Jewish and yet very much reworked theology is about the life of prayer which for the Jew meant among other things the regular recitation of the Shema sometimes referred to by later rabbis in terms of taking upon oneself the yoke of the kingdom Paul expounds the present and future Kingdom later in chapter 15 and chapters 8 to 10 contributes to this dramatically insisting upon the sovereign rule of the one God over the whole world not least the world of idols and the peroration of this section first Corinthians 10 23 to 11 one focuses on Psalm 24 verse 1 one of the great scriptural statements of the unique kingship of Israel's God this starting with the starting with the Shema and finishing with Psalm 24 that's how first Corinthians 8 to10 is framed scripturally Paul is teaching his here is to think as kingdom of God people people who live within the scriptural and prayerful world in which there is one God to whom all things belong and at the same time with his Christological reworking of the Shema he is teaching them to think as Messiah shaped Kingdom people that is to allow the fact of the Messiah's cross and resurrection to reshape not only their reflection on what they should do but their reflection on the communal context in which they do it and with these theological tools Paul is showing them how to navigate the choppy waters between the Scylla of a dualistic rejection of the world and the Charybdis of an uncritical embrace of it eat the meat yes if you know why but don't go into idle temples and don't engage in the practices normally associated with them but these are not just rules dumped on them from a great height whether take it or leave it those are the results of teaching them to think theologically another example is the little letter to Philemon not going to take any time over this the first chapter of the book I go into it in detail but the point is that Paul is teaching Philemon to think in the Messiah and to work out for himself what he must do which is one reason why some exegetes have found it difficult to see what Paul is asking him to do because the main thing is Paul is nudging him into thinking Christianly so that Philemon will himself realize what he has to do so my first main point then is that if Paul has invented something which with hindsight we can call Christian theology we can see that this is why he has done it to sustain the church as the United and holy people of God which can only be brought about through the transformation of the mind so my second main point how did he set about doing this in one sense of course the writing of the letters is itself the answer to the how question the letters are demanding as we know intellectually spirit actually culturally people often ask me how did Paul expect his hearers to understand all that dense material straight off especially if they didn't know Israel Scriptures like he did the answer is well there were teachers in the early church and one must assume that one of their main tasks was to teach the Scriptures we may also assume that whoever carried the letter would be the probable first reader and the probable first expositor someone who had been with Paul when he dictated the letter might be assumed to know what he was talking about and I suspect that the letters would be read again and again the shorter ones perhaps two or three times on the first day and they would form in themselves a challenge to the community to grasp new things to think in new ways to get their minds around what Paul was doing in this explosive little letter which they just received and not least to go beyond the specific issues discussed and to think outwards into new areas of life which weren't covered in the letters but to which the same kind of teaching needed to be applied that I've suggested was Paul's aim throughout but there are certain specifics as to the how let's explore a bit more what Paul meant by wanting them to think prayerfully the prayer in question being anchored in the praying life of Israel I've already mentioned the Shema quoted and adapted by Paul in 1st Corinthians 8 but Paul wanted the early church to think particularly as people who prayed the Psalms again and again we find Paul expressing the Psalms as having a new focus on Jesus Psalms 2 840 410 come to mind and several others as well not least those cited as the suffering Psalms like 69 and so on but then in one of the most spectacular prayers soaked writings from the 1st century there is the letter to the Ephesians I've said elsewhere that I regard the usually prejudice against Ephesians as an unfortunate hangover from 19th century liberal Protestantism strains there aren't very many 19th century liberal Protestants around and yet we still maintain their particular point of view but whether or do you agree with what I'm saying we are clearly dealing with someone very early who knew Paul and his writings well and was channeling his thought quite effectively and might even have had the same name anyway the whole of the whole of the first half of Ephesians chapters 1 2 3 is held in place by praise and prayer it begins with the great Baraka the great Jewish style blessing blessed be the God who goes on from verses 3 to 14 of chapter 1 praising God for his mighty acts in creation and in Exodus style Redemption and it continues with the prayer for the church that the church will know who it the church really is and then chapters 1 2 3 ends with that long summary of Paul's prayer that the church will know the Messiah's unknowable love and be filled with the divine fullness and chapters 1 2 3 Center upon the image of the church as the new temple United in worship and common life through the dramatic redeeming action of God in the Messiah there is a wonderful overall symmetry about chapters 1 2 3 which I think is then reflected in one of the central verses chapter 2 verse 10 out to God as men poema we are God's poem God's artwork poised between worship and intercession forming the new temple in which Jew and Gentile come together in the Messiah the vision of a theologically reflective community is held in place by the vocation to embody the creative artwork of the true God if appalled the howl of theology had to do with rare the obvious companion theme is that for him the inculcation of theology as the central and centering action of the church was scriptural he saw Israel Scriptures as a continuous and continuing narrative shot through of course with patterns and types and images and models but as a whole far more than that as a single story which he believed had reached its Telos in the Messiah as I said last night Josephus commenting on Deuteronomy 32 said that Moses was prophesying about things that would happen and that were happening in his Joseph as his own day in other words the Pentateuch is not just the backstory of Israel but through prophecy summarizes the whole story so Paul is again and again narrating his hearers into the story of Israel declaring triumphantly that the Messiah is indeed the Telos of the Torah and going on to prove it by quoting exactly Deuteronomy 30 and 32 and this is one of the things I mean when I say that Paul is teaching his churches to think Christianly there to understand themselves as those upon whom the ends of the ages had come the moment when God's age-old secret plan was finally revealed in all its shocking splendor that's clear in first Corinthians 10 11 which I just quoted but it's alluded to frequently not least in Romans and Galatians where the promises to Abraham have now come true in the Messiah promises about the family and the inheritance promises which evoke the pist is the faith or faithfulness which is the badge of the community the Christian theology which Paul was inventing and which as an activity he was eager to inculcate was about learning to think and live within this narrative rather than some other God had acted shockingly surprisingly world transforming Lee as he always said he would the apocalyptic moment is not of course the result of a steady process of evolution step-by-step progressive revelation something like that that's a 19th century aberration but nor is the apocalyptic moment a total novum or a crear Co ex nihilo it is the result of the dramatic fulfillment of ancient promises and within that the fulfillment of hopes many times deferred but still pondered and even calculated ancient Jewish apocalyptic literature consists of contains many symbolic prophecies of many bad things that are going to happen in a sequence after which the new age will dawn it is anything but a long slow journey up into the light but as one can imagine rabbi Akiba saying of Bar Kochba in the 130s ad and mutatis mutandis the supporters of other would-be messiahs of the period it must be possible to say that the time had fully come which is what Paul says of Jesus in Galatians 4:4 Paul's method of inculcating Christian theology as a task was then to get his hearers to think as praying scripture soaked people invoking the God of Israel now made known in and as Jesus the Messiah and in and through the spirit and narrating the story of Israel as having found its Telos in the same way the scandal of the cross was not that it denied any sense of a Jewish story but that the sense that it made within that story was shattering and radical just as one might have expected generating fresh fulfillments not least the long-awaited messianic theme from the Psalms and Isaiah in which Israel's coming King would bring justice and hope to all the nations if you cut off the Israel roots of this the and the all the nation's fruits of it aren't going to do what they ought to do but Paul's inculcation of Christian theology was not only related to his sense of Israel's traditions of Prayer and story it also engaged by implication but I think strongly with his non-jewish world Paul was after all the apostle to the Gentiles not or not primarily to the Jews when in 2 Corinthians 10 he speaks of taking every thought captive to obey the Messiah that looks to me like a statement of theological method it ought to be possible in principle to ask how that method worked out after all one of the dangers both with the so-called salvation historical reading of Paul and with a so called apocalyptic reading is that one ends up with a private narrative an enclosed world God does the new thing whatever it is which generates a new strange form of existence without visible contact with what went before the oldest passed away and everything has become new and from that point of view Paul might be read in line with some readings of the early Bart it's a wonderful building if you're already inside but if you're standing outside it's not obvious where you might find the front door but that was not Paul's way for him the new creation was new creation when he speaks of the renewal of the whole created order in Romans 8 or of God being all in all in first Corinthians 15 or of course in Colossians 1 of the Messiah being the one in and through and for whom all things were created he is expressing the characteristically Jewish belief that Israel's God is the God of the whole creation rethought around the belief that the in the Messiah this same God has addressed and redeemed this whole creation so when we imagine Paul engaging with the philosophical traditions of his day this would never be a matter of saying in effect that everything the philosophers had thought was wrong and they should just leave it all and embrace something totally different of course there are times when a note like that has to be struck Paul declares that his past privileges were so much Schouler trash and he wants his Philippian hearers to say the same about theirs but then in the next breath he can tell them to think about whatever is true and Noble and honorable and of good report the Creator has not left himself without witness in the creation part of the howl of Paul's theological project has to do with the constant implicit engagement with the pagan world of Late Antiquity how did that work out I've written this up particularly in chapter 14 of Paul and the faithfulness of God let me just make one or two short statements about them in that ancient world as we know there were three divisions of thought physics what there is ethics how to behave and logic how to know things or how to reason from the known to the unknown and these go together ethics is the behavior which makes sense in the world we describe in physics logic is about the true knowledge of that world for Paul these were signposts to understand the new creation it's no bad thing to understand the old one but for Paul the new world had come to birth in the resurrection of the Messiah and his new immortal physical body animated by the Spirit was the prototype of the whole new creation that's part of the point of Romans 84 Paul in other words there was a new physics the new world had come to birth in Jesus there was a new ethic which consisted in the behavior which makes sense within that new world and there was a new knowing as I've already said in which what which was what happened when the mind was transformed so as to grasp the new reality but the new physics was the transformation of this present world not the creation of a new one ex nihilo the ethic was the transformed living within the present world not a detached or isolated way of life shielded from that world and the new knowing was a matter of believing and discerning that the new had already broken into the old like the morning star shining when the night seemed still dark so to my conclusion my case is before you Paul invented Christian theology because only when the church is engaging in this task is there any hope of those elusive but mandatory virtues unity and holiness the task of reflecting about God and God's people and God's future was load bearing for the new community in a way which was not true either of non Christian Jewish reflection or of non-jewish theories about the gods and the way Paul invented this task was by teaching people to think prayerfully with the Jewish prayer tradition reworked around Jesus and spirit and to think scripturally with the scriptural narrative likewise reconfigured and what I've tried to do today is to insist that none of this makes sense within the old age eschatology is all these truths are the wisdom which you only see in the light of the divine glory revealed in Jesus and Paul is clear that that glory does indeed and will indeed fill the whole earth this is not a private revelation it's for all creation one quick final example and one quick final comment in Romans nine to eleven whatever we say about the contested meaning of the end of chapter 11 we must say a couple of things about the passage as an example of how Paul wanted people to think Romans 9 to 11 opens and closes with prayer but like several Psalms it opens with lament and closes with praise with intersession held in place in the middle this cannot be accidental second he is obviously expounding Scripture moving from Abraham through to Deuteronomy expounding the Torah indeed and then thinking messianic Lee about what was to happen next and third as he does so his final shout of praise from him and through him and him at all things actually echoes phrases which you might hear in the dominant stoic culture of his day at the very moment when Paul is being most Jewish he is articulating but upstaging the hope of the wider world the Jewish vision of new creation properly thought through in Messiah and spirit is the foundation for creative engagement with the wider world this exactly exemplifies the new discipline of Christian theology which Paul is inculcating one final comment as I've said in Paul's writing we often find passages which scholars have deemed poetic it's hard to know what sort of poetry they are but they are clearly set in a higher register with symmetry and assonance and many signs of careful composition we can't tell whether Paul composed these himself but one does not simply add a poem to a dense and careful argument like someone bringing home a souvenir a Chinese jar and simply sticking it randomly on a shelf it must belong I wonder if perhaps Paul saw these poems as themselves signs of new creation embodying the principle I mentioned a moment ago of the new emerging within the old as a foretaste of its eventual transformation part of his modeling something that we might call Christian theology could be the possibility that even the writing itself might hint at new Beauty emerging from standard forms after all there's no good reason why Sant Paul should not have done what many other writers do hiding a verse within his supple prose weaving the formal and the common words into a sleeping tableau there it lies still and still moving waiting for the breath the readers wakening voice no mere appendage a far-fetched foreign ornament but whispering the truth that new creations on the way out to God as men poem are his artwork a poem doubled thus beneath the flow of exhortation argument and prayer we sense a hidden stirring words words words the dry bones waiting for the promised breath thank so we have a little we have about 12 minutes or so for some questions and answers Jonathan is in the back with a microphone for those of you who'd like to ask questions I would ask that the questioners respect the short time we have and give us not speeches but concise questions and professor Wright will try to answer with equal concision that's right oh sorry my question is what would you say is the meaning of righteousness in the Pentateuch what a wonderful question I don't if you all heard that what's the meaning righteousness in the Pentateuch and is there a differentiated differentiation in Paul's varied use and as I have said more than once the Hebrew Sevcik tadaka root and the Greek to Kizuna root are like enormous ocean-going vessels into which all sorts of meanings have been packed through the centuries and part of our difficulty is that we do not have any ships in our modern fleets of words which can carry anything like the same quantity of cargo the same differentiated cargo so it is difficult we do not have words that will do this that's why I like others have tried to bring out different flavors so that on the one hand clearly the word has the root of right behavior appropriate behavior but it's also got a communal meaning and the communal meaning seems in the Hebrew Scriptures to be particularly concerned with the covenant between God and Israel and hence both the behavior that is appropriate within the Covenant and the ways in which that covenant is established ratified and worked out and it seems to me that Paul is able to draw in a very sophisticated way on those different resonances at different points but to take it very much further would I'm afraid need a narrative exegesis of Romans and Galatians which would be enormous fun but for which we don't have time now sorry yeah yeah hi Joe Tom thank you it was very impressive but I'm just a little bit confused about whether you were claiming that Paul invented Christian theology or that he invented theology in general and it seemed to me that by your emphasis on how load-bearing the theological task is in Paul in contrast to the way it is in Judaism you're sort of implying that he invented theology and I just wondered what you thought about people like the author of wisdom of Solomon letter of Aristeas or especially Philo of Alexandria who so much influenced medieval theology through origin weren't they all thinking theologically weren't they thinking about some of these same problems that Paul is thinking about idolatry and how to respond to the pagan world and weren't they also thinking of biblically and scripturally and trying to bring the scripture in conversation with their contemporary world so how is what Paul was doing different from what they were doing thank you yes that's that's a terrific question as one might have guessed and the the distinctive I really want to insist that I didn't say Paul invented theology because there was already a task called failure in the ancient world through Plato and Aristotle onwards so that's why I differentiated it as Christian theology and that also differentiates it from what's going on in wisdom in eros tears in Philo etc because there is a parallel activity I don't however see and maybe this is the accident of post 135 Jewish world's I don't see within Mishnah Judaism rabbinic Judaism that sort of task which wisdom or Philo or whoever were inculcating as becoming in any way load-bearing for community this fresh exploration which you do find in wisdom in fact it seems to me Paul is as much the heir of wisdom as anything in say the third or fourth century Jewish world could be and it's interesting that you say precisely its origin who's picking up stuff from Philo rather than much later Jewish writers and where you do get Middle Ages Maimonides and people trying to do a fresh theological task it never settles down and becomes foundational and to use the word again load-bearing for their communities in the way that what Paul begins and John continues and what other people do later become so that you then have this puzzle later on - drew - today where if Christians ask Jews what's your theology of this many Jews will respond we don't actually do theology in the way that you do and I think what I've tried to discern is why that is that they're different sorts of community needing different sorts of activity but certainly within the Jewish world I think Paul would be quite happy to say that he was doing in Christ in the spirit something like what wisdom say was doing and but the Christ and spirit thing is not just icing on the cake it's actually part of the reshaping itself so thank you in a fuller version of this I would love to rise few paragraphs engaging further with that time for a couple more there's one one there let's start there since answer the microphone isn't then carp here yes so where there is not overlap between Paul and the Gospels do you think that he has the same truth truth claim status as the Gospels or that he was doing something at an ad hoc solution to get people thinking about Christ and that we need to do different things responding to a different society to get people thinking about the Gospels today yeah I mean the question of the relation of Paul and the Gospels is obviously not simple because on most accounts the line goes from Jesus himself through to the very early church where we find Paul and then as maybe later we then actually know that for sure the writing of these particular stories in these particular ways but as I and many others have argued what you see in the writing of Matthew Mark Luke and John and any putative sources which might or might not lie behind them is precisely a reflection messianic Lee both on Israel's traditions as having found a strange and unexpected new fulfillment in Jesus his kingdom announcement his death and resurrection etc and on that story as the foundation of a new kind of community you see all of that going on in the Gospels and it is quite a complicated over layering of different narratives that are going on focused on the story of Jesus it seems to me that is one narrative ol way of doing something which is really rather like what Paul is doing teaching people to think within this great story to think prayerfully and and scripturally within it in order to be the people of God in the new situation so that what the Gospels are doing is talking about Jesus in one way Paul is doing it in another way but they're they're both trying they're all trying to sustain the life of this new community which must now live within this within this new story what I've tried to suggest is is yes that this is a pointer to Christian theology as an activity which the church must engage in in in every age engaging with its wider culture with its wider world in ways that I've just tried to hint at not in order to say therefore we can leave them behind and do something differently but in order that we can be true to the original nature of that task which is precisely in to include the fresh engagements with fresh cultural issues and expressions so it's it's got to be an easy commerce of the older new though okay any other questions are we good to go others one on here yeah must be quickly um would you perceive a sequence not only in how you would articulate how to think Christianly from monotheism to Messiah and then also to spirit obviously have to communicate it sequentially but for the Christian with the new creation logic can you step into thinking Christian Lee with a sort of simultaneous step into thinking about the world monotheistic Allah also through the Messiah also with the Holy Spirit obviously I'm reading your book on it right now but I thought I'd go ahead and ask the question it's a huge question I'm so much going on there I'm not quite sure sorry continues hang onto the microphone and just try and summarize the question because we have the Trinity we have creation we have Paul and we have one minute I guess as a Christian or coming to it from post the resurrection perspective I've often wondered how to approach explaining or even thinking about the idea of God do I step towards that through like honestly I immediately step and I start to think about Jesus and I find the God that is represented there I think Paul would say absolutely in order to discern and articulate who God really is you have to be talking about Jesus and you have to do so not necessarily talking about the spirit but invoking the spirit in order to talk about Jesus in order to make sense about God and by doing so since this God is X hypothesize the creator of the world this ought to be engaging in surprising and fresh and challenging ways with the wider world I think from Philippians 2 1 to 18 just to take that Paul would say that actually this is it is a matter of articulating but it is also a matter of the church being the church as this extraordinary United community the like of which no one had ever seen before and as the church as the holy community again the like of which no one had ever seen before which is why I've tried to stress in Chapter six in my book that for Paul the church itself is the symbol that people might see on the street that says Allah Ephesians three that we're challenging the principalities and powers because there is now a new sort of reality let loose in the world that is a huge challenge to my church your church anybody's Church and but that's the challenge which can only then be sustained by this serious ongoing theological activity thank you Tom we thank you for the stimulating lecture with its challenge for what it might mean for all of us to learn to take up the task of theology of thinking Christianly in the world we face those of you who'd like to continue thinking with empty write along these lines should be advised that a number of his books are available in our bookstore at the other end of this hallway beyond the cafe as I said we have to whisk him away to his next commitment here this afternoon let's thank Tom one more time for this wonderful you

Channel: Duke Divinity School

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Keywords: theology, christianity, Duke University (College/University)

Id: Y4CY73psVFQ

Length: 60min 30sec (3630 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 12 2014