Reclaiming Paul Conference – thoughts

This past week I had the opportunity to go to Kansas City and listen to & talk with Pauline scholars and Emergent Church writers and/or church-planters for a couple of days. It was a very nice experience as a whole. There are a few themes and discussions which I would like to share which were the most meaningful to me. I will describe each in short here and later detail each more fully. The ideas which seemed more insightful or exciting for me are as follows:

• reconciliation
• theosis
• apprenticeship
• working out one’s salvation

I think for the emergents of the room the presentation of 2 Corinthians by Ross Wagner on the last day seemed to hit a nerve of excitement. Ross presently very well a message of how central reconciliation is to the message of Paul. There is a two fold work of reconciliation which we find ourselves in. There is the reconciliation of God to us. It is the work which he does with us. Using the language of being reconciled, draws on the relational nature of it, which is positive news for anyone who has only heard the gospel in the language of legalism. The second area of reconciliation is between myself and others. There had been a rift between the Corinthians and Paul previously. He was attempting to mend that tear in the relations. This seems so important in an age where there is so much division and strife between people, even within the church where love should abound all the more.

The concept which I will struggle with explaining the most is this, theosis. It is Greek, meaning the making divine or divinization. It is derives from a rich Eastern Orthodox history, where it is understand as gaining one’s salvation from unholiness by participation in the life of God. There are a couple of foundational ideas which differ from the traditional Western ideology to create this idea. One is the lack of belief in original sin, which has come from Augustine in the Western Church. The second would be the taking serious of the being made in God’s image which we read in the Bible. If we are really made in the image of God, then theosis is understood in the sense that we are becoming very much like God. There is a real change in us as we work out our salvation.

The idea of apprenticeship is very historically grounded to the period of the New Testament. People did not have access to the internet or even to mass print where everyone could own the tools of scholarship. People didn’t google ‘how to fix a roof leak’, what they did was work under the leadership of someone, mirroring the work which they did. There has been a complete paradigm shift, previously one would speak of one’s abilities or compentencies with certain fields of work; now we speak of our knowledge of such and such. Instead of learning through our hands we have moved the work to the ingestion of knowledge.
So speak specifically of the church context, we have changed our idea of what ‘doing church’ means. Previously the church meant some active thing, multi-faceted activity of the Lord (feeding the widows, children, the needy as one example given as a command). Now ‘doing church’ simply means the 1-2 hours spent one day a week having a worship service. Don’t be confused there isn’t much serving done though; one is simply expected to come, sit and listen. The shift comes in how we think of getting closer to God, in our most basic practices. Instead of service and sacrifice, which is seen in Acts, we have churches which place most of the emphasis on the worship service. It is supposed to be the center jewel of the week. We see our pastor’s central role to be his one a week teaching gig; it is not being among the people serving and training them.
This is simply a reflection of society in many ways, we used to be a society who defined ourselves by what we did to a society which defines us by what we consume.

Lastly let us reclaim within Paul the idea of salvation being a life long project, which only finds its fulfillment after death, which moves us away from the salvation of a ‘repeat after me, ticket to heaven’ style. Not that this latter perspective is wrong. We can see within the story of Saul/Paul that people have dramatic events which are life defining moments of change. For those others who’s salvation story isn’t so dramatic but still definitive, it can be important for us humans to have those life markers. They help us designate and transition between phases of life. For an better understanding of that, Joesph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces is an excellent reference. But to say that Paul was done with his salvation with that moment is completely misguided. It is also deflating to think of it in some Calvinistic sense that we live our life to Christ out of gratitude. Paul state’s in Philippians that one needs to work out one’s salvation with fear and trembling. That seems like a very different perspective than a) ‘repeat after me’ understanding. To work something out, means difficulty and time. It isn’t something which can be finished quickly, even though it may have a definitive starting point. Also for to include fear and trembling seems to falsify the out of gratitude understanding of why we need to live this certain way.

I would like to spend more time with each of these topics at later moment. Hopefully I can get to this soon, before all this stuff isn’t so fresh.