Paul reminds them that, quote, "the frame of this world is passing away." - The Basis of Paul's Radical Side And Its Mitigation In His Expectation of An Impending Eschaton

AS I SAID, I think Paul is often, perhaps more often than not, misread because of the length and subtlety of his arguments.  That is often due to some of his statements about the context in which his conclusions must for now lie are taken as the end point of a moral argument when it isn't. Being LGBTQ+ a group against which the first part of one of Paul's arguments have been wielded against by those who never apply what he said about their sexuality to their own identity, I didn't notice that the infamous condemnations taken to mean same-sex sex are immediately followed by what was artificially divided many centuries later by the beginning of "Chapter 2" in which Paul said to his pious followers, if they thought they had a right to condemn sinners, they don't because they're sinners, as well.  Though missing that has an earlier pedigree than the division of Scripture into chapters and verses.  That's something that I had to hear from evangelicals such as Pete Ens and Matthew Vines before I noticed it.  Those are NOT the "white evangelicals" you'll hear about in the media, their evangelicalism is something I can not only co-exist with but learn from.  This section of Luke Timothy Johnson's lecture about the paradox of Christian freedom points that out about as clearly as I've ever heard it pointed out in a much different context.

So let's look at Paul and ancient identity markers.

Characteristically, Paul's exhortations are conservative with respect for social structures. No one in antiquity could conceive of a family arrangement other other than that of a household or a political reality other than that of empire.  And, thus, Paul commands his readers to recognize and obey governing authorities and to pray for all manner of rulers. Along with this conservative posture, however, Paul's instructions bear a more subtly radical edge.  Slaves are to obey masters, he says, for the sake of the Lord, just as masters are to remember that they, too, have a master in heaven.  In First Timothy, 6:2, indeed, he reverses societal symbolism by telling slaves who have believing masters to regard their service to them as a kind of benevolent patronage.

No doubt Paul knew that those who he had converted who were held in slavery had practically no prospect of gaining their freedom, there was no underground rail-road in the Roman Empire that I've ever heard about.  There was no large area of land where slavery had been abolished, there was no prospect of them ever getting their freedom.  There had not been any articulation of politics of philosophy that asserted anything like the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence or the Rights of Man, and I'll point out the governments that resulted in those seemed to have no intention of abolishing slavery, Jefferson certainly didn't, France maintained brutal slavery in their colonies for quite a while, the tragic history of Haiti was it was thwarted by both France and the United States proves that.  The earliest declarations of a condemnation of slavery I've found explicitly stated are in St. Gregory of Nyssa several centuries after Paul's missionary work and his written advice to those he had already converted.  Also more informally in St. Patrick who, unlike Gregory of Nyssa, had the experience of being enslaved.  Paul was telling slaves who were going to remain slaves how to get by and giving them some hope even as he obviously expected Christ to return very soon.  In the meantime, he was also telling those who had been converted to stop treating their slaves as slaves were treated in the Roman Empire (see the first post in this series for a very short, abbreviated idea of how terrible that could be).  

The most subversive idea in human history is the idea that we are morally obligated to treat others as we would like to be treated by them, an idea which, if it were ever really followed, would end slavery, would end all manner of oppression and cruelty and exploitation and neglect.  

I think the limits of the modern imagination, that imagines Paul was addressing anything like what we unthinkingly take for granted as the world of the possible has constantly been at play in misreading Paul and taking messages from Paul that are the exact opposite from what he said.  The American slaver power certainly did that, many a priest and minister blatantly ignoring the conclusions that you would have to reach if you took his full arguments seriously, ignoring the obligations he laid on slave holders to treat those held in legal slavery according to the commandment to do to others as they would have done to them.  Which is one of the reasons that the 17-19th century "enlightenment" slavery was far worse than the slavery that is codified in The Law of Moses, which included, for example, the exact opposite of the Constitutionally consonant Fugitive Slave Law which the abolitionists constantly pointed out was a violation of the very Bible that the slave power used to excuse their enslavement of People.  I am tempted to go off on that idol of English language atheism, Thomas Huxley, sarcastically mocking the language derived from Paul that Black People were "brothers" as he cheerfully predicted the emancipated American slaves would be wiped out in a Darwinian struggle for existence, but there's more of what Johnson said to go through , so I'll put that aside for now.   

As wrong is to be outraged that Paul was not an ardent abolitionist in the style of those from the 19th century England and the United States.  I don't think it's necessary to argue from what Paul did say to get to abolitionism and, in 20th and 21st century terms, liberation theology.  The Golden Rule and the commandment to "Do to the least among you," which certainly includes slaves will get you there.  Gregory of Nyssa got there from the Old Testament as well.  Even as I have disagreed with Luke Timothy Johnson that Christianity is at odds with liberation theology, I do agree that to insist on judging what he did say on the basis of far later criteria, from a world he probably couldn't closely guess was possible is a very good critique or use of him.  I doubt it would have been possible for later abolitionists to get far without making use of the very Christianity that Paul had such a large hand in forming just as Christianity certainly made use of The Law and the Prophets.  


Note in the next passage, Johnson hints of the two-tracks of Paul's arguments that I talk about, writing about the conditions in which his followers would be trying to be living their way towards what he was really getting to, the endpoint being inseparable from his advice about getting on where you are living your life.  

Now, I use the term "radical edge" advisedly because in such passages Paul modulates the" hierarchical social order by means of properly religious language.  The social-political arrangements of antiquity are not absolute but relative.  Although his readers must, therefore,  continue to exist and act within a world of social stratification, Paul reminds them that, quote, "the frame of this world is passing away."  So that everything that they engage in the world, whether it be marriage or trade or anything whatever, it must be, as he says in First Corinthians 7, as though not. Such eschatological detachment derives from the realization that, quote, "If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, the old things have passed away. Behold everything is new."  Second Corinthians 5:17.  Christian existence in a world that is defined not by being in the best social class but by first being rightly related to God and second by being rightly related to each other in the community.  Within the  messianic community, indeed,  the new social order is to be based on the reality of the new creation, one which the three great markers of social distinction and value in antiquity are to be relativized.  In three passages, Paul states that the differences in gender, male-female, ethnicity, Jew-gentile, or social rank, slave-free, are no longer to distinguish and, thereby, separate those who are now in Christ.

In First Corinthians 12:13. he says, quote, " We have been baptized into one body and one Spirit, whether Jew or Greek, whether slave or free and we've all been made to drink the one Spirit."  

In Galatians 3:28, likewise, he declares, quote, "Whoever has been baptized into Christ has put on Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."  

Imagine if someone got up in front of the Republican-fascist caucus of the House "Christian nationalists" and quoted that, emphasizing the last one, NO LONGER MALE AND FEMALE!  Especially pushing things like the radical act in Acts of baptizing an African who had been castrated - which often included cutting off the penis as well as the testicles - into the Body of Christ, the Church.  What would the Madge Greens, Matt Gaetzs and the like make of that being thrown in their faces.  

Finally, in Collosians 3:11 he exhorts, "Put on the new human which is being renewed in recognition according to the image of the one creating it where there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all in everyone."

Twice, also, Paul uses the identity marker of ethnicity to make the same point. . .

I will leave the transcription at that till the next post.  Imagine how the history of Christianity if Paul's most radical egalitarianism had been as focused on and enforced as his throwaway terms about sex have been.  His radical leveling is clearly a major point in Paul's conception of Christianity, probably the part of it least taken seriously by the subsequent history of Christianity, especially whenever that impinges on economic justice and gender equality.   As I mentioned, about the first, if not the first, condemnation of slavery in written history comes from Gregory of Nyssa and it's, perhaps related to that, that his writing about his sister and teacher, Macrina, giving her teaching of him, by then a bishop and one of the major theologians of his and later times, a respect that I haven't yet found in anyone before him, pagan or Jewish or Christian.   That's not because others hadn't read Paul's radical leveling, though I would suspect Gregory reading it in the Greek original instead of the Latin translation might have made things clearer to him.  Or maybe it was because his sister Macrina, who he called "The Teacher" in writing about her had read it and, being a Woman, she noticed things in it that the men missed for so many centuries to come.  She was the one who talked their mother into treating the household slaves as family instead of slaves.