The Early Church and the Guidance for Worldly Behavior

I’ve been reviewing my teacher Luke Timothy Johnson’s two volume work on Paul in advance of teaching a course on Paul this fall and I was struck recently by two comments he makes in volume 1. First, in discussing experience as a necessary major node for understanding Paul, Johnson remarks on the wonder that Paul’s letters address “quite quotidian matters” because they are under dispute among his addressees. To explain the disputes, he writes, “… since there as yet existed no guidebook for how the confession of Jesus as Lord and the experience of the Holy Spirit’s power should be translated into worldly behavior.” (Johnson, Constructing Paul 1:205) This struck me as simultaneously insightful and puzzling. After all, wouldn’t most early Christians who hailed from a Jewish background (and even at least those gentiles who had heard of Israel’s God as well as some who were hearing of Israel’s God through the preaching of Jesus) have immediately thought of the Torah as exactly the guidebook for living? Sure enough, in the next chapter, Johnson discusses the forensic metaphor at play in Paul’s letters and writes, “At the heart of this metaphorical field is the law revealed by God… with its commandments… that God wishes to be obeyed. These, globally, are “the works of the law”…, by the performance of which humans – according to the law itself – would be reckoned righteous and “live”.” (Johnson, Constructing Paul 1:241) I think for Johnson, any seeming tension between these two claims is resolved in that he takes the phrase πιστις χριστου (faith in/of Christ) definitively to be “Christ’s faithfulness”, specifically Christ’s faithfulness to God’s Torah, as the mechanism for justification (the granting of righteousness as a status to) of humans. Since Christ has fulfilled the righteous requirement of the Torah and therefore opened up the possibility of righteousness for those who are “in Christ” in this forensic metaphorical field, the question naturally arises, what now is the way to live? Yet, for those who would follow Luther insisting that it is not Christ’s faithfulness that Paul means, but rather the believer’s faith in Christ that Paul intends to label as the mechanism for salvation, the problem is much thornier. Now, the question becomes essentially one of supersession or of relativization of portions or all of God’s Torah given to Israel. Where Johnson’s solution opens up a new era, Luther’s solution requires a redefinition of the Torah. Either, there is a new Torah in Christ because the old Torah’s functions was never to be followed anyway (supersession) or at least some of the Torah, if not all of it, must no longer be valid. In this latter version, the invalidating of Torah follows from Paul’s own arguments that gentiles must not circumcise themselves, otherwise they become Jews and the eschatological age as Isaiah envisions it cannot be present (the nations, gentiles, will come to Jerusalem and join Israel; see Isaiah 60-62). Thus, some portion of the Torah must be relativized or excised and, as many Protestant traditions have found, debating where and how those lines are drawn becomes highly complex, very quickly. 

The Core of the Christian Faith

What is the center of the Christian faith? This question has been lurking in the back of my mind for a few years now as my department has considered the best place to begin our university’s five required Bible courses. As a Christian university, these courses form an essential part of the university’s general education course of study for all undergraduate degrees. For about a decade now, the first three courses have been set, with some flexibility for the fourth and fifth. For many decades, the first course has focused on the canonical Gospels. The current title is Jesus: His Life and Teachings. Our department has noted the decreasing biblical literacy among our incoming students along with an increasing lack of basic knowledge about the Christian faith. We have begun to wonder whether our current sequence, requiring essentially a yearlong survey of the New Testament followed by a one-semester survey of the Old Testament is serving the needs of our students, the future of the churches where they might be, and, thus the Church as a whole. We have wondered whether our current courses meet our students where they are or if they assume a level of knowledge of the faith that is missing. For example, does a course that jumps into the Bible assume both that a student would agree that reading the Bible is good and important for Christian faith and also that knowledge of the Bible is important for Christian faith, much less be prepared to explore various ways of reading the Bible for the nourishing of that faith. The answers are far from obvious.

Thus, we have embarked on an exploration of what we might do differently in order to start the students off in a better place. Two of my excellent colleagues have taught renditions of a pilot course these past two years that would begin from some foundations of the Christian Faith (among other things to be sure!). While the courses have differed in some ways, one core they have shared is teaching the Apostle’s Creed as a core summary of the Christian faith. While I neither deny nor intend to belittle the historical realities of creeds developing to operate as summaries or their use in providing some form of “catechesis” for the first-semester student at a Christin university, for a variety of reasons, some exacerbatingly specific to the current moment in US history and culture, teaching a creed has not sat well with me. Some reasons surely come from my own heritage in the Restoration churches of the Stone-Campbell movement, in which the slogan, “no creed but the Bible” has held sway. But more than that, I see in our particular moment in history a surge in the typical human behavior of using ideological purity tests as weapons. Whether in our federal government, our two political parties in the US, or say the tendency to fill in all sorts of imagined “facts” about a person based on where they might indicate they fit in debates about gender, gender roles, and/or sexuality, social media has put an exclamation point on our desire and willingness to use “creedal” ideas to draw lines by which we establish who is “our people” and who is not, who is to be welcomed and clung to and who is to be excluded, despised, and ridiculed. 

As one of my colleagues and friends that I most respect in the world asked me, though, if, given these negatives, the creed is not to be used as a mechanism for identifying a center of the Christian faith, as a starting point for building out theological literacy in the students as they are, what would I place there instead? So, herein, I hope to propose at least a basic sketch of what I may use.

I would center the Christian faith on a phrase memorialized by Paul in writing to the Corinthians: “Christ crucified”. Given that here we have an even shorter statement than a creed, I will attempt briefly to not only flesh out how this might function as the center of an initial course on the Christian faith, but also why it is superior to some kind of creedal statement.

In writing to the Corinthians, Paul explains (reminds?) them that their baptism was into the name of Christ and that it was Christ who was crucified, thus effecting something in connection with their baptism (1 Cor 1:13). Thus, he tells them, that though the entirety of humanity (both Jews and Greeks/gentiles, used as an hendiadys in 1 Cor 1:22-23) would consider the content of what Paul and his fellows proclaim worthless (a scandal to Jews and foolishness to gentiles), Christ crucified is the wisdom and power of God. It is through this lens that Paul asserts in the opening of his letter that all of the challenges currently dividing and besetting those in Christ in Corinth will be solved. Christ crucified in Corinth, as for Paul himself, changes everything. Most importantly, it changes everything because God has displayed the superiority of God’s weakness to human strength and God’s foolishness to human wisdom when God proved Jesus to be Christ (Messiah) in the Resurrection, by which God defeated sin and death (see 1 Cor 15, Phil 2, Rom 6-8, etc.). In order to understand “Christ crucified”, a first semester course would necessarily require moving out/backward to God, God’s creation, the reality of sin, Israel and God’s covenant, Kingship and Exile, the looking forward to God’s Messiah, etc., but beginning here as the heart of the Gospel, especially in light of how Paul typically reasons on the basis of Christ crucified, prevents us from viewing the center of Christian faith as a possible purity test or as a mechanism by which to draw lines. 

After all, for Paul Christ crucified has as one of its most powerful corollaries that God is now “breaking down the dividing wall” that was most fundamental to him as a Jew as to many other Jews as God’s Holy and chosen people, that wall between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2). Not only this, but many varieties of dividing lines are torn asunder by Christ crucified (see Gal 3:28). The moral logic of Christ crucified is an invitation into an inverted power dynamic, a fundamental interrogation of the human proclivity to look for tools that may be weaponized to elevate ourselves and people like us by identifying who is out, who doesn’t count, and who isn’t worthwhile, namely those who are not like us (see e.g. Luke 15). It is a call to greatness by way of humility, a call to fullness by way of emptying ourselves, a call to react to the love which we have received by looking not for ways to secure ourselves in that love, but rather by standing in that love as a place of sure-footing by which to be transformed into “a living sacrifice” as Paul would name it (see not only Rom 12, but Mark 9 and 10 and the parallel texts on greatness in Matthew and Luke). Surely, Paul could sympathize with the human tendency to experience and view God’s work in tearing down division as a threat to special status, but his encounter with the risen Christ changed everything for him. It was his preaching of this Christ crucified whom death could not hold that also caught the imagination of many Greeks and other gentiles. Surely Christ crucified today could also capture the imaginations of first-semester college students and serve as a foundation from which to build not only knowledge of the story of God through our sacred Scriptures, but also moral transformation in sanctification and a lifelong commitment to sojourning with the Church.

Alright, to be sure this is nascent and incomplete, but I find myself more convinced now than when I began of this as a centering starting point over and against any kind of creed. You, dear reader, are welcome to disagree, and if I may steal one other phrase from Paul in Phil 3:15, should you think differently on this matter, “I’m confident the Lord will also make this clear to you.” ;-)