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.