From the point of view of the critical Platonism developed in other essays, what finally matters always consists in some goodness internal to human beings. In many ways early Buddhist teaching lends itself to the resultant rational analysis and evaluation, focusing as it does on an internal restructuring of an individual’s psychological being through highly developed meditation techniques.
At first sight, Pauline preaching presents a much more difficult challenge to this kind of analysis and evaluation, since so much of Paul’s preaching appears to be a description of apparent objective facts concerning the unseen decisions and actions of an unseen God. Although Paul’s letters contain many exhortations to good behavior, he insists that the crucial event of salvation and being “justified” in the eyes of God, comes about through an act of God, not through any human effort or technique.
From a Platonist point of view, if we ask what good reasons might have impelled Paul’s audience to believe his message, the answer must lie in some connection between this objective message on the one hand, and the emergence in human subjectivity of a new admirable moral identity on the other — since from a rational point of view the goodness of this moral identity is the basis for the validity of belief in Paul’s message. The difficult task for interpretation is then an imaginative reconstruction of this subjective side of Christian conversion, the subjective correlate of the objective supernatural content which receives so much greater emphasis in Paul’s letters.
This is not an easy task, because the subjective human goodness we are trying to understand is not goodness in general nor a kind of universal goodness we could know about without paying attention to Paul’s message. It is a very particular kind of goodness, a particular admirable identity which would be awakened to emergence and then sustained by the particulars of Paul’s worldview.
Earlier essays have focused on two particular aspects of the Pauline worldview: the Holy Spirit as a saving presence within people, and the expectation that an angry God would soon come to destroy the world. We can now go on to give a more comprehensive account of Paul’s worldview, which takes the form of an historical narrative focused on idea that God sent his Son Jesus to save people, and that the key saving event was Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.
The full narrative Paul expects his audience to accept goes something like this:
Paul and his audience are living in the last days of the world. An angry God will soon come to destroy the unrighteous world we live in. But God has made salvation from this destruction available in the very recent past, a means of being justified in God’s eyes, removed from the evil world and so “saved from the Anger” directed at a radically unjust world. God made this justification/salvation available by sending his Son Jesus to be crucified, and bringing him back to life.
This saving event should be seen as the culmination of Jewish history, a history which has always been directed by acts of God intervening and directing events affecting the Jewish community. Previously these acts of God have taken the form of events pertaining to the history of the Jewish community as a whole, such as God’s covenant with Abraham establishing the Jews as God’s chosen people, God’s bringing the Jewish people out of Egypt and revealing his Law for the Jewish community through Moses, and God’s use of Babylonians destroying the Jerusalem temple as punishment for the disloyalty of the Jewish community.
But this latest act of God offers a new kind of salvation, not as in the past a political salvation of the Jewish people from the dominance of foreigners, but a “justification” of individuals who accept the salvation God is offering through the crucified and resurrected Jesus. In a Jewish context, what is necessary is ceasing to trust in human/fleshly efforts to keep the prescriptions of Jewish law, and to trust instead in the power of God to render a person justified in his eyes. Those who continue to trust in their own efforts to keep Jewish law are no longer God’s chosen people.
Replacing law-keeping with trust in God’s recent saving act means also that God will save/justify all who trust in this power and the salvation it offers through Jesus. Non-Jews can become members of God’s new chosen people in this way and be saved from the coming Anger, without becoming Jewish by taking on any marks of Jewish ethnic identity.
This is an emphatically “historical” worldview, centered on an act of God taking place at a certain point in time, in which God took the initiative to bring about a radical change in the relation between God and people, a “new covenant” (hence “New Testament”) making possible what was not possible before: complete justification in the eyes of God, for Jews and non-Jews alike.
The objective content of Paul’s message sketched here is extremely supernaturalist in its orientation. In Paul’s preaching, God is an overwhelming power completely separate from the world, standing over against the world as a whole, condemning it as a whole. What matters for individuals is only that they become “justified” in God’s eyes, separated from the evil world that God condemns. But individuals cannot justify themselves in God’s eyes by their own efforts — trusting in one’s own efforts at self-justification is the worst human “sin” and resistance against God. Only God’s supernatural intervention can justify people, an exercise of supernatural divine power coming completely from outside the world and outside human effort.
Somehow, the events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are this supernatural intrusion, they are the exercise of God’s supernatural power saving people by justifying them in his eyes. The condition for being justified in God’s eyes is to cease seeing oneself as part of the condemned world, cease trusting in human efforts to achieve justification, and accept God’s saving power which comes to us through the events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.
On the surface, this divine drama, taking place entirely in an unseen supernatural world, appears to constitute the central substance of Paul’s message. The tendency of Paul’s commentators has been to take Paul’s presentation at face value. God personally revealed to Paul all of these decisions God has taken — the fact that God is angry at the world and will soon come to destroy it, the fact that God will not regard any human efforts as sufficient for justification in his eyes, and the fact that God has made his justifying/saving power available through Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. God revealed to Paul all these decisions he has taken, and Paul conveys these facts about God’s decisions to his audience, who are expected to respond with unquestioning belief that everything he says is literally true.
At its most extreme, this line of interpretation results in what theologians call a purely “extrinsic” concept of justification. Justification is extrinsic when it is not thought to consist in any change at all in people. It consists only in the fact of a change in God’s attitude, the fact that he has decided, for inscrutable reasons, to regard as justified those who cease trusting in their own efforts at self-justification and trust instead in the saving/justifying power of Jesus’ crucifixion/resurrection.
This literal reading of Paul’s message presents insuperable problems for critical, rational interpretation.
Why exactly are people in need of salvation in the first place? Why should they believe they are in need of supernatural salvation? Why is it not enough to live a relatively decent life in the world, following ordinary standards of moral decency?
Why should anyone believe that God is angry with the world? Why would God create the kind of world that he would subsequently be angry with?
If God wanted to change his attitude or use his power to save people from his own anger, why was it necessary to send his Son Jesus to be crucified before he could exercise this saving power? If justification consists solely in God’s decision to regard people as justified, and God wanted to do this, why could He not just directly proceed to regard them as justified, without having to send His Son to be crucified?
Does God regard as justified only those people who believe that the crucifixion/resurrection of Jesus is the way God has chosen to exercise his saving power? Why would anyone believe Paul’s picture of this kind of arbitrary God?
Historically speaking, what reasons would Paul’s original audience have had for believing any of this? He claims that he received his message as a revelation from God, but anyone could claim this. How could his audience know that this is true? How could we know this is true?
And if justification/salvation is completely extrinsic to people, then what does it mean in practice to be saved? Does it involve any change in a person’s fundamental way of relating to the world? If it does, what is the relation between God’s extrinsic justification on the one hand, and this new way of being in the world on the other? Does ceasing to trust in one’s own self-justifying efforts mean that no human efforts to be good matter any more at all?
These problems are not rationally resolvable if we think of salvation as purely extrinsic, consisting simply in the arbitrary decision of God to regard some people as justified, and if we regard blind belief in this decision as itself what justifies people.
Pauline thought is rationally understandable only if we regard salvation/justification as a change taking place in people. This would make it susceptible of Platonist analysis — we could then ask about the goodness of this change. It would provide an historical explanation of the acceptance of his message by Paul’s audience. And it would provide some specific ideas about what it would mean in practice for us also to lead a “justified” life.
The problem of course is that Paul himself seems so emphatic in insisting that true justification is due only to God’s power, and that nothing outside God can justify people in God’s eyes. This has been a central and unresolved dilemma for Pauline interpretation throughout Christian history.
Previous essays have provided a basis for the following attempt to resolve this dilemma, which runs as follows:
First we must imagine individuals with a strong internal urge to construct for themselves a worthwhile identity, to form and maintain an image of themselves as persons worthy of respect, leading lives of some importance and significance. Normally, people do this by defining who they are in relation to some specific criteria. In the present case, we should imagine two such criteria:
1- Tangible signs of success in the social world. Individuals take pride in wealth, prestige, and winning out over others in various kinds of social competition.
2- Specific norms and rules as to what is right and not right in human behavior. Individuals pride themselves on being morally upright in relation to these norms and rules.
The criteria a person is dependent on for her sense of self-esteem have moral power over that person. By moral power I mean the power to support or to undermine a person’s vital sense of self-esteem. The power of the above two criteria actually, but typically unconsciously, derives from a person’s own urge to live a life of some consequence, importance, and rightness. For a person who lacked such an urge the above two criteria would actually have no moral power, no power to make her feel good or bad about herself, to give her a sense of pride or inadequacy. But despite this internal origin, on a conscious level individuals tend to feel the power of these criteria as something external to themselves. In the moral dimension, these two criteria constitute “the world” that is the framework an individual feels she must bring herself into accord with in order to lead a “justified” existence.
But then let us imagine an individual who tries her best to lead a life of importance and rightness, but despite considerable efforts, something in her is never able to actually feel satisfied. Living up to these external criteria does not really satisfy the person’s urge to importance and rightness. Their moral power comes to feel like a “foreign” power, in conflict with the urge which they are more normally felt to be expressions of.
Earlier essays described two plausible features of Paul’s cultural world that would explain such conflict.
One is the Jewish-Roman culture clash, strengthened and generalized by Paul’s feeling that the Jewish God’s demands for perfect rightness, separated from any specific Jewish ethnic customs, constitute the essence of the Jewish tradition. In the present picture, this gave Paul an acute sense that in the Roman Empire he saw in his travels there was little connection between moral rightness on the one hand, and actual social success on the other. The forces that prevailed in the social world did not feel morally deserving of his respect, and success in this world was felt to be morally insignificant if not a sign of moral compromise.
The second is an inner-Jewish dialectic described earlier. Being a person with extreme moral sensitivity, reading the Jewish scriptures gave Paul an overwhelming sense of the demands of God for perfect rightness. In the previous Pharisee phase of his life, he felt these demands of God as external to himself, producing a split in his moral worldview: On the one side stands the Law of God, and on the other side stand the limitations of what is possible for conscious deliberate willing, which Paul calls “Flesh.” In this previous life, Paul felt Law as something with moral power over him, and put all his (Fleshly) effort into trying to live up to the demands of God presented in Law. But despite his best efforts, some part of him never really felt justified. Law was something powerful standing over against him, but because of “the weakness of Flesh” unable to live up to the Law’s perfectionist demands, this Power could never grant real moral justification. He felt it as a power metaphorically “killing” him, i.e. condemning him to remain “Sinful” in the eyes of God. Law only brought “consciousness of sin,” and was responsible for “shutting him up in Sin” as he puts it.
These are psychological conditions conducive to the potential emergence of a new, different kind of split in moral consciousness among those of Paul’s contemporaries who identify with Judaism. On the one hand there is the “human world” as a framework in terms of which individuals define their moral identities. This human world is made up of material and social criteria for success, as well as moral and religious Law with its correlate of Flesh which defines its moral identity in relation to this Law. On the other hand there is an entirely different basis for a different moral identity ready to emerge, i.e. a powerful internal passion for rightness, completely inner driven, independent of any external criteria in terms of which it must justify itself.
This internal drive appears “irrational” and “otherworldly” in the senses defined in earlier essays. That is, it can find no place in “the world” constituted either by material/social standards of success, or by definable standards of moral and religious Law. It is unrelated to ordinary sources of power and influence in this world. And its demands are not easy to articulate persuasively within the framework of ordinary language and concepts belonging to this world. The moral identity ready to emerge in this context is one for whom what feels most morally powerful for justification (this inner irrational drive) is also what is weakest in the world, having no recognized place in the world. An earlier essay argued that this is precisely the situation which in premodern times often generated a dramatic increase in the attraction of images of supernatural power and supernatural intervention in human life.
All this sets the stage for an imaginative reconstruction of how Paul’s preaching could have produced in his audience a dramatic internal transformation, awakening a new moral identity ready to emerge. This reconstruction imagines an incipient moral power-struggle, between a ready-to-emerge irrational passion for rightness, on the one hand, and the moral power of the world and Law/Flesh on the other. The moral power of the world/Law/Flesh must be destroyed before this irrational passion can fully emerge and provide a completely new and more powerful basis for moral justification. This is what Paul’s audience heard when he spoke to them about God’s coming destruction of the world, and of the crucifixion as God’s condemnation of the moral identity called “Flesh” in the flesh of Jesus.
For the ready-to-emerge new moral identity, this event of the crucifixion represents supernatural intervention bringing about a fervently wished for destruction of oppressive powers. It signified that God, supreme moral authority, had just switched sides. Rather than residing on the side of external Law and rational Flesh over against irrational passion, supreme authority now stands on the side of an irrational and otherworldly passion for rightness. The moral, justifying power of this passion is a “supernatural” power, in that it is a power coming from outside and beyond the closed system of the world. Since in the ideal case it is associated with an ideal of rightness released from all limitation of what is actually possible in the world and what is possible for ordinary human nature, it is also a “transcendent” power in the Platonic sense, connected to an ideal of pure and perfect rightness.
A person identified with this irrational passion no longer leads a life guided and driven by consciously willed, Fleshly, “human” effort, but a life animated by an otherworldly Spirit. This is what it means to rely for justification on “God’s power” rather than one’s own human power. And this is also the practical meaning of the event of resurrection following the crucifixion. Following the destruction of Flesh, the newly emerged moral identity is now animated by an otherworldly “divine” (Spirited) life rather than an ordinary “human” life.
To cite Paul’s own words, for the new moral identity awakened into emergence by Paul’s message:
“the Body [Fleshly human existence] is [morally] dead because of Sin, but Spirit is Life because of [supernatural, divine] Just-ification. If the Spirit of the one that raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will bring to Life your ‘dead’ Bodies through the Spirit that dwells in you.”
This connection of the resurrection with the justifying Spirit enables Paul to attribute saving power not only to Jesus’ crucifixion, but also to his resurrection. As he says, Jesus “died for our sins and rose for our justification.”
Maintaining this new moral identity does require some deliberate human effort, but this effort consists in continuing to identify completely with this irrational otherworldly passion which is “God’s Spirit”, a passion which must continue to actively struggle to regard the old moral identity Paul describes as “Flesh” or “Body” as morally “dead”:
If you [revert to] liv[ing] by the Flesh you will [morally] Die, but if by the Spirit you [continue to] ‘put to death’ Body-efforts, you will Live.
You are not in Flesh but in Spirit because the Spirit of God dwells in you.
Body is [morally] dead because of Sin, but the Spirit is Life because of Justification.
If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will bring to life your death-Bodies though his Spirit dwelling in you.
Paul’s preaching of this transformative message is partly cast in the form of myth. I use “myth” here not in the sense of something we should reject as untrue, but in the more neutral sense in which anthropologists use the term, referring to a narrative about the doings of divine beings.
In briefest terms: The Pauline myth pictures an angry and demanding God, the one supreme being, condemning everything merely human (Fleshly) in the world as sinful, incapable of meeting his demands for rightness. He sends his Son to become a representative of sinful human Flesh, and demonstrates his condemnation of sinful Flesh by condemning him to die by crucifixion. After his Son’s death, God raised him from the dead by his divine power.
This myth describing the invisible doings of divine beings in another realm, also intersects with human history, in that the man Jesus, executed as a common criminal by crucifixion in Jerusalem only some thirty years before Paul’s Letter to the Romans, is this Son of God sent to earth. It also intersects with the personal histories of individuals in Paul’s audience, in that people transformed by enthusiastic response to his preaching are saved by participating in this divine drama of death and resurrection, cooperating in God’s condemnation of their own ‘sinful’ Flesh, and living by a new life animated by a divine Holy Spirit. And the myth intersects with the history of the Jewish people, since the widespread enthusiastic response to Pauline preaching is an act of God in history, “choosing” those who so respond, making them His new Chosen People, and establishing with them a New Agreement (“New Testament”). Enthusiastic response, coming upon a person in an irrational way, is the “gift of the Spirit” and a sign that God has “chosen” and “brought to life” the person who feels this response. In Paul’s words, “The love of God is poured forth into our hearts by the Spirit that is given to us.”
We can now return to some questions raised earlier.
First, why would Paul’s audience believe this myth? What good reasons could they had for believing it?
The answer:
Because of psychological conditions described above, and because of the way Paul presented his mythological narrative, his preaching brought about an internal transformation, the spontaneous emotional emergence of a new moral identity. This new identity was intimately connected to a new self-image, defined in relation to this mythological narrative, and supported by it. That is, a person with this new identity conceived of herself very essentially as someone justified and saved by her participation in the divine drama described in this mythological narrative.
A good Platonist would focus on trying to grasp the goodness of this new identity in an abstract way and commit herself to an abstract concept of this goodness, because from a rational/Platonist point of view this goodness is what constitutes a good reason for responding positively to Paul’s message.
However, concrete-minded people like Paul and his audience would most likely not feel that their new identity was based on something real unless it was based on objective concrete facts of some kind. This is why they might well feel that remaining committed to this new moral identity required a commitment to the literal truth of Paul’s mythological narrative.
Hence Paul’s emphasis on the importance of pistis, “trust” or “faith,” had a double significance. Its primary significance is that a person should not trust in her own human efforts to justify herself, but should trust only in God’s justifying, life-giving power (i.e. the irrational passion for rightness which is God’s Holy Spirit).
But pistis also refers to the necessity of belief in the concrete details of Paul’s mythological narrative, as a way of remaining committed to the new moral identity which that narrative defines and supports. This is how they could have a good reason for a literal belief in supernatural facts that they could not really know to be literally true.
Note that, in this explanation, from a strictly rational point of view the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are not the real events that brought about justification and salvation for Paul’s audience. It is rather the preaching concerning the crucifixion and resurrection that brought about this “just-ifying” transformation. (Paul himself actually says in one place that people are saved by the logos tou staurou, literally “the message [logos] of the cross.”)
Coming to some specifics: Why would Paul’s audience believe in God’s angry condemnation of the human world? Why would they think that no human effort to keep God’s Law was sufficient to make one justified in the eyes of this God? Why would they believe they were in need of justification/salvation coming from a supernatural source outside this world?
The answer:
Because the irrational passion for rightness ready to emerge, and awakened by Paul’s preaching, felt the entire complex of world/Law/Flesh to be an alien power belonging to an alien world, whose (moral) power must be destroyed before it can fully come into its own and exercise its own justifying power. The morally justifying power of this passion only becomes fully actualized when it stands alone as its own ultimate authority, not subject to the moral power of anything external to itself. So ultimate authority (“God”) must rest on the side of this passion willing the destruction of any power outside itself, and substituting for it an otherworldly power beyond and opposed to all the (moral) power of “this world.”
This reconstruction explains why the message of God’s condemnation of human Flesh would have engendered such an enthusiastic and intensely emotional response, interpreted by Paul and his audience as Spirit-possession. Several passages in Paul’s letters indicate that this is almost certainly what happened, and one task of interpretation is to give a psychological explanation of this psychological phenomenon. Modern audiences are likely to find this phenomenon especially puzzling, since they typically associate God’s condemnation of human Flesh with repression of all human feeling in response to demands of a God completely external to human subjectivity. The interpretation developed here represents a major departure in its explanation of why Paul’s preaching of God’s angry condemnation would have represented for his audience an awakening and releasing of intense emotion. To use Nietzsche’s categories in a way opposite to the way he used them: Pauline Christianity is an intensely emotional, “Dionysiac” religion, requiring the aggressive “destruction” of the spirit of order-giving “Apollonic” Law as a disciplining and restricting force over against human emotion.
Most modern Christians find Paul’s emphasis on God’s anger somewhat repellant, preferring to focus almost exclusively on God’s love manifest in sending his Son to save people. But this modern view of things fails to explain why anyone would think special supernatural salvation is needed in the first place. Especially, from an historical point of view, why would Paul’s audience feel there is something radically and irremediably deficient about ordinary (Fleshly) human existence, so that a person can only be saved by a special and unmerited supernatural intervention? Without this feeling, Paul’s message would amount to saying, “Be grateful that God through Jesus has offered you a salvation you did not know that you needed.”
This interpretation also addresses the question raised earlier about whether the justification/salvation offered by God is extrinsic (consisting only in God’s arbitrary decision to regard people as justified), or intrinsic (consisting in some real change in people themselves.) The problem for the extrinsic option is that in order to trust in God’s saving power, a person must in practice have some specific way of coming in contact with that power, tapping into it so as to be saved by it. The problem for the intrinsic option is that it seems to go against Paul’s insistence that people must give up trusting in the power of their own efforts, and trust only in the saving power of God.
In the present interpretation justification/salvation consists definitely in a specific internal transformation happening within a person. From a strictly rational point of view, this is in fact the main substance of the salvation event. But it is important to the Pauline worldview to picture this transformation as engendered by a supernatural force coming from beyond the world, and to picture the resultant way of being as guided also by an otherworldly force, a divine Spirit given as a gift, rather than something brought about by a person’s own conscious deliberate willing. There are several reasons for this:
- First, this is not a transformation that a person can bring about just by wanting to. A person who does not feel a passion for rightness cannot fake it or bring it into existence by conscious choice, any more than a person can make herself fall in love. This passion is what actually saves and justifies people, but it is something experienced as happening to them, rather than something under their control.
- Secondly, this passion for rightness is “irrational” in the sense described earlier, and this makes it feel like something otherworldly, coming from another world. It feels irrational and otherworldly because it has no place in this world. It finds no easy way of giving reasons for its urgings, because giving reasons means appealing to some legitimating ideas or standards commonly accepted in the social world.
- Finally, there is a certain kind of contrast between two ways of being in the world, important to defining the particular kind of goodness connected to this transformation. In one way of being, a person looks upon herself as a center of conscious thought and will, employed in pursuing her own interests in the world — even if one of those interests is constructing and maintaining an admirable moral identity by living up to some recognized social criteria for moral uprightness. This is what Paul calls “living by the Flesh.” In the contrasting way of being in the world (“living by the Spirit”), a person gives up even this best kind of self-concern, and looks upon herself as a pure selfless instrument of a passion for rightness, standing up for rightness in the world, for its own sake, and does not take personal credit for anything accomplished in this way. (As Paul says, “If you have nothing [no goodness] you have not received, why do you boast as though you have not received it.”)
The Pauline interpretation given here cannot claim to be a fully argued definitive interpretation of Paul’s thought. This would obviously require many more pages. The main purpose of these chapters is to illustrate the kind of things necessary for a rational, critical reconstruction of Paul’s thought along the lines of the pluralist Platonism developed in earlier essays.
One might easily object that this interpretation is highly speculative, reconstructing a picture of subjective human transformation based on rather slim indications in Paul’s writings. Isn’t it safer to stick more closely to what Paul himself explicitly says and emphasizes, i.e. the objective content of his declarations about the decisions and actions of an unseen God?
From the present perspective, this is an important issue because it points to the importance of imagination in the interpretive process. Platonism holds that the validity of any view of what finally matters is always based on the goodness of some fundamental attitudes internal to human beings. But pluralist Platonism holds that we cannot establish by reasoning ahead of time the one true definition of human goodness, then merely judge each particular view by this standard. There are an indefinite number of ways of leading a good and admirable life. Ultimately, we can know that some particular way of being in the world is good only by stretching our imagination to enter into that way of being, at least vicariously, and personally perceiving its goodness.
In the case of Pauline thought, this means imaginatively gaining a sympathetic grasp of a way of being that is fundamentally “irrational,” in a very specific sense, i.e. in the sense that it is a way of being not arrived at by reason, nor can it be brought about by conscious will. No reasons can be given why a person must have a passion for rightness, and if she does not feel it, no amount of rational thought or will power can cause her to have it.
Pauline thought is however not “irrational” in the negative sense, or in the sense commonly appealed to by believers, i.e. it is not irrational in the sense that it is based on something for which no reasons can be given. The whole point of the present treatment of Paul is to render his thought fully capable of rational interpretation and evaluation at its most fundamental level.
Here a comparison with literary criticism might be helpful: Authors do not typically create great literature by consciously applying the principles of some literary theory rationally arrived at. But once a poem or novel has been created through more “irrational” processes, a good literary critic can give a more rational analysis making more explicit what exactly makes some particular writing great or not great.
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