The interpretation of Judaism that Paul preached shared with some other contemporary Jewish groups the idea that God was angry with the world as it presently exists, and would soon come to destroy the present order of things. He says in the First Letter to the Thessalonians, “The Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they are saying, ‘peace and security,’ suddenly destruction will come upon them… and they will not escape.”
Apparently some Jesus-followers had asked questions about those in their community who had already died. He says in reply, “We the living, remaining until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep [i.e. died]. The Lord himself with a cry of command, and with the voice of an archangel and with a trumpet of God, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first, then we the living who remain will be caught up in the clouds with them to a meeting with the Lord in the air.”
This leaves little doubt that Paul thought this “Day of the Lord” was coming relatively soon – there will be some of “us,” Paul’s contemporaries, who will still be living at this time. So when Paul in the Letter to the Romans speaks of “the Day of Anger,” he is not referring to the very distant “judgment day” that modern Christians think of, still less of an individual judgment at the pearly gates of heaven, but of a very concrete destruction of the present world that he thinks is coming very soon. This is what we must keep in mind when he says in the Letter to the Romans,
In your hard and unrepenting heart you are storing up anger on the Day of Anger and the revelation of the just judgment of God, who will give to each according to his works… to those who are selfish, disobedient to the truth, obeying unrighteousness [he will give] wrath and anger, affliction and distress to every soul of man doing evil. (2/5-9)
Sometimes Paul refers to this Day of Anger as simply “the Anger,” as when he says in Romans that Jesus-believers have been “saved from the Anger.”
This essay focuses on this element of Paul’s thought, an element that is very challenging for any kind of rational treatment, but also an important element in Paul’s worldview, determining also what “salvation” means to him.
Like the Castaneda passage presented in another essay, the Pauline worldview consists in a particular narrative, but in Paul’s case centered on this imminent end of the world. In this narrative, we live in an “evil world ” (or “evil age”), the object of God’s anger, which God will very soon come to destroy. The salvation offered by God to believers “removes us from this evil world,” so that, justified in God’s eyes, they will be “saved from the Anger,” when God comes soon to destroy the world.
We now know that this belief was clearly false if taken literally. The end of the world clearly did not happen as soon as Paul expected it to happen, and as far as we know it may never happen (at least not as a result of an intervention by an angry God).
Thus the challenge for rational interpretation: Can there be good reasons for believing in facts that are not true? Does Paul’s preaching about the imminent End have anything important to teach us that we can know to be true? Several ideas presented in other essays provide a basis for addressing this question. The main such idea is the complex relation between exposure to a new worldview on the one hand, and the spontaneous “irrational” emergence of a new moral identity on the other. The term “moral identity” assumes that most people experience a need to construct and maintain an image of themselves as persons leading an important and worthwhile life, persons who in general stand in a morally “right” relation to the world. Normally a person defines her rightness in relation to some particular framework, which might consist of a narrative describing the meaning of life.
For example, in my personal case, reading Castaneda’s supernatural narrative regarding storing up personal power and a final death-dance awakened strong unexpected feelings potentially connected to a new way of being-in-the-world, a new sense of the meaning of life connected to a new way of relating to the world and life-events — this is what I call a new “moral identity.”
In this case one can see a complex relation between the supernatural narrative on the one hand, and the spontaneous emergence of a new moral identity on the other.
Castaneda’s very concrete narrative awakened and brought about the spontaneous “irrational” emergence of this new moral identity. This new identity is the identity that it is because of a self-understanding and self-image that defines itself in relation to this narrative. Thus the narrative becomes the way in which this new identity expresses its own self-understanding, and at the same time acts as a kind of essential support for this new moral identity.
From a rational point of view, the validity of this new identity consists in its own goodness, not in the factual truth of Castaneda’s narrative, taken literally. What makes this a good identity does not consist in the fact that it leads to actual storing up power to be actually expressed in a future, final death-dance. The goodness of this new way of being in the world lies in the goodness of the attitudes toward present life-struggles, rationally recognizable as good independently of Castaneda’s narrative.
It is immensely important that Castaneda’s “objective” narrative remain connected to this “subjective” goodness of some fundamental attitudes constituting a new moral identity. The validity of the objective narrative consists solely in the way it awakens, expresses, and supports this particular self-understanding and good way of being in the world.
Consider these ideas now in relation to Paul’s different narrative of a coming “Day of Anger” from which believers have been saved. Paul gives us the objective narrative itself. We need to try to reconstruct the subjective correlate of this objective narrative: What “irrational” feelings might be awakened by such a narrative? What recognizably admirable new moral identity might emerge as a result of this awakening? Building on the idea of a passion for transcendent rightness developed in other essays, I propose the following:
Picture an audience living in a world in which social relationships are deeply at odds with their own sense of fairness and rightness. Something in them feels that the forces that prevail in the world do not deserve their respect. There is no correlation or proportion between power, influence, status, recognition and social rewards, on the one hand, and true moral deserving on the other hand. The forces of the social world and “social pressure” are immensely strong, but at the same time lacking moral legitimacy.
On a rational level, people try to find some practical way of relating to this world, partially accommodating themselves to it in order to be successful, partially evading or perhaps actively trying to resist and remedy its unfairness through practical reforms.
But below the level of practical rationality, there are feelings ready to boil up, feelings of intense revulsion against the world’s unrightness. This rage for rightness is felt in severe and blanket opposition to the entire social order. Being a passion for rightness released from the limitations of what is actually practically possible in the world, this can become at its best a rage for transcendent rightness, rightness in its most pure and perfect, “otherworldly” form, the Platonic Form of rightness.
So we have on the one side a social world, felt to be fundamentally and irremediably not right, but exercising overwhelming “worldly” power. On the other hand, we have strong feelings allied with pure and transcendent rightness, which appear irrational because they have no place and no adequate practical outlet in this world.
In the scenario I propose, these are the irrational and otherworldly feelings awakened by Pauline preaching concerning the coming Day of Anger. These feelings are connected to a blanket condemnation of the present order of the world, and this moral condemnation receives concrete expression in the image of physical destruction of the world by a righteous God allied with this rage for transcendent rightness. In the best case, the awakening of these feelings brings about the spontaneous emerging of a new moral identity, a new way of being-in-the-world. The goodness of this new identity consists in its being identified with this emotional urge toward perfect rightness, an urge not compromised by any kind of accommodation to “practical” considerations in “the real world.” Such a person maintains a conscience uncompromised by any accommodation to this world, stands up for rightness, does what is right, irrespective of practical consequences.
The goodness of this identity does not consist in any future fact, i.e. that it actually avoids a future divine destruction which actually is soon to come. It consists rather in the fact that it is a good and admirable way of relating to the present world, recognizably good apart from any relation to a future divine destruction of the world.
Paul probably regarded the expectation of an imminent End as essential to his “faith.” On the present view, if it was essential, it was essential because it was part of a worldview crucially important for defining and supporting a certain moral identity and way of being in the world. This was a moral identity consciously setting itself in polar opposition to the unrightness of the present social order, owing its allegiance only to a righteous and world-transcending God whose condemnation of this unright world would soon be expressed in angry destruction. It was the goodness of this new moral identity that Paul was legitimately committed and attached to, the real logical foundation for his faith, the foundation of what was valid in this faith.
This can be put in terms of a power-conflict. On the one hand, there is the power of the present social order, in this case the very successful political and military system of the Roman Empire. For Paul, the physical and social power of this world was completely lacking in morally “justifying” power — i.e. tangible signs of success according to the standards of this world would not constitute true rightness.
On the other hand, the only truly justifying moral power is located in a passionate emotional rage for rightness which can only appear irrational because it is so discontinuous with any rational attempts to achieve particular practical goals in this present world. For Paul, this passion for rightness had a much more powerful emotional appeal than rational attempts to understand and practically manage one’s way in the world.
From a Platonist point of view, a passion for world-transcending rightness deserves this emotionally felt power because, as pure transcendent goodness, it represents a better focus for moral commitment. Yet this passion, which is more emotionally powerful and has the greater claim to true moral power, is at the same time what is weakest in worldly power, the power to actually exercise influence and achieve practical goals in the present world.
But Paul is not a Platonist at home with abstract thought and abstract concepts of goodness. He is an extremely concrete-minded person, and consequently he can feel moral justifying power as something fully real only if it is connected to physical power. So a devotion to “otherworldly” rightness in his case takes the form of a devotion to a God whose demands for pure and transcendent moral rightness are allied to overwhelming supernatural but very physical power soon to be revealed in an angry destruction of the present social order. Ultimately there must be a power-confrontation, in which the power of transcendent divine rightness wins out over ordinary kinds of power that prevail in the present social order. To adopt a moral identity and way of being in the world connected with this expectation of imminent cosmic destruction is to be “saved,” to be allied with the God of transcendent rightness, and to be “justified” in the eyes of this ultimate authority.
This image of a violent power-confrontation makes most evident the difference between the kind of transcendent goodness characteristic of Pauline Christianity, and the kind of transcendent goodness characteristic of Pali Canon Buddhism. Early Buddhism presents a similar picture of a polarized opposition between tangible success in the world on the one hand, and true goodness on the other hand. But the Buddhist solution is simply disconnection, letting the world go its way while severing all one’s essential ties to the world which would make one subject to deep disturbance through changing conditions in this world. “Just let it go,” says the Buddhist of the world. But Paul cannot let it go. The world must be actively opposed, and one mark of a true Jesus-follower is belief in its imminent condemnatory destruction.
The belief in an imminent end was not peculiar to Paul. It was a widespread belief in early Christian circles beyond Paul’s influence, and in fact was shared by others of Paul’s contemporaries, especially among Jews and others who connected themselves to the Judaic tradition. For example, the Jewish authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls also expected an end of the world soon to come. For some reason, historical conditions of the time made this view of things attractive and persuasive to substantial numbers of people. Inquiring into these conditions will be of help in imaginatively entering into this “apocalyptic” worldview, which in turn is necessary for a grasp of the particularity of the goodness, the particular admirable moral identity that Paul’s preaching about the coming End was meant to call forth.
The most obvious issue relevant here is the culture conflict between Judaism and Greco-Roman imperialism, which we know was the cause of violent conflicts in the 300 year period from the Maccabean revolt against the imposition of Greek culture on Jews around in the middle of the second century b.c., until the Romans crushed the last Jewish rebels at Masada n the middle of the second century a.d.
But here it will be helpful to cast our net also somewhat wider, to consider other cases in which similar culture conflicts led to similar beliefs in imminent supernatural destruction of powerful foreign invaders. Sociologist Bryan Wilson’s book, Magic and the Millennium, describes a large number of cases, mainly from Africa and the Americas, in which this kind of expectation took hold among tribal peoples who were subject to relatively sudden and very disruptive intrusion by European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries.
While it is a mistake to think of European culture as morally superior to tribal cultures, Europeans possessed vastly superior technology, and probably much more effective forms of enduring large-scale social organization. The extreme culture gap between Europeans and tribal peoples meant that neither culture could really understand the values of the other, nor the moral bases for its social organization. From the perspective of tribal peoples, this meant that they were confronted with an overwhelmingly powerful group of foreigners whose power was completely unrelated to moral deserving, and so could only be felt as completely illegitimate power, power completely lacking any moral basis.
Under these conditions, deep commitment to traditional tribal values easily found expression in images of imminent supernatural intervention to assure the victory of “true values,” reestablishing the proper connection between moral rightness and actual effective power in the world. In many cases this took the form of belief that deceased tribal ancestors would soon return to the earth, wielding supernatural power to defeat European invaders who could not be defeated by normal means formerly customary in intertribal warfare.
In fact, the accounts that Wilson gathers show that this kind of culture-conflict often gave rise to a more general increase in attention to supernatural interventions in human life, of the same kind we meet in Pauline communities: spirit-possession, supernatural revelations, charismatic preaching, and a fascination with miracles and with individuals possessing miracle-working powers. As Wilson remarks, the worldview of tribal peoples most often already included beliefs in various kinds of supernatural beings and powers, but encounters with overwhelmingly powerful foreign European culture often brought about a substantial increase in interest in and emphasis on the supernatural.
Wilson also reports attempts of tribal peoples to renew their commitment to purified and idealized conceptions of traditional tribal culture, associated also with attempts to separate themselves spiritually and culturally from the morally contaminating influence of the foreigners (e.g. refraining from alcohol associated with European settlers).
This represents a kind of self-assertion on the part of tribal peoples, an assertion of the superior moral rightness of their culture, concretized as imminent physical victory over the morally illegitimate power of foreign invaders. Images of concrete power located in a supernatural “other world” become the receptacle of moral convictions and passions unable to find expression by exercising effective power in this world.
One can easily see parallels in the case of culture-conflicts between Judaism and the overwhelming power of Greek and Roman imperialism. Jews seemed to have been somewhat unusual in the Mediterranean world in maintaining a sense of the moral superiority of their culture, and a refusal to see themselves as just one more religious tradition among the many tolerated in the Roman empire. It is also striking that apparently many other ethnic groups similarly alienated from Greco-Roman culture found Judaism an attractive alternative, so when Paul came to preach in Jewish gatherings he would meet there many people not of Jewish descent who yet identified with the Jewish tradition embodied in Jewish scriptures (later to become the Christian “Old Testament”).
At the same time, for many centuries before Paul, Jews had been faced with the overwhelming political and military power of neighbors with imperialist ambitions: first Babylonians, then Persians, then Greeks, and finally Romans. Again it seems plausible to suggest that these are the kind of conditions under which moral passion, unable to wield worldly power, finds concrete expression in images of powerful supernatural forces. A passionate feeling of opposition to the perceived immoral power of the world of “gentile sinners” (as Paul calls them), finds concrete expression in the image of imminent angry divine destruction of the present world order.
The above description focuses on a very particular culture clash, between Jewish culture and Greco-Roman culture, seen from the Jewish point of view. From a more objective point of view, a case could be made that this culture clash was due to cultural narrow-mindedness on both sides. Much could be said in favor of Greco-Roman culture. It’s just that devotees of this culture were incapable of appreciative understanding of Jewish culture, just as devotees of Jewish culture were incapable of appreciative understanding of Greco-Roman culture.
Two elements of Paul’s thought, both especially evident in his Letter to the Romans, helped move his teaching beyond this particular conflict between two ancient cultures, and make it potentially more enduringly relevant.
The body of the Letter to the Romans begins with a denunciation of the immorality of non-Jews, which the Jewish Paul connects with polytheistic religion. He seems to think that non-Jews are particularly immoral because they worship many gods rather than recognizing the one Jewish God. Although undoubtedly exaggerated, this is not a completely quirky association peculiar to Paul. That is, the importance of Jewish monotheism does not lie so much in the belief in one God in contrast to many gods. Its main importance lies in the fact that polytheistic religion associates the gods with many different facets of human life (sex, war, nature, political power, unpredictable fate, etc.) whereas Jewish moral monotheism associates God in an extremely single-minded way with demands for a high degree of moral rightness.
Taken by itself, this first chapter of the Letter to the Romans could be read as an extremely biased negative caricature of Greco-Roman culture from the point of view of an ethnocentric and narrow-minded Jew who could not stretch his mind to appreciate a culture different from his own. In this letter, Paul first mentions the Anger of God in connection with this denunciation of the immorality of non-Jewish polytheists.
If the Jewish-Roman culture clash were the main point, one would expect Paul to continue with an emphasis on the importance of being Jewish, the importance of specifically Jewish ethnic culture in contrast to the cultures of other ethnic groups. But instead, by the time we get to ch. 3, he includes in his condemnation precisely those contemporary Jews who did place great emphasis on certain customs, such as male circumcision and Jewish dietary laws, which for many Jews at the time had come to serve primarily as markers of Jewish ethnicity and Jewish identity. Paul ends up saying, “There is no difference [between debauched pagans and law-abiding Jews] because all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God.”
Paul strongly insists on connecting his message to the Jewish tradition, claiming that those receptive to his message are the true inheritors of the Jewish tradition, the new “chosen people of [the Jewish] God.” But most Jews in Paul’s time defined being a member of God’s chosen people in terms of being Jewish in contrast to other ethnic identities. Paul strenuously rejects this idea, so he needs a new defining contrast. He finds this, I think, in God’s demands for world-transcending moral rightness. Paul does not identify rightness with being Jewish in contrast to being Greek or Roman. What God demands is an extreme degree of moral rightness contrasted with the fundamental and irremediable unrightness of the world in general. “Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul says in ch. 12, but “practice what is good and holy and perfect.”
In effect, Paul makes God’s demands for perfect rightness the essence of the Jewish tradition, almost to the exclusion of all other aspects of Jewish culture. The destruction God will soon bring upon the world will not represent a victory for one ethnic group (Jews) over others (Greeks and Romans). It will represent a victory for an irrational passion for rightness, “irrational” because it can find no place in the present unright world, no matter which ethnic culture currently dominates.
* The second way that Paul’s thought in Romans moves beyond the very particular Jewish-Roman culture-clash consists essentially in turning this passion for rightness inward also toward self-criticism. God’s angry condemnation is directed not only at Greco-Roman pagans, and not only at the unrightness of external society. It extends within each individual, to apply to that part of human being which Paul calls “Flesh” (sarx) or “Body” (soma).
That is, Paul pictures the being of the ideal believer as split between “Flesh” and “Spirit.” These terms should not be understood in a Platonic sense, “flesh” referring to sensuality, and “spirit” referring to a more ethereal spiritual soul. Rather, “Spirit” in Paul is associated with intense “irrational” emotion, an intensely felt passion for rightness driving a person from within. “Flesh” refers to a person’s conscious rational self, in complete control of itself and its decisions. Sincere attempts to keep God’s Law employing conscious will-power, “works of the Law,” count for Paul as “works of the Flesh,” or “Body-works” (erga tou somatos). These conscious attempts at law-keeping are associated with “Sin,” not because somehow all law-keepers also break God’s law sometimes, but because nothing in the complete control of human beings can satisfy the immense demands of a righteous God, which transcend all normal human capabilities.
It is passionate Spirit alone, God’s Spirit dwelling in a person, which justifies a person in God’s eyes. In a Spirited person the Flesh still exists, but believers must completely dis-identify with it, regarding it as something “condemned,” just as they regard themselves as having been removed from the condemned world soon to be destroyed.
“I know that nothing good dwells in me, in my Flesh that is,” Paul says. “Flesh-mentality is an enemy of God… Those who are in Flesh cannot please God.”
In chs. 7-8 of Romans God’s condemnation of Flesh is expressed in Death-imagery, contrasted with “Life” given by Spirit.
“Flesh-mentality [is] Death. Spirit-mentality [is] Life and Peace.”
“Body is dead because of Sin.”
“Who will rescue me from this Death-Body?”
“If you live according to Flesh you will Die. But if by Spirit you put to death Body-works, you will Live.”
Believers show they are on the side of God in condemning the unright worldly order by their belief in the coming destruction by a righteous God. But God’s condemnation includes the Fleshly being of believers themselves, and they show they are on the side of God by condemning this part of their being as well, expressed in Death-imagery as “putting to death” this Flesh/Body part of themselves.
All this means that the conflictual relation between moral passion and the unright world is moved inward, so that the price of justification is accepting inner conflict as well. As Martin Luther put it, a believer must accept being “simul justus et peccator” — “simultaneously justified and sinful” — “justified” by God’s Spirit driving one from within, but still having to constantly struggle against one’s “sinful,” conscious-deliberate, human, Fleshly self which cannot live up to God’s demands for perfect rightness. This internal struggle is also evident in the diary of Dag Hammarskjold (whose background was also Lutheran).
Paul’s letters actually place much greater emphasis on this internal conflict within the being of believers than on conflict between believers and the world implied in belief in the coming end of the world. His advice on relating to the world is remarkably tame, actually advising one to obey pagan civil authorities as representatives of God (Romans 13). Opposition to the world mainly takes the form of opposition to “worldly” attitudes internalized within oneself, such as egotistic and self-assertive status-competition with other individuals (Romans 12). One could say, then, that Paul is not really opposed to “the world” itself in its physical reality. What he is opposed to is the world as it appears to a normal rational human self, prevailing powers in the world in terms of which a person defines her moral identity. Practical accommodation to “this world” inevitably compromises and limits one’s passion for pure and transcendent rightness, which Paul identifies with “God’s Spirit” taking hold of believers from within.
If Paul had focused on the particularities of ethnic Jewish culture in contrast to Greco-Roman culture, his thought would cease to be applicable beyond the confines of this particular culture-conflict. His separation of demands for moral rightness from specific Jewish customs, and his internalizing the conflict between God’s Spirit and the spirit of rational accommodation, gives his thought a potentially much wider relevance.
Other authors commonly speak of “universal” relevance at this point, but a pluralist Platonism must reject the word “universal” as an overextending exaggeration potentially raising all sorts of other problems. The kind of goodness Pauline spirituality focuses on is one particular kind of goodness. It is neither the only true kind of goodness, nor is it somehow deep down the same as other kinds of goodness. Paul is not mistaken in his insistence on connecting it with the specific Jewish tradition. The particular goodness of Pauline spirituality bears the marks of this very particular historical origin.
At the same time, appreciating the kind of goodness at the heart of Pauline spirituality does not require that we take sides with Paul against other claimants to the Jewish heritage, such as the Pharisaic Judaism which Paul rails against. Paul emphasizes the “prophetic” element in the Jewish tradition in a rather extreme and single-minded way. Pharisaic Judaism, the forerunner of rabbinic Judaism still alive and flourishing in our time, emphasized other aspects of the Jewish tradition in a different kind of synthesis. It has its own kind of goodness which is beyond the scope of this work to investigate and describe further.
Appendix:
Different concepts of irrational “blind” faith in later church-Christianity.
Perhaps the most important point of the Pauline interpretation presented in this essay lies in its contrast with other opposite interpretations of Paul which soon came to exercise such influence in Christian churches after Paul’s time, and continue to dominate discussions today. The main issue here lies in the manner in which one connects the objective content of Paul’s supernatural beliefs with the “irrational” basis for these beliefs.
On the present interpretation, Paul’s beliefs can be said to have an irrational basis because they originate in immensely strong human emotions, a rage for rightness expressing itself in passionate protest against the unrightness of the world. These emotions feel irrational because they cannot be justified by normal reasons in the normal way. To “give reasons” for them would be to appeal to some criteria commonly recognized in the radically unjust society which is precisely the target of this emotional protest. It is because these powerful feelings seem to have no place in the ordinary social world that they find their natural expression and support in images of supernatural power soon coming to physically destroy this world, which is already metaphorically “destroyed” morally and emotionally. Far from supporting a repression of human feelings, curbing self-assertive tendencies which threaten to disrupt social order, these images of supernatural destruction represent an extreme release of emotional self-assertion against the social order. Paul’s true believer does not believe in “the-world-and-God against me,” but “me-and-God against the world.”
Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind gives a very detailed history of the process by which the relation between irrationality and supernatural beliefs presented here came to be construed in an exactly opposite way. This is because the connection between subjective feelings and objective supernatural beliefs was lost, and priorities reversed.
In the above account, the subjective feelings associated with a new admirable moral identity constitute the valid basis for Paul’s supernatural beliefs. Images of supernatural power only serve to awaken and support these feelings, and provide a narrative defining and directing an admirable way of relating to the world. Later Church Christianity reversed this priority. The most important mark of being a Christian came to be unquestioning commitment to the objective content of a set of supernatural beliefs defining orthodoxy as taught be specific Christian churches. Losing the connection to subjective moral passion, emphasis shifted to their literal objective content. The fact that these beliefs were not rationally supportable became associated with “blind faith,” which in practice meant ignoring or repressing one’s own perceptions and feelings and blindly submitting to the authority of church officials.
This is how the supernatural beliefs which in Pauline communities represented the self-assertion of intense feelings came instead to be associated with repression of all self-assertive impulses in the name of a social order whose order and unity was thought to depend on adherence to church-defined orthodoxy (often identified with the objective content of Paul’s preaching), and avoidance of any “heretical” questioning of these beliefs on the basis of opposing subjective perceptions and feelings.
To be fair, this process which was very unfortunate for subsequent understandings of Paul, was not entirely due to malevolent power-hungry clergy. Freeman’s book also gives an account of the way that, first, Roman emperors in the fourth century tried to use Christianity to shore up their waning power and unify their empire by sponsoring a single “orthodox” interpretation of Christian supernatural beliefs, and suppressing what they declared to be heretical versions. Secondly, as the incursions of Germanic peoples weakened the power of Roman political authorities in the fifth and sixth centuries, Christian bishops often stepped into the vacuum as upholders of a social order under real threat of degenerating into chaos. Thus it may have been a good thing for society at the time to make Christian authorities into the chief representatives and enforcers of social order. It was just disastrous for an understanding of Paul’s message.
