Okay, thanks. Hit and run strikes me as approximately as trying as a troll, and I guess I will refrain from feeding him.LanDroid wrote:Well I doubt he's a troll - joined in 2012, posted only 24 times, last post was 5 months ago.
The tension between Paul's theology of grace and the alternate theology of the Kingdom has been around for a long time. If you read the Epistle of James, for example, the tension was clearly present in the first century.LanDroid wrote:I would be interested in responses our questions about Matthew 25 though.
There are huge gaps in our knowledge of the processes in the early church. Essentially no relevant documents date from before 100 C.E. and most of what we have from the next century are manuscripts from "church fathers" such as Iranaeus and the gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi library. The earliest manuscripts of the Gospels are generally copies from the Vulgate ca. 400 (although there is much excitement about a fragment of Mark found recently in a mummy's tomb, dating from 150 to 250).
What we are learning more and more about as time goes by is the cultural milieu of the early church. Recent scholarship concerning Paul has challenged long assumption about both what he said (translations were influenced by later theology to distort some key passages) and what he meant. One recent, very reputable book, argues that Paul only meant "salvation through Jesus" to apply to the Gentiles, who were unquestionably his assigned mission field, which would explain why he repeatedly insists that the Law is a good and positive thing, a pivotal part of his message often swept under the rug by theological commentators. If Paul thought of Torah as the "way to salvation" for Jews, and Jesus as the "way to salvation" for the Gentiles he wrote to, it reconciles a number of apparent contradictions.
This gets us into the question of what is meant by "salvation." One thing that Christian culture almost unquestionably gotten wrong about Paul and the early church is the focus on judgment in the afterlife. It appears in the Gospels, although in inconsistent references that sound more like gripping imagery than like peeks under the curtain at the secret workings of supernatural things. (So forgive me if I have trouble engaging with Matthew 25 directly).
Salvation up through the time of Paul was seen in terms of a renewal of the Earth, with violent kingdoms overthrown in favor of a peaceful "Reign of God" that worked entirely through righteousness and supernatural intervention. Paul seems to have thought of Jesus' Resurrection as the signal of the beginning of the overthrow. The concept of individual "reaching the goal" and "obtaining a crown" is interpreted in later theology as a clear reference to the afterlife, but since Paul was really talking about a new Kingdom on Earth, it is hard to unpick the biblical references to see if he meant a "kingdom in people's hearts" as N.T. Wright spins things, or a supernatural existence in which everyone has existence as a spirit but probably not a body.
So drop your ideas of individual judgment in an afterlife if you want to make sense of the Biblical "Kingdom/Grace" tension. Matthew 25 should be seen primarily as another "reversal" saying, along the lines of "The first shall be last and the last shall be first," or "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth". The judgment is not for performance of Torah, but for empathetic actions to help the unfortunate and the marginalized. A number of other passages in the Gospels, such as Jesus' back and forth with the Rich Young Ruler, strongly reinforce this idea. Jesus did not seem to be giving us a peek at the supernatural so much as telling us the main thing people had wrong about it.
Once you have that clear, you can read the Gospels with understanding. Mark's Gospel, very likely the earliest and a source for the other three, and Matthew and Luke which follow Mark's "Synoptic" format, center on "The Kingdom". This was a concept already used, referring back to prophetic literature including Isaiah and Daniel. When Jesus began his ministry he went to the synagogue and proclaimed that the Kingdom was coming right there in the middle of them, with his ministry. The prophecies were fulfilled, essentially. This is the view of the Gospel writers, which may or may not have reflected the dominant theology of the early church. Then at the end of the Gospels you find out that it meant he would be crucified and then would rise again.
We are left to our own devices to work out the implications. It wasn't very many centuries before church catechism for new converts was telling them that Jesus had died as some kind of payment for their sins (with the Epistle to the Hebrews having the only strong and clear expression of this, believe it or not). But it is quite possible that this is a convenient interpretation cobbled together from poetic references that don't mean that at all.
So, after a lot of background, where does that leave the grace/works or faith/works tension? The exlanation that makes most sense to me is that the content of salvation is the works of mercy that result. That isn't a test, or a judgment we have to pass, it is the point. It is the pearl of great price, to have a life in which one manages to do good things for others because that is what makes life meaningful. And of course it works best in a society of caring, in which there are not a few people with swords (or missiles) extracting their material comforts from the crowds of faceless nobodies, but rather those who "get" why helping others makes life rich and sweet do their best to introduce others to the fun.
Although Paul and the Gospel writers undoubtedly interpreted these categories in supernatural terms, it should be remembered that there was no clear demarcation at the time between the natural and the supernatural. People were often possessed by demons. Healings were not considered unbelievable by anyone (any more than you would be surprised if someone went to the hospital sick and came back well).
So what Paul was doing was introducing a new insight, or perhaps one could say a new mechanism, whereby people who were not part of a community of Torah could still join a community of salvation. Like Abraham, who lived before there were "Hebrews" or "Israelites" and first came to the land we now call Israel, you could pull up stakes from the way of life you knew before and join the Kingdom way of life. And the result would be "salvation" in a complex process.
The mechanism is by God's grace through our faith: God forgives us ("justifies" us, in Paul's terms - a whole new set of issues to sort out) not because of anything we did but because it pleases God to offer that, as exemplified by Jesus voluntarily dying. Did Jesus die as payment? Or as example, to show us what is meaningful and what gives life on an eternal plane? Paul does not say, nor does anyone else in the NT, really.
It would have been clear to Paul and the early church that Jesus was claiming to be the Messiah, and had deliberately botched the process of becoming a military Messiah (Reza Aslan in "Zealot" says he was seriously trying to conduct a revolt, but Aslan has to posit a massive coverup whereby the early church changed the message to avoid provoking the Romans, which would imply that they deliberately included, in their act of cowardice, an indictment of the disciples for their cowardice).
So, particularly in light of the Resurrection Event, as a result of which the Body of Christ carried on the outreach process, the early Church opted for an endorsement of Salvation, and the Kingdom, as a peaceful or at least supernatural transformation of society. And Paul's thesis should be seen as saying this happens, at least among the Gentiles, by the intervention of the love of Jesus, rather than by cultivating a community of keeping Torah.
Add to this the pervasive "gift of the Holy Spirit" in which ecstatic practices of the church seemed to be a direct demonstration of spiritual power. Instead of the slow process of bringing the Kingdom by keeping Sabbath and otherwise seeking to please God rather than to gain status, there was a lightning strike of spiritual revelation, demonstrated by speaking in tongues, prophesying, etc when joining the others for worship. (I don't do any of that myself, in case you are wondering.)
Paul's argument is that faith, i.e. trust in the power of a crucified and resurrected Messiah, would save us rather than the slow process of living on a path of righteous practices. Nothing wrong with a path of righteousness - that's the point of salvation. But faith is meant to enable God both to "justify" us (probably meaning to square the accounts about sin, but not obviously from the text) and to "transform" us. Transformation, like justification, now has a quick path, not just a slow path.
The author of James (the name refers to the leader of the Jerusalem Christians, who is usually identified as Jesus' brother) says, "Fine, you show me your faith and I will show you, by my works, my faith. Faith without works is dead". He was pushing back against a relatively early version of Paul's argument which went on to say, basically, not only do we not have to keep Sabbath, and kosher, and circumcision to be okay with God, but we also don't have to be kind to anyone. James argues that this more or less misses the point.
Luther called James "the Epistle of Straw" because it seemed to bring back a process of comparison and self-righteousness and earning God's love. But it is easy for us to see now that Luther was reflecting a thousand years of otherworldly interpretation of the whole salvation business, in which the church's claim to power was its ability to grant forgiveness for sin (and condemn you to eternal Hell if you were impertinent). It's just the wrong set of questions, but they were the only questions people in Luther's time knew to ask.
It has often been noted that today's Evangelical Christians have turned "right belief" into yet another "test of righteousness." They have brought back a "performance Gospel", (even though they claim they are preaching the opposite) and it is easy to see that such a thing has a powerful grip on the human imagination. But it is clearly not what Jesus was talking about in the Gospels, and probably Jesus' effort to transcend such legalism is of a piece with Paul's message of salvation by God's grace through our faith.
Those who are invested in the later version, where Salvation is all about judgement in an afterlife, may indeed want to explain their views. But their "logic" will come down to arguing what the essentially contradictory (in the framework of judgment rather than that of transformation) passages in the Bible "must mean," rather than giving an account of how it made sense in the first century as an explanation about this life, not just the life to come.LanDroid wrote: However as we've discussed, those passages seem to contradict much of current dogma. Perhaps someone else will have a crack at it...