Paul’s Missional Theology (acc. to NT Wright)
Mar
24, 2014 @ 5:05 By Scot McKnight 3 Comments
So
what were Paul’s aims? What was he
doing? What did he think he was doing? (Paul and the Faithfulness of God)
To
see Paul as the philosopher who
provided the ideological validation for the worldwide rule of Jesus would
hardly capture the whole of his thought, but it would possess more than a grain
of truth, and one regularly screened out. Paul was precisely not an isolated,
detached thinker. That is why the isolated thinkers in the western academic tradition have had such difficulty
with him, seeing confusion in his pastoral skill and contradiction in his
subtle paradoxes. He was a man of action, of performative fulfilment. He was both thinker and doer,
regarding his thinking as itself a form of worship, and his doing, too, as a
sacrificial offering through which to implement the already-accomplished
achievement of the Messiah. He was an integrated whole: razor-sharp mind and
passionate heart working together (1475-6).
I
want in this chapter to argue that Paul’s practical aim was the creation and
maintenance of particular kinds of communities; that the means to their
creation and maintenance was the key notion of reconciliation; and that these
communities, which he regarded as the spirit-inhabited Messiah-people,
constituted at least in his mind and perhaps also in historical truth a new
kind of reality, embodying a new kind of philosophy,
of religion and of politics, and a new kind of combination of those; and all of
this within the reality we studied in the previous chapter, a new kind of
Jewishness, a community of new covenant,
a community rooted in a new kind of prayer. Call this practical ecclesiology, or
indeed missiology, if you like; but whereas those phrases might be taken today
to imply the mere pragmatics of a theory already thought through, for Paul
there was always a complex give-and-take between the impulse and imperative of
the gospel and the stubborn realities of communities and individuals (1476).
And
Wright opens the door to his desk for
us to see notes of what will be in the next volume in this series:
What
I propose in this final chapter, then, is an outline of Paul’s aims and indeed
his achievements, but on a broader canvas than is normally allowed. I cherish
the hope that the final volume in this series will deal more directly, in
summary of the whole, with the question of early Christian missiology (1483).
Wright
knows the problems come from various angles: Medieval and Reformation emphases have
been on getting saved in order to go to heaven while the Enlightenment claimed
God had nothing to do with this world, in effect, cordoning off Paul into the
compartment at the end of the shelf called “religion.” Wright’s ecclesial
vision for Paul takes on a particular aim:
My
proposal here is not entirely new, nor would it be credible if it were. But
approaching it this way may reveal new aspects of a well-known per- spective,
and indeed bring us back to the task we set ourselves at the outset, that of
drawing history and theology
themselves closer together. My proposal is that Paul’s aims and intentions can
be summarized under the word katallagē, ‘reconciliation’ (1487).
In
two directions: with God, with others. All in a
new creation key, as seen in 2 Corinthians 5:13-6:2.
This does not make Paul a social worker, a politician, or a utopian
postmillennialist, but a believer that God was at work renewing creation.
There
is no suggestion that the world has started on a smooth and steady upward path
to utopia, or that the church itself is now launched into a triumphant
development. But nor will the churches which come into being through Paul’s
announce- ment of the Jesus-focused good news of the creator God be mere
accidental and temporary collections of individuals each of whom happens to
have responded to that gospel. They will be signs and foretastes of the new
world that is to be, not least because of their unity across traditional
boundaries, their holiness of life, their embracing of the human vocation to
bear the divine image, and particularly their suffering (1491).
In
particular, the communities which came into being through the gospel were to
embody that new world in the ways which our disjointed categories have
separated out. They were indeed to be a kind of philosophical school, teaching
and modelling a new worldview, inculcating a new understanding, a new way of
thinking. They were to train people not only to practise the virtues everyone
already acknowledged but also to develop some new ones, and with all that to
find a new way to virtue itself, the transformed mind and heart through which
the creator’s intention would at last be realized. They were indeed, despite
their lack of priests, sacrifices and temples, to be a new kind of ‘religion’:
to read and study their sacred texts and to weave them into the beginnings of a
liturgical praxis. In that worship, they believed, heaven and earth came
together, God’s time and human time were fused and matter itself was
transfigured to become heavy with meaning and possibility. These communities
were indeed, despite their powerlessness or actually because of it, on the way
to becoming a new kind of polis, a social and cultural community cutting across
normal boundaries and barriers, obedient to a different kyrios, modelling a new
way of being human and a new kind of power. There, too, the second letter to
Corinth leads the way, though arguably all that Paul was doing in his famous
power/weakness contrasts in that letter was picking up and developing what
Jesus had already said. And done.32 If we do not recognize Paul’s churches as
in some sense philosophical communities, religious groups and political bodies
it is perhaps because we have been thinking of the modern meanings of such
terms rather than those which were known in Paul’s world (1491-2).
Maybe
this sums it all up best, from 1492:
A
place of reconciliation between God and the world; a place where humans might
be reconciled to one another; a microcosmos in which the world is contained in
a nutshell as a sign of what God intends to do for the whole creation; a new
sort of polis in which heaven and earth come together, where a quite new sort
of ‘religion’ takes place, where the hidden springs of wisdom are at last laid
bare; a community which celebrates its identity as the people of the new
Exodus: all this means – as we might have guessed from his various comments –
that Paul’s aims and intentions could be summed up as the vocation to build and
maintain the new Temple.
And
this mission is shaped to go to the cities where Caesar had established his
powers.
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