Paul the Problem: Apostle of the Status Quo?

Our efforts to understand Paul’s thought and work in his historical context and to wrestle with his legacy today are of importance far beyond the bounds of church life. Paul merits thoughtful attention wherever Christianity has played a role in shaping contemporary cultures. My goal here is not to resolve the numerous questions that continue to occupy Paul’s interpreters—or even to name them all!—but to describe the most important patterns into which the answers continue to fall.

Many of the apostle’s critics—and even a few of his champions, who appear to consider this a virtue—would agree that Paul was largely unconcerned with the social inequities and injustices of his age. To many contemporary ears, the New Testament letters that now appear under his name include some of the most offensively retrograde passages in Scripture. These letters are among the most cited parts of the Bible (and remain influential even when they are not cited!) when a variety of questions regarding civil rights, gender equality, economic justice, and other areas of public life are discussed today.

The Pauline Letters have played a dismal role in many of the most grievous episodes of modern history. For example, the nineteenth-century movement to abolish slavery in the United States faced steep challenges, not least because the Bible nowhere condemns slavery. To the contrary, letters appearing under Paul’s name explicitly exhorted slaves to obey their Christian masters (Eph. 6:5–8; Col. 3:22–25; Titus 2:9–10), and not to assume that being members of the church together (literally, “brothers”) constituted genuine equality with their masters (1 Tim. 6:1–2). At a time when questions about the authenticity of these letters were rare, the presumption that the apostle Paul condoned slaveholding was inevitably powerful, and for that reason, specific letters proved inestimably useful to slave owners in the US South who recruited preachers to indoctrinate their slaves regarding their spiritual “duties.” But this woeful situation cannot be explained simply as resulting from a naive acceptance of letters that many scholars today consider pseudonymous. Even a century after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, the civil rights movement faced fierce opposition among twentieth-century American Christians who read Paul as enjoining quiet submission even to fiercely segregationist government (see Rom. 13:1–7), and exhorting believers to “remain in the state in which [they were] called” (1 Cor. 7:17–24 RSV). Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he challenged white clergy not to be “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” and lambasted appeals for Negro “patience,” had as one of its targets just this legacy of Paul.

For another example, the women’s suffrage movement in the United States faced tremendous obstacles in the clear and ostensibly Pauline admonitions that women should keep silence in the assembly and submit to their husbands (1 Cor. 14:34–35; Eph. 5:22–24; Col. 3:18; 1 Tim. 2:11–15). Almost a century after US women won the right to vote, these passages continue to exercise a baleful influence in the cultural “backlash” against women’s ongoing struggle for equality. Advocates for women and their children who suffer violence at the hands of the men in their homes candidly point out that these passages are now woven into a culture of rape, silence, and terror (Faludi), yet Christian clergy are often reluctant to denounce these texts from their pulpits. Like the passages exhorting subordination of slaves, verses encouraging women’s subordination continue to hold powerful sway through the presumption, alive and well in some corners of American society, that striving for equality between genders or among races somehow springs from an inordinate self-indulgence. Both these sets of passages are hard to square with Paul’s own declaration that in Christ “there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). But this only intensifies the question: If Paul wrote all these passages, was he unaware of the tensions between them? Or (as some more conservative Christians today would have it) did Paul wisely see, from the first, that freedom and equality could properly be exercised only within straitened limits?

Paul presents other problems as well, to which I have already pointed. His retrospective comments about his “former life in Judaism” (Phil. 3:4–7; Gal. 1:11–2:10) have often been read as flat dismissals of an obsolete and ineffective religion (“loss,” “rubbish”). Alongside Gospel narratives assigning blame for Jesus’ death to the “crowds” or “people” of Jerusalem, these passages have provided impetus not just for Christian supersessionism but also for centuries of violence against Jews that came to a terrible climax under Nazism. Yet as the historical record shows, even some Christian pastors in Nazi Germany who recognized that their government was perpetrating grave evils were often reluctant actively to resist it, not only out of fear but also from an exaggerated concern to obey the apostle’s admonition to “be subject to the governing authorities” (Rom. 13:1).

Those same words from Romans served to quell Christian resistance to apartheid in South Africa and to the national security regimes of Central America in the 1980s (Brown). They have been cited to deflect pacifism and conscientious objection to combat in every US war to date, and, with Paul’s exhortations (as they are usually translated) to “remain in the life the Lord has assigned,” the “condition in which you were called” (see 1 Cor. 7:17–24), have proven a powerful inhibition of Christian involvement in every progressive movement down to the present.

But Paul’s legacy has not always been read in so monochromatic a way. S. Scott Bartchy has shown that the now-standard reading of those exhortations in 1 Cor. 7:21–24, in which the Christian’s “calling” (klēsis) is understood as a calling to a particular social location, a “state” or “condition,” is lexically and exegetically impossible: the Greek simply does not say what the English represents. In subsequent work, he has traced the decisive (mis)translation to the period of the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany and Martin Luther’s response to it—hardly a situation conducive of objective, dispassionate exegesis! But the translation persists, and exercises decisive control over the assumptions that modern readers bring to Paul. Indeed, we perceive a much narrower range of possible meaning in Paul’s letters than our predecessors may have done. For example, some clergy were ranged with the poor in the fourteenth-century Peasants’ Rebellion in England, including a bishop who publicly read Paul’s declaration that “there are divisions of work, but all of them, in all men, are the work of the one Lord” (1 Cor. 12:6) as showing clearly that God did not intend disparities of wealth in creation (Thomas Brinton, Sermon 44). For another example, the words in 2 Thess. 3:10—“if any will not work, neither let them eat!”—have been quoted by right-wing pastors and politicians in order to vilify families seeking state-provided food or medical assistance, with such regularity that the verse has become a banner of what one journalist calls “poverty denialism” in government (Goldberg). But a century ago, Vladimir Lenin quoted the same verse as exemplifying “the prime, basic, and root principle of socialism: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’ ” It was obvious to Lenin, just as it was to a number of anonymous Russians who made the slogan into banners plastered around Petrograd, that those who “would not work” were the bourgeois profiteers, who exercised monopoly control over grain markets and used their power to suffocate labor. “Every toiler understands that,” said Lenin, and “in this simple, elementary and perfectly obvious truth lies the basis of socialism” (Lenin, 391–98).

Particular challenges to a received understanding of Paul’s “social conservatism” have been posed especially from Latin American interpreters working in the context of the theology of liberation. One of the earliest in a line of philosophical interpreters of Paul, José Miranda read Romans in terms of the contemporary tension between justice and “law and civilization” (Miranda, 109–200; more recently, Jennings; Frick). Elsa Tamez has argued that “in societies where poverty and marginalization abound,” evangelistic misreadings of the Protestant understanding of justification by faith “can be inappropriate and even violent” (Tamez, 23). Paul’s thought, she continues, was in fact “markedly utopian: Paul longed for a society of equals where solidarity would reign” (49). Néstor O. Míguez has read 1 Thessalonians in terms of the strategies needed to keep hope vital in a situation of imperial oppression. Indeed, Luise Schottroff argued years ago that the pivotal theme of liberation theology, the preferential option for the poor, was simply an elaboration of Paul’s conception of the ekklēsia (Schottroff, 249). One of the most important efforts on the part of a North American to synthesize a liberative theology of the New Testament relies on the Pauline language of “powers and principalities” to describe the need to name, engage, and unmask systems of domination in our own day (Wink 1984; 1992; 1993), and others have sought to describe a more emancipatory understanding of Paul’s thought (Elliott 1994; Lopez; Zerbe 2012).