Fifth Phase
THE CORPORATE IMPROVISATION OF JUSTICE IN THE NOW-TIME (12:1–15:13)
Almost from the beginning we have heard of a coming justice, a justice that comes from God, a divine justice. That this justice is “of God” means, at least in part, that it comes unexpectedly and from outside the inherited or even invented institutions that heretofore have instantiated the hope for justice. For law is the way in which the aspiration and yearning for justice have been made concrete in history. In that sense law is “holy, just, and good.” But the basic institutions for establishing justice through law have failed. This is true whether we are to think of the legal foundations of the Greco-Roman world as incorporated in Roman justice or in the structures of Israelite polity focused in the law of Moses. The social orders thereby established have produced injustice rather than justice, most dramatically for Paul through their collaboration in the rejection and execution of the one who was the messiah of God—the one who embodied the call and promise of justice. By the messiah’s return from the dead God had demonstrated a new and unexpected way toward justice that irrevocably turns away from the law-based quest for a just social order. In the light of this messianic alternative, it becomes clear that law could not accomplish justice because it has always already been seized upon by human incapacity and anxiety (flesh) to become, against its own intention, an instrument of injustice.
In place of this attempt to realize justice through law, the messianic project comes into being as promise and gift, as favor and generosity. It comes, that is to say, as the impossible, as life from the dead, whether from the dead bodies of Abraham and Sarah, or the dead body of the messiah, or the death-determined bodies of the old humanity.
Paul has offered a number of clarifications along the way. He has insisted that the messianic way is in a certain discontinuity with the old Adamic way in that it really breaks with the history of injustice, of settling for less than justice. So far from offering a relaxation of the claim of justice, it renders it, for the first time, truly effective. Instead of the impotent yearning for justice that always finds itself incapable of engendering what it wants and always finds itself undermined from within, Paul points to a messianic liveliness or spiritedness that characterizes loyalty to the messianic way of justice and mercy. Even now, this messianic liveliness takes shape as the capacity to endure the afflictions produced by the clash of eons as the messianic takes form in messianic societies somehow lodged within the old and increasingly hostile institutional orders of the world. The insatiable yearning for and commitment (fidelity) to justice make it possible to endure and even to exult in this affliction and to find solidarity with the groaning of the earth itself for deliverance from the weight of injustice. If there is this solidarity in suffering, then indeed there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.
This hope against hope must be rooted in the way of God (or justice) in human history. Paul, as the apostle of Israel’s God to the pagans, takes on the task of interpreting the history of Israel as a history that does not invalidate the reliability of this promise but as a history that, in fact, against all expectation, establishes the reliability of the divine promise to bring justice to the world through or by means of this people. Thus, the history recounted by Paul is a history of divine improvisation that turns opposition into unpredictable avenues for the bringing of justice and therefore wholeness for all the earth.
But what does it concretely mean that justice takes shape in the now-time or the messianic time inaugurated decisively in the resurrection of the executed messiah? The whole of Paul’s argument to this point is but preparation for what lies ahead. For now Paul turns his attention to the actualization of justice in the way of life of the messianic cells that have begun to emerge in response to the messianic message. Runar Thorsteinsson, who emphasizes the connection between the moral teachings of Paul and those of the Stoics, also makes clear that what follows is no moral appendix but the point of Paul’s entire argument (93).
The material of the next four chapters is sometimes dismissed as moralizing “parenesis,” as a kind of appendix added on to supplement the more interesting theological discussion that has preceded it. This is perhaps inevitable if one has lost sight of Paul’s main theme, which is the coming of justice and so the emergence of corporate ways of life that embody this justice and thus demonstrate that the promise of God is not mere wishful thinking. In fact, it would be better to regard all that we have read to this point as a prologue to Paul’s real concern: to show how justice in fact takes shape “apart from the law.” For if it does not do so, then there is no viable alternative to law-based social orders; there is no justice based upon gift that actualizes, in this now-time of the messianic, the call and claim of justice.
20. The Messianic Body (12:1–13)
What we read now is not an appendix but the point of Paul’s argument; it is the heart of messianic politics. Accordingly, it begins with Therefore:
Therefore, I appeal to you comrades through divine compassions to offer your bodies as lively sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God: your rational worship.
These words may be read as the initial summary statement for all that is to follow. “Therefore” links it to all that has gone before. Now we come at last to the heart of messianic politics: the justice that comes otherwise than as law.
That which is otherwise than law is thus an appeal rather than a command, the statement or articulation of desire and yearning, an appeal to the heart as will. It is situated in solidarity among those designated here as comrades (brothers), most importantly as equals who address one another in freedom as well as frank openness, without dissimulation. An appeal that is rooted in the divine compassions that have been made manifest in what has gone before, the forbearance, the patience, the promise, the gift of the impossible, in the solidarity in groaning for the new world of justice that leads to peace with all creation and with God.
It is an appeal to reason, to what is called here rational worship. The Judeans had mocked the irrational worship of the pagans who honored idols. And in this they were joined by pagan lovers of wisdom, who mocked the irrational superstitions of their own world. Paul himself had argued earlier that this irrationality of worship was deeply connected to the violence and injustice of the Greco-Roman world. But the lovers of wisdom had also found Judean forms of worship equally irrational with their temple sacrifices and odd customs. Philo had felt obliged to reinterpret the “special laws” of Moses, which could seem so odd to outsiders (what one can and cannot eat and so on), in Platonic terms in order to bring them into some conformity with reason. But what is rational worship? What is the way of honoring the divine that corresponds to right reason?
It has to do with our bodies. The body is the way we are in and of the world, the way we are available to one another, the way we engage the world and one another. It designates what Heidegger might call our comportment: the shape of our interaction with others, all others. It is not invisible but visible, indeed tactile. The body represents the ways we affect and are affected by one another, the ways we are vulnerable to giving and receiving pain or pleasure—the ways we can plausibly be, as Paul has earlier said, “instruments” of injustice or of justice.
The body as the interactivity of existence may be clarified perhaps by reference to the reflections of Jean-Luc Nancy, who has been the thinker most devoted to rethinking the way in which existence is being-with and thus is always, as the title of one of his books has it, “being singular plural.” It is plural because always shaped in interaction with all other existents, and singular because shaped singularly, newly, differently, oddly perhaps, each time. Each body is thus singular, yet never alone but always plural. Body is that whereby we are exposed to one another. Nancy refers to this as the place of proximity as well as separation whereby we are placed in community without the merger of communion (Inoperative Community 60–61).
It is thus as body that we are to honor God’s call to justice, in all our ways of being engaged with one another and the world. This is the “sacrifice” that is acceptable to God. This “sacrifice” consists not of the dead bodies of those who are governed by death but of living and lively ones that enter more and more fully into life, with one another and with all. The prophets had always maintained that God was not interested in sacrifices of cows or doves, not interested in days of feast and fasting, not interested in all the religious games by which God’s people distracted themselves from the call and claim of justice. These religious diversions must cease so that we might learn to seek justice and love mercy. What justice calls for is precisely ourselves, our ways of being with one another. Amos had spoken for this justice when he said, “I hate and despise your feasts . . . but let justice roll down” (5:21, 24), and Isaiah had said, “This is the fast that I choose: to take the humble poor into your house” (58:5). The call of the divine has to do not with religion but with a rational way of responding to the divine, a way that governs all our interactions with one another and the world—that is, our bodies. For this we substitute the irrational worship of ceremonies and cultic sacrifices. And this, as the prophets (and some philosophers) knew, is defiance of God. It is not too surprising, alas, that translators have effaced the call for rational worship by calling it spiritual, even though Paul’s word is more aptly translated as “logical.” If this sounds too “humanistic,” so much the better.
What we shall hear is that the rational way of honoring God is doing what honors our neighbor. The sacrifice called for is what enables us to live in solidarity with the vulnerable. It is this which is well pleasing to God. We should not forget that much is at stake with our bodies—with being body—for as Paul has recognized, the redemption of our mortal bodies brings with it the hope for the renewal of all creation. This renewal begins in the now-time of our bodies put forward in ways that correspond to justice and mercy.
It is this that is holy. For the holy is that which corresponds to the divine, set apart for it. Recall the paradox that we noticed at the very beginning when noting Paul as set apart for the universal message directed to all: to be separate in order to be available (an offering therefore) to all. So also with those Paul spoke of as holy ones in Rome: They are set apart precisely as those whose manner of life anticipates the messianic justice intended for all. They are set apart from the profane only in the sense that they are set apart from the old eon of death and violence, of cruelty and injustice.
Precisely because the body locates us in the world and is our way of being available to one another and is, as Käsemann noted, “that piece of the world that we are” (New Testament Questions 135), Paul goes on to say:
Do not be conformed to this age but be transforming by the making new of your mind so that you can make evident the will of God: the good, the pleasing, the fully realized [perfect].
The age or eon that is yet all too present but that Paul had indicated in writing to Corinth is perishing (2:6)—because it belongs to the order of death enforced by the rule of death—does not have a grip on what is coming into being. For we live as those who have passed from death into life. Thus, we do not play by the rules of the old order: we are not conformed to it and its all too predictable regularities.
That which corresponds to the will of God is here called the good, the pleasing, the fully realized. These categories appear first of all as pagan or gentile terms. Paul has used this sort of terminology before in this letter when he spoke of those who seek glory and honor and immortality in doing what is just (2:7). And he had used similar terminology in encouraging the messianic gathering in Philippi to aspire to “whatever is true, grave, just, pure, loveable, of good reputation, if there is any virtue or praise” (Philippians 4:8). This means that Paul, in addressing pagan or Greek culture, has no difficulty appropriating the highest aspirations of that culture for purposes of his messianic project. The messianic takes these terms and their associated aspirations into itself, thereby indigenizing the messianic into the heart of the Greek aspiration.
But there is even more here, for these categories are not only those with which Greek culture would resonate. They are also not so much ethical categories as aesthetic ones. The form of life that Paul is entreating his equals (brothers or comrades) to embody is one that is good, that has a pleasing shape, that is fully realized (perfect). These are terms that could well be used to describe a fine work of art: a symphony, a painting or sculpture, a play or novel. What we might term “ethics” here shades into aesthetics.
Moreover, the well-shaped life is one that depends upon a renewed intelligence. This is not something that somehow just happens without discernment or forethought or something that can be shaped by going along with the way the world as presently constituted thinks of such things. It is a work of intelligence (nous) that has been made new, made innovative.
New forms of life must be intelligently fashioned so they give evidence of what God is purposing for the world. Just as God acts in and through history in ways that improvise in relation to what is happening in the world, so, too, must the lifestyle that testifies to or gives evidence of divine justice also improvise. Improvisation is not random. It is responsive and creative, and in that way, it both imitates God and gives dramatic evidence of the in-breaking of the messianic age.
One might even say that precisely this new improvisational and creative form of life is the only persuasive evidence of the messianic reality. For this reason Paul is so urgently concerned with these questions of the form, shape, or style of life of his readers. If there is to be any proof of the truth of the gospel, they must be it. Three centuries later in arguing for the plausibility of the Christian proclamation of the incarnation of the word, Athanasius could still point to the dramatically different forms of life that characterized Christian communities—their fearlessness, nonviolence, generosity—as decisive evidence of the truth of the gospel. Such a proof has become less persuasive. Perhaps this testimony is less persuasive in part because of the failure to grasp Paul’s urgency in this matter, a misunderstanding fostered by supposing that the material we are beginning now to read is mere appendix. This has led to a trivial moralizing that takes the place of the actualization of dramatic signs of social justice.
In the next few sentences, Paul will offer pleas about what we might call the internal life of the community, to be followed by sentences that address the way in which this group interacts with those outside, even with those opposed to the messianic mission. What is at stake throughout is the way to shape the common or shared life of those loyal to the messianic. It is not our life alone but our life together that concerns Paul. Ethics is more like ethos. This ethos is to be shaped with intelligence and creativity to be a dramatic sign of the new that is occurring in the now-time of the messianic.
For through the gift given me I say to all among you not to think more highly than is fitting, but to think with sober self-assessment.
As it stands, this might be regarded simply as sage philosophical advice, not that different from the advice a wise Stoic might give. Indeed, there are several points at which Paul’s advice intersects with that of Greek schools of philosophical wisdom. It will thus not be surprising that at the end of the second century Clement of Alexandria could devote almost his entire body of work to seeking to inculcate forms of life and thought that would resonate with that ethos.
One important difference, however, in the advice Paul is giving is that it has in view not the lifestyle of individuals as such but the form of life and thought that conduces to living together. It is this corporate exigency that makes arrogance and self-preoccupation so clearly problematic from his point of view. In virtually all of his letters Paul sounds this same theme with the same relation to the question of life together, of a shared life.
Paul writes here to his equals on the basis of the gift that has been given him. He supposes that all his readers are also gifted in a variety of ways. He does not write, therefore, from some position of exclusive right or authority but as one equal to another who has a particular gift and responsibility that governs his way of being loyal to the proclamation concerning the messianic. His advice is oddly inflected in ways that would not be at all common for the Greek philosophical ethos: But to think of each according to the measure of faithfulness that God has distributed to each.
We have heard much of faithfulness in this letter, but now we hear that there are many ways of being faithful. Faithfulness is not conformity with the world; it is also not conformity with one another. It is distributed within the group in diverse ways, and this diversity is to be affirmed and carefully nurtured. We might wonder, How could it be otherwise if the messianic form of life is not the mechanical application of a rule book but the improvisation of a style or form of life that answers to the new, to the messianic innovation of God? Thus, we will hear that there is more than one way of being faithful, of forming a life shaped by the spirited in-breaking of justice. As we shall see again and again in this concluding argument of Paul, much depends on this diversity of faithfulness and on finding ways to embody and affirm this diversity in community.
For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same activity, so we many are one body in the messiah, and each one members of one another.
Paul’s comrades are asked to imagine themselves as a multitude of members of one whole, each with a distinct function, each a different “instrument,” each a distinct part of an ensemble whose various parts are necessary to one another and to the ensemble as a whole. The singularity of each is related to the plurality of all. This is the messianic sociality that Paul sees coming into being precisely as participation in the messianic. It is by virtue of the messianic that a multiplicity becomes a sociality in which each is necessary to the whole, in which we become parts not of a machine but of a living and lively body.
One image that might help explain this is the way in which a jazz ensemble might work together. One has a saxophone, another a trumpet, another a harmonica, and so on. They are each distinctive, but they need one another and “play off” one another. Each may improvise in its own way but always in relation to the others. There is a certain democracy in that each part is important, each is necessary, each has its own voice. But it is a “social” democracy because together they achieve unexpected variations as well as unexpected harmonies, all related to a discernible pattern or melody or rhythm. Here the “melody” will be the messianic, the coming into being of justice and mercy. Because it is justice and mercy, the individual parts, the singularities, are not isolated, self-contained individuals but parts of a well-shaped whole—and essential to one another. It is in the “interest” of one that the others be different. Diversity is not an obstacle to a certain wholeness but indispensable to it.
Thus, to return to Paul’s image of the body: if I am a heart, it is essential that another be the lungs; or if I am a thumb, somebody else will have to be a finger. Being all thumbs is not a good way to be a body. Moreover, it is clear that for Paul each has an active and indispensable role to play. There is no division between an active “clergy” and a passive laity. There are only active parts.
Hence, having gifts given that differ according to the giving [let us use them]. The singular functions or actions are themselves rooted in the generosity (gift) that comes to each differently. There is in what follows no hierarchy, nor is the list definitive or exhaustive. Rather, it is illustrative. The first point to be made is that these gifts are potentialities to be activated: if serving then in serving, if teaching then in teaching. There is no rule book offered for the particular function but an exhortation to “do it.” The reference to prophecy at the beginning of this list may well be a reference to the task of discerning what is appropriate in a given situation and of enabling the band to act in ways consistent with the messianic message and form of faithfulness. Paul continues: those who share in simplicity, the ones aiding in diligence, the one showing mercy in cheerfulness. The body, we have said, is that by virtue of which we become available to others, to one another. Here Paul emphasizes the ways this messianic body engages those others outside itself. It was precisely the astonishing generosity of Christian communities in the next few centuries that served to win over larger and larger elements of the general population. In his Rise of Christianity (73–94), Rodney Stark uses the example of the care of the sick in plague-ravaged cities of the empire to show how Christians’ selfless service to others accounted in no small measure for the outward movement and growth of these messianic communities.
Let love be sincere, shrinking from what is bad, holding fast to what is good, in brotherly friendship to one another with warm friendliness. With terms like philadelphia (brotherly friendship), Paul points toward a friendship of equals that is impassioned. A much later semimessianic movement would insist on the appellation of “comrades.” These comrades do not share the same class position or gender (as “brothers” might lead us to suppose) but are differently enabled to be instruments or members of the messianic project.
Outdo one another in showing honor to one another. The quest for honor divides, while showing honor to another as a common aspiration unites. In the Dong Huk rebellion in Korea at the beginning of the twentieth century, the bow of obeisance reserved by Confucian culture for the king became the way that each person of the ragtag groups of peasants and slaves greeted one another, honoring the divine in each, even the lowliest. Similarly for Paul, the competitive character of the Roman social order is turned on its head: instead of competing for honor, they compete to show honor to the other, every other.
In zeal, be unflagging; in spirit, be burning, serving the lord; in hope, rejoicing; in affliction, enduring; in prayer [yearning], persistently continuing; for the necessities of the saints, sharing; hospitality [friendly welcoming] seeking. Although I may have rendered this passage a bit awkwardly, the point is to show that it has a nearly poetic character. The terms of affliction and endurance, of persistence, hope, and rejoicing we have encountered before (5:3–5, 8:32–35). All of this is now animated with zeal and spiritedness. All seems to aim at those expressions of sharing and welcoming that imitate the generosity of the divine, the messianic. Responding to the needs of the other, welcoming the wandering stranger—all of this suggests how the divine love and generosity take concrete shape through the messianic body.
21. Overcome Evil with Good (12:14–13:7)
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. The inner generosity of the new society reaches outward to those who oppose, even persecute, this fledgling messianic society in order to bless rather than curse. Here and a few sentences later, we have a vigorous emphasis upon the love of the enemy, even the enemy in a position of power such that they are capable of persecution of the vulnerable body taking messianic shape in their midst. The response of the faithful to the persecutors is not a mechanical tit-for-tat but is surprising, creative, and in that way spirited and lively. A few decades later, the narrative ascribed by tradition to Matthew will present a similar perspective in more detail: turn the other cheek, go the second mile, and so on. It is critical, however, if we are not to have an unrealistic picture of how the messianic body takes shape in the world of the old eon to note that this is accompanied by persecution. The community does not separate itself from the world, but the world draws the dividing line by means of persecution. The “body” is separated from the “age” only by the opposition of the age. As body, the messianic intends the inclusion of all, but the age reacts to this inclusiveness through persecution. Thus, we have the irony that precisely the inclusivity and solidarity of the body come to set it apart from the age, “separate it” as the messianic or the holy.
Within the new social reality there is to be a remarkable mutual attunement: Rejoice with the rejoicing, weep with the weeping, be attuned to one another. It is this mutual sympathetic attunement that makes the improvisation of the members result in a harmony.
Don’t be arrogant but seek out the lowly; never be self-centered. These are not merely high-sounding ideals or idealistic platitudes. They depict the way any concerted living together takes shape. The mind-set that Paul is encouraging is characterized by a sort of intentional “downward social mobility.” He had also encouraged this in Philippi when he urged his readers to imitate the mind-set of the messiah (Philippians 2:5). This seems to have been reflected in his determination to earn his living as a common laborer in the lower-class occupation of stitching together animal skins to make tents or market awnings (an occupation he may have learned when on the run from the authorities in Thessalonica) rather than accept as his “due” the financial support of his hearers. And it is reflected in his self-characterization as a slave. Those who are the adopted heirs of God orient themselves toward the lowest in imitation of the messiah. This is the surprisingly countercultural lifestyle of those who participate in the messianic. This is all quite different from the post-Pauline encouragement of those who are themselves on the lower rungs of the social order (women, children, slaves) to comport themselves in a servile way toward their social betters. For here, Paul is exhorting all in the community to associate themselves with the humble, the humiliated, rather than to look out for their own advantage. Needless to say, husbands telling wives to submit or slave owners telling slaves to be humble is simply flying in the face of the messianic transvaluation of all values.
Moreover, this living together aims outward to include rather than to exclude. Repay no one evil for evil, but provide only good things toward all people. Insofar as it depends upon you, seek peace with all. The justice that takes shape here is not retributive or distributive but creative. It seeks to bring about now the messianic goal of peace that flows from justice, a justice that flows from generosity. That the goal is peace is already entailed in Paul’s greetings to the community: generosity and peace from God (unconditional generosity is the beginning and the means; peace is the goal).
How is peace with those who oppose the messianic to be achieved? Beloved, not avenging yourselves, but rather making space for wrath; for it has been written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord” [Deuteronomy 32:35]. No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give to drink, for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head. While some of the imagery here presents commentators with difficulty, the general drift is clear enough and is quite radical. Indeed, it goes further than what we later find in the Sermon on the Mount, since it specifies what it means to love not only the neighbor but also the enemy: give food; give drink. The citation from Deuteronomy is deployed to indicate that the fate of the unjust is to be left to God. Although Paul speaks of wrath, he does not actually say the wrath “of God.” We have already pointed out this shift in terminology in chapter 8. In any case we have seen from the first chapter that the notion of wrath is regularly tied to systematic injustice. Once again the idea is that the justice practiced by the community is unpredictable because it does not conform to worldly notions of justice. Instead, it is creative, innovative. Käsemann guesses that the reference to burning coals may be a reference to an Egyptian penitential ritual (Romans 349), but no certainty seems possible about the allusion. What seems involved is that the surprising action of the messianic community aims at the transformation of the unjust or, perhaps failing that, leaves them without any pretext or excuse for their unjust behavior.
The general perspective that governs relationships with opposition is this: Do not be conquered by evil but rather conquer evil by goodness. To give in to evil, to imitate it or to respond with reprisal, is to be overcome by it. We become “the evil we deplore.” But the band of messiah followers in Rome can conquer evil by its own manifest and surprising goodness. The idea here is not to escape from the evil or to be passive with respect to it but to turn the tables on it and in that way conquer it so that it is won over to the good. The messianic community becomes a body of the messianic, for in this way as well it imitates the action of the divine, who “while we were yet sinners . . . while we were enemies,” yet loved us—and sets out to win humanity over to the good by showing only goodness, astonishing goodness, toward all. Thus, the corporate body that is the evidence of the messianic in the world is to overcome all evil by doing only good toward what until now has been an instrument of injustice.
The relation to the persecutor (12:14) and to the unjust (12:18–21) must be borne in mind if we are to have any hope at a reasonable interpretation of the sentences that follow concerning “higher authorities” (13:1–7). One of the chief ways in which Paul’s perspective has been distorted in the history of theological and ecclesiastical interpretation is through the separation of segments of his argument from their context. This has been true with respect to the severing of Paul’s talk of the coming of justice through faithfulness rather than compliance with legal structures in such a way as to eliminate the claim of justice altogether. We have also seen this sort of distortion arising when Paul’s discussion of God’s way with Israel is separated from its context in order to develop a non-Pauline doctrine of double predestination. Something similar has often happened with respect to the next few sentences of Paul’s argument, sentences that seem to refer to an unquestioning obedience to political authority, an authority that takes the place on earth of God’s own rule.
While this fragment of Paul’s argument has often been cited in a politically reactionary sense, it has also been appropriated in somewhat progressive ways. At the beginning of the modern era Hobbes and Spinoza could see here a basis for the laicizing or secularization of the state that would affirm its independence from competing religious dogmatisms, thereby laying the foundation for the separation of church and state. And others could cite the connection between authorities and the enforcement of the good as a rationale for opposing authorities when they manifestly opposed the good. Despite these alternative ways of understanding the import of this segment of Paul’s argument, neither they nor the more common uncritical celebration of state authority has usually taken the context of Paul’s argument into account.
If any sense is to be made of these sentences, they must be kept firmly in relation to the overall thrust of Paul’s argument in Romans (that justice comes not through adherence to the law but through faithfulness to the messianic event) and to the more immediate context that emphasizes that the messianic follower—though persecuted by the world—still seeks to overcome evil with good and, as Paul will go on to say, that the “world” as we know it is disappearing with the arrival of the messianic reality. While the sentences having to do with “authorities” may fit rather awkwardly within their context (giving rise to the plausible view that they may be the interpolation of a later follower of Paul), it is the context that must provide the way toward a plausible interpretation of them.
Let every soul be subject to superior authorities. For there is not authority except by God, and those in existence have been ordained by God. So the one resisting authority has opposed the ordinance of God, and the ones who oppose will receive judgment to themselves. For the rulers are not a terror to good work but to the evil. But you want not to fear the authority? Do good, and you will have praise from it. For he is a servant of God [divine servant] to you for [the sake of] the good. But if you do evil, fear, for he bears the sword not in vain; for he is a servant of God, an avenger for wrath to the one who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience.
If we are to take the whole of Paul’s argument seriously, we will have to begin by understanding these phrases in relation to the whole. For example, we would have to be clear that this should not be read as taking back Paul’s radical critique of the injustice of the imperial system in the first chapter. Recall that there he had indicted the politics of Rome as manifestly incapable of administering justice, since the Roman ruling class was characterized by a thoroughgoing opposition to divine justice. In 1 Corinthians he had suggested that it was precisely “the rulers of this age” who “had crucified the lord of glory” (2:8) so were to be regarded as “perishing” (2:6) with the onset of the messianic reality inaugurated in the messiah. Some have therefore supposed that Paul is not referring at all to imperial authorities but to the low-level magistrates with which the community might ordinarily come in contact. This is the perspective, for example, of Ernst Käsemann (Romans 354). Others have supposed that Paul is referring not to civil authorities but to the officials of the synagogues within which the messianic groups would meet (Nanos 291–336). In the nature of the case, since we are reading texts so far removed from our own time and culture, texts not addressed to us, there will always be an irreducible multiplicity of plausible interpretations of such matters.
In any case, those who suppose themselves to be “authorities,” whether “religious” or “political,” whether lower magistrates or higher imperial authorities, would be only too ready to suppose that all (every soul) ought to be obedient to them as those who are appointed by God or who administer justice in the name of the divine law. Thus, it is likely that several of these phrases could be cited more or less verbatim from the self-justification of those who present themselves as wielding authority in a social body. I think that it is probable that many of these phrases do come more or less directly from the authorities themselves. Paul’s readers in Rome would recognize in these words the very words of the authorities. The question is what becomes of these words when they are inserted into Paul’s messianic perspective. We have already learned that such self-justification of legal authorities must be taken with a substantial helping of salt. For it is not the case that those who face persecution, for example, will uncritically agree that these authorities are God’s servant for your good or are always and everywhere a terror not to good conduct but to bad. They have not forgotten that authorities that claim this for themselves have been the ones to condemn and to execute God’s own messiah and who are at least complicit in the persecution of the messianic cells that have been forming within the empire.
To remind ourselves of Paul’s indictment of the law and of those who administer “justice” in the name of the law is also to remind ourselves of the other side of Paul’s argument about the law—it is, in regard to its reference to justice itself, holy, just, and good. Could it be that Paul is doing something similar with respect to the authorities? Certainly this would help align this passage with what we have been reading. The “authorities” are those who act on behalf of the law and thus “administer” justice as it is encoded in the law. Apart from this legal function related to the question of justice, there are no “authorities” in the sense being written about here. (Paul is not writing about academic authorities, for example.) Thus, precisely insofar as the law is holy, just, and good and precisely to that extent, the authorities are God’s servant for your good. Just as the law is holy, in the sense that it is derived from and aims at the divine claim of justice, so also and in the same way, the authorities may be servants of the good. (We recall that in Romans, Paul has abandoned the suggestion made in Galatians that the law comes not from God but from Moses through intermediaries.)
But Paul and his readers also know that authorities are not so benign. They, like the law, are corrupted by injustice. For this reason it has been necessary to speak of comportment in relation to (unjust) persecution, comportment that aims at overcoming evil with good, which involves concrete ways of doing good even to the enemy. This doing good aims at provoking the enemy to renounce bad behavior (coals of fire) or at least to deprive the enemy of an excuse to continue in its animosity.
There is another sense in which authorities are instituted by God or appointed by God consistent with Paul’s earlier argument. It has to do with Paul’s appropriation of the prophetic tradition’s view of the arrogant empires that threaten Israel with destruction. They are regarded as instruments of wrath not because they themselves are just but because they serve to punish the injustice of Israel itself. Paul had said, citing prophetic tradition, What if God, desiring to show wrath and to show his power, endured with patience the instruments of wrath that were themselves to be destroyed? (9:22). Here he says concerning the authority: He is the servant of God to execute wrath on the one who practices evil (13:4). What is invoked here is the world-historical function of “imperial” authority that serves, despite its own arrogance and injustice, to awaken the sense of the awesome claim of justice. Of course, neither for the prophets nor for Paul does this mean that God favors these authorities. On the contrary, they are already consigned to destruction just when they are at the apex of their power. For the arc of history aims not at wrath and destruction but at mercy and salvation. And this messianic aim is accomplished not by unjust instruments of wrath but by the just instruments of the messianic itself.
Thus, the reference to the ways in which the authorities legitimate their own authority may be understood to be deeply relativized by the messianic context within which this self-understanding is cited. What Paul is doing here may be consistent after all with what he does in 1 Corinthians in his discussion of the relation to existing institutions like marriage and business and religion: the “as not” (hos me) that, without engaging in a frontal assault on existing social institutions, nonetheless robs them of their force, their ability to determine the identity of the subjects who operate within them. This is what Žižek has termed “uncoupling” (Fragile Absolute 127–129), and Agamben has insisted that the “as not” renders all such classifications “inoperative” (Time 28). Agamben notes: “The only interpretation that is in no way possible is the one put forward by the Church, based on Romans 13:1, which states that there is no authority except from God, and that you should therefore work, obey, and not question your given place in society. What happens to the as not in all this?” (33). Of course, what has happened is that a fragment of Paul’s discourse has been isolated from the context of his argument as a whole in order to render that entire discourse harmless so far as the world is concerned.
Does what Žižek termed “uncoupling” operate here? Therefore also pay taxes, for they are divine servants attending constantly to this particular thing; render to all what is owed: taxes to those to whom they are due, tribute to whom tribute is due, fear to whom fear is due, honor to the one due honor. The question of tax and tribute is especially emphasized, together with what may well be a rather sardonic reference that the authorities may be chiefly concerned with revenue. Of course, for ordinary people in the Greco-Roman world, the authorities would be far more aptly characterized as seeking to extract money than to administer justice. This issue is also treated in the Gospels, written some years after Paul. There we find the desire to distinguish the messianic movement from a mere tax revolt—hence the question in the synoptic Gospels about paying taxes to Caesar or in Matthew concerning paying the temple tax. In each case, what transpires is that a sentiment along the lines of “let them have their damned money” is combined with the radical undermining of the claims of the authorities to legitimacy. That undermining is accomplished in the Gospels by the call to render to God what is due to God (namely, the very loyalty that the imperial coin ascribes to Caesar).
Here that subversive gesture occurs in a rather different way. Paul has just said to give honor to the one due honor, but he had already said to the messianic group that they should compete to give honor to one another, thereby undermining the whole system of seeking honor. Honor is to be given away rather than claimed. The giving of honor to the authorities is actually undermined from within by the fact that the same honor is shown to everyone else. On the one hand, the authorities receive the honor they crave, but on the other hand, that honor is deprived of the significance it was supposed to have by being distributed promiscuously, to all. While the Gospels undermine the ideological significance of taxes by reference to what is due to God, Paul undermines the ideological significance of honoring the authorities by reference to what is due to the fellow human.
The messianic politics of Paul, then, does not entail a taking over of the state and its functions. This was certainly a much debated issue in the emergence of the nineteenth-century messianic movement associated with Marx, Engels, and Lenin. On the one hand, there was the view that the capitalist state would simply self-destruct on account of its manifest self-contradiction. On the other hand, there was a flirtation with the capturing of the state through a violent revolution more or less patterned on the French Revolution, which had ushered in the capitalist state. In either case it was supposed that with the coming of the new and just society, the state would “wither away.” For Paul, the state is essentially irrelevant to messianic politics. There is no point in an attempt to assume state power, for it belongs to an order that is no longer pertinent: it has a past, but no future. Indeed, in a remarkable group of essays titled The Idea of Communism, Alain Badiou and a number of other contemporary Marxists renounce the dream or nightmare of an assumption of state power. This is one of the ways that a Marxist or “post-Marxist” political thinking converges with the Pauline project. In the now-time, the state or empire is engaged in the same way all other institutions are engaged: as if not. But that does mean offering it its due in taxes and so on, doing good in order to win over evil, rather than engaging in the counterforce of revolt that the state knows only too well how to deal with. Here as elsewhere, the aim is to take the world by surprise—the messianic surprise of love. Or, as he has already said, seeking where it depends on us, to be at peace with all.
22. After the Law (13:8–14)
The radicality of this approach is further demonstrated in the way Paul seems to take back the entire logic of giving what is due or owed (tax, tribute, fear, honor) with this advice: Owe nothing to no one except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. The entire economy of debt is here being undercut. Of course, love is not the payment of a debt. It is the excess, the “how much more” that is the very character of divine justice. The law is here relativized by being both abolished and exceeded all at once. And this is also precisely what has happened to the authorities. The honor they crave has been radically shared out and is thereby deprived of any ideological significance. The love that is “outside the law” is also and at the same time not against the law (insofar as the law aims at justice) but beyond its dictates. It overthrows the law of what is due by doing what is not due. It thereby “overcomes evil with good.”
The reflections of Derrida on what he calls a duty beyond debt may help clarify the stakes of what Paul is wrestling with here. Speaking of an appropriate, even necessary, gratitude, Derrida writes: “Pure morality must exceed all calculation, conscious or unconscious, of restitution or reappropriation. This feeling tells us, perhaps without dictating anything, that we must go beyond duty, or at least duty as debt; duty owes nothing, it must owe nothing, it ought at any rate to owe nothing” (On the Name 133). This language is eerily similar to Paul’s, even though Derrida makes no reference in these discussions of duty beyond debt to Paul or an “indebtedness” to Paul (Jennings, Reading Derrida 96–108).
For “you shall not commit adultery,” “you shall not kill,” “you shall not steal,” “you shall not covet,” and whatever other commandment is summed up in “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Jacob Taubes has pointed out that here Paul’s perspective is rather more radical than the one attributed in the Gospels to Joshua/Jesus, who added: “Love the Lord your God with all your strength.” There is here no “love of God” that can be set against the love of neighbor. Taubes writes: “No dual commandment, but rather one commandment. I regard this as an absolutely revolutionary act” (53). Opposing the love of God to the love of neighbor is precisely what Jesus’s/Joshua’s opponents had done in suggesting, for example, that healing (love of neighbor) could just as well wait until after the Sabbath (loving God). Although Paul’s formulation is far more radical than that attributed to Joshua, it does correspond pretty well to the messianic practice as recorded in the gospel narratives to be written much later.
It is characteristic of Paul that neither here nor elsewhere does he supplement his exhortation by appealing to the teachings of the messiah. Moreover, when he does cite the commandments, he refers not to the “religious” or God-oriented ones (honor God alone, Sabbath, etc.) but only to what might be termed the “interhuman commandments,” those that have to do with not wronging the neighbor, the other human being. This is the very heart of the divine justice, the messianic justice, with which Paul is concerned. Moreover, here Paul is attending to the commandments not as enshrining a particular legalism but as intending justice. What is really at stake is not a question of not violating one of these laws but of what violates the neighbor.
Levinas has attempted to clarify a similar perspective in claiming that one can honor God only in the face of the other, the other whose claim of regard is the claim of the divine: “The supernatural is not an obsession for Judaism. Its relation with divinity is determined by the exact range of the ethical” (Difficult Freedom 49). Thus, a separate honoring of God that bypasses the need of the other, the neighbor, is simply impossible.
The “commandments” identified here, while couched in terms recognizable from the traditions of Israel, are common to Judeans and gentiles and in some form or other are common to all cultures (with each culture exhibiting variations on what exactly is covered by the prohibition). Similarly, versions of the exhortation to look out for the interests of one’s neighbor seem also to be common to all cultures, again with important differences in how this is to be understood. From Paul we already know that this “love” or concern for the well-being of the other extends also to the enemy so is without restriction. It is this unrestricted commitment to the welfare of all without exception that marks the messianic exigency of a sociality beyond or outside law. The messianic is therefore a radical humanism that aims at a certain universalism.
Love does no evil to the neighbor; therefore the fulfillment of law is love. If as Hobbes believed, law (and the state) has the purpose of limiting the damage done by interhuman aggression and violence, the war of each against all, then love, which does not do evil to the other, has no further use for law (and the state). It is abolished in principle (as Marx and Lenin supposed would be true with the advent of the new sociality of humanity). If the law aims at a certain negative justice (limiting the damage by measuring violation, as Paul has suggested), it has nonetheless proven itself incapable of establishing a positive justice. Moreover, it has been captured by anxiety (sin) so as to become a force of injustice. Thus, it is only love that can accomplish even the negative function of the law and the state. Paul has just indicated that the “authorities” exist to restrain evil. But he had also earlier pointed out the way in which the social order of Rome not only did not restrain but actually fomented injustice (something similar had occurred in relation to Mosaic law as well). Thus, the law is no longer serviceable, nor can it be made serviceable. Even the negative function of the law can be accomplished only through that which is outside the law—love.
Giorgio Agamben has shown that Jewish, Christian, and Islamic messianic perspectives contemplate the end of the law and ask what then happens to law. It becomes, he says, an object of childlike play or, what amounts to the same thing perhaps, simply an object of study. This play—or this study—he reminds us, is not justice itself but is the gateway, the entrance into justice. When law has lost its “proper” function, it becomes inoperative in its original use but becomes usable for imagination (State of Exception 63). To a certain degree, this is what already occurs with the law in Talmudic study. Neither is it made into a univocal prescription nor is it discarded (on the ash heap of history, as certain Marxists said about bourgeois institutions), but it becomes the fount of endless study or play.
That Paul’s perspective is determined precisely by this messianic consciousness is made evident in what he next says: And then this: knowing the time [kairos], that now is the hour for you to be raised from sleep. For now the salvation is nearer than when we believed: the night passing away; the day has drawn near. The now of messianic time is a moment when it is still dark, still obscure (so a time of danger and affliction), yet it is also the time when the day approaches precisely in and as this darkness. Thus, the meaning of the present darkness is transfigured as approaching day, just as the meaning of creation’s groaning had been transfigured as birth pangs.
The metaphor of being raised from sleep echoes the metaphor of being awakened from among the dead. The now-time thus becomes already characterized by the anticipated resurrection. It is an awakening from the sleep (hypnos) of the current age that has also been characterized as the dominion of death. This awakening is occasioned by the drawing near of that salvation (for all flesh) that had been the subject of the messianic announcement.
The theme of wakefulness or alertness as characterizing the appropriate consciousness of messianic time is also present in the Gospels, where it is associated both with the requisite alertness in the time of affliction and travail (Mark 13:33–37) and with the unheeded injunction to the disciples as Jesus enters into his agony in the garden prior to being arrested (14:38).
Levinas has characterized the ethical relation to the other as entailing a certain insomnia, which maintains a constant state of alertness to the coming and to the need of the other (Of God 59). In Pauline discourse, this insomnia is also a historical political insomnia, one that awakens in the darkness of the present to shake off the drowsiness of the present age and to discern signs of coming light.
This sense that the time is growing shorter, that the wholeness for which we hope is rushing toward us, is the indispensable horizon for Paul’s work and thought. We may be less sure, we who live some two millennia later. Can we still live with this sort of insomnia, this same wakefulness? Have we not, rather, dozed off? We may, however, wonder whether it is really possible to live toward justice without the sense of impendingness, without the sense that the coming of what we hope for is not far off. Agamben suggests that messianic time is “the time that remains between time and its end” or “not the end of time but the time of the end” (Time 62). This figure gives its name to his commentary on Romans: The Time That Remains.
Let us then cast off works of darkness and put on the weapons of light. As regularly happens in Paul, the indicative (the salvation is nearer, the hour of awakening) becomes the imperative to conduct oneself in accordance with the true time, the kairos of approaching light. Earlier Paul had spoken of being instruments or weapons of injustice or of justice. Here justice is linked to light, the approaching daylight of the messianic time that heralds the radiance or shining forth of messianic consummation. The weapons of light would appear to refer precisely to the comportment that vanquishes evil with good, so is not passive but active in its surprising ways of engaging “the enemy” with a disarming goodness as well as with the capacity to endure affliction and even to exult in it.
Let us conduct ourselves [walk] as becomes the day, not in reveling and drinking bouts and in beddings and in outrageous excesses, not in strife and jealousy. These depictions of nighttime activity do not correspond to the ways in which the members of the messianic movement in Rome might be thought plausibly to comport themselves but echo depictions of the behavior of the elites in Rome who are familiar to us through more or less contemporary histories of the time. In this allusive way, Paul distinguishes the comportment of the messianists from that of the “authorities” who are immersed in darkness. The discerning reader will then be reminded of the characterization of the apex of Greco-Roman society in Paul’s opening indictment.
But put on the leader, Joshua messiah, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. The readers are exhorted to so identify with the executed and resurrected messiah that this becomes their way of appearing to the world; in this way they become weapons or instruments of justice and of light in the midst of a society of injustice and darkness. The new sociality that is coming into being is thus itself messianic, both in its state of affliction and in its active love of the neighbor. It so assimilates itself to the messiah as to be the body of the messiah, the way that the messianic becomes visible as well as vulnerable—and also victorious in the midst of the death-dominated present age.
While many interpreters have linked the “passions of the flesh” with the revelings, beddings, and so on of the previous sentence, passions of the flesh for Paul have far more to do with enmity, jealousy, and those behaviors that arise from what Levinas termed an “allergic reaction to the other” (Totality and Infinity 51). That this is precisely what Paul is concerned about is evident from the issues to which he immediately directs the attention of his readers—the question of welcome.
If we pause to look back over the way we have come, we may be struck by a remarkable consistency in the direction of Paul’s argument. He had earlier suggested that the new life outside the law stood in a fundamental contrast to life under law and sin. Indeed, he had faced the question of continuing in sin as what it might mean to be outside the law (6:1, 15) and had answered with a number of analogies of transformation: death to life, passing from one owner to another, being liberated from marriage by the death of a husband. He had encouraged his hearers, [Do] not to let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies to obey their passions (6:12). He had also spoken of the flesh and of our liberation from the self-preoccupation that flesh entails. What has been added here, however, is a positive description of the new life, the lively life, of those who have passed from death to life, of those for whom death lies in the past rather than the future. And this is precisely the perspective that he has now made concrete. He is weaving a very intricate web here, and it hangs together with a remarkable, even if not “predictable,” consistency.
23. Welcome: The Messianic Sociality (14:1–15:13)
How are we concretely to put on the leader Joshua messiah, and in what way does this exclude a provision for the appetites of the flesh? Above all, these questions aim to make evident how a new social reality comes into being, one that instead of enmity exhibits commitment to the other, to one another. The argument that Paul makes in the following sentences has to do with this new politics, this new sociality, that exhibits justice beyond the law.
In order to be clear about this, it is helpful to recall the sociality or, rather, antisociality that Paul had described at the beginning of his letter: they were filled with all injustice, flesh-obsessed, covetousness, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, guile, malignity, gossipers, slanderers, god haters, insolent arrogant, boasters, inventors of evils . . . foolish faithless, heartless, ruthless. That is the social (dis)order within which the new sociality is to take shape, one constituted through a renovation of mind-set that will demonstrate or embody the aim of divine justice.
Again, we cannot stress too much the way that, for Paul, this takes the shape of a sociality, a way of being related with one another. It is therefore a kind of politics. But it is a politics that is beyond the law, beyond the coercion that the law entails, one that is spirited to invent or improvise the concrete forms of love. And this has to do above all with welcome. Welcome the one weak in faith, not for disputes over opinions, Paul writes. Welcome is the openness to the other, the one who is different, the one who is therefore by no means the same. The very difference of the other makes the other other, and thus this difference is itself the possibility of a welcome of another.
Here we touch upon the most basic feature of a messianic politics, a polity that instead of closing itself to the other, the stranger, the different, actually welcomes the advent of the other as distinctly other. Derrida writes that justice “is the affirmative experience of the other” (Negotiations 104) and that justice “is the experience of the other as other, the fact that I let the other be other” (105).
To see what is at stake here, we may reflect on the character of the polities we know. In general, they seek to make clear the distinction favoring those who are the same, our citizens over theirs, nationals over aliens. Think of the basic political struggles, for example, in Europe: Who is French? Who is German? Is a refugee from Algeria French? What of one from the Ivory Coast? Is someone from the Bahamas English? Or from Nigeria? Is someone born in Turkey German? Or is someone born in Albania Italian? The great stresses in the national political life of the so-called nation-states have typically had to do with the stranger. Often the polity is one of exclusion, sometimes of assimilation or integration, which demands of the newcomer to become as we are, hide the differences. But what differences are to be hidden or excluded? Are the differences of language, custom, food, observance, religion, and so on to be excluded or hidden? What is hard to imagine is a welcoming of difference as difference, of otherness as otherness. And this, we may even say, is the basic question of a cosmopolitan sociality, one that does not impose uniformity but welcomes difference. Derrida notes that in the face of the contemporary issues of right of refuge and of the undocumented and so on, what is called for is a quite different international law, a quite different cosmopolitanism of welcome, of hospitality (Adieu 101).
Paul will be dealing with this order of question in his argument. It is therefore with a question that bears directly on the question of the instantiation of justice. The form that this question takes for Paul here and elsewhere (in 1 Corinthians 8, for example) is the difference, as he puts it, between those who are weak and those who are strong. Weakness is identified with a set of scruples or restrictions, while strength is identified with the absence of such scruples. Thus, one who has and obeys a number of rules about how to be faithful is regarded as weak, while one who seems on principle to be more or less indiscriminate is said to be strong.
We note first that this is to a degree counterintuitive, since it is more often thought that those who are very strong in faith are precisely those who observe more restrictions. We may think, for example, of the prestige of the anchorites of the early Christian world who abstained from a variety of foods and a number of activities, including sexual ones. Precisely these disciplines were regarded as badges of strength, especially of spiritual strength. And there would seem to be a certain connection to some of Paul’s rhetoric here, as they seem to be those who, as Paul has said, take no thought for the lusts or desires of the flesh. It would be easy to provide further examples since Christianity came under the spell of ascetic movements of the ancient world. These disciplines seek to provide a way of demonstrating that one was not conformed to the world but transformed. And this continues into modernity with holiness movements and the like. Thus, the first move that Paul makes here is one that is itself counterintuitive, associating strength with what looks like laxness, and weakness with what looks like rigorous discipline.
We should be aware that this is a question that occurs regularly in Paul: 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 are concerned with a similar set of issues, although in that case it is directed to the question of eating food that is part of the celebration of civic deities. The so-called Jerusalem Council imposed an abstinence from this practice upon gentile or pagan Christians according to Acts 15:20, but Paul seems willing to accept greater liberty among the Corinthians in this regard. This serves as the background to the sorts of issues to which he turns attention in Romans. Here it is not a question of meat that has been dispensed from the temple of other gods as part of civic ceremony but, rather, it would seem, of certain forms of ascetic discipline chosen to signify a messianic difference.
One confidently eats anything; another, being weak, eats only vegetables. What is this apparent difference of “faith,” and why is one weak and another not? In the first place, how is eating only vegetables a sign of faithfulness? Already in pagan practice there was a possibility of principled vegetarianism. It is not clear that this was a possibility in Judaism, although this is sometimes debated. Certainly we may recall that Adamic humanity, before the Fall and until the time of Noah, was supposed to refrain from eating meat. Is this eating of meat not itself a sign of violence? Today can we not see the terrible reality of the meat industry with its utter disregard for the animate life of the animal, for what makes an animal precisely animal—its animation, its freedom of movement. On this question, Jacques Derrida has presented some rather compelling arguments from a philosophical perspective (Animal 25). There may well be very good reasons for adopting vegetarianism as a sign of messianic faithfulness.
And what of those who disregard such restrictions? They may, of course, have simply not given the matter any thought. But they may also be persuaded that all foods are the good gift of God and therefore accept all with gratitude.
Why are the former weak in faithfulness? Perhaps because they suppose that faithfulness consists in rules and regulations, so seem nearer to the compliance with the law from which the gift of the divine has set us free. Meanwhile, those who eat anything are not anxious. Above all, they do not place limits on the gifts of God, they do not regard them with suspicion, and so on. (Perhaps also in the background here is the way in which eating and not eating certain foods was made to be the mark of religious difference by which Israel distinguished itself from the pagans. Nevertheless, this is not the primary issue with which Paul is dealing.)
Paul is by no means concerned to resolve the dispute in terms of deciding which is right. This also is quite remarkable. For it is the work of what is often called ethics to make this judgment, as it is the work of politics, or of law. But this is precisely what Paul will not do. Instead, Paul will insist that these very important differences remain side by side. The eater is not to despise the noneater, and the noneater is not to judge the eater. Whether in despising or in judging, what each seeks is the elimination of difference. This is precisely what Paul does not want, for in this elimination of difference, whether as despising or as judging, is found the true or greater violence.
The basis of not despising or judging, but in fact welcoming, is this: For God has welcomed him. That is, what the divine has done already, as the inauguration of a messianic politics, is to welcome the other, including, of course, my other. That is to say, the other person or other community, whether this otherness is expressed by the absence or presence of scruple, is one who has already been welcomed.
Who are you to pass judgment on the servant [or household member] of another? That one stands or falls [in relation] to his/her own lord; that one will stand because the leader enables him or her to stand.
The term “servant” simply indicates one who is a member of the household of a lord. It may be translated as “servant,” “client,” or even “adoptee.” Any of these have been prepared for in the arguments that Paul has advanced before. Thus, he has spoken of himself as a slave of the messiah and of his readers as slaves of justice. The point seems to be that one who is a slave belongs to the other and can be disciplined or commanded only by the one to whom he belongs. I have no rights with respect to the one who belongs to another. This belonging to the leader marks the limit of my interference with the friend, sibling, or even fellow servant. That the other person belongs to another prevents my assimilation of him or her. It is thus the other’s freedom from my judgment, my accusation. And this is especially so since the lord of the other can make sure that the other stands and does not fall.
In a way, this is the inviolable secrecy of the other: the other belongs to someone other than myself. We might be inclined to say that the other person belongs to himself or herself rather than to another, a third. Is this as effective a way of ensuring the other person’s independence from me? It is also likely that Paul has in mind here not only other persons but other cells or communes of messiah followers that have developed different views about how to practice the messianic justice to which they are committed.
One judges a day to be above others; another judges every day [to be the same]. Let each be persuaded in his or her own mind. The special regarding of particular days is a mark of a certain piety. This was true of Roman or pagan piety as well as of Judean piety. And it is today true also of Christian piety, and Muslim piety, and so on. In fact, the dividing of days into “holy” and “profane,” together with particular inclusions or exclusions concerning food, is the invariable way in which religion, or what we call religion, distinguishes itself. What could be more important than determining how one ought to observe special days in honor of the tradition, or of the gods? In the world of the old eon, governed by law—perhaps especially religious law—these differences of opinion and practice have been the occasion of an astonishing amount of violence and bloodshed.
It is critical that Paul feels that there is no need to declare for another what is right here. However, he does not say that this is a matter of indifference: Let each be persuaded in his or her own mind. Decide for yourself what is good, and do what you decide to be good. But make no rules, no laws here. Invent no religion to which you will seek converts and from which you will exclude unbelievers. This is extraordinarily difficult: to insist that this is something that is not a matter of indifference but also to say that it is not a matter to cause division or separation.
The one who observes the day, to the leader, the one eating, to the leader; for each gives thanks to God. And the one not eating, to the leader abstains, and gives thanks to God.
Here then is the basic principle: Give thanks. What matters is whether what we do or don’t do is an expression not of anxiety but of thanksgiving, and so of gratitude. In this way the doing or not doing is oriented to the messianic as gratitude to God. Gratitude is what marks the orientation to the gift and produces justice as a gift or on the basis of gift. Turning away from gratitude is a turning away both from God and from justice, as Paul had emphasized early on in this letter when indicting gentile civilization as being characterized as knowing God but without honoring or giving thanks to God. It is becoming clear that Paul is opening up considerable latitude for what I have been calling improvisation with respect to the forms of life that may honor God and arise from and aim at thanksgiving.
None of us lives to him- or herself; no one dies to him- or herself, for if we live, we live to the leader and if we die, we die to the leader; whether we live or die, we belong to the leader.
Here all is placed in a much more decisive context. Far more dramatic than the difference between eating or not eating a certain food or observing or not a particular day is the difference between life and death. But even in this difference, living or dead, we belong to another. We live or die in the direction of, or in orientation upon, another.
Before, Paul could deploy the alternative of living or dead to mark a frontier: before alive to sin, dead to justice, and so on (chapter 6). But now this frontier, the last and most intractable border, is all but erased: For to this end the messiah died and lived, in order to be leader of both the dead and the living. Note that the death and resurrection of the messiah are here related to the question of abolishing the division between the living and the dead and thus of abolishing division as such. For the messiah, who can be lord or leader of both the dead and the living, can certainly be lord of both the eating and the noneating, the observant of days and the nonobservant.
This is not said in such a way as to make us individuals or monads or isolated subjectivities. Rather, we are of or to another, and we are this precisely as we are incorporated into the messiah. In what may have been his first letter to a messianic community (1 Thessalonians), Paul had felt compelled to deal with the apparent separation between those who had died in the messiah and those who were yet alive. The issue there had been an intolerable rupture in the solidarity of the community. It was in this connection that he spoke of the essential equality of the living and the dead in the messiah. Here the social character of the messianic, which overcomes the distinction between the living and the dead, is redeployed to effect solidarity among those groups who have fundamentally different views about what faithfulness to the messianic might mean in practical terms. Being possessed by the messiah or the messianic makes us free to make up our own minds and free not to interfere with the other doing the same.
Why do you judge your own comrade [brother], or why do you despise your own comrade [brother]? For we will all stand before the divine tribunal.
Here it seems to me that we could go back and maintain that the belonging to the household of which Paul spoke earlier is to be understood in terms of the adoptive relation celebrated in chapter 8. The one who eats what I do not is precisely my sibling who has received the same adoption that I have received and under the same condition: by sheer unmerited and undeserved (and undeservable) generosity. Each must stand before the divine tribunal, and there we know that there is justice. It is a justice, however, that does not condemn but welcomes.
To emphasize this point, Paul cites Isaiah 45:23, a text that also shapes what is called the Christological hymn of Philippians 2:10–11. The Isaianic passage has in view the eschatological victory of God in which all nations and creatures join in praise of God. In the course of Christian doctrinal reflection, this will be taken to authorize the incorporation of the messiah into the divine as understood in Greek philosophical terms. But it may also be noted that the tendency of Paul’s thought is to identify the divine with the messianic in such a way as to prepare the way for a messianism that absorbs the divine, rather than the other way around.
Each will explain himself [or herself] to God, so then let us then no longer judge one another but rather decide [judge] not to trip up or hinder a comrade.
The only judgment is the good judgment of not judging one another—of not putting our opinions and practices in the way of another in such a way as to make him or her agree with us on pain of exclusion or condemnation. How could it be otherwise if the power of law to condemn has been broken? There is then no law, but there is still conscience, and here not my own conscience is decisive but the conscience of the other and this is not to be damaged but treated with all respect and tenderness.
This is the turning point in the argument. Until now, it has been simply that there is to be an end to that judging and condemnation or even contempt that rends the fabric of sociality, especially in matters that may be termed “religious.” But now we seem to go further, in a direction already prepared by the quote we have read. This is at least the case for those who know how Paul deploys this trope in Philippians, since there it serves the purpose of indicating how believers are to renounce their own privilege to accommodate the weaker, just as the messiah or the Son has done.
As difficult as what Paul has already suggested is to put into practice, what follows is far more difficult. It is to not offend the other or cause the other to stumble, especially the weaker. Here Paul accepts the principle of “the strong”: I know and am persuaded in the leader Joshua that nothing is unclean. This is the very basis of the possibility of a mission to the nations, the pagans, those who are after all “unclean.” This is even narrativized in the later Acts of the Apostles in terms of Peter’s vision, which leads to his decision to baptize Cornelius. Paul himself had had to grapple with Peter’s ambivalence in this regard according to Paul’s account in Galatians. There he strenuously defended the freedom that pertains to the messianic.
The difficulty is that this freedom with respect to scruple can itself cause damage to the conscience of the scrupulous, that is, to one who thinks something is unclean. In 1 Corinthians, Paul had likewise warned against harming those who had a more tender conscience with respect to meat that had been used in cultic ceremonies in pagan temples (chapter 8).
Paul decides the Galatians case rather differently: no circumcision, no succumbing to the scruples of others. But the cases are different. Here it is not that the weak are attempting to impose their scruples on me, but I am attempting to impose my lack of scruples on them. But this may do violence to them. It may injure them. If your comrade is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. If my comrades decide to imitate my freedom but without confidence, without clarity in their own mind, then they may do what they think or feel is wrong. And then they have in fact violated their own conscience; they have acted without faith or confidence and thus have “sinned.” This flaunting of a freedom from scruple, then, is not love for the other, not a care for what is in the interest of the other. It can seem to destroy one for whom messiah died.
It should be clear that we are caught here between irreconcilable imperatives: on the one hand, the imperative of an openness to all (including all foods and so on) and, on the other hand, a love for the other that sacrifices even the privilege of faithful freedom. For if I yield to the conscience of the weak, I am in danger of imposing a law; but if I do not, I am in danger of violating her or his conscience. There is here a seeming aporia.
So do not let what is good to you be spoken of as evil.
There is no program by which I can act here without responsibility, without negotiating the unconditional, the nonnegotiable. This is precisely the character of a properly ethical decision, as Derrida has so carefully explained: “Negotiation is always negotiation of the nonnegotiable” (Negotiations 304); “one must negotiate the nonnegotiable” (325). This is also the reason that the ethical ultimately requires improvisation rather than rules. There can be no way that accomplishes both aims of this dilemma perfectly, so there can only ever be improvisation.
It can never be the case that rules about eating and drinking can become the condition of the reign of God. The only condition here is justice and peace and joy in holy spirit. He who thus serves messiah is acceptable to God and approved by humanity. It is here that we become responsible, where there is a kind of aporia. But we are responsible not only for ourselves (for we must explain ourselves to God) but for our neighbor as well. So let us pursue what makes for peace and for strengthening one another.
Neither rules about eating and drinking nor freedom from those same rules should become the reason for dividing the new messianic sociality. Do not for the sake of food destroy the work of God. This work is precisely the bringing into being of a justice without or outside the imposition of law, a justice impelled by love. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong if one stumbles over eating. It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your comrade stumble. This is a concrete attempt on Paul’s part to show how love for the neighbor and the welcoming of the other takes shape in an emerging messianic sociality.
The faithfulness or the faithful manner of life that you have according to yourself, have or hold in relation to God or before God. Blessed is the one who does not judge [condemn] himself or herself in what he approves. But the one who eats with conflict or against his or her own judgment has been judged because it does not come from confident faithfulness. All that does not proceed from confident faithfulness is sin.
This is rather difficult, but it seems to me that the test here is not a rule or law but free confidence and loyalty. If what I do leaves me in internal conflict about what is right, about whether I am being faithful, then I am still in that position of being divided and anxious, so am not within the sphere of free and happy adoption that rests on gift. This does not mean that what I do is decided for me by a programmed response dictated by rules. On the contrary, as Derrida notes, “There is no decision without the undecidable. If there are no undecidables there is no decision. There is simply programming, calculation” (Negotiations 31). The messianic form of life is improvisational. This improvisation, however, is oriented not to what pleases me but toward another: to the lord, to the neighbor. And this double orientation is in fact single, for the messianic is precisely the openness to and care for the other.
This is precisely what Paul argues: We the strong [or empowered] ought to bear the weakness of those who are not strong [or empowered] and not please ourselves. Note that the terminology of “weak” and “strong” is rather too static to get at what is going on here. What is at stake is the power (dunamis) of faithfulness, the greater of lesser degrees of such empowerment. The measure of our faithfulness is not how empowered we are but the extent to which that empowerment is placed in the service of the less empowered. Let each of us seek to please the neighbor for the good [of the neighbor] with the aim of building up. The aim of pleasing the neighbor isn’t to leave the neighbor alone but to also empower the neighbor and thus to build up the body.
Paul argued in 1 Corinthians that this is the true mark of power: it appears as weakness for the sake of the other. There he had spoken of the message concerning the cross and of the way it seemed both foolish and weak yet was the power of salvation. Here that “theology of the cross” is made, perhaps even more clearly than in 1 Corinthians, into the principle for the development of a messianic sociality.
For even messiah did not please himself. As in 1 Corinthians and Philippians, the point of recalling the messianic event is that it should serve as a pattern for our dealings with one another. To underscore this point, Paul cites Psalm 69:9: “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” The psalm gives voice to the one who is insulted because of his faithfulness to God, who bears the reproaches directed against God. But notice the transfer that occurs here. The messiah receives the reproaches directed against the weak, the ungodly, the enemies of God—who bears a condemnation as outlaw that by rights should be directed to us. Once again Paul is not interested in a speculative theory of atonement. The point is that just as he bore with our weakness, so we, too, ought to bear with the weakness of our neighbor.
The citation of the psalm leads Paul to maintain that the written (the law, the prophets, the psalms, and so on) has the function of teaching us, of enabling us to be faithful. Whatever was written previously was written to instruct us. This is not, of course, a theory of the inspiration or even of the authority of the written but rather an assertion of the pragmatic usefulness of the written, in particular of the texts of Israel. Paul’s view is quite different from the one that will come to prevail: that all must have a Christological interpretation. Instead, the point of rereading or of appropriating the previously written is that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the written we may have hope. Thus, the written, when read within the context of endurance (that is, the context of affliction, suffering, or persecution), strengthens the reader toward hope. The function of the text is to awaken hope and thus to orient the reader toward the messianic consummation set in motion by the messianic event associated with Joshua messiah. This is a far cry from later ideas that the function of the text is to impose laws, either for thought (doctrine) or for moralism. The text is to be read as encouragement toward hope. Several times in the course of this letter, we have heard Paul connecting affliction, endurance, and hope. What is added here is that the written has the function of enabling this perseverance toward hope, this confidence in the promise of God.
It is important to note that by bearing the weakness of the other, we are enabled to bear together so to endure and to have hope. The love that has been directed to us is directed through us to the neighbor, and in that way both we and the neighbor are able to stand. It is this that testifies to the overcoming of the world of enmity, the antisocial disorder of everyone for himself or herself. In this way we are enabled truly to hope (together) for the overcoming, the transforming, of the world—and thus for the accomplishment of the justice to come.
And the God of endurance and of counsel [comfort, advocacy] give to you the same thing so that you may think among yourselves in accordance with the messiah Joshua. So that with one voice and one harmony you may make shine forth the God and Father of our leader, Joshua the messiah.
The aim of the new form of sociality that is constituted through the love of the neighbor expressed concretely as the welcome of the other is the praise, the glorifying of God. It is the togetherness of what is basically different that is this glorifying. It is the bearing with one another, the welcoming of the other, and the concern for the other in and through such great differences that is the shining forth of God, of that God who is the father of the one to whom we are oriented in life and death: the messiah Joshua. The basic sense of “glorifying” here is that it causes this divine to appear, to shine forth, or is itself this shining forth within the darkness, that heralds the dawn of the divine radiance or shining forth itself.
Welcome one another, therefore, as messiah welcomed us, so that the divine may shine forth.
It is this welcoming of the weak by the strong, of the strong by the weak, of the different that remains different, that echoes the act of God in messiah Joshua and is that which testifies to the power of God in weakness and the victory of God over injustice. In this way the divine radiance shines forth into the world.
Although some commentators have understood the distinction between weak and strong as applying to the difference between gentile and Judean members of the messianic cell in Rome, this is quite dubious in my judgment because of some of the specific differences indicated (drinking wine or not, being vegetarian or not, neither of which distinguishes Judeans and gentiles in this or any period), and because of the deployment of weak and strong that Paul has seemingly also applied in 1 Corinthians to indicate differences among pagan or gentile messianists concerning the distribution and consumption of meat deriving from cultic celebrations in pagan temples. Up to this point in the text I am in agreement with Thorsteinsson (91–92).
However, Paul does want to make use of the pattern of the action of God relative to Israel’s messiah in order to indicate the importance of not pleasing oneself but attending to the requirements of the weaker neighbor. This now allows him to return to a theme that has permeated this letter: that the good news concerning the messianic establishment of justice is first for the Judeans and then also for the pagans. This theme, announced several times early in the letter, became the subject of his lengthy argument concerning the incorporation of all of Israel into the messianic salvation by means of a sort of detour though the pagans, occasioned in part by the rejection of the messiah by (some of) his own people. He is now able to combine these approaches in a way that justifies his confidence in the salvation of both Judeans and pagans.
For I say messiah had become a servant [diakonon] of circumcision for the sake of the truthfulness of God, in order to confirm the promises pertaining to the “fathers” and the nations to make the divine mercy shine forth.
The text may be translated in a variety of ways, but something like what I have ventured helps make it clear that Paul understands the promise to the patriarchs to be a promise that expressly reaches out to the nations or pagans. That the messiah becomes a servant of the circumcision thus confirms the priority of Israel as God’s chosen people while at the same time makes clear that the favoring of Israel comes to fullest expression in the extension of the messianic effect (justice and thus salvation) to the pagan nations.
In contrast to the extended argument of chapters 9–11, which dealt with the actual rejection of the messiah on the part of the Judean authorities and indicated that even this rejection would have the effect not only of including the gentiles but also “all Israel,” here Paul implies that that rejection was by no means essential to the divine “plan” or intention. It was, rather, as I have indicated, a case of improvisation that responded to historical contingency (the rejection) in such a way as to accomplish the original goal both in spite of and by means of that rejection.
Here Paul is emphasizing an even more basic perspective that the divine promise had always been a promise to Israel concerning the incorporation of the gentiles. The significance of this is that on this most basic level, it is not the case that the messiah “had to die.” Rather, if we were to extrapolate from Paul’s argument, it would be fair to say that God has been able to turn what would appear to be a drastic setback into an instrument to serve the original divine intention. To demonstrate that God has done what God promised to Israel—and to the nations as well—Paul introduces a chain of citations from the written testimonies of ancient Israel.
As it is written, “Therefore I will confess you among the nations and sing praises to your name” [Psalm 18:49], and again he says, “Rejoice, O nations, with his people” [Deuteronomy 32:43], and again, “Praise the Lord, all you nations, and let all the peoples praise him” [Psalm 117:1], and Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse shall come, one who rises to rule the nations; in him the nations will hope” [Isaiah 11:10].
The selection of texts (Psalms, Torah, and Prophets) is consistent with what Paul has done at other points in this letter when calling upon the testimony of “the written.” Whereas he had before cited texts that seemed to confirm the unfaithfulness of Israel, he is now able to bring to bear texts that emphasize the promise to Israel. Accordingly, the tone is not that of accusation or lament but of glad rejoicing. The passage from Isaiah is decisive in that it connects the messianic hope of Israel to the root of hope for all the nations of the earth: “in him the nations will hope.” Earlier Paul had maintained that the true function of the written was to undergird hope, and with this chain of passages he demonstrates that hope for Israel and hope for the nations is the same hope, rooted in the promise to Israel.
It should be clear from this perspective that there can hardly be any justification for a “Christian” mission to the “Jews.” Paul is a Judean with a mission to the gentiles: to proclaim the good news that Israel’s messiah is also the messiah for the gentiles and that this is precisely in conformity with God’s promise to and through God’s chosen people. The promise is not that pagans can become Judeans, nor is it that Judeans can become “Christians” (nor still less that the Judeans should become gentiles), but that God is faithful to God’s promises to Israel in such a way as to include all the nations (and, as we have heard, all of Israel as well). The relation between Jews and Christians in the very different circumstance in which we find ourselves today should be one by means of which we can mutually incite one another to hope and do so in terms of a commitment to justice that welcomes one another. In our own time, the way in which Jewish thinkers like Levinas and Derrida incite us to think justice and welcome of the other anew, as well as the ways in which Jewish thinkers like Scholem, Benjamin, and Taubes incite us to think anew in the key of messianicity, testifies to the significance of this pattern of relationality. Whether Christian thinkers can similarly be “servants of the circumcision” remains to be seen. If so, it would justify Paul’s confidence that hope for the nations does not abrogate but substantiates Israel’s hope as well.
Accordingly, Paul can conclude: May the God of hope fill you all with joy and peace in faithfulness, so that you abound in hope by the power of holy spirit. The One whose word of promise turned Abraham and Sarah to hope against hope, whose promise to Israel cannot be defeated even by Israel’s rejection, and whose messiah cannot be defeated even by shameful execution is indeed the source of hope, the God of hope as Paul suggests. And this hope is the ground of exuberance, perhaps in a certain sense irrational exuberance—joy. For already in the life of a welcoming sociality, we are able to see a sort of anticipation of the ultimate peace or harmony that is the goal and consummation of the divine justice.
The mark of spirit or spiritedness is a certain exuberance that is not solitary but eminently social, a rejoicing together that makes the anticipated peace not a pacification but an exultant harmony of multiple voices, each distinctive but “in tune” with one another in a way that can be characterized only as love, a love that accomplishes what law cannot: justice that endures for each and all.