The Constructive Alternative
If the focus is not, then, on a particular understanding of the individual standing alone and transformed alone, where does it lie? It lies in Jesus’s initial proclaiming the imminence of the kingdom. Persons must repent if they are to enter it. Repenting and entering it both have about them subjective dimensions, but they can best be described in terms that include the cognitive (dealing with awareness of ideas) and the social (dealing with the awareness of other persons and groups to which one is related). The description of the change that comes over a person who repents and believes will freely include elements of emotion and self-understanding; but it will not involve any need to demonstrate that the changed nature is self-contained or self-interpreting, or that its inwardness is prior to, or the sole and adequate cause of, or independent of, its social reality.
When we move from Jesus to Paul the same answer is clearer. The reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in the “new humanity” is first a community event. It cannot happen to a lone individual. The prerequisite for personal change is a new context into which to enter. A Gentile can only find Abraham by meeting a Jew. A Jew can only celebrate the messianic age by welcoming a Gentile. This is not to negate other dimensions—mental ideas, psychic self-understandings, feelings, etc. The issue is the sovereignty of the individualistic definition over other levels of interpretation.
All that is needed now is to have seen that both major texts we have tested are understood more fully and more roundly if their location in the ethnic policy debate of the early churches is given more attention than the agenda of modern Western self-doubt.
1. Originally entitled “The Apostle’s Apology Revisited.” Reprinted by permission, with minor editorial revision, from Klassen, New Way of Jesus, 115–34.
2. First edition, 1972; revised edition, 1994.
3. Some of these sources are cited in Politics of Jesus, 212ff. In addition, see Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Since these lines were first written, considerable additional scholarly opinion, which I do not seek here to cover, has further supported this line of interpretation.
4. This point was made by Markus Barth in “What Can a Jew Believe?” 382ff., esp. 395–98, but earlier and most directly by Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, 87ff., and confirmed by others. The opinion of the “Judaizers,” to whose criticism Paul responds, was not a representative Jewish view. They must have been making of the sign of the covenant a superstitious, ritualistic, noncovenantal use, which born Jews would not have supported, and which recorded rabbinic opinion does not support. No born Jew would have given circumcision the saving value Paul has to argue against. For born Jews, the law was to be kept, but its motivation and binding character have a different frame of reference. The “Judaizers” must then have been Gentiles making a superstitious and noncovenantal ritualistic use of the covenant sign.
5. Much recent discussion seeking to review Christian truth-claims seeks to disavow the triumphal provincialism of the past, and has with that intent played the “particular” and the “universal” over against each other. Such a formulation of the issue does violence to the New Testament witness, and is also confusing and un-ecumenical in our time. The revision proposed here is much more basic.
6. In 1 Cor 4:5 Paul affirms that when all secrets are revealed, “then each one will receive praise from God.” Martin, in Last Judgment, demonstrated how much modern Protestantism had changed the concept of a last judgment into a frightening one.
7. Strachan, Second Epistle of Paul, ad loc.
8. It is striking, in a way analogous to my comments at the beginning of this essay, how little attention the writing of commentaries pays to creative alternative readings.
9. Héring, Second Epistle of Saint Paul, ad loc.
10. [An incomplete and thus unintelligible footnote making reference to Paul Pruysser, “a theologically oriented staff therapist at the Menninger clinic,” has been deleted.—Ed.]
11. This section overlaps in substance with pages 212ff. of Politics of Jesus. Its phrasing is derived from a draft written earlier. A more recent parallel text is my “Social Shape of the Gospel,” 277–84.
12. Since this usage appears both in earlier and later letters, including some that many scholars call “deutero- pauline,” the meaning must have been present not only in Paul’s own mind, but also in his communities. He does not claim it as his original idea (as he sometimes does on other subjects).
2
The Moral Axioms of the Kingdom’s Coming1
It is customary to designate as “Sermon on the Mount” chapters 5–7 of Matthew’s Gospel, which appear as one uninterrupted discourse. This is the first such block of such material to be reported at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry; it is also the longest. Luke 6:17–49, a briefer passage containing parallel material, is sometimes designated “Sermon on the Plain.” It too stands (in addition to 4:16–21) as a kind of “platform” statement at the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry.
I shall be analyzing five fragments of this material, looking at both the Matthean and the Lucan versions. My concern shall not be to lift from them a catalogue of sample statements about proper behavior, although such specimens are given. My intention is rather to see these examples as representing the mentality and the world vision within which Jesus calls his disciples to a new style of life.
The entire text of the “Sermon” has come to be taken as the most dramatic specimen of the way in which the presence of Jesus reverses all the otherwise dominant value patterns of society. For the past century, the understanding of this text in the West has been under the impact of the simple literal argument of Leo Tolstoy, whose intellectual and spiritual conversion came about by taking this text seriously and seeing in it a condemnation of the moral laxity and betrayal of Christendom. In a host of ways, interpreters since Tolstoy2 have circled around the text, proposing alternative ways to understand its simplicity. We cannot, in this connection, even survey the variety of reinterpretations3 that make the meaning more spiritual and more distant, more idealist, or more symbolic; but when we see all this reinterpretation going on, we can be warned.
This text being neither parabolic nor poetic, our goal should be the most straightforward interpretation possible. We need therefore to direct a special suspicion to traditions of interpretation whose intent or effect is to divert our attention from taking these words of Jesus as a call to us, here and now.
A text we know is most likely to speak to us tomorrow if it says something it did not say yesterday. So it is the interpreter’s task to turn a suspicious eye to any well-established convention of interpretation, even the best-intentioned. For this reason I shall phrase the following subtitles in a tone of critical disengagement.4