The Competing Paths to Faithfulness?

Pietas in its ancient Greco-Roman context has the connotations of "duty" or "devotion," and it simultaneously suggests both ones duty to the gods and ones duty to the larger family unit.  In the Greek language the term is the all too familiar "pistis" of faith/faithfulness fame.  Anyone familiar with Paul's appropriation of "pistis" and its cognates is aware that this term is at the center of a longstanding debate.  Thankfully we are naturally going to side step that debate and focus on what is happening in Romans 4.

Paul's letter to the Romans has many perplexing and vexing little issues that are often glossed over in many of the popular attempts to deal with the work, and naturally so, because who in their right mind would want to read a digest of all the interpretive problems in Romans.  Coherency is the name of the game in any successful reading of the letter, but working all these pieces into a readable whole is often more difficult than it would seem to appear.

One of these perplexing issues is why Paul highlights Abraham in Romans 4.  Now many people at this point will say to them selves, well that is easy Paul wanted to prove that even the Hebrews of old were saved by faith/faithfulness and not by works (read circumcision).  Elliott lays out a different position based on the Greco-Roman context.

Briefly the key to Elliott's interpretive move is to look at the role of ancestors in the Greco-Roman world, and specifically how Augustus was associated with piety and the vocation of civilizing the nations.  Ancient figures were often seen as representative figures, thus Augustus represents a history that is closely intertwined with the residents of Rome and their ability to be ushered into the civilized world.  Not to get into to much detail, but the crux of the problem is that the nations in Rome began to think of genealogy in a deterministic way, the Judeans deserve there present lot (jobless and homeless due to the recent mass deportations) because their God had lost.  Imperial ideology, which always interprets the present, saw the Judeans as a people born to servitude.  Paul's story about the Messiah and the program set forth in Abraham did not connect with the people on the ground because to them the Roman story seemed all too true. Thus for Elliott the issue was one of harmonization, could these two stories be effectively reconciled?  This is what some in Paul's day were attempting to do, thus the term "Works of the Law,"  were those Judeans who sought to harmonize the two stories and gain acceptance by utilizing the Roman Law in an effort to further their movement/interests (this is an extremely generalizing account of Elliott at this point).  Paul is thus contrasting two avenues, you could either, by following the works of Augustus, look for salvation through benefactions of the Caesar, or you could practice the kind of piety that Abraham is the representative of - a salvation through faithfulness that involves waiting patiently, expectantly, on the God who can reverse the present circumstances.

Empires, Mercy, and Obedience

Back to Elliott's Arrogance of Nations, we are now up to the chapter on CLEMENTIA, or mercy.  Mercy if you understand politics is the prerogative of those who have power.  In this case the Emperor.  It is the Emperor who has the ability to show those who are truly powerless and submissive mercy and it is up to him to determine what is and what is not merciful.  It is nice to be the one in charge of making these decisions.  Now it is easy to see how Paul's proclamation of God’s mercy as the public manifestation of God’s Justice could be offensive.  Because ultimately the purpose of mercy is that for those who have received such mercy they are supposed to be so moved as to respond in obedience.  But according to Paul all the world – not just the Judeans- is accountable to God.  But the subtext to all this is that it is the losers who receive mercy.

So who were the losers in Rome during the time of Paul's letter.  Well Elliott would argue, based on a number of things, including the "in chrestus" expulsion, the recent return of the homeless and jobless Judeans, and from the perspective of mercy coming from the Emperor, that the Judeans were indeed the losers.  For Paul if the Romans buy into this form of thinking then it naturally would beg the question of whether Israel stumbled so as to fall.  Paul's task is to get the Romans to be able to see past the surface of history, to see that mercy comes from the justice of God and not from throwing your lot in with the Empire. 

Now this is a very cursory attempt to summarize Elliott, his chapter, and his book, is much richer than my feeble attempts at summary make it seem.

Justice, what is it good for... Post 5

Folks, I think I was close to getting back on the biblioblogs page, but alas I must have no pull with Brandon Wason, nor with Jim West.  I can't believe that my Sheffield connection didn't do anything for my chances.  Why did I pay so much for an education if it doesn't even get me on to the biblioblogs site? I thought Sheffield was the mecca for Jim, I have heard stories of his regular pilgrimages and ritual sacrifices that he has offered to the the great paternoster in the north. The same paternoster that I myself made regular sacrifices to weekly as a student.

 

I do promise to stop the groveling ... soon.

Ok, now for the next topoi that Elliott brings to light in his reading of Romans is JUSTITIA.  Now justice is by and far the biggest subject in Romans, however many people are not able to see this because they frame Paul's justice talk in individualistic pietistic ways like, "how can I be made right in the sight of god".  The problem with such individualistic notions is that they are foreign to the NT and Paul.  What Elliott wants us to understand is that the notion of morality is often given to, and an authority enjoyed by, those with the actual power to dominate others.  This is pretty basic stuff, and even if you detest Foucault and his cronies this statement seems pretty uncontroversial, right.  So in looking at Paul's justice talk in comparison to the Empire's we can see that what Paul is doing is contesting the morality of the Empire and confronting the imperial claims and propaganda.

A number of things that Elliott highlights in the text of Romans that Paul is confronting are (1) the notion that Caesar is the embodiment of divine Justice, (2) the proclamation of Caesar's triumph, and (3) the notion that Rome has brought peace to the world, to highlight just a few.  Paul's point is to give his readers/hearers the ability to see that appearances are deceiving, and that reality should not be read from current events, but rather through an apocalyptic imagination.

Elliott does something really interesting in this chapter.  Now I am not sure that I am entirely convinced, but I must say that Elliott is one of the most provacative and interesting interpretors of Paul that I have read, I put him with the likes of Nanos and Stowers as my favorite authors to read on Romans. Elliott takes the famous "chrestus" pronouncement as having a real effect on the Jewish community of Rome.  I tend to see the "chrestus" evidence as overblown, and of little relevance for interpretations of Romans, but that is because most people use it as evidence of a Jewish Gentile split in Rome. Elliott sees it as having an effect on how the recently returned Jews would have been perceived socially and politically.  In the case of the Roman imperial order they would have been deemed as the weak, poor because they would have had to start over whence returning to Rome, and the marginality of these returned Jews, would have called into the power of the Jewish god.  Elliott surmises that the presence of a marginalized poor Jewish community would have been bad PR for the Jewish god, especially when compared to the imperial rhetoric of triumph.  Paul is thus intent in his letter to the Romans to contrast his message with the political realism of the Empire.

It is definitely food for thought...

THE ARROGANCE OF NATIONS (III)

Elliott's main thrust in the book is to flesh what he perceives to be Paul’s critical engagement with the Roman imperial ideology. Here I think Elliott is on to something, and so do loads of other interpreters for that matter, but what separates this book from others is Elliott's careful focus on this engagement.  For Elliott the purpose of Romans is Paul’s attempt to counter the Roman Imperial Ideology and the corrosive effects it has on the Roman congregations of Christ-believers.  Elliott establishes his argument by examining what he terms as Imperial Topoi (which I shall discuss in later posts). 

 

Because in large part I agree with Elliott, I naturally am not looking for him to present a slam dunk case for his thesis, if anything my reading of Elliott helps me make a stronger case for my own reading of Romans.  But even if you do not see political polemics as being key to the interpretation of Romans, Elliott at least presents it as a reasonable reading of the text and I think anyone would benefit from Elliott's presentation.

 

Here is How Elliott fleshes out his political reading of Romans and some of these are redundant (this is due to my presentation rather than Elliott’s):

 

·        As stated before Elliott takes for granted that a political reading of the NT is the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretations.

·        So with that we need to look for the Strategies of Containment, or those forces in Paul’s day (and in our own for that matter) that repress certain ways of thinking from our consciousness. ( A present day example of this would be the fact that much of the western church has no problem reading capitalism back into the NT text.)

·        We also need to listen to what is said in the text, and also to what goes unsaid, and we need to be willing to read against the grain.

·        We need to keep an eye out for what Elliott terms, fissures in the text, (I use ungrammaticalities) or places where a unified surface reading becomes impossible, we need to notice and attend to the subterranean forces at work beneath the text.

·        The rhetoric of Romans, as Elliott teases out, shows that Paul participated in a cultural transcript, drawing on the repertoires of Judean scripture and apocalyptic writing that was inescapably in conflict with the empire’s absolutizing claims of allegiance.

·        Paul was engaged in the unfinished drama in which competing visions of history’s fulfillment are pitted against one another, for this reason we recognize with Jameson that the ultimate horizon of political interpretation is the sweep of history itself, we need to read Paul in this light.

·        Ultimately any reading ought to unmask, unveil, and uncover the deep logic that legitimizes exploitation, especially when that injustice bears the sheen of divine patina.

The Arrogance of Nations (Part II): Voice of the Voiceless

Fundamentally the key for Elliott in unlocking Romans is a particular kind of political reading (I will offer a spoiler and say leftist).  If Romans is about justice (which it is), and justice is something that takes place between human beings (and that is certainly part of it), then the letter to the Romans ought to be an interesting read for just about anyone.   Elliott’s off to a good start here, if he can convince anyone of this.  And here is Elliott’s problem, everybody already knows what Paul’s letter to the Romans is about, and while many may concede that it is about righteousness, or justification, their definition of those terms tend to be abstract and individualized (how god makes me right with him, and then me right with others).  So it is Elliott’s task to offer a corrective.

 

Well we (the masses) need a couple of ground rules in order to understand what justice is all about.  The first rule is to reject every approach that favors the rich to the detriment of the poor. The second rule is to read the NT texts so that they address the reality of empire as an omnipresent, inescapable, and overwhelming sociopolitical reality (Fernando Segovia, not the guitar player).

 

So begins Elliott’s quest of explaining the thesis of Paul’s letter to the Romans as a comparison between two rules.  And a quest for Paul to explain which rule is truly righteous and which rule has the power to make the world truly peaceful.