Paul and Jesus

Albert Schweitzer once characterized the teachings of Jesus as “interim ethics.” He was thinking of the ways in which an apocalyptic view of history could radicalize one’s ethics to a degree that would be foolishly impractical if the “end” did not arrive as expected. In other words, an individual who believed that the end of history was very near might well choose to “turn the other cheek,” forgive enemies, refrain from resisting evil, or sell what he has and give to the poor. This is what Schweitzer meant by “interim ethics,” meaning they made sense only if God’s intervention to bring about justice in the world did in fact come. In a world that continued on, generation after generation, one might even consider such ethical standards to be unjust since they would enable oppression and wickedness to thrive.

Paul’s ethics were decidedly apocalyptic, but he took things a step further, giving a new definition to the idea of radical. He asked that people behave “as if” the heavenly transformation had already taken place, even if by every visible indication it had not. This perspective profoundly affected his views on human sexuality, economic and social inequities, and religious and ethnic divisions.

NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE

Let’s begin with Paul’s view of men and women. He describes to his followers in Galatia the ultimate ideal of God’s kingdom: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave or free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ” (Galatians 3:27–28). Clearly Paul did not imagine that these ethnic, economic, and gender categories had somehow magically disappeared through the act of baptism into Christ—or did he? His letters are filled with instructions about how to handle various problems related to ethnicity, economics, and gender, as well as similar problems, but on another level he expects the new reality “in Christ” to have raised his followers far above the fray of all human failings and disruptions. What does Paul mean by his claim that sexual distinctions between male and female no longer exist in the one body of Christ?

As a Jew Paul believed that God had created humans as male and female in the beginning: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). The very first command God gives Adam and Eve in the Genesis account is “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it,” which certainly puts God’s positive blessing upon reproductive sex (Genesis 1:28). Throughout the creation story everything that God has made is pronounced as good, and at the end the whole is declared “very good.” This notion that a good God created and blessed the good earth is fundamental to most forms of Judaism in this period. In certain Hellenistic and gnostic systems of thought the physical creation was viewed negatively, the unfortunate creation of an inferior deity, so that the “fall” of humans into the lower world, and their fracture into male and female, was seen as a problem from which one needed to be “saved.” Recall the Greek understanding of the physical body as a repository for the soul, something to be discarded so the soul could be free.

Paul is no gnostic. He accepts that human sexuality is part of the intended order of God’s good creation. He also accepts the notion in Genesis that the woman is to be subject to the man, and is, in that sense, inferior to the man. He writes the Corinthians: “For a man ought not to cover his head since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” (1 Corinthians 11:7–8). Paul has been blessed as well as damned for these clear and definitive words.¹ What he says here has put him at the center of heated discussions about the role of women in the church and society that are as active today as they were anciently. The difference is that the Church largely went the way of Paul, especially from the second century A.D. on, so that the emphasis in the Hebrew Bible regarding the essential goodness of the physical creation and blessings upon male and female sexual union were muted in contrast to Paul’s otherworldly perspectives.