Arguing With Paul, who is sometimes pompous

Reading and interpreting the bible can be intimidating.  As an old camp song put it: “It’s a great big complicated hard to understand book.”  The bible is neither handbook nor textbook.  It’s a rambling record of humanity’s emerging relationship with God, who is incrementally revealed over many centuries.  How you understand what the bible is influences how you read it.  If it’s God’s inerrant word, you must submit to it without question.  If it’s not God’s word, it’s no better or worse than any other text claimed to be sacred, and you can interpret it any way you want.  On the other hand, if God spoke, and speaks still, through the humanly written text, then the text, sacred as it is, invites questioning conversation and even argument with its human authors as you strive to hear God’s voice.

I was thinking about that when I got into an argument with Paul while reading a portion of his first letter to the Corinthians.  He wrote over a half dozen letters that made it into the bible, so who am I to argue with him?  He was an apostle, a genuine saint, I’m just a retired country parson.  He wrote scripture.  I write columns on an obscure blog site. 

Maybe so, but I never believed Paul knew he was writing scripture.  He was just writing to answer questions, as best he could, put to him by congregations of new Christians uncertain about matters that troubled them.  He knew Jesus had commissioned him to proclaim the good news to gentiles in the GrecoRoman world, but he was the last and least among other apostles senior to him.  We have no authentic records of what the others wrote or said, but we have Paul’s letters, and in time, church leaders came to understand that God spoke authoritatively through them, which is how they got included in today’s bible.  

God may have spoken through Paul’s letters, but Paul wrote them, and he was prone to the kinds of mistakes we all make.  Other apostles challenged him, and Peter wrote that “there are some things in [his letters] hard to understand…”  I think you and I, in good faith, are free to challenge him as well, especially when he’s hard to understand.  Personally, I think Paul is too sure of himself, and can come off as pompous when he commends himself for being the most perfect of all Jews, the hardest working of all apostles, the one who can be all things to all people, who can endure every hardship without batting an eyelash.  It leads me to contentious conversation with Paul as I struggle to hear God speaking through what he wrote.  Most of the time he’s a reliable, patient and loving teacher.  Sometimes he gets in the way of what God has to say.  In other words, just because Paul wrote it doesn’t mean God said it.  Even Paul admits it when he offers opinions he knows are not from God, as he does in 1 Cor. 7.12. 

And so it was that in my Tuesday morning ecumenical lectionary study group, I lit into Paul for telling the Corinthians that he was a Jew to Jews, a gentile to gentiles, obedient to religious laws when he needed to be, but otherwise disregarded them.  In the end he claimed to be all things to all people for the sake of the gospel.  How arrogant.  Who is the authentic Paul if he’s always wearing a different mask? How can that be “for the sake of the gospel?” 

My friends suggested that if I read the passage (1 Cor. 9.16-23) in a different tone of voice, I might discover Paul was only trying to meet people where they are, willing to enter into their world in order to share the good news of God in Christ Jesus with words they could understand.  Maybe I was too harsh on Paul.   The question remains, even if there is wisdom in his words, how far can one go entering into another’s world without losing authenticity?  We who are well educated white teachers, steeped In the Western canon, have been accused of inappropriate cultural appropriation when we try to imitate the cultural ways of other people.  

It’s difficult to be the alien in another’s culture; honoring it, yet remaining authentically one’s self.  Learning how to do that is what Jesus was up to when he sent new disciples into nearby villages.  He instructed them to stay with whomever received them in peace, and accept whatever hospitality was offered until it was time to leave.  The disciples were not going outside the realm of their local culture, but it was good training for the day they would.  To receive the other’s hospitality, however strange it may feel, is to honor them without surrendering one’s own authenticity.  European missionaries who were successful in proclaiming the gospel during the age of empire, willingly received hospitality as offered without demanding that those to whom they went adopt Western ways.  Nor did they pretend to be other than who they were, European missionaries.  Those who were not so successful tried to impose their own cultural norms on the people to whom they had been sent.  There were few of the former, many of the latter.

Maybe that’s what Paul was trying to say when he commended himself as being able to be all things to all people.  If so, I think his ego got in the way of making it clear enough.  He did better at one of his meetings in Jerusalem when he explained to senior leaders that he didn’t expect his gentiles to follow Jewish law, he only expected them to follow in the way of the Jewish Jesus, without the necessity of circumcision or adhering to strict food laws.  And he was furious with the Galatians for trying to imitate Jewish ways foreign to their own culture, claiming it distracted them from authentically following Jesus.

It seems that, on his good days, Paul was as good as he claimed to be, on his bad days he was pompous.  As Holy Spirit inspired as his letters were, we need to be reminded that God didn’t dictate them, and Paul wasn’t right about everything in them.   Understanding that opens up tremendous opportunity for conversation and argument, with the sure and certain expectation that God’s voice will enter into it, often with something new to say.  It is also assurance that you and I, ordinary Christians of 21st century America, can enter into that conversation without fear of breaking anything or committing an unforgivable sin.