[Oe List ...] 2/10/10, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part XIV: What Does Salvation Mean to Paul?

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Thursday February 04, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament
Part XIV: What Does Salvation Mean to Paul?

Paul was a person who discovered in his Christ experience new dimension of life unknown to him before. In that sense he was a classic mystic. Every human experience, however, in order to be shared must pass through the medium of words. There is no other means of communicating content to another. In that process the wordless experience inevitably takes on the dimensions of the human mind with all its limitations. Human beings always reflect the presuppositions of the cultural wisdom of the day. They reflect the level of knowledge that the speaker has achieved. Inevitably they become limited and warped by that transition and are rendered finite and mortal. An experience of God may well be eternal, but no human explanation of that experience will ever be. That is a fact that religious believers in all traditions constantly forget. All sacred scriptures, developed creeds and complex theological doctrines cannot help but compromise truth because nothing about the time-bound words they have to employ can ever be eternal. In a similar way God is by definition beyond the scope of the human mind, which is always captured in time and space. Since a horse cannot escape the limit of its "horseness" to describe what it means to be human, neither can a human being escape the limits of humanity in order to describe who or what God is. Paul wrestles with this reality constantly. 
Paul talks about his experience of encountering the Christ as that which enabled him to transcend all of his limits and to cross all of those boundaries that separate him from others. In this newfound sense of an expanded humanity he came to a new sense of oneness. Because he was quite sure that this new wholeness resulted from his encounter with the risen Christ, he desperately needed to find the words to explain just how that worked. He was a Greek-speaking Jewish man living in the Mediterranean world of the first century of the Common Era and had no other categories of thought to use except the ones that his world provided. Our task in this column is to search through the time-bound words that he used in order to find a way to separate the eternal experience, which was so obviously real to him, from the pre-suppositions of his time and place in history that he used to explain his Christ experience, most of which have been dismissed by modern knowledge as no longer believable inside our world view. That means that, as students of the New Testament, we must always be engaged in an activity that is not unlike delicate surgery and we will find it a never-ending task. The world does not slow down to give any of us time to adjust. We begin with an analysis of Paul's view of human life. 
Paul's writing reveals a person who is very much aware that something is wrong with humanity in general and with his own humanity in particular. He is quite sure that whatever this distortion is, all human life somehow shares in it. Paul expressed this in his ever-present sense that he was alienated from God, from all others and even from himself. There was indeed a war, he said, that is going on in his members. His Jewish tradition affirmed this sense that human life is somehow separated from God. The Jews, over their long history, had developed an annual fast day, which they observed with great solemnity and which they believed enabled them to acknowledge liturgically what their human reality was. They called this day "Yom Kippur" or "The Day of Atonement." The observance of "Yom Kippur" involved the slaughter of a carefully chosen sacrificial lamb, the blood from which they then smeared on the mercy seat in that part of the Temple called the Holy of Holies, which they believed was God's earthly dwelling place. A second Yom Kippur ritual occurred when they symbolically piled their sins on the back of a goat, known as the "scapegoat," and then drove this sin-bearing creature out into the wilderness, thus leaving them purified and newly at one with God. 
Similar doctrines of atonement are found in almost every religious tradition the world over because there is a universal human sense of being separate and alone that I believe is born in the emergence of self-consciousness, which only human beings possess. It manifests itself in the idea that none of us is what God intended us to be. The content of that statement varies widely, but the experience is part of what it means to be human. The Jewish version of it was based on the idea that God was the creator of all things and that nothing God made could itself be defined as evil. They had, therefore, to find a way to account for this human definition without blaming God. The ancient creation story in the beginning of the book of Genesis served this purpose well. In that story the goodness of God was upheld by the assertion that God looked out upon all that God had made and pronounced it good. The problem of human alienation and its resultant human evil, therefore, had to be something that human life brought upon itself. In that ancient Jewish story the perfection of God's creation had been broken by the disobedience of Adam and Eve. As a direct consequence, Adam and Eve, and through them all future human beings, were condemned to live not in "Eden" but "East of Eden," to borrow a phrase from John Steinbeck. Human beings, this story asserted, were not so distorted that they did not remember their original glory, so they still possessed a yearning to return to the mythical garden where before being expelled they had once lived in the oneness of God. The story asserted, however, that the gates to that garden were forever locked and were now even guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. Human life, the story suggested, could never return to its original status. So in this world of imperfection Cain killed Abel, Jacob cheated Esau out of his birthright, Joseph's brothers sold him into Egyptian slavery, the Jews escaped starvation by moving to Egypt only to be cruelly treated by their Egyptian overlords and ultimately God was said to have intervened in history to bring these Jews to freedom. That is the way the biblical story unfolded. 
That story, with that understanding of human life, shaped the liturgical life of the Jewish people. That is what created Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to provide an annual occasion for the Jews to recall the glory of their creation and to face liturgically the fact of their alienation from that original goodness. The perfection of the sacrificial lamb, both physically, in that it could have no blemishes or broken bones, and morally, in that it did not have the power to choose to do evil, represented to them what human life was created to be. So the perfect lamb was offered to God as a substitute for the human life, which was not worthy to be that offering. Human beings, out of their sense of alienation had to come to God only when they had been cleansed by "the blood of the perfect lamb of God." 
Paul, shaped by this Yom Kippur understanding, interpreted Jesus under the symbol of Yom Kippur's the "Lamb of God" who had the power to "take away the sins of the world." He saw the death of Jesus on the cross to be analogous to the slaughter of the lamb on Yom Kippur. It offered a doorway back to God for all people. This is not only what salvation was all about to Paul, but that is also what Paul believed he experienced in the person of Christ. He accepted this gracious gift, undeserved and freely given, as that which had rescued him from "the bondage of sin." Thus he climaxed his theological argument in Romans by proclaiming that now "nothing in all creation can separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus." To offer this compelling gift to the world was what fueled his missionary fervor.
We live today, however, on the other side of Charles Darwin, whose thought has destroyed most of Paul's presuppositions. For Darwin there never was a perfect creation. Life rather evolved over billions of years from a single cell into self-conscious complexity. Without original perfection there could have been no human fall into sin. If there was no human fall, there was no need for a divine rescue. No one can be rescued from a fall that never happened or be restored to a status one has never possessed. So the basis upon which Paul has constructed his concept of salvation has become inoperative. The universal experience that Paul sought to address may well still be real, but his explanation has been destroyed by the march of time. 
Students of the life sciences have identified the drive to survive as a universal characteristic present in all living things. Survival drives adaptability. It is seen when plants gravitate to the sun, when vines snake across the forest floor in search of the tallest trees to which they then attach themselves, when desert cacti develop a capacity to store water, when fresh water plants develop elaborate systems to filter salt in tidal rivers and when wasps and ants in the jungle develop mutual defense alliances. This drive for survival is instinctual, not conscious in plant or animal life. In self-conscious human life, however, this drive to survive rises to our awareness and is installed as the highest human value, making us the world's first self-conscious, survival-oriented creatures. Everything in human life is bent to the service of our survival and that in turn inevitably makes human beings self-centered. This is not the result of some prehistoric or mythological fall, this is in the nature of our biology. Out of this survival mentality all of our fears about "others," our xenophobia and our prejudices arise. It is out of our survival needs that we fight wars, enslave and segregate those who are different, denigrate women, abuse homosexuals. That behavior religion has dubbed "sin," the result of "the fall." 
Can one find salvation by being rescued from this, as Paul seemed to believe? I do not think so. We can, however, find wholeness in the experience of being lifted beyond these boundaries. I am now convinced that this was the heart of what the Jesus experience was.
Next week, in our final column on Romans, we will seek to tell the Christ story as Paul experienced it, but against the background of this analysis of what it means to be human. It still rings for me at least with authenticity and integrity. 

– John Shelby Spong
 



Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Twila Compton from Charlotte, North Carolina, writes:
The question I have is about prayer. For so many years I have begun my prayers with "have mercy on me, O gracious God." Having been well taught to be guilty and unworthy, it is hard to come up with a positive prayer. At times I feel like my religious beliefs are like a bowl of scrambled eggs and I keep trying to unscramble them.
Twila Compton from Charlotte, North Carolina, writes:
The question I have is about prayer. For so many years I have begun my prayers with "have mercy on me, O gracious God." Having been well taught to be guilty and unworthy, it is hard to come up with a positive prayer. At times I feel like my religious beliefs are like a bowl of scrambled eggs and I keep trying to unscramble them.



Dear Twila,
Yours is just another form of the question that emerges constantly among my readers and those who attend my lectures. Prayer focuses our theology as does nothing else. In your words, you were taught to begin your prayers with a plea for mercy. You were taught to be guilty and unworthy. That is the experience of many.
Look, however, at what these words commit you to believe. You are making an assumption that God is a powerful parent figure in the sky who elicits fear and guilt. You have defined yourself as one who has failed to satisfy what you perceive to be this God's requirements. Perhaps that is because you have been taught that God is a judge "unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden." Who among us would not feel guilty and afraid before an authority figure who knows us this well? 
This God might be very useful if controlling behavior is religion's primary agenda. If, however, the purpose of Jesus as interpreted by the Fourth Gospel is correct that he came "that they might have life and have it abundantly," then a prayer based on an understanding of God that elicits primarily guilt and fear will never accomplish that goal.
It is not, therefore, a positive way to pray that you seek, but a whole new understanding of life and what the word "God" means in terms of that life. That then becomes something that cannot be addressed in a question and answer format. It also points to why people like you have increasing difficulty participating in the life of traditional religious institutions that are more into guilt rather than grace, fear rather than faith and judgment rather than Jesus. If prayer is the activity of your life through which God is experienced as life, love and being, then prayer is more about who you are than what you do.
The journey starts there — travel well.

– John Shelby Spong






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