Tony Payne speaks with Mark Strom about his new book, Reframing Paul, and the issues that it raises.
You highlighted two particular problems for modern evangelicalism in your book: the influence of Greek thought on our systematic theology, and the social influence of rank and status and such ideas on church life. On the first, you seem very down on systematic theology generally. Can you explain why?
I want to say up front that I’ve benefited a great deal from the best of systematic theology. I studied at several institutions with some very good theologians, so I don’t want to say systematic theology is all bad. I have a great respect for many of my former teachers. But I believe something significant is lost between what we find in the text of the Bible—couched in a narrative of what God had done in Israel and Jesus and the lives of early Christians—and our systems of thought. Of course we all construct systems of thought; the ability for abstract thought is one of the noble things about being human. We couldn’t have surgery if we didn’t have abstract thought. I couldn’t have driven here in the car. We couldn’t build bridges.
The difficulty is when abstract categories obscure from us the real people and activities we seek to understand. This is when it becomes unhelpful. I see this all the time in my work as an advisor to corporate leaders. For example, in their quest to improve their businesses, some leaders embraced the concept of ‘Quality’ only to end up losing touch with what the business actually did to serve its customers. This has been evident in Australia over the past two decades with the ‘Quality’ movement. Many companies actually ended up with worse systems and worse products. They followed the Quality system, adapted their businesses to the conceptual structures of ‘Total Quality Management’, documented all their processes as ‘best practice’, yet ended up worse off. It’s quite a common story.
It’s that problem that I see too often in theology. We all create systems of thought, that’s not the issue. The moment I say “God is like”, or “People are like”, and I am not quoting the Bible, I am in the realms of systematic theology. We all do that, and that’s fine. I have no problem with that.
The difficulty I have largely concerns the agendas at work. It’s not just that too much theology is removed from our social experience. Nor am I saying that theologians are simply involved in a political game. In most cases, not at all. But we are all caught up in systems far larger than ourselves; collective ways of thinking about what it is to be a Christian which lose too many crucial things. For instance, we lose the conversation about what it means for us to engage meaningfully in the world, as those who believe that Christ has died and risen from the dead. I now have a radically different identity with a different sense of my place in history; I am a child of God. What do I do about that? I’m a dad, a husband, a professional, I work in a political system, I have to vote etc. How do I deal with those things, now, as a follower of Christ? I know there are theologians who are also concerned with these issues, and who try to bring the best of their craft to bear on such questions. There are some great theologians for whom I’m very grateful. Nonetheless, I believe that the momentum in the system of theology is not towards that end.
Are you saying that the very practice of theology, of abstraction, is a sell-out to Greek thinking? Well, I know you’re not, because you’ve just said abstract thinking is necessary. The point you seem to be making about Greek thinking in contrast to Paul’s way of thinking is that in the Greek mode of thought the abstract was separated very strongly from the everyday, so to think abstractly was almost by definition not to deal with the stuff of everyday life, but to deal with ideas and principles and things in another realm. It’s not as if we should not do abstract thought, or we cannot say true things about reality or God, but that as we do so we can’t buy into that split. Whatever we say about God and the world, whatever systems of thought we synthesize as we read the Bible, they have to interact with, interplay with, and function within everyday life. Have I understood you?
Yes. But I don’t want to be silly about this, like there’s a time limit—“Can I talk for 10 minutes without being abstract?”. I want to say that we need conversations about everyday life nestled within the kind of conversation that engages the Bible. That conversation runs over years, and includes times when we want to do our homework around particular ideas and issues, in order to get a better handle on where the conversation goes next. That’s fine. What I’m most concerned about in this respect is the way we keep presuming a split in our lives between what matters as a Christian and what doesn’t. The split is false or, at the very least, often drawn in the wrong place.
I think it helps to understand a little about the history of ideas behind this split. Why do we think this way? The standard comment I get about the book—apart from the fact that people have found it very helpful—is that chapters 2 and 3, or even 2 through 5 (where this philosophical background is described) are really hard work. I tell them to start with the first and last chapter, then go to chapter 6, and only go back to the hard stuff later.
Yes, that was my experience to some extent. I found those chapters by no means light bedtime reading; they almost had the flavour of a PhD thesis that had become a book. Even so, I didn’t think they were badly written.
I worked really hard on it, but I guess the writing style is pretty dense; there’s an awful lot packed in. The editor and I talked about whether we would drop the early philosophical chapters, and he insisted we keep them even though they’d be hard for some people. I think in terms of the strength of the whole argument they’re important.
So we were talking about the split—
A few centuries before Plato several events opened what we today think of as the ‘Greek’ world to cultures beyond themselves. This challenged their assumptions about life. Other people didn’t look at justice or truth in the same ways, they didn’t have the same attitudes to social conventions and so on. In part, this is what gave rise to what we think of as philosophy. In an increasingly ambiguous world, the search was on for what was fixed: Can we pin down what justice really is? What truth is? What beauty or goodness is?
Their search yielded various answers. Over time, the trend that developed, made clearest by Plato, was to view life as fundamentally split. On the one hand was the stuff of the everyday world. But the fixed could not be found there. What they were looking for, the stuff that really matters (I’m compressing long periods of time and many arguments here!) was to be found only in a realm quite other than everyday experience. Whether this other realm was perceived in religious terms, or mystical terms, or more intellectual terms, for Plato it had to be something above, outside, beyond, different to everyday life. This is where we find true reality. For Plato that led to the forms and so on. You see this in his Timaeus, where he tries to give a rational account of why the world is the way it is. When he asks “why do I have a neck”, he does not explain it in medical or anatomical terms, but in rational terms (the head’s supreme, intellect is the most important thing, and the neck is narrow to restrict the evil passions of the body that might come and affect the brain and render us incapable of philosophy). The whole of life comes to be explained by a rational system.
Now contrast that with Genesis (and even the other ancient near-eastern traditions). What they give us is a story. Genesis tells us the story of how God makes the world, enters into relationship with people, puts them into relationship with each other, and in a world he declares is good. God is the supreme authority in figuring out what life is about, but you don’t have to escape life and the world to discover the truth.
Over time, the propensity to split the world emphasized abstract reasoning as the key intellectual tool for finding truth. Real truth is the essence of something, its core. It’s the ‘onion methodology’; we strip away the outside distractions to find the kernel (to mix a metaphor). That is the method of abstraction. To get the real truth, you abstract the core concepts from the data of everyday life, sort them into their correct categories, and create a tight, logical system. Then you’ve really got something.
I can’t remember in the book how much you talk about the doctrine of creation. In what ways does the problem we’re talking about spring from an inadequate sense of creation? When I hear the problem you’ve just described, my reaction is to think, “Well I have a very different doctrine of how the world is, of how God made the world, how he interacts with the world than did the Greeks”.
My sense is, as Christians, as people who take the Bible seriously, we’ve always had a very different view of life. It’s a view that dignifies all of life, for it tells us that it was made good. It also gives us a robust understanding of the brokenness of life in sin, the capacity of us to do dreadful things. I think that what has happened in this recasting of the Bible in terms of the prevailing philosophical mood in Paul’s day, is that we’ve ended up with this practical split or dualism between the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and the physical, reason/emotion, clergy/laity, whatever. For many Christian people this split nags at them. Is the work I do with my hands really spiritual? Is it really my worship of God? Is it something that matters? Or is it a necessary evil filling in the time between the real business of going to church, or evangelizing my neighbours, or something else? I believe this dichotomy is entirely misleading and very unfortunate. It is a false distinction for me as a professional to ask, “Do I want to see my clients come to Christ?”. Absolutely. “Do I want my clients to build good businesses that dignify and help people?” Absolutely. I need make no choice between them. I desire both.
Some of the things you raise later in the book such as the clergy/laity distinction—that Christianity is defined as the clergy—do you see that deriving from this philosophical split? That if you locate the action in the abstract system away from everyday life, then the everyday becomes secondary?
Yes, that’s my argument. It can show up in a simple place like a Bible study. You have a leader full of good intention that the group will not become a sharing of ignorance, but will be anchored in the Scriptures. Yet the people there want to tell their stories. They want to tell what is happened in their lives and to engage with the text in ways that do that. But the leader gets nervous because he thinks, “Oh no, we’re drifting away from the Bible, and I must keep the Bible central”.
We must have conversations that are deeply grounded in the Bible—I never want a faith that drifts away from the Bible, I don’t want a Christ of my imagination, I want the Christ of the Scriptures. But I want conversations that robustly engage with the stuff of our real lives. I guess I’m pretty relaxed about the pathway. If I gather with my friends, and on one occasion 90% of our time is spent reading and talking about the Bible, and the next time or two it’s the other way around and 90% of the time we’re talking about our lives and what’s going on for us, I’m relaxed about that. In the totality of what is emerging in our lives, we’re engaging with each other and with Christ over the Scriptures to discern how we are going to live. We do not need some artificial measure—“Oh no, this conversation didn’t have enough Bible in it”—to me that’s a manifestation of the underlying split. I’m not trying to say that all ills trace back to Greek philosophy. I focused there because I wanted to show what was lurking behind Paul’s audiences and letters. Whatever its origins or expression, I think that nonetheless this split view of life has pervaded life such that we tend to undervalue the experiences and issues of our everyday lives in our insistence (rightly!) on wanting our faith to be subject to the Scriptures. I think the structures of our church, the way that we do church and theology, reinforce this split and devaluing. Not all the time, not in every instance, but too much.
I kept recognizing myself in the book in the things you’re critiquing, and at other times saying, “I’ve seen that problem, but I don’t think that’s where I’m at or my church is at”. At times I thought, is your beef really with classical theism, rather than our biblical-theology driven evangelicalism? One of the things I learned in my own theological education was this: if on the one hand you have liberal theology, process theology, and panentheism, where God and the world are on an uncertain journey together, that kind of metaphysics, and on the other hand you have classical theism with a very strong philosophical approach, seeing the system as all, then the strength of a biblical theology approach is that the story and the salvation history drive the categories of thought. A new metaphysics emerges which avoids some of the problems of classical theism but yet does not flip over to process thought or panentheism. At points I felt that what you were criticizing was classical theism, not the theology taught by Moore College etc.
Two responses to that:
The lesser one—about what’s taught at Moore, or Westminster or wherever. I see a lot of good things taught in these places. The emphasis on biblical theology is a welcome shift. But I also see a social system that remains and that is at odds with that very biblical theology. It makes it even more intolerable to me. If I thought in terms of classical theology, then at least this hierarchical structure could be rationalized. But once I see church in terms of biblical theology, as the assembly of God’s people which emerged through Israel’s history and culminated in Christ—if we took this really seriously, none of us would end up arguing for the conventions of being an Anglican or Presbyterian or Baptist or whatever.
I’m obviously a fan of biblical theology. I wrote Days are Coming. I studied at Westminster which was largely responsible for its modern revival as a method of doing theology. But I believe the method and its practitioners never fully left the split behind. Now we see a split between redemptive history and so-called ‘ordinary’ history. Some of the scholars with whom I have interacted operate with two constructs in their minds; ordinary history, the sources of first century social history, which is profane, and redemptive history which is the only pure and proper history. This can only, in the end, reinforce our disengagement from the world.
A symptom of this split is the reluctance of some evangelical scholars to engage with social-historical study of the New Testament. I’ve dialogued with biblical theologians who talk of my work as ‘dangerous’—they see the use of social-historical sources as dangerous. What is the fear here? What is the difficulty with me saying that Paul is a real flesh and blood person who lived in history as Jesus did, who spent the majority of his ministry with Gentiles who did not think the same ways that Jewish people did? Paul had to reshape his approach and his thinking, and in his letters we see evidence of his understanding of Gentile thought, and of Greek and Roman responses to him—what is the problem with me trying to draw from this wider social and intellectual background?
I’m not sure who you’ve talked to, but (if you asked me) I would say that, when I’ve read books that strongly emphasize the social and historical background to the text, the danger is that the excitement of that research and the possibility of reconstructing the background, often ends up overwhelming what the text is actually saying. You read books where on page 10 there is a suggestion that possibly x may have been part of the background to the text; then on page 15 it’s probably the case, on page 25 it is the case, and by page 35 we have completely recast what Paul was saying in 1 Corinthians 3 on the basis of our background knowledge.
However if you’re just saying that the Bible is a human document, from history, and you need to understand the Greek language and what the words mean in that milieu—that’s not dangerous, that’s just part of good reading.
You are right. That can happen. But I weigh that against the other danger, that when we don’t do it, we read the text in such a way that the system of church as we’ve always known it overwhelms the text. Or for the biblical theologian, the sense of an emerging grand pattern through Scripture controls what I read to the point that the text has to fit in. I don’t think one danger is any greater than the other.
Fair enough.
But what is lopsided is the fear. There appears to be a disproportionate fear about engaging with social-historical stuff. I know at Moore College that a little of this wider background is now drawn upon.
I think the reason it is seen as threatening is partly because of an abstract principle of theology that I must work only from the Bible to understand the Bible, but mostly it is a fear that the social-historical information leads us to ask different and difficult questions. We come to see that Paul was not nailing everything down. He didn’t act like a theologian. He didn’t attempt to formulate the one doctrine of doing church, one model of leadership and so on. I see tremendous commonness between the New Testament churches based on their commitment to the controlling narrative of Christ. But the way they gathered together left a lot of room for local expression. In the past, theologians have tended to think of this as the ‘intervening period’ until they got it all worked out. As if it was the immature stage. But it wasn’t. That provisionality was something very precious, that it goes to the heart of what the freedom and responsibility we have been given. We are meant to have the freedom to improvise.
It’s so hard to get this right. I felt this throughout your book. At some points I agree wholeheartedly, that we try too much to institutionalize and legislate uniformity. Your are right in saying that there should be room for movement and flexibility; that there is a great deal about which the New Testament is silent or gives only the merest hints; there are important principles but the implementation of them is not written in stone.
However, there are also things on which a ruling is given for all the churches.
Yes—if we don’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead, we can’t go anywhere.
Yes, but there are also structures and morality that are laid down as standards. The worldview that is based on the truth of Christ and his resurrection spills into all sorts of areas, with universal application—love is always right, adultery is always wrong. You can assert those while leaving room for lots of flexible arrangements. We mustn’t nail down more than the New Testament itself nails down.
I’d like to talk more about the relationship between the primitive church and the modern church. You’ve said that some see the primitive church as an immature model before it was sorted out.
The alternative, of course, is that it was pristine and perfect, and we must get back to it. But there was no fairy-tale era. From the very beginning, people were trying to work out what the message meant. The evidence of the letters is that some of the stuff they come up with was plain wrong, and loaded with their own personal or social agendas. That’s what prompted most of the letters. Some of it was also terrific.
Someone said to me recently, “Does your view mean I can’t be the pastor of a large church? It’s hard to reconcile my position in the congregation with the picture you’ve painted of Paul, or this large organisation with the gathering of small dinner parties in the first century”. I want to say that we have freedom to work this out. I’m not saying you can’t have a big church, or a paid pastor. But we attach strength to these things, as if they are marks of evangelical success. That’s naïve and flies in the face of Paul’s comments on strength-in-weakness. I want to engage with people in a variety of different churches. People from all those situations have said there’s something they can take from my book. Are there ways, they ask, that they can get some of the spirit of what I’m saying even in structures that seem contrary to it? I don’t have the answers, but it’s the right question, and I think yes there will always be ways. You don’t have to say, “Okay, we can’t have this church of 1000 people any more”. But if it is true that part of the original picture was conversations in which we learn together what it means for Christ to be part of our lives, and if we have constructed structures and systems that marginalize these conversations, how can we bring them back to the fore? Can we do that with 1000 people? That’s an exciting thing to try.
Lots of people read the book and say to me then, “Okay, what now?” They want five bullet points as an answer. The answer is to experiment. To improvise. There is no one right way to do it. You have to try and see what works with the people around you.
I believe many people are dropping out of the evangelical system because they can’t see the relevance any more. They find intolerable a way of insisting on the gospel which is actually a way of rationalizing abusive behaviour, where there is an unspoken assumption that unless you measure up to all manner of expectations, you don’t cut it any more. So people are walking away. I empathize with people who do that. Some merely spit the dummy and are being petulant. But most are not. There is a huge risk here. If church remains irrelevant to many people, we may end up not knowing what to do with church any more. I’ve seen young people who can’t see the relevance of current church structures, but don’t know what the alternative is. So they just drift. You can’t give up a regular meeting with other Christians. But if they don’t see a viable alternative, they just end up not meeting. I’m worried about those who are fed up with the old ways, however well intentioned they may be, who give up on church altogether. I don’t want to impose one way on people; I want to encourage people not to give up, to find ways to meet and teach one another the Scriptures so that those conversations with the gospel work for them. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with an illiterate generation who don’t know the Bible.
What do you see is the relationship between teaching—as in formal preaching—and the ‘conversation’ that you want to encourage?
The monologue has its place within the dialogue. I love teaching. The difficulty, however, is that teaching is often disconnected from the dialogue. Another difficulty is the social structures placed around preaching, the veneration of it. We don’t have a sacramental clergy/laity divide any more, but we do have a professional one. So unless you’ve passed through certain professional hoops you can’t do it—
Or conversely, if I have passed through the professional hoops, then I have authority and you should listen to me—
And if I question you, the preacher, as a congregation member, while many young preachers may love that, there are plenty who are threatened by it. Their sermons sell a packaged gospel of justification and grace that is in fact a new kind of legalism. They tell people how their world has to be. They preach as if their preaching cures all ills. They think to themselves, “I’m just telling them what God says”, but they’re not. They’re imposing their view of what the godly husband or wife or professional has to be. Each sermon comes with a whole system of spoken and unspoken expectations, so that if you don’t measure up, you’re on the scrap heap. If you question, you have trouble with authority. If you seek to widen the conversation, you aren’t biblical enough. A lot of terrible things are done to people who are just as devoted to Jesus and just as keen to evangelize their neighbours but who are pushed out of congregations. Sue and I have spent years listening to such people. It gives me a jaundiced view of life, and I know I must be careful to not simply be negative. But I know and love people on both sides of the ‘Sydney divide’, and I hear each side criticizing the other and it hurts me, and I find myself defending both sides to each other. There are too many conversations that go like, “The Bible says this, you’re unbiblical, end of conversation”.
True. It doesn’t do just to defend your position and not be willing to engage. But conversely, I see in the wider world a tendency to abandon the possibility of certainty. I see this in Anglicanism at the moment. We no longer have any certainty about what the Bible says. Is homosexuality right? We don’t know. The only thing we have any certainty about is that the system must be maintained at all cost.
I’m right with you. But surely we can find ways to disagree without pronouncing one another as ‘unbiblical’. Why can’t we rejoice in what God is doing through another brother or sister with whom we disagree on some issues? I recently spoke with a charismatic pastor, with whom I have all sorts of disagreements, who shared with me about his ministry and struggles, and I empathized with him and enjoyed hearing of the people who have come to know Jesus through him and his congregation, even if I don’t fully agree with everything he is teaching them. The test for me is, can I rejoice with this brother about people out there who have come to know Jesus through him? Or will I be cynical and suspicious and regard his ‘fruit’ as spoiled. That doesn’t mean we stop the conversations where we disagree. But I don’t want the friendliness to just be lip service—“Let’s say the nice affirming things up front so we can get on with belting each other”—that just doesn’t square for me with what I read in how for example Paul dealt with the so-called strong and weak at Corinth.
I guess what it comes down to in bald terms, in the end, is identifying the enemy and identifying your friends. In Paul, there is no mincing words with the enemy, or even with your friend if your friend has stuffed it up. He will draw a line and say, “Let me be perfectly clear on this”—especially with his co-religionists, he is totally uncompromising. It is working out at what point you draw the line.
We must draw a line. But we draw too many lines too bold in too many places. My concern is that too often we destroy brothers for whom Christ died in the name of being biblical.
I know you have to go. It’s been a really good conversation.
Thanks. I appreciate the fellowship.
