POLITICS – PHOOEY!

I concur wholeheartedly with Ted Williams III’s lament about political polarization within Christianity, and I applaud his personal commitment to openness. But I think that for true reconciliation, we are going to need more than just acknowledgment of the problem and the will to overcome it. That’s because the cause of the problem lies in what we all are as a culture, in how we all operate as modern Americans. We might, however, at least achieve more clarity by considering the ingrained ways we react to controversy and interact with each other as controversy plays out, in contrast to the habits of the more-peaceful early propagators of Christianity.

For a start, I’d like to point out something I’ve noticed in reading Paul. He was a master of rhetoric – not a surprise, as he very likely had a standard Greco-Roman education, including practice in competitive and display oratory. These activities got a great boost from the demise of the Roman Republic in 31 B.C. The oratorical training favored in Rome under the emperors looked not so much toward preparing young men to argue public policy or legal cases—since all important decisions now came from the top—as toward words as an art form; and this change must have been influential in all of Rome’s settled domains, including Tarsus, where Paul was raised.

According to the new emphasis, a boy had to be prepared to take up any premise, even a fantastical or ridiculous one, and rather than proving himself personally right on a particular point, as an aspiring politician of the previous era would have striven to do, he needed to charm the crowd and take it with him wherever he was assigned to go in the speech. 

I think this kind of training helped Paul in his challenging mission. He had many polarizing political and social and cultural issues to deal with, but in my view of his genuine letters as a whole, he did not so much argue positions, take stands, and issue decrees as make discourse on any subject a mere vehicle for his one essential message—his assignment, if you will—that Christ had died to save humankind from death.

There’s thus no sign of embarrassment—and the typical orator of his time wouldn’t have shown any—that in one passage circumcision could be the enemy (Galatians 5:2), and in another a religious distinction of great value (Romans 3:1-2); that at one moment governmental authority was slated to be wiped out in the apocalypse (I Corinthians 15:24), and at another it derived from God and required unquestioning obedience (Romans 13).

My favorite piece of Pauline rhetoric is his address to the Athenian Areopagus (Acts 17:22-31), in which he flatters their city as “extremely religious in every way,” because there are so many shrines – a quite absurd statement to come from a pious Jew like Paul. All of these structures honor false gods, hunks of marble or wood or metal, so that the Athenians are not religious but delusional. Paul’s words represent not what he believes, nor what his listeners believe he believes; but neither is he attempting a trick or a trivial gambit. Rather, he is making a skillful verbal approach to this judicial body of a proud and ancient city, the cradle of the European intellect. No one who bluntly challenged these people at the onset would get a hearing.

The worship of the Unknown God is also idolatrous (it is, to pagan minds, just insurance against the failure to sacrifice to any god who exists but whom they haven’t heard of), but Paul’s mention of this god’s altar is a brilliant means of asking his audience to contemplate the possibility that their religion may be wrong. They cannot of course picture or even name the Unknown God, yet they cultivate him, so (as Paul implies) isn’t worshipping material objects as gods ridiculous in contrast? He rounds his discourse out with two learned citations from Greek literature, one from a philosophic source so obscure that we can’t securely attribute it; the second from the quite recherché poet Aratus. The result is that the audience, instead of dismissing Paul out of hand, yields some lasting interest and eventually some converts.

It isn’t only in the secondhand Acts that we see Paul operating indirectly, tamping down his own views. In 1 Corinthians 14, the apostle makes his tactful yet playful way around the topic of speaking in tongues. The practice has the blessing of the Pentecost miracle, but it is easy to read between the lines in 1 Corinthians that at least in this Assembly, incomprehensible utterances are out of control and self-indulgent. Paul does not say straight out what he feels; if he were to judge and insult his followers concerning their modes of worship, he would be casting doubt on his entire mission, especially on the centrality of love that he has just written of in Chapter 13. He instead offers reassuring fast-talk around his guarded criticisms, conveying by the sheer repetitious length of the discourse that modesty and decorum in the Assembly are important.

His message seems more effective than an “honest” one would be. My own surmise is that he was not a devotee of speaking in tongues, as he claims, but rather quite suspicious of the practice. Where else could his assumptions come from that his followers can freely choose between prophecy (= preaching) and speaking in tongues and are not seized by the divine will (as the people reportedly were at Pentecost); and that the interpretation of any mysteriously worded inspiration can be provided for in advance? On a matter of sectarian tradition and culture even as important as this, the apostle might have virtually shrugged. Phooey about speaking in tongues, in itself. The important thing was for people to be there, hearing the news of their salvation. Whatever distracted or irritated them must be discouraged, but the rhetorical means by which this was done must not be a distraction or irritation in itself.

We have a very different environment to deal with than Paul’s. We’re a democracy and then some, where individuals bear a great deal more political responsibility. We’re supposed to own up to and stand by our opinions, because people literally live and die from the outcomes of our votes; nor can we leave this responsibility at the church door. But in comparison to Paul, do we take ourselves and our views too seriously? Do we really have our priorities right?