by Peter Enns
Of course, this brings us to the apostle Paul, who wrote perhaps as many as thirteen of the twenty-one letters* and who is always easy to understand and never ever says anything controversial. See, I left the snark aside for almost a whole page.
Does God Influence Elections? Dear Lord, I Hope Not
Protestants love Paul, because Paul said that we are justified by God’s grace and not by works. In Martin Luther’s hands, Paul’s words launched the Protestant Reformation back in the sixteenth century. Ever since, Protestants have had an obsessive relationship with the apostle, judging by the fact that, as a lifelong Protestant, I have heard a lot more sermons on Paul than the Gospels (or Old Testament).
Paul is “our guy,” and we Protestants continue to expect from him clear direction about what to believe and what to do. And Paul certainly seems to oblige. He has that alluring black-and-white, decisive, uncompromising “just do what I say” quality that some of us just can’t get enough of. It’s almost as if Paul’s letters have become the Protestant version of the Law.
But that’s fine, as long as we remember that biblical laws are, as we saw, evasive and fidgety little buggers that don’t really tell you what to do. Reading Paul’s letters for clear divine guidance is ironic, and has frustrated more than one Bible reader. No wonder Protestants have a long history of splinter groups hating each other over disagreements about what Paul means.
As with the Law, wisdom is needed when reading Paul’s letters—perhaps more than with any other biblical writer because so much is expected of him.
We could throw a dart at Paul’s letters to see the point. Oh, look! Mine landed on Romans 13:1, which makes the rounds during every presidential election (as long as your candidate wins): Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.
This raises some questions, like: “Are you serious?”
Not to escalate this too quickly, but does this include Hitler or other genocidal rulers? Do we just goose-step through life and give our “governing authorities” a free pass because their authority is “instituted by God”? How about some wiggle room? And does this include King George III, because if so, the entire United States of America has been operating outside of God’s will for two and a half centuries. Were we wrong? (I’m asking for a friend.)
And as I write this, Romans 13:1 recently made the rounds on the American political scene to shield the administration from criticism for separating illegal immigrants from their children at the border—which is just one of many reasons why politicians should not be allowed near a Bible without adult supervision.
But what if politicians are just plain corrupt—accepting bribes, covering up crimes, ordering tax breaks for the rich and tax hikes for the poor, sponsoring racism, and on and on? Is anything God’s will just because rulers say so?
Yes, this verse is in the Bible, and yes, Paul doesn’t leave room for debate. But Paul’s “command” still needs to come under the scrutiny of wisdom—as with everything else we read—so we can discern how or if it applies to us today in our moment in time.
Yes, even Paul’s letters bend the knee to wisdom.
Again, it would help to remember that reading Paul’s letters today is quite literally reading someone else’s two-thousand-year-old mail; we do not share with Paul and his readers their moment in time. Whatever we might think of Paul, he wasn’t an idiot; I’m sure he had very good reasons for saying what he says for his situation. But it strikes me as very bad form to take Paul’s comment written in the context of the early years of the Jesus movement in the Roman Empire (of all places), simply parachute it into the landscape of American politics, and conclude that God never wants us to criticize a sitting president because God put him or her in office.
We can’t know exactly what motivated Paul’s black-and-white comment, but a factor that shouldn’t be ignored is the uneasy recent history of Jews in Rome. Emperor Claudius had exiled Jews from Rome around the year 50 CE and they only recently returned after the emperor’s death.
Paul wrote Romans in that setting, and Romans 13:1 may have been a word of wisdom for the church to keep a low profile and not stir up trouble. As the capital of the Roman Empire and therefore the world, Rome was a strategic center for the successful spread of the gospel. The gospel wasn’t about overthrowing Rome, and so they needed to play it smart.
Of course, other explanations are possible. Perhaps Paul was playing on the pro-Roman political devotion of at least some of his readers, seeing that one of Paul’s main reasons for writing Romans was to raise money (read a little between the lines of Rom. 15:22–33). Whatever the reason—perhaps all the more so because we don’t know what it is—it is simplistic to read this verse as universally binding upon all believers at all times and places, regardless of circumstances.
A command for that time does not make it a command for all time. That can be a hard lesson to accept, especially of Paul, but it is true.
It’s possible that Paul is echoing a line of thinking from his Jewish tradition—at least part of it—since the Babylonians were seen by some Old Testament writers as God’s instrument for punishment (Jer. 28:14; 29:1–14; Hab. 1:5–11) and the Persian king Cyrus as God’s servant for bringing the exiled Jews back home (see Isa. 45:1, 13). Yet Jewish tradition also has a strand that looks forward to the time when the yoke of their oppressors will be broken (Isa. 9:4; 10:27; Jer. 30:8). And Jews, let’s not forget, rightly rebelled against the wicked king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, which led to a period of (uneasy) Jewish political semi-independence for about a century.
The Jewish tradition includes diverse, context-dependent views on what to think of foreign rule. And with that in mind, it’s worth mentioning that Paul was hardly a model of consistency. He also engaged in politically subversive activity, namely, when he declared again and again that Jesus is “Lord.” That word carried political as well as religious freight in the Roman Empire; it was a title used for the “divine” Caesar. To speak of another as “Lord,” not simply over some people (Jews), but over all people, including Caesar and his subjects, was insurrection, which eventually led to some jail time for Paul; he likely spent his last years under house arrest, ironically in Rome (Acts 28:30–31).
So, for Paul, sometimes you hold your ground and invite Rome’s wrath and sometimes you don’t—not unlike the choice we saw in Proverbs 26:4–5: sometimes you answer a fool and sometimes you don’t.
Far from being an unalterable law that simply has to be obeyed by all at all times because Paul said it and it’s in the Bible, Romans 13:1 is a demonstration of wisdom at work, of choosing the best path for Paul’s here and now. Rather than simply doing what Paul told the Christians in the Roman capital to do two thousand years ago, we today follow Paul best by exercising the same kind of wisdom he did—discerning for ourselves how best to follow God in our time and place.
Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals: No Big Deal, Nothing to See Here
Accepting the invitation of wisdom as we read Paul for today is a responsibility we can never shed. Which brings me to three controversial issues in Paul’s letters that have generated enough heat among Christians to melt the moons of Neptune: slaves, women, and homosexuals.*
(Deep breath.)
As for slavery, Paul could have been clearer. He never actually argues for it, but he does assume its legitimacy, as does the Old Testament; he never once calls the institution itself into question and certainly never abolishes it. That being said, major props to Paul for pushing the social boundaries of his day, for example, when he claims that slaves are “equal” to free persons in God’s eyes (Gal. 3:28)—which did not accord with the thinking of the ancient Israelites (recall from chapter 3 that slaves did not have the rights of free Israelites).
In a society based on honor and shame, where the social pecking order was sacred, claiming that slaves and free persons were the same in God’s eyes would be like telli
ng white supremacists that they are no better in God’s eyes than people of color. So Paul is pushing the boundaries. But the church has had a far from flawless track record when it comes to slavery. There are instances that are horrid and shameful throughout the history of Christianity, not least of which is the saga of buying and selling Africans (to the glory of God, of course). And yes, as hard as it is to believe, even today I have heard Christians making atrocious arguments from their rulebook Bible for why slavery of non-white humans is part of God’s design.
Having said that, if you asked your average Joe and Jane on the street what Christians think about slavery, they’d probably say that Christians denounce slavery as immoral. Generally speaking, in other words, the church is known for having accepted Paul’s boundary-pushing trajectory and pushing it farther. Freedom and equality eventually won out as the norm over passages like, Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling (Eph. 6:5), a compliant go-to passage of nineteenth-century Southern slave owners.
Actually, slavery is a really good example for us to look at here. That issue caused a real crisis for Christians in the nineteenth century who thought the Bible held the clear answer. The problem is that Northern abolitionists and Southern anti-abolitionists both made their case by pointing to the same Bible.
The thing is, when the Bible is viewed as a once-for-all rulebook, the anti-abolitionists had a slam-dunk case, because you have passages from both parts of the Bible that assume the institution of slavery. The abolitionists had to argue differently—on the basis of the Bible’s trajectory toward justice and equality. That type of argument is a wisdom argument, tied not to the words on the page, but to discerning where the Spirit seems to be leading. I’m glad to say that the wisdom way of handling slavery won the day—at least in theory. The racism that lay beneath is, tragically, still with us.
But my point is that the just way of addressing human slavery had to go beyond the Bible—it had to take seriously “the moment” and read it well.
The Bible couldn’t be counted on to settle a pressing moral issue of the day—whether God favors light-skinned over dark-skinned humans (if they even are human). That should have been a wake-up call to everyone that knowing what to do can’t be left to finding a Bible verse.
The Bible isn’t set up for that sort of thing. The Bible is ambiguous enough for us to find there what we already believe. The answer to this issue would need to be found elsewhere—in the realm of wisdom, not Bible verses.
The same principle of wisdom holds for Paul’s views (plural) on women. Many Christians today and throughout history have clung fast to the view that pastoring, preaching, teaching, and other such ordained authoritative churchly functions are restricted to men, because Paul says things like, Women should be silent in the churches (1 Cor. 14:34) and I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man (1 Tim. 2:12).*
But, not unlike his views on government, Paul seems to be comfortable with multiple options. In Romans 16:1 he entrusts Phoebe to bring his letter to the Roman church and in 16:7 praises a woman named Junia as a prominent apostle, a role often assumed in some Christian circles to be reserved for males. In 1 Corinthians 11:4–5, Paul takes for granted that women are praying and prophesying (speaking for God) in public right alongside men rather than being “silent.”
The simple fact that Paul isn’t consistent about women should never be seen as some logical embarrassment to be overcome—like a misprint in a legally binding contract or an owner’s manual that has to be corrected—but as a clear sign that wisdom thinking is at work. We follow Paul’s lead best when we likewise exercise wisdom in our here and now. Christians have always had to choose which of Paul’s two trajectories to follow, and Christian history is replete with both.
Knowing something of the world Paul lived in may help us see what it means to follow Paul with wisdom rather than as a dispenser of information.
In a rather striking move, we read that husbands and wives should submit to each other: Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ (Eph. 5:21). The words that follow, however, aren’t exactly the stuff of women’s liberation: Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord (5:22).* On the social ladder at the time, women had a clearly defined rung—below men. I seriously doubt that “women’s rights” as we think of them today were on Paul’s radar, given his time and place. Simply lighting a match to the social ladder, as some of us might have hoped he would do, would have gotten him nowhere. A move like that would have actually erected barriers for the Christian mission in that Roman world. Like our trying to start up a community organization that barred women from positions of rank and authority, it would never have gotten off the ground.
Which brings us to an ironic twist that gets right to the heart of reading Paul’s letters with wisdom at our side.
Paul’s comments about women straddled the line between social expectations of the day and Christian liberation from those expectations. To have obliterated those expectations would have impeded his mission to spread the gospel. Today, cultural expectations are not what they were in the Roman Empire of Paul’s time, and it is our responsibility to, likewise, be aware of those expectations and not obliterate them, lest the mission of spreading the gospel be compromised.
And so, taking seriously today Paul’s words about women would mean employing the same principle of wisdom, but arriving at the completely opposite conclusion about the role and status of women, given our cultural expectations. Paul brought gender equality into his world as far as he could. Christians today can—and should—build on that wise trajectory and take it farther.
A paradox: only by “disobeying” Paul’s “command” are we able to follow the path of wisdom he was following.
Finally, whether Christians today should accept same-sex relationships and marriage equality is a lightning rod of controversy (in case you haven’t noticed). This issue is, I feel, a complex one in which we need to keep a lot of plates spinning. This isn’t the book for working through all that.* Here I just want to point out a self-evident fact: although you will always have your quotient of belligerent people in any Christian debate, most of those involved in this one are good and decent people who disagree about both what the Bible says and what sort of guidance we can expect from the Bible on this issue. At least that is my experience.
As I see it, as in the slavery issue, the side of the sexuality debate that can more easily draw on the Bible for support is the “homosexuality is a sin” side—it’s relatively easy to find passages that are negative, but not a single passage that affirms what we call same-sex relationships. But the very fact that polar opposite opinions exist among actual Christians shows us that there is more going on here than what first meets the eye.
In my opinion, digging into Paul’s words introduces us to some context-dependent complexities that might not be apparent at first blush. It’s not enough to cite, for example, Romans 1:24–27 as clear proof that God hates queers without struggling with how human sexuality was understood in Paul’s day.
Paul certainly decries degrading passions and “unnatural” acts, and I certainly don’t think he would be advocating for Gay Pride Day.
But some argue that the idea of “sexual orientation” was not on anyone’s radar back then and so same-sex intercourse was seen not as doing what comes naturally for those born that way, but evidence of being so depraved and sexually out of control that “natural” outlets aren’t enough and you spill over to what is “unnatural.” Also, one of the men in same-sex intercourse would have to assume the submissive female role (as would one woman the dominant male role), thus exchanging the natural for the unnatural (see Romans 1:26–27).
As with any other issue, we have to consider that Paul’s words might not be an eternally binding command, but a comment that assumes a culture of sexuality different from our own.
Further, some see Paul’s entire introduction in Romans 1:18–32 as a setup for the rest of the argument in the chapt
ers that follow. Paul seems to be dealing with tensions between Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus, and a core purpose of the letter is to convince them that they are all on the same page—neither group has higher status than the other. Jews do not get a free pass simply because they are children of Abraham and have Torah. Greeks are not superior simply because they aren’t subject to laws like circumcision and eating only clean foods.
In Romans 1, Paul is outlining specifically Greco-Roman types of behaviors beginning with idolatry and sexual depravity and continuing in the Greco-Roman “vice list” in verses 29–31. As a Jew, Paul begins his letter of reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles by slamming Greek culture for being ungodly. And one can perhaps see Paul’s fellow Jews listening to this portion of the letter and feeling a bit good about themselves—here is Paul, one of “us,” putting these Gentiles in their place. Go get ’em, Paul.
But then Paul turns the tables on his fellow Jews in chapter 2, which he more or less keeps up for the remainder of the letter. Jews, Paul argues, are in no different a place in God’s eyes than these depraved Gentiles. Why? Because though they have Torah, they don’t actually keep it—which makes them worse off. The punch line (the first of many, actually) comes in Romans 3:22–23: There is no distinction [between Jew and Gentile], since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
When Paul says all have sinned, we might think he is speaking on the individual level, but he is certainly speaking on the corporate level: instead of all, read “both”—meaning both Jews and Gentiles—and then we’ll see better what Paul is getting at.
