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Communion and Koinonia (Wright) |
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Bishop N.T. Wright is Bishop of Durham and an internationally renowned New Testament scholar. He was also a member of the Lambeth Commission on Communion which published "The Windsor Report 2004" in October. Among his more recent works is a commentary on Romans in the New Interpreter's Bible series. The following paper was given at the "Future of Anglicanism" Conference, held in Oxford in 2002. It is posted here, with the author's kind permission, entirely unedited. A helpful compilation of some of Wright's writings can be found at NTWRIGHTPAGE.COM. Communion and Koinonia: Pauline Reflections on Tolerance and Boundaries, by N.T Wright Introduction: Paul's Context From the very beginning, the church was faced with the problem if different cultures coming together. Even in the earliest days, when all Christians were Jews, there were Greek speaking Jews and /Hebrew-(or Aramaic-) speaking Jews, and problems arose between them. Even during the public career of Jesus, there were different reactions to him, including among his own followers, and we may suppose that these were sometimes to do with what we would call culture just as much as they may have been to do with personality, preference, temperament, level of faith, and so forth. Once the Christian message reached the Gentile world. Not least in a swirling pluralistic metropolis like Antioch, all the cultures of the Orient would be jostling together, and the impact of this rich mixture on the church was bound to be considerable. Coping with a pluralist environment was not, of course, anything new for Jews, and early Christianity remained very firmly Jewish. Diaspora Judaism had faced the challenge of the pagan environment for many centuries; nor was there an iron curtain screening off Palestine from pagan influences. 'Galilee of the Gentiles' may have been home to many zealous and Torah-observant Jews, but it also contained many Gentile institutions, and, ever since the time of Alexander the Great, Hellenistic culture had been the backdrop for ordinary life in the Middle East. Sometimes this culture had forced itself on Judaism, as under Antiochus Epiphanes, persuading some to compromise their Judaism, to go along with the pagan ways, and others to take to the hills, plot revolt, and prepare for martyrdom. The folk memory of this and other clashes were alive and well in the first century, not least among those who, like Saul of Tarsus, were 'zealous for Torah'. The problem of what counts as compromise, what is perfectly acceptable, what must be resisted at all costs, and what you may get away with for a while but should expect to tidy up sooner or later - all of this is therefore familiar ground to most Jews of the first century, certainly those who did any travelling. And that, of course, is what Paul spent a lot of time doing, living for a while not only in Antioch but also in Ephesus and Corinth, with shorter stays in other places around the Mediterranean and Aegean seaboard. He was thoroughly familiar with the different customs of different places, and with the problems of Christian behaviour that arose from them. His letters, particularly those to Corinth, reflect exactly this set of questions, and are a goldmine for those prepared to work at finding out what he really had to say. One theme of Paul's letters, particularly those to Corinth and Rome, in his emphasis on the need to tolerate, within the Christian fellowship, those who have different opinions on contentious issues. 1 Corinthians 8-10 and Romans 14 stand out here; though, from a somewhat different angle, Galatians 2 is also extremely relevant, and as we shall see Colossians 2 and 3 need to be factored into the picture as well. But it clearly will not do to simply say that Paul advocates 'tolerance' and leave it at that. In the same letters there are a good many passages in which he shows himself robustly intolerant of all kinds of types and modes of behaviour. How can we give an account of this? Was Paul just inconsistent, trying to get people to put up with one another's foibles but insisting that his prejudices at least were sacrosanct? This highlights our central theme, which is koinonia, 'fellowship' or 'partnership', and what it means in practice. Paul is our earliest Christian writer. He preached the gospel in a radically plural world, with every variety of culture, religion, politics, and ethics. He did indeed insist on justification by faith, and on the unity of Jew and Gentile, and by implication everyone else too, in Christ. What did he mean by this? What was the basis of his 'tolerance'? How do we explain the times when, despite urging tolerance and unity, he lays down firm rules, even to the extent of insisting that people who break them should be put out of Christian fellowship? As most of you will know, there has been a remarkable shift of opinion in Pauline scholarship over the last generation. The massive though uneven work of Ed P. Sanders, mainly in his book Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), heralded what was quickly called 'the new perspective on Paul'. The very phrase has become something of a red rag to several bulls over the last two or three years, and this is not the time to enter into the current debate in any detail. I want to state two things very clearly: first, that the so-called new perspective on Paul, with its main exponents as Sanders and Dunn, has made two or three important, accurate and theologically fruitful points; second, that it has also got quite a lot of things wrong, and has in certain cases not followed through its own insights where they properly should have gone. I am thus a critical insider to the New Perspective, supporting some of its main thrusts but remaining deeply critical at certain other points. If you wan to see how this works out in practice, read my new commentary on Romans, which is due out any day now in volume 10 of the New Interpreter's Bible. It simply won't do to wave the New Perspective away, as some have tried to do, and to go back to Martin Luther as though he solved all our problems. Luther got some things gloriously right and other things gloriously wrong. If, for instance, you have to choose between Luther and Calvin in New Testament theology, in my judgement you should normally go with Calvin; that, in fact, was where I myself came in, wresting with Charles Canfield's essentially Calvinistic interpretation of Paul and Romans, knowing that it was superior to the Lutheran and evangelical commentaries I was used to, but discovering at an exegetical level it didn't quite work. It was in that context, in the mid-1970's, that I read Sanders, and found that, though there was much I didn't agree with at the time and still don't, there was also much that was helpful in the essential task: allowing the text to speak for itself, instead of imposing our traditions upon it. Communion and Koinonia - pg. 2 | ||||||||
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