Paul and Religion

So many today love to contrast Jesus (and therefore themselves) with “religion” and “religion” is always bad and institutional and ritualistic while Jesus (and probably Paul, too) was not … but that means those who do this will be surprised when they read chp 13 of Wright’s massive study of Paul. One of the more innovative, if not controversial, dimensions of N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God, is that he contends Paul formed a “religion.” But he has to clear the ground first, so here goes:

The question was posed in terms of the standard protestant assumption, strengthened through the theology of Karl Barth: ‘religion’ was something humans did to try to gain favour with God, whereas‘revelation’ was what happened when God, as an act of free grace, chose to unveil his love or his purposes to humans.2 Seen from this point of view, Christianity was not a ‘religion’ at all, since it was about divine grace rather than human effort, and the question was whether the Old Testament shared this character, or whether it had to be seen as the Jewish version of the human effort to please God, or even to know him.

It would be interesting to map this discussion onto the larger German debates of the twentieth century: for instance, Deissmann’s insistence that Paul himself was an archetypal homo religiosus against Käsemann’s insis- tence that it was precisely against homo religiosus that Paul’s ultimate polemic was directed. That remains a task for another time. The particular insight came with the response by Professor James Barr, who had recently moved to Oxford from Manchester. He pointed out that in England the word ‘religion’ carried few if any of the negative connotations presupposed in the German title of the paper. In England, ‘religion’ meant, more or less, ‘what some people do on Sunday mornings’, with a penumbra of assump- tions about ethical standards and personal piety (perhaps with a dash of  what might be called ‘mysticism’). People might not wish to join in, but neither they nor the worshippers perceived ‘religion’ as a bad or dangerous thing (unless the mysticism got out of hand).

Times have changed, of course. We have more recently had Richard Dawkins and his ilk telling us that ‘religions’ are bad both for their practi- tioners and for society as a whole; a kind of turbo-charged and politicized version of the continental protestant position.3 There has also grown up in some evangelical, fundamentalist and similar circles a sense that ‘religion’ is what happens in boring mainline churches while they themselves are enjoy- ing something quite different: a living relationship with God, perhaps, rather than an outward form. Those, too, are issues to be addressed elsewhere, but they locate the subject of the present chapter in relation to the varied uses of the word in contemporary thought, with a warning against importing into a historical study the assumptions and prejudices of a much later age (1320-1321).

This is all the more complicated in that several works which have discussed Paul in terms of‘religion’ have not made this distinction clear. Locating the study of early Christianity within university and college ‘Departments of Religion’ has had a massive, if mostly hidden, impact on the way in which the subject is perceived, carrying the implication that we all know what ‘religion’ is –and that, for instance, it has little or nothing to do with politics or ‘real life’. When the traditional subject-matter of early Christianity is put into the box we now call ‘religion’, various things hap- pen (1321).

Wright turns to how EP Sanders’ grand and influential project on Paul (creating the new perspective) had an 18th Century understanding of religion, making Paul too Protestant and too soteriological, and at the same time not Christian enough … and then he peers in through the window at Ashton’s important and recent work… and then to Gerd Theissen’s “semiotic cathedral” image…

But once we understand 1st Century Roman world, “religion” is different. How so? What did it look like?