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{"id":8187,"date":"2012-11-27T18:43:38","date_gmt":"2012-11-27T18:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1921"},"modified":"2012-11-27T18:43:38","modified_gmt":"2012-11-27T18:43:38","slug":"be-first-second","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2012\/11\/be-first-second\/","title":{"rendered":"Be first second"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

<\/p>

In his contribution to The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays <\/a> $\"\"$ , John Barclay highlights the creativity of Paul\u2019s notion of reciprocity in the church. Reciprocity as Paul conceives it \u201chas the capacity to complicate power relations, and to work against the emergence of one-sided systems of gift, patronage, or authority.\u201d It is \u201cnot a neat hierarchy, in which the lesser honor the great, but a mutuality of honor-giving.\u201d When Paul tells the Romans (12:10) to seek to be first in bestowing <\/em> honor, he is in effect telling them to \u201cBe first . . . in being second,\u201d and he passes on this instruction \u201cnot to one party but to all.\u201d <\/p>\n

As Barclay says, this is not simply an inversion of a hierarchy, not simply the lowly exalted and the exalted lowered. It is a \u201cmore creative\u201d model of communal life \u201cin which community members continually invent ways to honor each other,\u201d a see-saw with ever-shifting relations of gift and reception, of \u201csuperiority\u201d and \u201cinferiority.\u201d <\/p>\n

These \u201cdynamic\u201d acts of deference that run \u201ccontinually both ways <\/em> \u201d aim not merely at the unity, albeit \u201cdifferentiated unity.\u201d Rather, for Paul unity is \u201cpart of a larger shared commitment to processes of mutual construction . . . . What is in view here is a continuing project in which each party seeks to draw out the potential of the other, and both are committed to the construction of a community that is perpetually being remade and further developed.\u201d The goal is the mutual construction that Paul describes with the word \u201cedification\u201d (424-5). <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"