Michael has responded and suggested that I am ‘blurring the lines’. I would like to counter and argue that I see the lines as already being blurry, and feel that Michael is trying to make them clear and obvious where they aren’t.
In discussing my earlier invocation of the evidence of Acts 17, Michael takes what I feel is a typical conservative ‘either/or’ approach. Paul was evangelizing the philosophers in Athens, and so James’ view must be that Paul was saying that ‘they were all OK’. Obviously the latter view is not what the text says, and so Michael can declare victory for his own viewpoint.
Not so fast.
There are multiple parties present on Mars Hill, we are told. Paul is encountering Stoics and Epicureans. Even so, I wish to point out that he is not without common ground. But note who is missing: Socrates and his heirs, such as the Platonists. Where are they?
If we take Luke’s depiction of Paul in this story completely seriously, we could be forgiven for concluding that Paul is representing “their side” in this debate. He is depicted as being accused of “advocating foreign gods”, the very accusation levelled against Socrates. The echoes of Socrates are noted in many commentaries (and in online articles) and need not be rehearsed here. The line that Michael wishes to draw so clearly seems to run into the Greek philosophers’ camp to embrace Socrates over against the other views Paul argued with in the story in Acts 17. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria would not be surprised, I imagine. My point was never that Paul thought “everyone was OK” and represented a universalist approach. My point was that Paul found genuine faith and experience of God to cut across every conceivable boundary marker that separates people. This is what I think of as “inclusivism”, for want of a better term.
It is when Michael gets to figures like Abraham and Melchizedek that it becomes clear how much his presuppositions dominate his understanding of these stories. Melchizedek, we are told, rejected the idols of Canaan and worshipped only one God. Perhaps. A more likely scenario is that he was a devotee of the Canaanite high God, El, as was Abraham himself. More striking still is Michael’s willingness to sacrifice even Abraham’s salvation to his presupposition that there can be no salvation outside of Christ. Where I feel confident that Paul was looking to Abraham as by definition a paradigm for the people of God who are defined (in one way or another) as his children, Michael seems happy to make subtle distinctions between being ‘righteous’ and being ‘saved’. I think the way I am reading the text is far more natural. I would welcome input from other readers who may wish to assess both our readings, and perhaps propose still others.
I asked at an earlier point in the conversation whether the coming of Christ is understood to make it harder to come to God. Michael has at last come right out and said that his answer is “yes”:
We might take the view that the cross, since it was established before the foundations of the world, covers those prior to it (at least in God’s mind) who were faithful to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, after the cross event, this cannot be the case as “belief” and “confession” in Christ are a MUST.
So apparently individuals like Abraham were acceptable to God before Christ came, but are now unacceptable to God because Christ came, even though Paul uses Abraham as a paradigm for saving faith in the present. Once again, this exclusivist reading does not seem to me to be an obvious way of understanding the text – any more than a universalist one. An inclusivist, on the other hand, can regard the coming of Jesus as a way of inviting those formerly excluded to be included, without thereby excluding those who were previously acceptable.
Let me conclude by saying that the author of Hebrews was not “probably Paul”. I doubt I am alone in recalling, as a Greek student who had tackled passages from the authentic Pauline letters, getting to Hebrews and suddenly feeling overwhelmed (and learning very quickly to expect to meet the genitive absolute construction repeatedly). I doubt that anyone who has studied these letters in Greek, whether in modern times or in the ancient Church, really thinks Paul wrote it.
Drew is now a full-fledged participant in the conversation, and since he made the point about what it means to have heard better than I probably would have, I will simply direct readers to his post.
Finally, I noticed that the last post was the 500th since I moved my blog to Blogger. Yet another reason to celebrate!
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