Today I'm working back through an incredible volume on Philippians by Stephen E. Fowl from the Two Horizons New Testament Commentary Series that I'm requiring for my Pauline Letters class at Rochester College. I was struck again today by the power of some of the things Fowl says, drawing them out of both the implicit and explicit theology of Philippians. I thought I would toss a few out here for thought.
If one sees the aim of the life of discipleship as growing into ever deeper communion with the triune God and with others, then one of the things that contemporary Christians can learn from Paul is this habit of being able to narrate the story both of one's past and one's present circumstances from the perspective of those who have learned their place in Christ's ongoing story. (p. 41)
... Paul's self is de-centered.... The crucified and risen Christ provides both the central point for the drama of God's salvation and central focus for Paul's life. Of course, the fact that one may speak of Paul's self as de-centered does not mean that Paul or any other disciple is free from being responsible for his actions. Paul's is a self in which God is at the center, ordering and opening courses of action in the light of the ends and purposes of god's economy of salvation. Instead of controlling and directing circumstances, the primary task for these theologically de-centered selves have to do with perceiving the movements of this larger drama into which they have been drawn and appropriately fitting themselves into that drama in word and deed. (p. 42)
In a situation where the Roman Empire would be expected to exert a great deal of control over Paul's body, Paul counters that Christ will be magnified by the way in which he comports himself. Whether he lives or dies, Paul's body will be, as he has always been, Christ's text rather than the empire's....
Paul claims here remind us that our actions display aspects of our character as Christians. Christians in America may appear to have far greater control over their bodies than the imprisoned Paul had over his. We would do well to recognize, however, that at the beginning of the twenty-first century all Americans are under unprecedented and minute levels of surveillance. Americans' purchases, reading materials, and the form and content of their communication are under the scrutiny of an extraordinary number of interested parties. [Eric's aside: just notice the household specific coupons you get from your local grocery store. Why do you think they give you that key fob?] At the very least, most of these parties seek to create and manipulate the desires of all of us and to offer alternative narratives into which we all might be tempted to fit our lives....
The desires we manifest, our patterns of consumption, the ways in which we get, hold, and distribute wealth, can all be occasions where either we are disgraced or Christ is magnified. (p. 48)
[All language about God] are attempts to to speak about a mystery toward which humans can only gesture with a variety of different metaphors and analogies. (p. 51)
God's love for us will not allow God to offer us anything less than God's self. (p. 52)
Paul's choice [for life instead of death, Phil 1:20-26] analogously replicates the climactic movement in the divine economy of salvation. Seeing his situation as part of that larger story provides Paul with a compelling exemplar of how he should comport himself in his imprisonment. (p. 52)
Clearly, Paul is not advocating violent opposition to the empire here (1:30). Nevertheless, he makes it very clear that the interests and aims of the church are very different from and largely at variance to the interests and aims of the empire. More generally, once this notion of dual citizenship is applied in a contemporary theological context it starts to demonstrate a tendency toward a posture of accommodation to the modern state. Christian life then becomes a matter of private transactions between believers and God, while the state exercises control over the public lives of Christians.... As modernity has so powerfully shown, this results in a privatizing of Christian convictions so that they can coexist alongside one's loyalty to the state. This allows the state effectively to discipline the church, to destroy the church's identity as the material body of Christ in the world, to co-opt the bodies of believers for service to the state and, ultimately, to erase the possibility of Christian dissent that might be substantial enough to create martyrs. While Christians will need to discuss and discern together the concrete shape of a common life worthy of the gospel in the light of the particular secular orders they find themselves under, they must avoid thinking of themselves as holding dual citizenship. They have one Lord and serve only one master." (p. 61-2)
Christians in the U.S. should not assume that the church here does not suffer state-sponsored opposition because of the benevolence of our government or the protective powers of our constitution. I suspect that it is much more the case that the common life of most churches is so inadequate to the gospel and our disunity so debilitating that the state has nothing to fear from us. (p. 71)
...does the eucharist taste bitter to us in the midst of our divisions? (p. 73)
... the unity or communion of believers is intimately tied to our salvation or communion with God. Thus, if salvation is a gift of God's grace, then the unity of te body of Christ is also a gift of grace. (p. 73)
What do we make in the light of our current situation of division? The most extreme way of putting the matter is to say that the church's witness to the principalities and powers is falsified or undermined by division. At the very least, one must say that the church's witness to the principalities and powers is hindered and frustrated by division. (p. 76)
If church division represents a series of wounds to the one body of Christ, then we must stop anesthetizing ourselves to this wound. (p. 77)
And those are just the things he teases out of Philippians 1!
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