Embattled Reason by Reinhard Bendix

Author:Reinhard Bendix [Bendix, Reinhard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781412822442
Google: 1E4bQWxRiq0C
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 1989-01-01T05:00:13+00:00

The following verses (1 Cor. 2:6–9) certainly allow the interpretation that the apostle had performed miracles in the eyes of the community founded and promoted by him. But how these communities actually perceived Paul, and in particular the dialectic relationship between the apostle and the faithful, is beyond what we can know.

In the light of Paul’s own testimony in his letters, it is probable that he speaks of the miracle that has been worked in himself through his conversion and that he experienced personally. Beyond this, ever new miracles occur in Paul’s experience through the successful conversions of Gentiles in his own mission. This seems to be the decisive difference between Paul, the community organizer, and Jesus, the itinerant charismatic. Whatever may have been in the mind of Paul’s own disciples and of those he converted to Christianity, Paul himself experiences God’s miracles only in himself and in other persons. He does not claim to perform them. In a secular perspective, he would have jeopardized the authenticity of his own mission based on faith in God and Christ, if he had written of his own actions as the Evangelists were to write about the life of Christ and the revelations manifested by Him. On the other hand, Paul cannot deny the phenomenon of miracles either, if he is not to impair his absolute veneration of God’s power as revealed through Christ, and if he is not to disappoint altogether the expectations and the hopes for signs of that power among the believers of the community. And yet, neither can he simply yield (any more than Christ) to this craving for “signs,” particularly since he must distinguish himself as clearly as possible from the miracle-workers among the missionaries who were his rivals. In its details, we cannot know how Paul solved the problems and conflicts which confronted him in this matter of miracles.29

At any rate, one can infer from the critique of Paul which is implied in his letters that other missionaries appeared in Corinth and elsewhere by appealing to “signs” legitimating themselves as successors of Christ. One can also assume that in an apocalyptic age, the believers in their despair and hope were longing for such “signs.” In this situation the missionaries of the new faith were exposed to the temptation of competing with one another by means of such signs. And these inferences, derived from his letters, allow us to understand the vehemence with which Paul refuses to be drawn into this competition (2 Cor. 10:12–18). And yet he finds himself compelled to answer his rivals and to throw the suspicion of “false apostles, deceitful workers” back into their faces (2 Cor. 11:13). So it comes about that he calls self-praise foolish and rejects it, but still gets into the way of boasting, apologizing as he does so: “That which I speak, I speak it not after the Lord, but as it were foolishly, in this confidence of boasting” (2 Cor. 11:17).

In order to escape this vicious circle of “boasting,” Paul writes instead about the “visions and revelations of the Lord” (2 Cor.

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