Divine Accounting by Jennifer A Quigley;

Author:Jennifer A Quigley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

The Down Payment of Righteousness

And can it be that I should gain

An interest in the Savior’s blood?

—CHARLES WESLEY, “AND CAN IT BE?”

Theo-Economic Afterlives

WHAT IS THE AFTERLIFE of some of the theo-economic language in the Letter to the Philippians? What do other early Christian writers make of the blurring of divine-human financial exchange offered in the commodification of Christ in Philippians 3 or the security and venture language found in Philippians 1? In what ways is the economy of suffering outlined in the Letter to the Philippians put to use in other early Christian texts? How do other early Christian writers describe Christ as an object that can be bought, sold, traded, or otherwise used in divine-human transactions?

In this chapter, I take up these questions by turning to a letter or set of letters written some fifty to seventy-five years after Paul, partially preserved in Greek, Latin, and Syriac: Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians (Pol. Phil.).1 In addition to the composite nature of the text and limited manuscript tradition, some of the themes of the letter have struck scholars and interpreters as disjointed. Along with identifying the forwarding of Ignatius’s correspondence as an occasion for the letter, Polycarp addresses numerous other topics. These include a situation surrounding a former presbyter named Valens, who, along with his wife, “had engaged in some shady dealings, possibly involving the church’s finances,”2 as well as polemical concerns over teachings proliferating in the communities about the full humanity of Christ, resurrection, and future judgment.3 The majority of the letter is spent in interpretation of a wide set of texts ranging from the letters of Paul (including the Pastoral Epistles), 1 Peter, Tobit, and sayings of Jesus from the gospels, coupled with teachings about “righteousness” offered, Polycarp claims, at the request of the Philippians.4

By focusing on Polycarp’s use of some of the same theo-economic themes we found in Paul’s letter to Philippi decades earlier, it becomes clear that these topics are less disjointed than at first glance. There are important theo-economic ties between this letter’s focus on the use and misuse of money, exegesis of texts such as 1 Tim 6:10 (“for the love of money is the root of all evil”), concerns over false teaching, and emphasis on God’s judgment. As Laura Nasrallah has recently put it, “In the second-century Philippian community in Christ, we find that issues of money—the dangerous love of money, and how benefaction can be liberative—still persist.”5 These issues of money, however, and the theo-economic rhetoric in which they are framed, unfurl in different directions from those found in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, even as they echo some of its same themes.

As a starting point for considering these themes, I focus on Pol. Phil 8.1–2, where Polycarp introduces the idea that Christ is the “down payment for our righteousness.” We find that Polycarp understands both the use of money and following proper teaching within a juridical theo-economic context in which Christ has spent blood in suffering as a down payment

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