Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? by J. R. Daniel Kirk

Author:J. R. Daniel Kirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL006720, REL006100, Bible. N.T. Epistles of Paul—Theology, Jesus Christ—Teachings, Narrative theology
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

Breaking Down Our Dividing Walls

Paul and Jesus share a frame of reference when it comes to questions of judgment and inclusion of outsiders: Jesus is the Messiah who is therefore Lord over all things and the One to whom we must be faithful if we would enter into the eternal salvation that Jesus’s death and resurrection bring about. Those who submit to Jesus’s reign are themselves the family of God. And because following Jesus determines the family identity, anomalous behavior that strays from the way of Jesus is a matter of mutual concern and correction. The flip side of this familial identity, however, is that judgment of outsiders is left in the hands of God while we are simultaneously called to see Jesus’s reign more fully realized on earth through our own being sent into the world to make disciples.

Thinking about our postmodern cultural context, this complex set of interrelated themes creates both opportunities and challenges. First, the opportunities.

The Jesus who is Lord over all things will not demand that the church become culturally homogenous. The gospel is always contextualized. This, Franke’s “indigenization principle,” is what we have seen throughout this book as Jesus and Paul have told the same story for different contexts. The whole New Testament is a testimony to how people in different contexts think about, articulate, and perform the gospel differently. Even with an all-encompassing, cosmic narrative to tell, Christianity admits of a rich diversity. More than this, it demands that we continually reassess how to tell the story so that it makes sense in the worlds that we live in.

In a society marked by its plurality of cultures, we discover that many of our judgments about the world seem normal to us simply because of the context we are immersed in. Encountering people from countries that do not share the industrialized world’s perspectives on historical “development,” people from other parts of our own countries, or even simply people from our same towns who do not traverse the same Christian terrain where we so freely move—each of these can have the effect of making us more self-aware and self-critical about how we articulate the Christian message.

And here is where Paul becomes an invaluable resource for the church. As the first person to take the gospel across cultural boundaries, he simultaneously insisted that his gentile converts had become part of a story that had not previously defined their identities (they are transformed) and that they did not have to adopt the peculiar ethnic identity that marked out Jewish Christians (the gospel became indigenous to their culture). A transformation had taken place, but it was a metamorphosis into the story of the crucified Christ and the God of Israel, not a metamorphosis into the likeness of the dominant Christian subculture.

And so as we grow in our awareness that our ways of articulating Christian theology are deeply contextualized, we open ourselves to the possibility that postmodern or non-Western cultures might choose not to adopt our way of speaking and living Christianly—and that such difference within the body need not be a source of division.

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