CHANGING THE CALENDAR WON’T BE EASY

Recent reports in the media suggest that both Roman Catholic Pope Francis and Anglican Archibishop of Canterdury, Most Rev. Justin Welby, are prepared to discuss the possibility of changing the date of Easter. The Coptic Orthodox Pope, Tawadros II, has said that he is also ready the join the negotiations. I wonder what they would agree on - if they ever did.

The difficulty we face is changing the present calendar in any way is a confusion of religious and secular measurements of the year. Our present system was approved by Roman Catholic Pope Gregory XIII on February 24, 1582. That change from the ancient Julian calendar, established in 46 BCE by Julius Caesar, occurred only in those states where papal authority applied.

Great Britain, a few other western European states and Scandinavia demurred. No longer politically subservient to the Roman Catholic Pope`s degrees they continued to use the Julian calendar for another two generations. Not until 1752 did Britain and its American colonies accept the Gregorian calendar we still follow worldwide.

At the same time Christian churches throughout Western Europe and across the world retained their traditional liturgical calendars featuring the beginning of the Christian Year as the First Sunday in Advent, the fourth Sunday prior to Christmas celebrated on the 25^th of December. That made it possible for churches to celebrate the great festivals of Christmas and Easter, as well as days for fasting and saints’ days throughout their special annual cycle.

Not so the Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Some of them still retained their practice of following the Julian calendar. While Western Christians celebrate their Christmas on December 25^th and the secular world generally celebrates New Year’s Day on January 1, Orthodox Christians wait until January 6 for their Christmas celebrations.

Modern political, commercial and industrial activities have not been particularly observant of any religious calendar. In this age of widespread understanding of religious and cultural differences, each community has its own calendar related to its specific culture. For instance, in 2016 the Chinese New Year begins on February 8^th. The Jewish New Year, called Rosh HaShanah, begins at sunset on Sunday, October 2^nd and continues until Tuesday, October 4^th. The Muslim New Year, Muharram, begins on October 8^th.

The date of Easter is also a problem. It follows the lunar calendar. Traditionally the Christian festival of Easter and its associated preparation of six weeks of Lent began on Ash Wednesday, a day of special penitence set as the Wednesday of the week before the first Sunday of Lent. So this year it began yesterday, February 10, so Easter will celebrated on March 27. In this unusual order Easter Day was established as the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox by the Council of Nicea in 325.

I once wrote an article proposing a more orderly secular calendar totally separate from any religious calendar or our present secular way of measuring time. My proposal gave each month a full thirty days making an even 360 days in each year. Then, between the old and the new years, we all take a five day universal vacation. That would still need one extra day every four years, but surely no one would protest that.

 The beauty of such a system would definitively separate the religious and liturgical celebration of Christian festivals from the secular and commercial calendar marking the end of one year and the beginning of each new one. After all, it was the political influence of Roman Catholic Pope Gregory XIII that established our current calendar in February 1592. It would also separate other religious cultural celebrations of a new year from our increasingly secular practices.

We still mark the beginning of a new year as January 1^st because in the Roman calendar that was the feast day of the god Janus from which the name of the month is derived. Janus was thought of as a god who faced both forwards and backwards. That is still a very human way of marking the new year. At different times and in different cultures, the beginning of a new year has also been celebrated at the spring or the autumnal equinoxes. But that wouldn’t work except in the Northern Hemisphere. Even then it could vary as much as three or four different days from year to year. We would still be in a mess, wouldn’t we? 

COUNTING TIME

“Our feeble ways of counting time, with a curious mixture of Roman/Greek/Julian/Gregorian elements in our calendar, none the less has powerful symbolic value.” So wrote Professor James Tabor, of the University of North Carolina, in his brief New Year’s Day blog https://jamestabor.com/

His point is well taken. Our calendar is a mess, but it is still our calendar. This curious mixture of religious, secular and meteorological data has a hoary history. Most confusing of all its strange details is this month, February 2016.

This ancient rhyme about it was one of our early childhood learnings about the calendar.

Thirty days hath September, 

April, June and November;                                                                                             excepting leap year, once in four,                                                                  

February has one day more.

There have been various alternative English versions over the centuries. A Latin version has been dated as far back as 1488.

The Weather Network, Canada’s most quoted source of weather information, a posted very helpful article that explains why 2016 is another leap year. As the ancient rhyme states the term comes from the necessary addition of an extra day every four years to account for the fact that each day is only 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds long, not 24 hours. That is how long it actually takes our planet Earth to make one revolution on its axis. Over the years that brief daily gap in time keeps adding up.

A solar year, the time it takes for the earth to make its annual orbit of the sun from one spring equinox to the next, takes actually 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds longer. To keep the measurement of years on the calendar in synch with the actual length of the solar year, we “leap over” one day every fourth year. If we didn’t, our calendar would become out of order with the actual seasons by as much as one month every 125 years. It has all happened before. That is why we have to correct our calendar every now and then.

For all the details, see this very detailed and diagramed posting:

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/leap-year-2016-puts-february-29-back-on-the-calendar/61821/

So why don’t we change the way we count time? That’s another subject altogether.

From Here To Eternity

This phrase has been in English poetry, prose, comedy and film since 1892. It was first penned by Rudyard Kipling in his poem, “Gentlemen-Rankers.” The poem was about enlisted men who came from upper class backgrounds but had been demoted to the ranks in disgrace. They were cavalry troopers of the British Imperial Army during the Victorian era. As early as 1902 students at Harvard and Yale Universities made fun with the chorus of Kipling’s poem as the “Whippenpoof Song.” The later book and film of that title told of American sailors at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in1941.

It isn’t just an idle phrase. Kipling’s poem referred to with the deadly business of war: “To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned, to my brethren in their sorrow overseas.” Soldiers of any nation who served in Afghanistan or Iraq in recent years would recognize the bitterness it expresses, perhaps as the prelude to PTSD.

Poetic phrases and titles can be turned to other uses - redeemed, as it were, from the cruel bitterness to the beautiful hope of life beyond death. Alister McGrath has done so. Trained as a molecular biologist and a theologian, he is now Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, Oxford, as well as the Andreos Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, and the President of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. In his writings, lectures and interviews as well as an associate priest in Anglican parishes in the Cotswolds, McGrath speaks of death and our Christian hope of life beyond death as the dramatic passage from the realm of space-time to eternity. That is exactly what the words and images of heaven and eternal life in our Christian scriptures were trying to convey.

As soon as we were conceived we began to live in the realm of time and space. But do we also at that moment begin life as an eternal soul? That is often claimed by traditional Christian doctrines, but it isn’t a scriptural idea. The Greek philosopher Plato was the first to use the term psyche, usually translated by the Anglo-Saxon word soul. Plato stated that the soul could be liberated from its imprisonment in the body by philosophy. Greek mystery religions believed that the immortal soul, imprisoned in the material body, was liberated by death. The early Enlightenment philosopher, Descartes (1596-1650) held a similar view of human nature as a physical body and an immortal soul. That concept of human nature became popular as biblical scholars read Paul’s letters with references to ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’. Many scholars now believe that Paul meant that ‘to live according to the flesh’ meant no more than to live on a purely human level without any spiritual dimension.

Alister McGrath puts current thinking about personal identity and hope of life beyond death in relational terms. In his latest book Inventing The Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Science, FaiTh and God, “(This) is a way of thinking that is rooted in the Bible and sees the believer’s identity as rooted in and sustained by their relationship with God…. Whether you think Christianity is right or wrong, there is now way of getting way from one of its core ideas – that we are in some way hard wired to think about, even long for God.”  (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.) As Augustine of Hippo put it in his Confessions ca. 400 CE: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

As both my wife of nearly sixty-five years and I move into our nineties during the coming year, these issues are becoming of supreme importance to us. In these precarious times, it isn’t merely the elderly who may voice such concerns - and not just for Christian believers like us. People of every age of differing religious traditions, or vague, uncertain faith, or even no faith at all, may surely give thought to similar concerns. What is most important to remember as we turn into a new year is that we were born into the realm of time and space. Eternity, or whatever happens when we pass from this realm is not in our control. 

A Challenging Thesis

The thesis submitted by Philip McCosker for the doctor of philosophy degree at Cambridge University is a challenge to even the most skilled theological scholar. He ploughs deep furrows in the field of philosophical theology and more specifically the area known to theologians as Christology, also known as the study of the person and work of Christ. The topic is indeed mysterious, mystical and paradoxical.

McCosker stated his hypothesis thus: “that one textual marker of the mysteriousness of the mysteries of Christianity – one of the expressions of the theological mystery – can be loosely described as its paradoxicality.” The mystery of which he writes is the true nature of Christ as both divine and human, as contained in the Chalcedonian Creed, “truly God and truly Man…. Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis.”

Without doubt this is a very abstruse discussion with which few will wish to grapple. To provide a theological basis for his argument McCosker looks to the work of several late mediaeval and renaissance theologians in the Roman Catholic tradition with mystical attributes, namely Bonaventure (c.1217-1274), Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-c.1327), Nicholas of Cura (1401-1474) and Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629). 

By no means limiting himself to these “base authors” (McCosker’s term), he also refers frequently to the ancient Greeks like Plato and Aristotle as well as Church Fathers of the early Christian Church in both its  Eastern and Western traditions. It was the participation of these so-called Church Fathers in the many church councils that led to the formulation of the historic creeds of Nicea (325 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE). These creeds determined the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit - held by most Christian traditions to this day.

McCosker’s concern is the paradox that persists in the context of this doctrine and especially as related to the difference and identity of the relationship between God and Jesus Christ. His discussion begins with a definition of paradox in its many forms. Then he analyses four distinct “configurations” or “models” of paradox related to the nature of Christ: Mixture of the divine and human; Middle, Centre and Circumference; Enhypostasia; and Kenosis. 

None of these models fully satisfies our human need (or McCosker’s theological referents) to describe exactly what we mean when we say, as many New Testament authors assert, that Jesus Christ was at one and the same time, both divine and human. McCosker’s purpose is to analyse the core issue in what we mean by the connective and.

If McCosker has any preference for the above four models, it is enhypostasia. He feels that his base authors “will show the intrinsic connection between this doctrine in chistological expression and its expression in theologies of the Christian life. (McCosker’s italics) It directly and explicitly relates to and deeply influences our lives in the everyday world as Christians.

The term enhypostasia is a Greek word that denotes how “the Son and the Father have some kind of reciprocal … existence whereby they can be said to be ‘in’ each other.” At the start of his chapter on enhypostasia McCosker lists two quotations from the New Testament exemplifying the term: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me.” (John 14:11) and “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. (Gal. 2:20)

After searching the writings of the Church Fathers without much success, McCosker turns to his ‘base authors’. There he found that “this christological model yields a christological account of the christian life in various ways in Eckhart, Nicholas and Berulle with their different accents.” However, McCosker also found that with regard to his investigation of the various models of paradox, “that paradox appears to involve two senses of opposition. The divine is characterised by a peculiar kind of opposition such that it can assume humanity ‘within’ its own hypostasis.”  One would therefore conclude that the true nature of Christ in inevitably bound up with the nature of God. This places the whole subject of the nature of Christ as both divine and human in the realm of a mysterious and mystical reality we name “God.”

McCosker’s least favoured model is kenosis which he sees as prominently held by modern Protestant theologians from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. McCosker found no evidence of kenosis (based on Philippians 2:5-11) in the writings of the Church Fathers and rarely in his select “base authors.” Even in the title of his chapter on kenosis: “a wrong turn: divine or human?” his conclusion regarding this model is “at base – an exclusive, displacing one. This model did not display the parsings which the other models, especially mixture and middle, did. God and humans are conceived in this model as in competition: in the theories of the modern kenoticists this model is of the “or” kind, even though most of the kenoticists only gingerly dip a toe in the corrosive waters of this logic, not diving in as Gess does.” (W.F. Gess was a German theologian of the 19^th century “who thought that God straightforwardly desisted from being divine when human and … gave up inessential attributes while incarnate.”)

Our Christian doctrine of Christ rests finally on our doctrine of God. By also sounding his base authors’ doctrine of God, McCosker finds that “most of the authors we have looked at reveal a paradoxical core of the descriptions of God…. All our authors share a view of the unity of God which is dynamic and overflowing; for none of them is God static, fixed, and definable…. An adequate christology depends on an adequate doctrine of God, and vice versa.”

McCosker realizes that his analysis does not exhaust the subject. His final words are prophetic: It preserves, we may say, an open wound in the craft of theology. It encourages us not to lose our sense of wonder at the newness of the Gospel and the person it reveals, and to discipline our theology to that wonder, and make our theology appropriately and precisely humble.

It would have been a thrilling experience to have been present when Philip McCosker faced his examiners who listened to his presentation of his thesis and defended it against their challenges. His aunt and uncle live in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, and were the source of McCosker’s thesis for my review. Educated at both Harvard and Yale Universities, McCosker is Research Associate to the Norris- Hulse Professor of Divinity and an Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge University. He is currently engaged in the preparation of a book based on his thesis with the title, Christ the Paradox: Reconceiving Ressoucement Theology. 

WHAT IS SCRIPTURE?

In our Bible study sessions as a group of seniors, we never did answer that question. The late Professor Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, former distinguished scholar of comparative religion, at McGill and Harvard Universities, openly acknowledged that whatever else it may be, scripture is a human activity. In his final work, What Is Scripture?  (Fortress Press, 1993) Smith also asserted that no one tradition, religious or secular, no one civilization is adequate to do justice to our modern awareness of the multiplicity of scriptures. Smith further questioned whether for all practical purposes today “scripture” is a viable category.

One of the basic functions of scripture throughout the ages has been to make real for religious people at least that God has something to say to humanity. For those non-theists who insist that there is no God, scripture in the sense of some literature having existential meaning might say that the universe has something to communicate to us.

One of Smith’s conclusions is worth quoting: One might wonder whether any theist today, confronted with our vaster diversity of scriptures throughout the world and the diversity of readings of those scriptures over the centuries might emulate these Buddhist theorists by speculating that God has in fact remained (verbally) silent, yet has set up the human situation in such a way that diverse peoples in diverse conditions would have scriptures capable of letting Him/Her/It enter their lives and capable of guiding them to Him/Her/It and to spiritual richness.

Secularists would argue that the universe is silent and scripture is a strictly human function. Yet that does not explain why there is a nearly universal human propensity to create scripture and to find in them inspiration, nurture and moral guidance that makes sense for their daily living.

Is the age of scripture coming to an end? Some would say that it is. Yet the fundamental historicity of scripture over several millennia suggests that humanity has not yet reached that point. There is as yet no historical evidence that the transcendent dimension of human thought has disappeared. To quote Smith again: It has been one until now standard element, yet only one, in the complex patterns in and by which human beings  have lived…. The basic question is not about scripture, but about us.

A daily devotional posting on the internet by the United Church of Christ (USA) has been given the title, God Is Still Speaking. The assumption of these daily readings based on brief excerpts of the Christian Bible assumes that the religious practice of opening to the transcendent spiritual reality we call God is still valuable in the present world with all its violence and vicissitudes. But as is so much else today, making use of the scriptures of any religious tradition in any way is still a matter of individual choice.

PAUSE AT THE THIN PLACES.

 “Thin places – where heaven and earth come closer.” That was the heading of a New York Times article three years ago. “This column will change your lives,” roared another article in the usually sedate Guardian in London, UK.   “We’re in the territory, here, of the ineffable: the stuff we can’t express because it’s beyond the power of language to do so.” Ireland is littered with these places a writer on travel in Ireland wrote.

So what are they, these places where the veil between our earthly – or earthy – existence and a transcendent, spiritual existence vanishes?

To me they are not places so much as experiences.  Totally unexpected moments of delightful ecstasy when one sees and hears and knows that one is closer to the infinite, transcendent reality we call God. An experience we simply cannot have in the hurly-burly of everyday life.

And yet I had one such experience recently in, of all places, a hospital emergency room. No, it wasn’t a room; it was a warren of corridors where patients like me waited endlessly for attention from a nurse or a doctor or someone to transport us to another part of the hospital for more extended care.

I lay in that place for forty-eight hours before being moved to the RAZ, a large room - called a zone not a ward - where one waited in a bed slightly more comfortable. Sooner or later one would be assessed more completely while waiting for a bed in the medical or surgical ward where more extensive treatment could be given.

This thin place had happened earlier during a sleepless night as the business and desperate noises of emergency medicine went on all about me. I was in pain but not as severely as others nearby. Not like the young man in the throes of withdrawal from drug addiction and had lost his methadone. Or the older man like myself calling out endlessly for someone – anyone - to help him find his wallet then finally demanding to see the police to lay charges on whoever had stolen it.

In the midst of this cacophony of an emergency department in crisis, I suddenly felt how grateful I was for the care I was being given in such hectic circumstances. My immediate need for pain relief had been met by a young nurse with a hypodermic needle applied to my left buttock.

Perhaps it was the morphine taking effect that launched me into the ecstasy I experienced. I felt lifted beyond my immediate situation and wrapped in the warmth of a presence I had rarely experienced before. I realized that I needed to make some changes in how I was living toward the end of my ninth decade. My communication of faith and the religious life available to anyone would henceforth have to be in a different form. With means like this blog I could reach beyond the circle of a few friends who gathered on Tuesday mornings for coffee and conversation about scripture passages I had pointed out in some preliminary notes posted online a few days earlier.

Furthermore, my wife’s declining health was a major factor in whatever changes I had to make. This revelation of future possibilities reminded me of another moment all of sixty- four years ago when another thin place experience had made me realize how marriage would involve endless sacrifice reflecting the sacrifice of Christ himself. So I proposed marriage to the young woman. She accepted and our lives together since then have fulfilled for both of us all that thin place prophesied.

When the momentary ecstasy dissolved into the reality of my surroundings, I knew that I had been richly blessed by my stay in that emergency ward. My experience could only be described as being given the best of care in the worst of circumstances.

Thank God we can pray daily that the new hospital we can see from the windows in our senior residence suite will be opened as promised by the end of this year. In the meantime, we can pause to experience the richness of spiritual life in those thin places.

The Apostles' Quarrel

Some of Paul’s early letters to the Galatians and Corinthians tell us of a bitter dissension between Paul and the Palestinian apostles, especially James and Peter. How severe was this conflict and what were its consequences?

Only if we accept the narrative of Acts as historically accurate, does there appear to have been some compromise between the Palestinian Christian community on the one hand, and Paul (Acts 15:1-31; 21:17-26). Paul appeared to confirm this compromise in Galatians 2:1-10.

The conflict was long in developing. Scholars often quote a statement by the Roman historian Suetonius that such a serious controversy about one “Chrestus” among Jewish citizens that Emperor Claudius banished them from Rome in 49 CE. According to Acts Paul arrived in Rome about 58 CE and continued teaching under house arrest, presumably until his death.

As he reported in Galatians Paul had met James, Peter (Cephas) and John in Jerusalem and agreed with them that he would minister to the Gentiles while they continued to minister to Jews. (Gal. 1:18-19; 2:8-10) Subsequently he confronted Peter and others in Antioch about their withdrawing from eating with Gentiles when delegates came from James in Jerusalem. (Gal. 2:11-14).

Paul did admit in 1 Corinthians 9:20-21 that while with Jews he lived as a Jew and with Gentiles as a Gentile. Yet in Galatians 5:2-6 he charged that anyone accepting circumcision as a condition of belonging to Christ was actually cutting him or herself off from Christ. Any inconsistency of his views disappeared in writing 2 Corinthians 10 to 13 where his language implied that he would brook no interference from other apostles with his work among Gentiles. (2 Cor. 11:1-5, 12-15; Phil. 3:1-7)

Today leading Roman Catholic scholars no longer believe that either Peter or Paul were the founders of the Christian community in Rome. In the 2^nd century the tradition arose that both apostles died during Nero’s persecution in the mid-60s CE. In later centuries, the Church ignored this controversy between them. Tradition associated Peter and Paul so closely that their names were remembered together in ancient and modern church art and architecture all over the world.

James D. Tabor is certain that in the end Paul won the struggle for dominance among the Greek-speaking congregations of the Roman Empire. Toward the end of the 1^st century it was either the community in Antioch or Ephesus that began to circulate Paul’s authentic and attributed letters. Tabor further claims that Paul’s teaching also greatly influenced the writing of the gospels, especially the three earliest, Mark (ca. 70 CE), Matthew (ca. 80 CE) and Luke (ca. 90 CE).

Thus, by the end of the 1^st century Paul’s views were dominant in Christian communities all over the Roman Empire. The first true Christian historian, Eusebius (ca. 260-340 CE), stated that at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Christians there fled to Pella, east of the Jordan River. At the end of the 2^nd century, a Christian sect there, the Ebionites, were condemned as heretics by Irenaeus (ca. 120-200 CE). Paul’s triumph coloured Christian history thereafter.

The Torah of Christ

A continuing debate among scholars rings changes on Paul’s real view of the Torah. James Tabor is no different, but seems to go further than most. He declares unequivocally that Jesus is the “second” founder of Christianity in that he so radically severed his relationship with the Torah of Judaism that he can be truly said to have founded a new religion.

Paul broke with James, Peter and the other apostles in Jerusalem to the extent that while they continued as practicing Jews, as a Jew himself Paul made possible the spread of the gospel of the resurrection throughout the Gentile world by refusing to force his Gentile converts to follow the Torah. Within fifty years of Paul’s death, the Christian Church was almost exclusively Gentile.

As a descendant of Abraham, a Jew is a Jew by birth. Or one can become a Jew by conversion but must follow the Torah, especially its outward symbols like male circumcision and prescribed dietary laws. From the Jewish perspective, Jews always remained Jews and Gentiles remained non-Jews unless they had adopted these requirements. Paul had a new vision of what anyone’s religious affiliation could be. To quote James Tabor:

In Paul’s new vision of things, a non-Jew, in order to be ‘saved’ from God’s judgment, must turn from idols to the one God and also bow the knee in worship to Jesus as Lord – something Jews would be forbidden to do…. This single move, in which a human being is considered equal to God and thus worthy of worship, separates Paul’s version of Christianity from Judaism and effectively creates a new ‘religion’ separate from most mainstream Judaism.   (Tabor, James D. (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.)

To every Jew’s astonishment, this Jewish follower of Jesus denounced those who shared his own Jewish tradition as “Jews according to the flesh.” By their refusal of Jesus as Lord, he claimed, they had separated themselves from God’s purpose for Israel and had been replaced as the true Israel. Paul believed God had never intended that the Torah of Israel should be permanent. The death and resurrection of Jesus had led both Jews and Gentiles to Christ. The ancient Torah had been superseded. (See 1 Corinthians 8:4-6; Philippians 3:3; Galatians 3:23-25, 6:15; Romans 10:4).

Paul did not regard being free of the Torah of Israel as freedom to live an immoral life. Quite the contrary, he advocated strict sexual behaviour and how to deal with food offered to idols, especially where blood was involved. He displaced the Torah of Israel with the “Torah of Christ.” But he did so for a special reason: the expected transformation at the imminent return of Christ.

Try as he might Paul could never solve the very human problem of living in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual. To quote Tabor again: According to Paul there is no solution, no victory to be won over the flesh until the body is shed at the resurrection and one becomes wholly transform. Not that he was indifferent to moral living. It all has to do whether one is in Christ or outside. The Law of Christ, which operates by the Spirit of Christ dwelling within a person, is a strategy of resistance activated by ‘yielding’ to the Spirit and not to the flesh.

That is the way to live until the kingdom of God comes. But the kingdom for Paul was not on earth but in heaven, where God’s holy will is fully done. (Philippians 3:20)

Already But Not Yet

Without doubt Paul and his disciples were faced with a perplexing quandary. He believed passionately that they were living in the last days of human history. The great transformation heralded by the death and resurrection of Christ was about to occur. Yet the relentless passage of time indicated that the expected moment had not yet come and the promised end of their suffering followed by their eternal glorification had not arrived.

More – or perhaps worse – for Paul and his followers the end time (eskaton) had already begun, but its conclusion had not yet arrived. They were living in two worlds. As Tabor puts it: Paul’s gospel said that the chosen ones were already in the kingdom of God, by being in Christ even while waiting for its arrival…. Since (God’s) reign was a heavenly one, the kingdom of God had already arrived and would shortly be manifested to the surprise of the whole world. (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2012)

This meant that while they were even now living in God’s realm, they would continue to suffer as Christ himself had suffered until “Christ had put all things under his control.” The final result would be Christ’s heavenly exaltation when “every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” (Philippians 2:10-11)

In the interim until that joyous day arrives, Christians would face opposition and persecution. So “the challenge, and the insurmountable problem, was to work out the conflict between the intersection of the old world and the new in the present.” (Tabor, 160) This called for a totally different behaviour than that of the general populace among whom they lived.

The early 20^th century theologian Albert Schweitzer said what they and we are living an “interim ethic.” He meant that Christian ethical behaviour makes sense only if God does bring about justice in the real world. The social justice movement espoused by many of the mainline churches in the 20^th century hoped and worked for this ethic to be applied by all humanity. So did many secular and political institutions.

Paul’s daring exclamation in Galatians 3:27-28 would have made news in any society, not least in the Graeco-Roman society of his time. It set a standard that many countries still struggle to achieve today. Most fail, including our own.

Paul himself neither fully achieved the new standard in his correspondence nor in his own behaviour. He used the Hebrew scriptures to justify some interpersonal activities we regard as unacceptable today: an inferior place for women in the church and society, and the abomination of human slavery.

On the other hand, Paul believed that “the present form of this world is passing away.” (1 Cor. 7:29-31) He was not challenging the present systems such as slavery because he earnestly expected Christ’s return to bring all such evil relationships to an end.

What Paul advocated has raised numerous objections from different sectors of the Christian community as well as societies still coping with their ancient cultural heritage. Evangelism among some cultures has been very difficult if not legally banned by political authorities.

Mystical Union With Christ

If Paul had a favourite term, it was “in Christ.” The term appears more than fifty times in his authentic letters and twenty-seven times in other letters attributed to him. Elsewhere in the NT it occurs no more than four times and never in the four gospels or words attributed to Jesus. But what did the apostle mean when he used the term? James Tabor says:

Paul’s Christianity can be understood only against the worlds of mysticism, magic, miracles, prophecy, and supernatural manifestations of the spiritual worlds – both angelic and demonic – so alien to our modern scientific worldview. At the very core of these religious experiences of Paul and his followers were his two great innovations, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which he introduced in a wholly new form to his wing of the Jesus movement. (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2012)

The importance of this new expression of spirituality is best expressed in 2 Corinthians 5:16-17. Paul made no mention of the life of Jesus and little of what he taught. Instead he wrote of what Jesus had become and what we too are in process of becoming: the first-born and the later-born members of a new spiritual family.  This is also what he meant in calling Jesus the Second Adam.

As the context of this passage in 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 expresses, this was the special insight Paul received by revelation from God. (Cf. 1 Corinthians 2:2; Philippians 2:5-11.) Tabor puts it clearly in this way: What Jesus represents to Paul is one thing and one thing only – the cosmic, pre-existent Christ being ‘born of woman’, as a flesh-and-blood mortal human being transformed to a life-giving Spirit.

Tabor also claims that Paul changed the meaning of baptism from that which had been practiced by John the Baptist and Jesus’ early Palestinian disciples. That rite had been a “a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.” For Paul, baptism was not a symbolic cleansing or sign of repentance for past sin, but the initiation into an entirely new and spiritual life. (1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:26-27; Romans 6:3-4.)

The gift of the Spirit in baptism was equally important to Paul. The Spirit enabled living in Christ and was a guarantee, like a first installment, of continued growth and transformation in spiritual living as children of God. (2 Corinthians 1:21-22; 2 Corinthians 5:5.)

To sustain this growth in spiritual living, Paul also introduced to his churches the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. He insisted that this too was part of his revelation from Christ himself. (1 Corinthians 11:23-25 Galatians 1:11-12.) He strongly condemned those who participated but did not recognize its significance. Mark, then Matthew and Luke, also derived their renditions of the same community fellowship meal from Paul.

Writing to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 10:16) ca. 54 CE, Paul went so far as to assert that the two sacraments were not mere symbols or a memorial of Jesus’ death but actual participation in his death. This has led to centuries of dispute between the Catholic and the Protestant traditions. On the other hand, regarding the Lord’s Supper as a memorial implied not merely remembering a past event but participating in something very much present as well, and indeed with awesome future spiritual benefits – sustenance for living “in Christ” forever.

A Cosmic Family and Kingdom

Through the ages many scholars have deemed that Paul’s primary concern was justification by faith, i.e. those with faith in Jesus have their sin forgiven and are set right with God. This is what salvation through faith in Christ still means to many (most ?) people.

In contrast James D. Tabor (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. Simon & Schuster, 2012) asserts that God’s purpose revealed in Christ was something far greater – he called it “a mystery.” He mentioned it in passing only six times in his authentic letters. The only place where he gave an explanation of this “mystery” is found in Romans 8. Tabor puts it in these words:

The mystery Paul reveals is God’s secret plan to bring to birth a new heavenly family of his own offspring. God is reproducing himself. These children of God will represent a new genus of Spirit-beings in the cosmos, exalted in glory, power, and position far above even the highest angels.

In Romans 8:29-30 where Paul set out the complete process of what this “secret plan” is, he summarily described it by the single word glorification: (We are) …those who are known, chosen, called, and justified, finally to be glorified.  All this depends on “Jesus’ resurrection … his transformation to a life-giving Spirit-being, with a glorious spiritual body.” (Cf. 1 Corinthians 2:7; Philippians 3:20-21; 1 Corinthians 15:51-53.)

According to Paul this is what awaits us beyond death. But he did not stop there. The process of our glorification is already taking place. In 2 Corinthians 3:18 (cf. 4:16) he made it clear that day by day we are being spiritually transformed into those future spiritual beings.

Writing as long as a generation later, the author of Colossians 1:15-17 showed how much he depended on Paul’s thinking, possibly even to making use of some earlier material by Paul himself.

But what is glorification? The British edition of The Good News Bible may have given us the best definition in Romans 8:30. God … shared his glory with them. That is to say, we shall be like God because God has shared with us God’s own spiritual life as he already did with Jesus.

If one searches the term The Glory of God in art one gets a remarkable number of nature scenes – sunset, sunrises, flowers, forests, sunlight shining through clouds and so on and on. The Jews had a word for it – kabod which was manifested in theophanies, often associated with earthquakes, fire and storms (Ps. 18:7-15; Job 38). Brilliant gold is the colour most often used to depict divine glory. Revelation 21:22-27 describes a vision of the New Jerusalem as a city of light without sun or moon because the light comes from the glory of God. Rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures referred to the glory of God resident in the temple as shekinah from the word meaning “to dwell.”  

Paul was not very specific about the exact nature of coming kingdom of God. Yet he believed in universal salvation following a final judgment. Those dead or alive who already believed at Christ’s return would enter the kingdom first followed later by all others. (Rom. 2:9-10; 1 Cor. 4:5; 1 Cor. 15:20-28.)

Paul's Literary Victory

We read the New Testament beginning with the four Gospels. On the other hand, if we were to read it chronologically, we would start with the letters of Paul. By no means can all of those attributed to him and bearing his name be regarded as from his hand or dictated by him to scribes.

Scholars generally, with some notable dissensions, regard only seven of the letters authentically from Paul: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians and Philemon. The latest scholarly view is that they all date from about 50 to the early 60s CE.

A second set of three letters bearing his name – Colossians, Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians – are believed to have been composed between 80 and 100 CE by unknown disciples of Paul. British scholar N.T. Wright holds that these three were also probably from Paul but in a different style than the previous seven.

The three letters known as “pastorals” – 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus are generally regarded a pseudonymous and from the early decades of the 2^nd century CE when the church was much more organized than in Paul’s time.

In his book, Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity, (Simon & Schuster, 2012) James D. Tabor cites the narratives of the resurrection of Jesus in Mark and Matthew in particular as the basis for his conviction that Paul influenced the report in those gospels of the Christian community’s earliest tradition.

By examining reports of all of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, Tabor discovered that only Mark and Matthew provide truly credible details, few as they are. He concluded that these appearances occurred only in Galilee, not in Jerusalem, as the Luke and John state. They were of “a visionary nature” especially in Matthew. This is confirmed, Tabor believes, by a late 2^nd century text in the pseudonymous Gospel of Peter and the appendix to John’s Gospel (ch. 21). He finds the reports in the other gospels of post-resurrection sightings of Jesus in Jerusalem as a resuscitated human corpse from a later tradition and much less credible.

Tabor also points out that if Paul’s report of his own call to be an apostle is valid, he was the first apostle, not the last. He bases this claim on Galatians 1:15-17 where Paul claims to have been “set apart before I was born.” Later in this same passage Paul also stated that he had spent three years in Arabia. Tabor speculates that this was a time of retreat, possibly in the region where Mount Sinai was traditionally located. As Tabor writes: “Like the Twelve he had his own ‘three years’ with Jesus.”

Tabor further reminds us that in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Paul speaks of a mystical experience where he “presumably saw both the glory of God as well as Jesus in his glorified state.” Paul also spoke of his physical limitation, “a thorn in the flesh,” that kept him humble despite this remarkable experience. Of this whole episode Tabor comments: “Paul had tasted in a proleptic way the glorification that would be revealed at the second coming of Jesus in the clouds of heaven.”

Thus Paul’s literary victory and the fundamental theme of the whole New Testament is based on the perceptions of the resurrection and the anticipation of Christ’s return at some unstated but imminent time in the near future.

Paul's View of Resurrection

When Paul wrote of resurrection (1 Corinthians 15) he was unequivocal that resurrection is real, spiritual and God’s gift to us in Jesus Christ. Yet, as James D. Tabor asserts in beginning his chapter on the resurrection as interpreted by Paul: New Testament scholars, historians and even novelists seem incapable of offering a rational explanation as to what most likely happened that first Easter weekend. This seems to be the mystery of the ages when it comes to understanding Christian origins.   (Tabor, James D. Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christiainity. Simon & Schuster, 2012.)

Tabor found his solution in Paul’s “rethinking [the] resurrection of the dead.” He believes that if we begin with Paul rather than the gospels everything will be “clear, rational and historical.” But is he successful?

To begin with, Tabor states that there is much confusion about the distinction between the peculiarly Jewish way of thinking about resurrection and the Greek way of thinking about immortality. Both affirm eternal life, but the Greek view is based on a dualism of body and soul as two distinct realities.

Furthermore, the Greek attitude was almost wholly negative toward the body, while emphasizing the inestimable value of the pure soul. At the end of life death releases the soul to an afterlife of judgment, rebirth to another human life of reincarnation, and after a long time the soul could ascend to eternal life. Since the 2^nd century CE Christian theologians, learned in Greek philosophy, have been influenced by or generally adopted this view, as Tabor puts it: after death “the body perishes and the immortal soul passes on to the unseen realm of the spirit.”

The Hebrew view did not despise the human body as the Greeks did. They based their attitude to the body on God’s creation of humanity and all living things as stated in Genesis 2:7ff. And God was pleased with what God had made. The King James Version and other more recent versions of the English Bible have translated the Hebrew word “nefesh” as “a living soul,” whereas the correct translation is “a living being.” Hence the confusion for us.

The Hebrews viewed life after death described in scripture as a shadowy disembodied darkness without substance. They called it Sheol often referred to as “the pit” from which no one returns. (Psalms 30:3; 115:17; 6:5; 88:3-12; Job 3:11-19; 14:10-12.)

On the other hand, the Bible also contains instances of resuscitation of the physical body. There are three in the OT, one by Elijah and two by Elijah. (1 Kings 17:17-22; 2 Kings 4:32-37; 2 Kings 13:21.) In the NT three were said to have been performed by Jesus. (Mark 5:41-43; Luke 7:11-17; John 11:38-44.) In each instance, presumably, all the people so resuscitated died and were buried at some later date.

The main NT tradition of life after death is that of Paul’s view of re-embodiment as a spiritual being as set forth in 1 Corinthians 15. As Tabor describes it:

“… a body is a mode of being, whether a physical creation or a new spiritual creation that God would fashion in the future. Paul uses the resurrection of Christ as his illustrative example, viewing Jesus as the prototype of what will in the future for the dead take place in the future for all the dead who will be raised at Jesus’ com

Paul's Conversion

These are the notes for the next in the series of studies on the Apostle Paul a group of seniors in Glen Abbey United Church, Oakville, Ontario, Canada is working through with considerable diligence. These notes are also posted on the website of the congregation: glenabbeyunitedchurch.com . They may be used with attribution by anyone who so desires.

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Not a great deal is known about Paul’s conversion other than that as a zealous Jew he was on his way to Damascus with a licence to persecute all followers of Jesus he could find there. It would appear that his transformation from a pharisaical zealot to a convinced believer and dedicated apostle occurred in some kind of religious experience of a mystical nature. In 2 Cor. 12:1-10 he wrote of a “thorn in his flesh” given to him to prevent excessive elation about what had happened. Although many attempts have been made to diagnose what this disability may have been, no objective symptoms can be discerned. Were the two related?

Scottish scholar and preacher, James S. Stewart (1896-1990) described Paul’s experience as reactive mysticism in contrast to the other common type of proactive or meditative mysticism. In other words, Paul reacted to a divine initiative. As a sincere and able Pharisee, he believed he had been doing God’s will in defending the Law of Moses against the Jesus movement. He did so with great passion.  But God had acted in some way, perhaps by means of Paul’s physical disability, to completely reverse his deep commitment as an orthodox Pharisee.

In the Old Testament at least two other similar mystical experiences stand out: the call of Moses when he turned from herding sheep at the sight of a burning bush (Exodus 3:1-12); and Isaiah’s call while attending the morning sacrifice in the temple (Isaiah 6:1-13). Do both of those correspond to the Paul’s conversion experience? On the Damascus Road did Paul have some sudden some physical incident which he interpreted mystically as divine revelation?

Moses and Paul both suffered from great inner conflicts which their respective calls resolved. Isaiah, worried about his nation’s future, was going about his daily routine of attending worship. Through the ages other people have reported similar spiritual experiences in either circumstance. Divine revelation described as reactive mysticism appears to occur in such different ways regardless of human desire or will.

In the other main type of mystical experience, known as proactive mysticism, someone intentionally engages in activities such as prayer, meditation, dedicated personal devotion, or other rites for the specific purpose of discerning the presence and purposes of God. It is possible that prior to his Damascus Road experience, Paul used this “God-seeking” mysticism in dealing with whatever his “thorn in the flesh” may have been.

Through the ages radical conversions have occurred in many forms and still occur today. The famous 18^th century evangelists, John and Charles Wesley, both devoted Anglicans, had been instructed from childhood by a deeply religious mother. As students at Oxford University they formed a small group nicknamed disparagingly as “the Holy Club” which actively engaged in prayer, bible study and methodically sought to live a holy life. Later, as an ordained minister John Wesley failed as a missionary in Savannah, Georgia, but came into close contact with a group of Moravians whom he found to have a much deeper conviction than he did.

While in Georgia, Wesley became romantically involved with a young woman but broke off the relationship on the advice of a Moravian preacher. Wesley faced a suit for breach of promise, but the trial ended without resolution. Returning to England, he experienced a life-changing experience while listening to a reading from Martin Luther’s Preface to the Letter to the Roman. He “felt his heart strangely warmed,” and found new trust in Christ that gave him assurance that Christ had saved him from sin and death. His long preaching ministry thereafter changed the course of English society by bringing innumerable others to a deep experience of God.

Paul The Pharisee

These are the notes for the next in the series of studies on the Apostle Paul a group of seniors in Glen Abbey United Church, Oakville, Ontario, Canada   is working through with considerable diligence. These notes are also posted on the website of the congregation: glenabbeyunitedchurch.com . They may be used with attribution by anyone who so desires.

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In Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism (Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013) James D.G. Dunn, of Durham University, England, reviewed the timeline of Paul’s life and ministry – “subject to some dispute,” as he said. Probably no subject is still more uncertain than this.

·         Born in Tarsus, Cilicia                   c. 1 BCE – 2 CE

·         Education in Jerusalem                     c. 12 – 26 CE

·         Persecution of Hellenists                           31-32 CE

·         Conversion                                                    32 CE

·         Flight from Damascus to Jerusalem         34/35 CE

·         Missionary of the church of Antioch        34 – 35 CE

·                                                                  and 47/48 CE

·         Jerusalem Council, incident at Antioch     47-48 CE

·         Mission in Corinth [wrote 1 & 2 (?) Thessalonians,              

·                                                         Galatians]

·         Third visit to Jerusalem and Antioch        51/52 CE

·         Mission in Ephesus                           52/53 – 55 CE

·                   [wrote 1 & 2 Corinthians]

·         Corinth [wrote Romans]                            56/57 CE

·         Final trip to Jerusalem and arrest                  57 CE

·         Detention in Jerusalem and Caesarea       57-59 CE

·         Attempt to sail to Rome                                  59 CE

·         Arrival in Rome                                              60 CE

·         House arrest in Rome                                60-62 CE

·                [wrote Philemon, Philippians, Colossians (?)]

·         Execution                                                   62 CE (?)

Another major scholarly debate surrounds the question of how much change Paul brought to the early church during his thirty year ministry. Unlike his master, Gamaliel I, the leading Pharisee rabbi of his era, Paul at first adamantly rejected the idea that Jesus was the Messiah. Yet the earliest believers were able to make this claim “without serious opposition,” Dunn asserts, “for almost all of the 35 years following Jesus’ crucifixion.”

Dunn further says that the Hellenists (Greek-speaking Jews in Jerusalem) supported Stephen who suffered martyrdom for his irreverence toward the temple and preaching that Jesus was the true Messiah. (Acts 6:8-8:1) As a Diaspora Jew with Pharisaic passion, Paul would have been horrified, thus explaining his anger and violence toward the Hellenists.

His zealous persecution of these messianic followers of Jesus came from his desire “to defend and preserve Israel’s holiness and set-apartness.” It was not surprising, therefore, that his conversion was a stunning event for the earliest Christians as for Paul himself.

James D. Tabor goes further in discussing Paul’s effect on the Jesus’ movement. (Paul and Jesus: How The Apostle Transformed Christianity. New York: Simon & Shuster, 2012.) Tabor argues that Paul was the true founder of Christianity as we know it today. James, Peter and the other apostles “held to a Jewish version of the Christian faith that faded away and was forgotten due to the total triumph of Paul`s version of Christianity.”

In his Paul and Palestinian Judaism. (SCM Press, 1977) E.P. Sanders pointed out that the religious system of the Jews depended on the covenant law set forth in the Torah while Paul proposed that it depended on faith that Jesus is the Messiah/Christ who gives new life to all believers. A new book Paul and the Faithfulness of God by N.T. Wright, (Fortress Press, 2013) may offer some promising new data on the tradition.

Speculation Leads To Hypothesis

Scientists may howl in protest at the title of this post, but the origin of these thoughts goes back many decades. I have long been wondering - and yes, speculating - about the similarity and distinction between events described in our Christian scriptures and natural phenomena that scientists investigate using the traditional scientific methods of cause and effect.

One such series of questions arose out of the description of the ten plagues of the Exodus when Moses demanded and eventually won the freedom of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. (Exodus 7-12). This speculation focused on the question: Were there natural events that might be identified as the cause of the several plagues sanctified by inclusion in the Torah, the most important part of the ancient scriptures of the Jewish people?

A missed opportunity to watch a CD of the lecture on Santorini by Professor Michael E.Wysession in the series on  The World's Greatest Geological Wonders made me turn to the Internet in search of scientific information on the violent explosion of that volcano on the island of Thera (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea about 1600 BCE. What I learned only increased by desire to search further. There can be little doubt that the Santorini eruption caused great havoc all through the eastern Mediterranean region and beyond. Nor am I the first to wonder if there was any evidence in the Bible of this great disaster that is said to have ended the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete though it was some seventy miles from Thera when the eruption occurred. (http://www.decadevolcano.net/santorini/minoaneruption.htm)

This led to an initial conclusion that there were some details of the plagues of Exodus which strangely reflected what may well have been tales told for centuries by generations of Jewish ancestors which remained still fresh in living memory when the Torah took shape in written form. Nor am I the first by any means to have speculated in this way. As recently as 2006 Israeli-Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici and producer/director James Cameron created a widely broadcast documentary on the same subject.  
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus_Decoded)

Of course, there has been much religious and archeological criticism of Jacobovici's work. Not the least is the argument that his datng of the destruction of the Minoan civilization was 150 years later than archeological and geological research has shown it to have actually happened (ca. 1645 BCE). But his assumption that the children of Israel of whom the Exodus story told were really the Hyksos who were thought too have been expelled from Egypt about the same time seems unwarranted

As expected there was some very erudite criticism of this documentary. Possibly the most severe was a comment by a noted scholar, Dr. Ronald Hendel, Professor of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He compared The Exodus Decoded to an Indiana Jones movie or an actor-salesman in an expensive infomercial advertising a product with exaggerated claims selling "a highly dubious bundle of theories about the historical and scientific veracity of the Biblical Exodus."

This debunking of Jacobovici documentary does not  prove one way or another that elements of the Exodus story have no relationship to the Santorini /Minoan eruption. Though many biblical scholars have tried, no one has yet explained what the cause of the Exodus plagues may have been. Nor have scientifically motivated archeologists yet discovered the actual route of the Israelites out of Egypt inthe 13th century BCE.