Last week,\u00a0I threw up on the worldwide interwebs a little post about Paul and the book of Romans<\/a>, namely that, Paul seems to be winging it.<\/p>\n I say that for two reasons.<\/p>\n He relentlessly makes the\u00a0case for placing\u00a0Jesus<\/em>\u00a0and Gentile inclusion<\/em>\u00a0at the center of God\u2019s plans all along, rather than the Law of Moses<\/em> centered on Jews<\/em>. In fact, he makes such a strong case that it looks like he is\u00a0throwing his fellow Jews under the bus. So at several points, Paul seems to realize he might be going too far<\/strong> and steps back away from the ledge.<\/p>\n It seems we are watching Paul struggling to work out\u00a0the ever-present\u00a0Christian theological challenge of continuity and discontinuity<\/strong> between (1) the story of Israel (as told in the Old Testament and in Judaism\u00a0thereafter) and (2) the gospel. Paul\u00a0must hold in tension his unwavering belief\u00a0that #2 grows out of #1 (Jesus completes Israel\u2019s story) while dealing with the undeniable fact that #2 is a surprise ending to #1 (a crucified and risen Messiah who flings open the doors of the kingdom to both Jews and Gentiles by faith alone).<\/p>\n But I\u2019m not going to talk about #1 here. I want to elaborate on the second point I made in the aforementioned post, which is:<\/p>\n And it looks like Paul is riffing\u2014at times it almost seems like he is grasping for a text, any text, that he can use to make his case stick, that all this unexpected Jesus business (discontinuity) is fully anticipated in the Hebrew Bible\/Old Testament (continuity).<\/p>\n I want to tease this out a bit\u00a0because saying that Paul is \u201cwinging it\u201d doesn\u2019t quite get at the dynamic. On one level, yes, Paul\u2019s use of the Old Testament seems haphazard, but on another level it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n Let me put it this way:\u00a0it seems\u00a0to us<\/em> that Paul is winging it, playing fast and loose with the Old Testament,\u00a0rummaging through it to find passages that sorta kinda work and then bending them to his will.<\/p>\n From our<\/em> perspective\u2014and I think it is crucial to acknowledge this\u2014Paul is out there when it comes to Old Testament interpretation. But our<\/em> perspective can\u2019t drive our understanding of what Paul is up to and it can\u2019t be the basis upon which we judge what Paul is doing.<\/p>\n From an ancient Jewish perspective, Paul isn\u2019t winging it. And that\u2019s my point.<\/p>\n They wouldn\u2019t have given a second thought\u00a0to the\u00a0manner<\/em> in which Paul handled\u00a0his Bible.<\/p>\n A creative handling of scripture had by Paul\u2019s time a long and honored history, going back to the Old Testament itself: the writer of 1 and 2\u00a0Chronicles creatively adapted Israel\u2019s older history (in Samuel-Kings) in order to let ancient\u00a0<\/em>scripture speak into new<\/em> circumstances that scripture did not address or anticipate (namely, exile in 586 BCE and return under Persian rule in 539).<\/p>\n For Judaism, this unexpected turn of events caused a lot of pain and questioning of God, which\u00a0continued through Persian, Greek, and the finally Roman rule, and onto\u00a0the cataclysmic\u00a0destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE.<\/p>\n That wasn\u2019t how Israel\u2019s story was to have panned out, and so accessing Israel\u2019s ancient story after the return from exile meant reading between the lines, beneath them, above them, and around them to see how God\u2019s word back then was speaking to them right now.<\/strong><\/p>\n What is interesting about Paul, historically speaking, isn\u2019t his method of interpretation. What set him apart was his content.<\/strong><\/p>\n For Paul, as for his Jewish contemporaries, scripture was malleable\u2014like forging metal or shaping\u00a0clay on a potter\u2019s wheel. Scripture necessarily had\u00a0to be \u201cworked with.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul\u2019s faith in God\u2019s dramatic inbreaking of the kingdom in the resurrected Christ, however, is what drove him to read his scripture in a particular way<\/em>\u2014to fill in the content<\/strong> by bending Israel\u2019s past toward the Lord Jesus Christ and his kingdom, made up of Jews and Gentiles as fully equal partners.<\/p>\n This is why I absolutely never get bored reading Paul. Wrapping\u00a0our heads around what exactly he is up to and why is an energizing and uplifting mental workout that\u00a0takes us out of our stale modern expectations of how the Bible is supposed to behave.<\/p>\n In other words, for me, watching Paul at work (rather than judging or defending him) is interesting not simply for understanding Paul, but coming to terms with the nature of scripture<\/strong>: what the Bible \u201cis,\u201d what we should expect of it, and therefore what it means to read it today.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve gone deeper into Paul\u2019s use of the Old Testament in a few places, especially the entire second half of The Evolution of Adam<\/a>.<\/em> You can also check out chapter 4 of\u00a0Inspiration and Incarnation<\/a><\/em> and chapter 6 of\u00a0The Bible Tells Me So<\/a>.<\/em> I blog about it a lot, too (search, for example, Paul and the Old Testament). Gee, now that I think about it, I sure do write a lot about this topic.\u00a0Maybe I think it\u2019s important or something.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n1. The gospel Paul preaches seems to back him into a corner, logically speaking, especially with his fellow Jews.<\/h2>\n
2. Paul quotes the Old Testament a lot<\/em>.<\/h2>\n
Paul\u2019s readers back then might have agreed or disagreed with what<\/span> he was arguing<\/em>, but not with\u00a0how<\/span> he argued<\/em>.<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nWhat we<\/em> might call a fast and loose use of\u00a0the Old Testament was for Paul and his contemporaries<\/em> a normal and expected approach to biblical interpretation\u2014creatively connecting the past with the present.<\/h2>\n