Walking in Love: Moral Progress and Spiritual Growth with the Apostle Paul

Scripture

Introduction

I’ve written this work for inquiring people, curious to understand more clearly what drives the Apostle Paul, what really matters to him about the life of faith. I have not written it for my scholarly colleagues, though I dare to think even they might enjoy reading it.

I’ve written it as a participant in the community of Christian believers. My fascination across the years is that I find Paul to be a wise, older brother in my believing life. Like any brother, sometimes I get a little exasperated with him; some places I don’t understand him (though I’m still working on it and this book represents some of my growth on that front); but more often than not, I have come to trust him as a trustworthy guide to a fuller and more loving life.

I’ve tried to be thoughtful of my readers and to be as clear as possible, but I have been resolutely determined never to speak down to them or oversimplify things. When I was writing I always kept in my mind a representative group of my former students and of our local church parishioners to whom this book is dedicated‒‒and I have tried to write for them. I have sought ways to make the trip through the book comfortable for my readers. At the same time, I have tried to reward the inquisitive readers who want, for example, to know the range of meanings for a Greek word or expression so they can test their own—and my—understanding of these ancient texts.

Across the history of Christianity, Paul’s letters have been mined for doctrines like original sin and the Fall of Adam or for arguing that justification is by faith, not by works. I write not about doctrines but about how Paul instructed, encouraged, and built up—and, yes, at times chided—his followers who trekked behind him (and have continued to do so, across the centuries) in the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:14). Paul had a rather basic goal of calling people to faith and, once they were involved in a community of believers, he worked, in every way possible, to help them walk in love—love for God and Christ, and love for each other.

I imagine individuals reading this book for their own understanding of Paul and, perhaps, for the enhancement of their own practice of faith and love. This book should be an elixir or potion for anyone who is interested in making spiritual and moral progress in their lives. But I do not mean to presume that all my readers approach this text as Christians. I expect that discussion groups could relish talking about the book. It would be a first-rate text book for any persons who want to study Paul, whether in college or a seminary or school of divinity. I trust that pastors will find the book, and maybe especially the treatments of the baptism and the Lord’s supper, informative for relating to and encouraging their parishioners’ efforts to make moral and spiritual growth or progress. I trust that the book could be engaging for Protestants and for Catholics alike, and for Jews who would like to see what Paul the Jew made of their shared traditions and faith; and for other readers interested in an attentive, sympathetic study of what Paul was most centrally about.

Historical Perspective. First, let’s situate Paul historically. Jesus died around the year 30 ce, give or take a couple of years. Paul, like Jesus and his disciples, was a Jew and he first made his name by persecuting Christ followers (1 Cor. 15:9; Gal. 1:13, 23). His opposition to the new faith had to occur between the years 30 and 34-37, the latter being the best estimate of the time during which Paul received his call to be Apostle to the Gentiles.

The first Gospel, Mark’s, was probably written in 68 ce, a generation after Paul’s call and four or so years after Paul can be presumed dead. So all of Paul’s mission had been completed before any of our four Gospels was written; all of his churches had been established; and all his undisputed letters (more on that soon) had been written. Because all of his letters are written to the churches he has established or in which he has a strong interest (Romans), Paul’s letters let us see inside the earliest churches and therefore give us the best evidence of the beginnings of what we have come to call Christianity. This is an historical fact, not an evaluation that tries to say that Paul, because he is the earliest, is therefore the purest form of the gospel—because in Paul’s letters we see evidence that Christ followers had a variety of understandings from the start (Rom. 16:17-19; 2 Cor. 11:12-15; Gal. 1:6-9; 2:1-10; 4:17; 6:12-13; Phil. 1:28; 3:2-3).

In my time, Paul’s letters have been studied with lots of special foci, appropriately: theologies of Paul; Paul’s relation to Israel’s Scriptures; Paul in the Greco-Roman world; Paul and Hellenistic and Roman Judaism; Paul and rhetoric; Paul and Acts of the Apostles; lives of Paul; Paul and ministry; Paul and mission; studies of individual letters and churches in their own settings; and the list could be continued ad nauseam. There are also studies of Paul and ethics or morality, and books that give Paul’s position on various ancient and modern issues. My purpose here, however, is distinctive.

Purpose. The book that lies before you has a very particular goal: to understand, on the basis of the evidence from his letters, how Paul thought believers should discern and do the will of God and walk in love with God, with Christ, and with one another. My assumption is that this is indeed the heart of Paul’s purposes in all his letters, even though the situations and issues faced by Paul’s recipients vary from site to site.

Paul’s letters are a lab for intra-church relations, for what it means to walk—individually and collectively—in love, for our self-identity and overall purpose in life. Those sorts of issues are the same ones that any group of believers in any time would have to consider, so what we find about Paul and his communities can also be instructive for us today. Accordingly, I write this book from inside Paul’s faith-structure, so you will see that in all the chapters I readily slide from writing about them to writing about us. In this fluidity, I nevertheless take seriously the earliest settings and try to understand Paul on his own grounds while I also take with the utmost seriousness modern readers who seek to live responsible, faithful, and loving lives, as well as the places where they may benefit from or be troubled by Paul.

Sources. This study is conservatively based on the undisputed letters almost all scholars agree Paul wrote: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Whether any of the other letters (Ephesians, Colossians and the Pastoral Epistles [1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus]) ascribed to Paul are authentic can be argued in some other place. By sticking with the letters most agree come from Paul, none of our evidence is drawn from a letter that someone could come along later and say, Aha, you based such and such an assertion on a letter that Paul did not write. Also, Luke’s second volume, Acts of the Apostles, will not be a primary reference because Luke, writing a generation after Paul’s death and in all likelihood without having had personal contact with Paul, not surprisingly has his own purposes in his portrayal of Paul.

Paul’s letters are special documents. Apart from the Letter to the Romans they are written to places and people he knows very well—he has been their father in the faith. Each of the letters, Romans included, is focused on problems that Paul thinks are present in the different communities. In no Pauline letter do we have an even quasi-systematic layout of his beliefs and practices. We are not at a loss, however, in our effort to piece together, from observations across all the letters, the larger picture—and even some details—of Paul’s teachings and practices. We know from 1 Corinthians that Paul thinks of himself as having beliefs, teachings, and practices that he has inculcated in all his communities. He says as much when he describes himself as having sent Timothy to the Corinthians "to remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach them in every church (1 Cor. 4:17; emphases added). In fact this whole volume is premised on the conviction that we can indeed figure out much of what were Paul’s ways," that is, his standard teachings across his churches.

One final point: none of Paul’s letters aims for conversion because they are written to people who already believe. So the Pauline letters are a treasure trove of the how-to’s of this new faith, how to understand and govern themselves in a new way, how to care about other believers, and how they should properly and fully love one another as they walk this new life’s path toward the glorious finishing up of God’s purposes in Christ.

Several characteristics of the book. 1) a) Translations from the Greek are generally mine. This will make some of the texts sound strange to you if you know a particular translation well, but maybe in the strangeness you can see or hear something that you never realized might be in that text. b) Where I think that the reader needs, for example, to realize that the same Greek term transliterated as eikōn is often translated as image and likeness in different—and even the same!—published translations, and where I think Paul has the same meaning for that term across his letters, I will put the Greek transliteration in the text or, more often, in a parenthesis at the end of the sentence. I beg your patience with this practice; if it gets in your way, please try to read across it. c) I take a risk with you, reader, by considering that some of Paul’s Greek terms have either a range of possible meanings, or, more rarely, distinctly divergent meanings, and, therefore, as a result of wanting you to be able to weigh what a different translation might do to our understanding of the text, I will include various meanings and separate the different possibilities, as in 2 Cor. 5:14, where the verb synechō may equally well be translated as urge on/compel or hold within bounds/control. My recommendation is that you either pause to ponder such alternatives, or, if the Spirit moves you differently, please try reading just the first term in a slash-marked series and skip the rest.

2) In Paul’s world, the term Christian does not occur, so when I am specifically addressing issues about Paul and his followers in their own context I will employ Paul’s own terms (believers, children of God, spiritual persons," and so on) to describe them. When I am speaking about us moderns, I often use the term Christian. I expect many of my readers may in fact be Christians, but I don’t mean to convey that I assume that all of my readers are Christian, or ought to be. My reason is that Paul wrote to people who were in Christ and assumed his message would be meaningful especially to their striving to live a life in Christ. It is useful, I think, to put ourselves‒‒however we understand ourselves as religious or non-religious‒‒imaginatively in the role of Paul’s readers and hearers. 3) Longer sections that are printed in italics are places where, if you are interested to read more on the question at hand, you can read the italicized portions; but you who want to move on should simply skip to the end of the italics and pick up the discussion from there. 4) I will often refer to the recipients of Paul’s letters as auditors/hearers—and sometimes as readers. The reason for the first pair is that many (maybe a majority? cf. 1 Cor. 1:26) of Paul’s followers in any city were unable to read, so they had to listen to his letters (possibly read by one of the people who have brought the letter from Paul to them, there being nothing like we’d call a postal service).

Layout of the book. The opening chapter, After His Call, Paul Sets Out, situates our study of Paul within the context of his missionizing work around the northeast quadrant of the Mediterranean world. He lived out his call to be apostle to the Gentiles by going from major city to major city, preaching in whatever situation he found himself. Near the end of his career, we see him, through his Letter to the Romans, projecting an expansion of his mission field out through Rome and into Spain (Rom. 15:24-28). All along the way, his preaching had a powerful effect on people and formed communities of believers (1 Cor. 2:3; Gal. 4:15; 1 Thess. 1:5-10).

Next, in chapter 2 we set the lens to wide angle and look at Paul’s conception of God’s plan that stretches from creation to that future time when the new creation is finished up with Christ’s return at the end of the ages. Though it is not what Paul calls it, we will call it The Big Story: What in the World is God Doing? because it is indeed a narrative that moves through history and toward its culmination. Make no mistake about it, the entire picture is centered on Christ’s death and resurrection as a finished, completed action. The story of the renewal of creation starts in Christ’s death and resurrection and moves out toward Christ’s return/parousia when Paul expects Christ to hand over the reign/kingdom to God. Into this Big Story, Paul and all other believers, both ancient and modern, write their own individual and collective stories.

Because throughout the entire volume our chief concern will be to understand and illuminate how Paul thinks believers can figure out and do the will of God, we will pay especial attention to the resources available to believers as they do their moral reasoning and the procedures or considerations they make as they sort through the moral choices before them. Accordingly, chapter 3, entitled New Creation Beings: Responsive and Responsible, seeks to discover Paul’s understandings of people as moral agents. Here we see that Paul contrasts the new life of believers in Christ, where their minds and hearts are renewed and enabled to make moral decisions, with their universally shared, previous slavery to sin, where their hearts and minds were paralyzed and non-functional—except to do more sin.

The next chapter (4), entitled Believers’ Progress: From Babies to Adults, builds from Paul’s basic assumption that believers are made new or become babies in the faith in their baptism—they have become adopted children of God—but are expected to grow or mature in their faith until they come into their full inheritance. Paul has several ways to describe this progress: believers grow in their measure of faith; they become more complete; Christ is more fully formed in them; they are more fully conformed to the eikōn/image of Christ.

The following two chapters (5 and 6) examine the role the earliest believing communities’ primary rituals—baptism and what Paul calls the Lord’s supper—play in the life of the community and the resources they provide for moral reasoning. In Baptism: Starting Well and Ending Better, we see that all believers share the rite of baptism as the defining point of entry into the community of the faithful; it inaugurates the life of faith and tells believers who they are and suggests the riches of everything they will become. It is a one-time experience for each believer. By contrast, the Lord’s supper, Paul’s term for what more modern believers call communion or the eucharist, is a repeated event (as often as you do this; 1 Cor. 11:25-26) in the community’s worship and is a primary, continuing setting for self-assessment and, if needed, self-correction. This chapter is entitled: Lord’s Supper: How to Eat, Drink, and Live Well.

Next we study the multi-faceted issue of judgment as suggested in the chapter 7’s title: Judgment: God’s of Us, Us of Each Other and Ourselves. Primary is Paul’s conviction that at the end-time God or Christ will judge us on the basis of our deeds, our works of love. Beyond that, we have to consider proper and improper judgments between and among believers and, most importantly for understanding the fitting moral life, self-discernment, self-judgment, and self-correction.

Paul never led his followers out to the wilderness to a place like, say, Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls community was. Quite the contrary, he expected them to remain where they were. Though they were part of the new creation, they continued to live in what he once called the evil aeōn/age that he expected to end when Jesus returned. We study this tension in chapter 8, entitled Us and Them: Relations and Contact with the Oustide World.

In the last main chapter of the book (9), dubbed Making Choices Right and Sitting Loose in the Saddle, we detail the considerations that every believer has to contemplate in the process of a decision to do (or not) a particular deed. Then we look at some passages that give us an insight into Paul’s counsel about how to keep a faithful perspective as we journey through life, with all its high and low points.

In an epilogue (chapter 10), called Paul for the Twenty-First Century, I have two purposes: one is to wrestle with some questions that I think modern believers might have with Paul in our own times; and the second is to relish the astonishing resources baptism and the Lord’s supper provide for guiding believers in our effort to walk more fully in love before God and with others.

A few ways of suggesting Paul’s importance across the years. 1) In thirteen of the twenty-seven documents that compose the New Testament Paul is a) named as the author (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon) or b) mentioned (Acts of the Apostles, 2 Peter). Sheer numbers don’t necessarily tell much, but in this case they are remarkable. 2) Arguably, Paul or a rediscovery of Paul is at the heart of many major revivals of western Christianity across the centuries (witness Augustine, Luther, Wesley, and Barth). 3) As already noted, Paul’s letters are the clearest window onto the earliest form of our faith. 4) Paul’s letters let us see the earliest churches in history, with all their warts and glory. I know of no other New Testament author who sees so clearly and poignantly our capacity for glory and our ability to shoot ourselves or others in the foot. 5) Paul, by following his call to go to the Gentiles, insured that what we now call Christianity could not remain a Jewish sectarian movement. I am not saying that Paul rejected Judaism and started a new religion. Paul insisted that, even after his call/conversion, he remained a Jew, and proudly so (Phil. 3:4-7). He refers to believers in Christ and in God as the Israel of God (Gal. 6:16). Paul’s followers—among them many Gentiles—are dubbed the [true, understood] circumcision (Rom. 2:28; Phil. 3:3). And in a protracted simile in which an olive tree is taken traditionally to symbolize Israel (Ps. 52:8; Jer. 11:16), Paul describes Gentiles as being grafted, like wild branches, into the olive tree, Israel (Rom. 11:16-24).

With that, let’s turn to the study.

1

After His Call, Paul Sets Out

God set me apart before I was born, and … called me through his grace and God was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles (Gal. 1:15-16). Those words are Paul’s understanding of what happened to him. God intercepted Paul while he was persecuting the people who later came to be known as Christians and sent him to preach to the Gentiles, a code word for non-Jews. What did he preach? Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). Where did he preach? In the larger cities of the northeast quadrant of the Mediterranean; again, in his own words, from Jerusalem as far around as Illyricum, a Roman province on the northeast side of the Adriatic Sea (Rom. 15:19).

From his letters to the churches in some of those cities we can reconstruct a general missional pattern. He entered a city and preached to just about anybody who would listen; even when jailed he shared the gospel with his guards (Phil. 1:12-13) and with those who visited him in prison (Philem. 10). We should be utterly surprised if he did not also preach to those imprisoned with him.   Almost without fail, his preaching ultimately landed him in the guest quarters of a wealthy citizen (Philem. 23-24; Rom. 16:23), and he registers no problem with accepting the hospitality because that is a part of the faithful life (practice hospitality; Rom. 12:13). No doubt such prominent people, who because of their wealth had a large house, often ended up hosting the assembled believers on a regular basis (cf. Gaius, who hosts the whole church at Corinth, and Erastus, the Corinthian town treasurer; Rom. 16:23; 1 Cor. 16:19).

God’s call. Paul’s gospel places what he terms a call upon those who take it to heart. That call is God’s claim on the individuals that, when heard, not only restores them to fellowship with God as their loving Father, but also gives them to one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. Community, sharing, and caring are the direct outcome of the preached and received call. Those called ones (we can also dub them believers because they now love and trust/believe God) become a living part of the new creation. Therefore they relate to one another on a new level and in a new way that is no longer bound by the patterns and values of the society. Paul, himself, has experienced just such a call when Christ appeared also to me (1 Cor. 15:8; cf. Gal. 1:16).

Communities of believers. Pauline communities, assemblies of the faithful, gathered regularly in house churches. Smaller towns probably had only one church; Rome, being so large, clearly has several churches, at least, that Paul knows about (Rom. 16:3-16). Paul’s house churches are a sociological anomaly in the Roman world because they cut across social boundaries, with believing slaves, wealthy householders, and persons of all sorts of social status in between.

Women believers have prominent roles in and sometimes among the Pauline churches. What would Paul have done without Chloe whose representatives, traveling to do her business, bring word to Paul here and there about how things are going with the believers at Corinth and Cenchreae (1 Cor. 1:11)? Phoebe, clearly a woman of means and a patron of many (including no doubt Paul), may have carried the Letter to the Romans, or at least was part of the Pauline inner circle of leaders and will represent Paul in Rome (Rom. 16:1). Prisca was a force among the earliest Christians and was, along with her husband Aquila, a great help to Paul from time to time (Rom. 16:3-4; 1 Cor. 16:19; see Acts 18). Euodia and Syntyche, two leaders in the church at Philippi, are accorded one of the highest categories of Pauline associates/agents when he writes of them that "they have struggled/labored with me and Clement and all the rest of my fellow workers (Phil. 4:3; emphasis added). He even says their names are in the book of life" (4:3).

Romans, which most scholars think is Paul’s last letter, shows him at a turning point in his work. He acknowledges that his missional program has always been designed to preach the gospel where Christ has not been named (Rom. 15:20). Further, he tells the Romans a) he has wanted to come to them many times and b) that he wants to go from them to Spain (15:22-24, 28), an area where he can logically expand his assigned task of preaching to the Gentiles. His own assessment at the time of writing Romans is that he has fully preached the gospel of Christ from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum (a Roman province across the Adriatic Sea from Italy; 15:19). So when Paul writes Romans, his ministry—at least the preaching part of it—in the northeast quadrant of the Mediterranean basin is completed and he is free to move. Indeed, he must move on to follow his call to preach to the Gentiles before the end times arrive.

Sources for our knowledge of Paul. We know about Paul from the biblical book entitled Acts of the Apostles, and from letters that are credited to him. Acts was written probably a generation after Paul’s death by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke. Luke had no first-hand knowledge of Paul but has numerous accounts about Paul. Throughout Acts, Luke puts his own spin on the Pauline story. For example, Luke’s Paul delivers speeches that feature the gospel as framed around human repentance and God’s forgiveness (cf. Acts 17:30; 26:20) whereas Paul centers the gospel on Christ’s death reconciling us to God—and forgiveness is highlighted in Paul’s letters as bearing on relations between believers whose actions have grieved one another (2 Cor. 7:9-12).   Another example of Lukan spin may be seen in his structuring everything, including Paul’s missional work, as going out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8); so it is possible in Acts to speak of Paul’s three missionary journeys that go out from Jerusalem and swing back to that city, a pattern that is not at all obvious in Paul’s own letters.

Paul’s letters are the only first-hand source we have for studying Paul. Most scholars think that not all thirteen New Testament letters that bear Paul’s name were actually written by him. Because there are differing degrees of certainty about the authenticity of some of the letters (for example, many scholars think that the Pastoral Epistles [1 and 2 Timothy and Titus] are not written by Paul, but by members of the Pauline school who wrote them in his honor, after his death) the most conservative and cautious judgment is the one we will adopt in this study, namely, to base our claims about Paul on the letters that almost no scholar doubts that he wrote: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.

Because these seven letters are by Paul himself, and our goal in this study is to understand Paul, we will focus all of the investigation on Paul’s letters as our primary source, not on Acts which is written roughly a generation after Paul is dead and about Paul, not by him. In earlier times our understanding of Paul was often seen through the eyes of Acts; here we will see if we can hear Paul in his own voice, through the letters that he wrote.

The Letters and the Pauline communities. Six of the seven undisputed Pauline letters are written to his churches in the area Paul is prepared to leave behind as he writes Romans.   Beginning farthest to the East, the Letter to the Galatians, written to a set of churches in that province (the central highlands of modern Turkey), is occasioned by believing Jewish outsiders coming in and telling the Galatian believers that, though Paul’s preaching was good to a point, he did not bring them all the way into the faith. The outsiders argue that to make the Galatians fully part of God’s people the males must be circumcised, the traditional rite confirming entry into the covenant. Paul writes a sometimes fiery, sometimes endearing letter, trying to disabuse his Galatian followers of this imported folly.

Philippians is written to the church at the head of the Aegean Sea that across the years (4:14-16) seems most simpatico with Paul. To them his message is focused on their restoration of relationship between Euodia and Syntyche, two leadership-type people in the church, and a general encouragement to continued maturity of faith. 1 Thessalonians, arguably the oldest extant Pauline letter, is written to a newly-inaugurated church that is facing severe persecution from its neighbors (1 Thess. 2:17-3:10). Paul, who hastily (to save his own neck) had to leave Thessalonike, located on the northwest of the Aegean Sea, is eager to confirm them in their faith and to encourage them to stand fast.

The Corinthians (Corinth was slightly more than 40 miles west of Athens) receive possibly as many as five letters from Paul, a first, lost one, which is mentioned in what we now call 1 Corinthians (in 5:9-11), and two or three fragments of letters in what we now call 2 Corinthians. These letters were written across a few years and show some of the Corinthians, despite their early enthusiastic introduction to the gospel, coming to be divisive, contentious and rebellious. The Letter to Philemon does not yield evidence that would let us locate it in any particular place, but is generated by the conversion and return of a runaway slave to his believing master and his community of believers.

Romans, the longest and probably latest of Paul’s letters, is written to a group of churches in the imperial capital, Rome. Paul knows many of the leaders of those churches (Rom. 16:5, 10, 11, 14, 15), so he has what were probably strong connections to those worshipping assemblies, but most of the recipients of the letter probably do not know Paul. They know about him but the way Paul writes seems to show that Paul thinks they may have a warped picture of him in certain respects. For example, Paul seems at pains to demonstrate to the Roman readers that he has not taken lightly the Jewish heritage of the faith; Scripture, the law, and even circumcision seen in a certain light are honored by Paul and the first two of this list, he claims, support his gospel.

Churches of the Gentiles. True to his calling to be an apostle to the Gentiles Paul’s assemblies are predominantly Gentile. Galatians is clearly written to Gentiles because the major issue causing the letter to be written is the aforementioned intrusion of believing Jewish leaders who have come into the Pauline mission and told the Galatians that their men must be circumcised if they are to be fully part of God’s people. Even Philippians, as generally eirenic as it is, has warnings about those who mutilate the flesh, a locution for circumcision, that cause Paul to ruminate about circumcision and his impeccable credentials as a Pharisaic Jew (Phil. 3:2-11). Jews would not need those warnings. In the opening of his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul describes the recipients as having turned to God from idols, signifying that they too are for the most part Gentiles (1 Thess. 1:9).

In the Corinthian correspondence, the most telling clue as to the identity of his audience is in the very opening verses of his treatment of the crucial issue of charismata, spiritual gifts, an item in the Corinthians’ earlier letter to Paul (1 Cor. 7:1). The treatment of this major matter continues through chapter 14 but opens with Paul’s reminder of their background: You know that when you were Gentiles/heathen, you were led astray to dumb idols (1 Cor. 12:2). The problem of the proper role of spiritual gifts at Corinth is not an issue that can be assigned to some imaginary Gentile segment of the congregation. Nothing would account for such a forced reconstruction. Rather, Paul here describes the majority of his Corinthian believers as having been Gentiles who were converted by God in Paul’s preaching. The same point is confirmed by Paul’s passing mention that his hearers/readers were before now accustomed to idols (1 Cor. 8:7) in a chapter-long treatment of whether the Corinthian believers can eat food that has been offered to idols; Gentile converts who were formerly accustomed to eating at table in an idol’s temple are the persons Paul is addressing about going back there for table fellowship and defiling a weaker believer’s moral consciousness (8:7). Clearly, the Corinthian recipients are accustomed to dining with their unbelieving neighbors and Paul sees no problem with their continuing those friendship patterns and occasions (1 Cor. 10:27-29). Twice Paul describes himself as preaching among the Gentiles (Gal. 1:16; 2:2), and the Jerusalem Conference, occasioned by Paul’s preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, was resolved, Paul seems happy to report, with James and Cephas and John dividing the mission field, with them going to the Jews and Paul and Barnabas going to the Gentiles (Gal. 2:7-9). Of course, Jews were no doubt part of Paul’s congregations and, if we pay attention to Prisca and Aquila, were sometimes among his supporters and leaders. The mention of specifically Jewish considerations such as clean foods (1 Cor. 8:1, food offered to idols), unleavened bread and Christ as our paschal lamb (5:6-8) and his calling the people of the exodus as our forebears can be explained as the result of Paul’s having successfully enculturated his Gentile converts into seeing themselves as now included in the Big Story, from Adam forward.

Romans, by contrast, is written to a combination of Jews and Gentiles: some of the churches in Rome may very well be predominantly Jewish and are having difficulties with some perhaps predominantly Gentile congregations. Paul intervenes via his letter and tries to find common ground elsewhere than in disputes about issues such as sabbaths or unclean foods that might divide Jewish and Gentile believers (Rom. 12-14). Philemon does not give us enough information to assess the makeup of that congregation on this issue.

An under-appreciated comment at the end of Romans confirms what we have been arguing here, and adds to it: not only were Paul’s churches largely Gentile in make-up, but Paul also thought of them, he tells the Romans, as all the churches of the Gentiles (Rom. 16:4).

Writing letters and sending agents/representatives. The last couple of years of Paul’s ministry (and perhaps of his life, because he fades from our direct sight with Romans, his last letter) are largely devoted to the details of gathering a collection for the poor saints in Jerusalem, a topic to which we will turn at the end of this chapter. It used to be a commonplace among us students of Paul that he wrote letters when for some reason he could not go to the assistance of some church or churches that were having a problem. His letters, we said, were sent when he could not be present in person. Surely, that explanation would have been correct some times. But we now have to enlarge our picture to include the possibility that Paul may some times (many times?) have chosen to write instead of going. Parts of the Corinthian correspondence may be examples. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians show them to be a fractious, contentious group whose meetings ranged from times to get drunk to occasions for intimidation and hectoring (1 Corinthians 11-14). Order and consideration of others were not hallmarks of their assemblies. How could Paul go there and make the kind of reasoned deliberation that would be necessary to disclose their patterns of unacceptable behavior and their loss of values and perspective? How could he then call for a radical reassessment and a fundamental change of their ways with one another? If he did not go there personally, however, he could write as long and detailed a letter as he felt was needed and send it, along with authorized interpreter(s), and the Corinthians would more likely hear the whole argument, in its entirety. Paul might well have been able to break off his work in one place and go to one of his churches that needed him, and he may well have chosen not to do so in order to make his case more effectively through a carefully reasoned and structured argument that letter-writing allowed.

Leadership in Pauline communities of believers. Paul apparently did not worry much about the leadership structure in his churches. First, he was convinced that the return of Christ and with it the end of the ages was just around the corner. And, second, he counted on leadership to emerge from within the local community of believers. Philippians’ address of bishops and deacons along with all the saints there (Phil. 1:1) is so curious because Paul nowhere else in the undisputed letters ever mentions any position that might be considered anything like a church office. And even in Philippians, when he gets down to dealing with the split between Euodia and Syntyche, he does not implore the bishops and deacons to intervene—unless the person dubbed true yokefellow happens to be one (Phil. 4:1-3).

By contrast, in 1 Corinthians Paul affirms what all believers are supposed to know: there are varieties of deaconing/serving that are apparently open to everyone (1 Cor. 12:5). And in that same letter, when wealthier Corinthians are taking poorer believers to court to adjudicate disputes, instead of resolving them in the assembly of believers, Paul sarcastically chides the Corinthians, who seem quite taken with wisdom as a status indicator, for not having a single person wise enough to step in and bring about reconciliation (1 Cor. 6:1-8). Believers are supposed to come together and hear one another out so that the church is edified/built up (1 Cor. 14:1-5) and let the others render a judgment on what has been said (14:29).

Paul’s little commendation formulas that are descriptors of leadership-type people in the Pauline churches ring some common notes. The largest category is those who re-present Paul in his work for the gospel as expressed especially in his care for others, who act and do as Paul would if he were with them. Timothy, for example, is doing the work of the Lord, as I am (1 Cor. 16:10). Pay attention to what people do and esteem them very highly in love because of their work (1 Thess. 5:13). Consider Epaphroditus: he nearly died for the work of Christ (Phil. 2:25), risking his life (2:30) and is to be honored because of it.

Co-workers is Paul’s most succinct formulation in praise of those who join with him in advancing the gospel—not so much in terms of spreading it, perhaps, but in terms of living it in an exemplary fashion. The household of Stephanas, Paul’s first converts in Achaia, are lauded for their devotion to the service of the saints or ministry to other believers, and Paul advises the unruly Corinthians to align themselves with such co-workers (1 Cor. 16:15-16).

Paul has a coterie of people whom he calls co-workers and whom he presents as models of the life of faith. Timothy (Rom. 16:21) and Titus (2 Cor. 8:23) stand out as right-hand people whom Paul sends when his churches encounter difficulty and need help or reorientation. Prisca and Aquila are co-workers who have themselves advanced the gospel (Rom. 16:3). Collectively, these people exhibit what Paul most values in the life of faith: like Christ, as depicted in the sublime hymn in Phil. 2:1-11, they do not seek their own things but the good of others, they are concerned and anxious for other believers and they put the gospel and its life ahead of everything else, even their own lives.

Perhaps the most informative and certainly most detailed single example of a person dubbed co-worker is Philemon, one of the people to whom the letter of the same name is addressed. In the very first verse Paul describes him as our beloved co-worker (Philem. 1). From the beginning of the thanksgiving (4-7), Paul paints this rich portrait of Philemon, his co-worker, as the one who is known for his love toward Jesus and all the saints (5). Without using the term love, Paul reports two ways Philemon’s love has been exemplary: Paul has received considerable joy and comfort from Philemon; and the saints have been refreshed by him as well (7). The details of Paul’s description of Philemon as co-worker gives us a window on Paul’s understanding of the work that is proper to the life of faith: it is the active choice to seek and to express love in all our actions and in all the situations in which we find ourselves. The work of faith, namely love, is to care for, comfort, and encourage others. Galatians 5:6 says it in a nutshell: the one thing that really counts is faith expressing itself in love. In the process of our loving others we realize, that is, we make real, our relation to God who created us for those very relationships (to God and to others).

Of course, Paul uses other, related images to describe his partners in the faith. To that very point, he identifies Titus as his partner in service to and caring for others (2 Cor. 8:23). When he thinks of life as a battle, he identifies Epaphroditus (Phil. 2:25) and Archippus (Philem. 2) as soldiers alongside him. When life is viewed as a struggle or contest (agōn), he describes Euodia and Syntyche as strivers or athletes shoulder to shoulder with him (Phil. 4:3); and, using the same imagery, he tells all the Philippians he expects them to be striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel (Phil. 1:27).