Frank

Now that I’m back home and on my own little computer, I can finish my comment. (I was at the library, doing job hunting research, having been umemployed for some time). As I was saying, Gordon Fee explains how Paul addresses this very shame/honor issue we’ve been discussing in 2 Cor 5:11-21 and Gal 3:26-4:7. So now I’ll complete my quote of Fee’s explanation:

…Thus the Gentiles had all the advantages over thew Jews, so Jews took refuge in their relationship with God, which they believed advantaged them before God over the Gentiles. The hatreds were deep and natural. Likewise, masters and slaves were consigned to roles where the advantages went to the masters; and the same was true for men and women, where women were dominated by men and basically consigned to childbearing. In fact, according to Diogenes Laertius, Socrates used to say every day: “There were three blessings for which he was grateful to Fortune: first, that I was born a human being, and not one of the brutes; next, that I was born a man and not a man; thirdly, a Greek and not a barbarian.” The Jewish version of this, obviously influenced by the Greco-Roman worldview, is the rabbi who says that “every day you should say, “Blessed are you, O God,…that I ‘m not a brute creature, nor a Gentile, nor a woman.” It is especially difficult for most of us to imagine the effect of Paul’s words in a culture where position and status preserved order through basically uncrossable boundries. Paul asserts that when people come into the fellowship of Christ Jesus, significance is no longer to be found in being Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. The all-embracing nature of this affirmation, its counter-cultural significance, the fact that it equally disadvantages all by equally advantaging all–these stab at the very heart of a culture sustained by people maintaining the right position and status. But in Christ Jesus, the One whose death and resurrection inaugurated the new creation, all things have become new; the new era has dawned. The new creation, therefore, must be our starting point regarding gender issues, because this is theologically where Paul lived. Everything else he says comes out of this worldview of what has happened in the coming of Christ in the Spirit (cf. “Gender Issues: Reflections on the Perspective of the Apostle Paul,” LISTENING TO THE SPIRIT IN THE TEXT, pp. 60-61).

And when I was a Bible college student, I can remeber the lively discussions that went on regarding “the heart of Paul’s theology”: Was it justification, reconciliation, sanctification, union with Christ, oneness of the Body of Christ, whatever? Well, after much study and thought of Paul’s letters, I agree that it is only Paul’s doctrine of the New Creation, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Christ and his pouring out of the Spirit upon the Church, that really unites and explains Paul’s theology.

Consider, for example, his teaching in 1 Cor 11:2-34. Apart from his directives that men are not to wear a head covering while the women are so as to maintain proper sexual distinctions in worship–i.e., not engage in unisexist or androgynist worship–yet he otherwise commends the Corinthians for not only keeping the “tradition” he had given regarding men and women praying and prophesying together, but other authoritative teachings pertaining worship which maintained in all the churches he had established. But it is not until 11:17, that he actually and directly reukes them for violating these traditions.

Now, I would ask our hierarchicalist friends, what “tradition” called for Paul’s “gentle” rebuke of the apparent unisexism in 11:2-16? I believe it was a misunderstanding of the tradition he first sets forth in Gal 3:26-4:7, a vital element of his “New Creation” theology, “the adoption to sonship of all believers.” And this doctrine of adoption and all it means is further developed by Paul in such passages as Rom. 4:13-17; 8:9-25; 1 Cor. 12:12-27, and Eph. 2:11-12. According to this teaching, through “the Christ event”–i.e., as a result of Jesus Christ’s life, death, resurrection and pouring out of the Spirit upon his new covenant people–the eschatological promise of the Abrahamic Covenant is now being realized at the end of the Old Age and at the inauguration of the New Age, which will be fully manifested by Christ’s Second Advent and his Millennial Reign. And this fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise is now manifested by the new covenant family of Abraham, the true Israel, united with Christ, the Seed of Abraham (Gal 6:15-16, NIV)–“the new humanity” in which distinctions of ethnicity, race, age and gender are no longer valid barriers in either having fellowship with God, nor in how and where they serve him. They are heirs of Abraham and co-heirs of Christ, destined to rule and reign with him in the future, while serving as priests, prophets and ambassadors of God’s Kingdom in the present time (cf. Matt. 28:18-20 and 2 Cor 5:11-21).

So I think that part of our challenge in winning our hierarchicalist friends over to our view has to do with convincing them as to the nature of the New Creation in Christ and its centrality to Paul’s theology. But as Gengwall has pointed out, the various presuppositions governing their understanding of the Scripture regarding Adam and the Old Creation vs. Christ and the New Creation, as well as their supporting arguments, have to be constantly exposed and challenged, in but the spirit and methodology of 2 Tim. 2:23-26. Or at least that is how I see it.