Are Titles Important? Sometimes More Than You Think!



Ara Pacis - Altar of Peace

To celebrate retirement, I rationalized I needed a large flat screen, to better appreciate the intricacies of the line blocking when my grandson and I watch the Packers play the Bears.  Lenore, on the other hand, decided her retirement treat would be to see the glories of Rome.  Go figure!  So shortly we will be touring museums, and wandering through the Sistine Chapel.  (She decided to take me along.)  Now as luck would have it, the Vatican is just across the Tiber from the ruins of Caesar Augustus’ mausoleum, and his Altar of Peace.  And just a little farther on is the forum Augustus built, with the ruins of its temple of Mars Avenger.  So my plan for the trip is to soak up as much as I can of the spirit of Augustus.  Not because I am that interested in ancient history, but because in a very real sense Augustus was Paul’s sparring partner.

Temple of Mars Avenger

Augustus in Paul’s letters?  Yup.  We imagine Paul’s letters as abstract and eternal religious truths.  Rome would have understood them as high treason, an attack on the culture of empire.  So where in the letter does Paul mention Augustus?  Where is the political conflict?  Everywhere!  Our ears just aren’t attuned to it, since we are not Romans.  Basically Paul and the early Jesus movement stole all the titles of Caesar, and applied them to Jesus instead.  The obvious conclusion is they didn’t much like empire.  Consider just the first sentence of 1 Thessalonians, Paul’s version of a normal first century salutation.  'Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy to those in Thessalonica who are called together by God our Creator and Benefactor and our lord Jesus, God’s Anointed:  divine favor and peace to you.'

In an economic system dependent on patrons doling out favors to clients, Caesar was the greatest giver of benefactions.  Rome was Washington lobbyists writ large, and then even extoled as the virtuous way to run a kingdom.  To say, as Paul did, that God is our benefactor is to insult Caesar.  And insulting Caesar had consequences.  Consider that it was obligatory at a banquet for friends, to offer a wine toast to Caesar after the meal.  That puts ‘he took the wine cup after the meal and said, This cup means the new covenant. . .’  in a whole different light, doesn’t it?  Wouldn’t that make for a different kind of liturgical renewal! 

Paul called Jesus lord, when lord is a title of Caesar.  Jesus is singled out as God’s Anointed – the Christ, the chosen one.  But Caesar was the one chosen by the Gods to save the empire when it was about to crumble under the weight of a long bloody civil war.  If Jesus was anointed, chosen, then Caesar wasn’t?  Paul invokes God’s divine favor and peace.  But for Rome favor came from Caesar.  And Caesar was the prince of peace, because of his victories which ended the empire’s civil war.  Augustus built that exquisite Altar of Peace, now on display next to his mausoleum, specifically to impress upon Romans that he was the one who made Rome peaceful.  Peace through victory on land and sea was the Roman mantra.  And the Temple of Mars Avenger was Augustus’ nod to the God of War.  Of course, Augustus would say, empires are made peaceful by war.  How else?

And all that in just the opening sentence of formal greeting of 1 Thessalonians.  There is much more in the rest of the letter, if you are sensitive and looking for it.  Caesar was divine.  It was chiseled in stone billboards all over the empire.  Augustus was the ‘son’ of the divine Julius Caesar, whose assent to the heavens was proclaimed on Roman coins.  Paul and early Jesus followers stole the titles of Caesar, the one who ruled from the Palatine Hill in Rome, and bestowed those titles on the executed criminal from the Nazareth Ridge in Galilee.

So if you want to host a quiet social evening for a small group of friends, good heavens, don’t invite Paul.  That old religion and politics don’t mix line would never work with him.  Paul was a political animal, not an abstract philosopher of eternal truth. 

The other thing that jumps out in 1 Thessalonians is that Paul was more than just a talker.  He was a social activist.  Think about it.  He formed little communities of opposition, little groups who refused to toast Caesar when they met together, specifically in the capitals of Empire.  It wasn’t only that Paul was against empire.  He had a vision of an alternative empire, lived here and now in the communities he was forming.  The Thessalonians were singled out for lavish praise, specifically because they lived out that vision of alternative empire here and now.  'And so you became imitators of us and of the lord . . . Therefore, you have become, in turn, a model for all those in Macedonia and Greece  . . . your trust in God is so widely known that we don’t need to mention it.'  And the rest of the letter is basically Paul’s attempt to encourage the Thessalonians to even more fully model life together in the alternative empire.

So reforming churches Paul’s way has nothing to do with finding a wiz bang new minister.   It has more to do with modeling an alternative society, a society of justice and sharing, rather than of power and accumulation.  No raping of the earth now, and then escape to heaven later.  I really am looking forward to walking where Augustus walked, thinking quietly about the different kinds of empire people build.  That and the Packers/Bears game too. 

Why is My Church Shrinking?

We lived in the same house for 25 years.  When we moved in 2000, it was time to unload some of the stuff weighing us down, so we had a garage sale.  As the moving van headed to the new house, it wasn’t just our collection of stuff that had considerably lightened.  In some real sense, what we kept and what we left behind has influenced our life paths going forward.  Or perhaps we moved partly because we felt the need to change the path of our lives.  Or both.  In any case, it is kind of liberating from time to time, to think about what you really need to keep, and what, from a past life, is just taking up space in the attic.

Churches are professional hoarders.  If you look deeply enough, behind the liturgy, behind the culture, behind the theology, behind the architecture, behind the beliefs and hopes, you will see a random collection of 2000 years of ‘stuff’.  Some of us like to bless it all, and call it Remembering the Tradition.  If we flip the coin though, the dark side of tradition is the recent TV show Hoarders.  Hoarding is when all the stuff clogs life, when the stuff loses all relevance to what I really need to do after breakfast this morning.

Hoarders are of course dysfunctional, and perhaps shouldn’t be taken advantage of on TV.  Letting go is hard, because not just the ‘stuff’ is going, but pieces of past lives too.  Hoarders need much more than a dumpster.  They need to be in touch with the essentials of their own lives, with what really makes them human.

Churches are professional hoarders.  One wonders, can we stop endlessly rearranging the stacks of stuff cluttering the metaphorical hallways and stairways of our community, and get back to the essentials of life together?  The premise of The 500 Year Garage Sale is that declining mainline churches desperately need to go back to the essentials.  And to go back to the essential core of what is important for life together, is to go back to St. Paul.

So now you are cringing.  Paul is archaic.  Paul is from a different world.  Paul’s religious world view doesn’t relate to today.  If you have every tried to read him, you quickly gave up because it is difficult to follow his abstractions and wooden language.  All true.  But it is also true that if you read Letter from Birmingham Jail without any knowledge whatsoever of Dr. King or the civil rights issues of the ‘60s, you would be equally mystified.  You need a readable translation, and you need a minimum amount of background information to understand the man in his context.  The same is true of Paul.

A group of us are together trying to ‘go back to St. Paul’.  We are rereading all of Paul’s authentic letters to groups of Jesus followers, in the hope and expectation that we will learn enough about community back then, to figure out what is essential for ‘doing church’ today.  We want to free ourselves from 2000 years of baggage, lighten the load, and visualize our small role in the re-formation of mainline Protestantism.  As we read and discuss, I want to share some of what we learn about Paul, and what I think this means for reforming the church in our time.

We started our group with some brief information about how to properly read Paul in his context.

Step 1.  Forget everything you learned about Paul from the Book of Acts, which forms probably 95% of everyone’s  image of Paul.  Why?  Because Acts was written in about 120CE, a century after Jesus, and more than a generation after Paul.   Acts is an epic story of how the Jesus movement transitioned from Galilee and especially from Jerusalem, to Rome as the center of the known world.  Acts is definitely not historical detail.  The only accurate and firm historical knowledge of Paul and his communities comes from Paul’s own letters.  Where the letters and Acts conflict, which is often, the letters take precedence. 

Step 2.   Not all letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament were actually written by Paul.  According to best current scholarship, the authentic letters of Paul are 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans.  2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Hebrews were not written by Paul, and to varying degrees actually were even not in harmony with Paul’s thinking.  These later non-Pauline letters tended to tone down Paul’s understanding of Jesus in order to make the later Jesus movement more culturally acceptable to Roman society.

Step 3.  Get a good translation in order to make Paul understandable.   Translations can either stick very closely to the original Greek word order, and therefore be wooden and difficult to understand in English.  Or they can be very free form, and sacrifice accuracy for readability.  The translation we are using, The Authentic Letters of Paul, is exceptional in that it sticks to the sense of the Greek text in an accurate, scholarly way, but still is surprisingly readable.  Here is a video link to one of the translators, talking about the translation process.

Step 4.  Read Paul’s authentic letters for yourself, in the order given in Step 2, which is probably the historical order in which they were written.  Remember that when Paul was writing in the 50’s, the gospels didn’t yet exist – they hadn’t been written yet.  (Mark, the earliest, was composed some time in the later 60’s.)  Most important of all, form your own sense of Paul’s intent.  Resist the temptation to think that the ‘experts’ know more than you.

Following these 4 steps, our adult discussion group is working its way through Paul’s letters.  We think from each of the letters we learn something useful about reforming how church is typically done in the 21^st century.  Paul can lead us to rethink 500 years of Protestantism.  Next:  what we think we learned from 1 Thessalonians.