Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul's Anthropology

By Susan Grove Eastman and John M. G. Barclay

 In this book Susan Grove Eastman presents a fresh and innovative exploration of Paul’s participatory theology in conversation with both ancient and contemporary conceptions of the self. Juxtaposing Paul, ancient philosophers, and modern theorists of the person, Eastman opens up a conversation that illuminates Paul’s thought in new ways and brings his voice into current debates about personhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781467448338

Susan Grove Eastman

Susan Eastman is associate professor of the practice ofBible and Christian formation at Duke University DivinitySchool, Durham, North Carolina, where she also directs theDoctor of Theology program.

Book preview

Paul and the Person

Reframing Paul’s Anthropology

Susan Grove Eastman

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive NE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

www.eerdmans.com

© 2017 Susan Grove Eastman

All rights reserved

Published 2017

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 171 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN 978-0-8028-6896-1

eISBN 978-1-4674-4839-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eastman, Susan Grove, 1952– author.

Title: Paul and the person : reframing Paul’s anthropology / Susan Grove Eastman.

Description: Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017014597 | ISBN 9780802868961 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Theological anthropology—Christianity. | Bible. Epistles of Paul—Theology. | Bible. Epistles of Paul—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BS2655.A58 E26 2017 | DDC 233.092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014597

For Eddie

Contents

Foreword by John M. G. Barclay

Preface

Introduction

The Puzzle of Pauline Anthropology

PART ONE: A THREE-WAY CONVERSATION

1.The Way to Freedom

Epictetus on the Person

2.Who Are You?

Contemporary Perspectives on the Person

3.Embodied and Embedded

The Corporeal Reality of Pauline Participation

PART TWO: PARTICIPATION AND THE SELF

4.Relationality Gone Bad

The Evacuation of the Self in Romans 7

5.Divine Participation

The New Christological Agent in Philippians 2

6.The Saving Relation

Union with Christ in Galatians 2

Conclusion

Pushing the Reset Button on Paul’s Anthropology

Works Cited

Index of Names and Subjects

Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources

Foreword

Susan Eastman is an intellectual explorer. From the familiar terrain of Paul’s statements about humanity she has gone in search of concepts, frames of reference, and models of personhood that could help us make sense of Paul. She has traveled far, into philosophy (ancient and modern), neuroscience, and experimental psychology—mostly territory unknown to biblical scholars—and she has returned in triumph. The book before you offers genuinely fresh insights into some of the most difficult material in Paul’s letters, while giving us new ways of conceiving what it might mean in contemporary terms.

Paul’s complex anthropological terminology (flesh, body, spirit, mind), his unique configuration of the human condition (as both sinners and under Sin), and his innovative language of participation (in Christ, Christ in me) have drawn his interpreters into a long and deep conversation with his letters. Platonist, Stoic, Aristotelian, and existentialist philosophies have all been deployed as intellectual frames in which to make sense of Paul’s anthropology, some more successfully than others. The truth is that, without a conceptual framework that makes some sense to us, we end up merely repeating Paul’s language without understanding it. Rudolf Bultmann’s brilliant attempt in the mid-twentieth century to interpret Paul’s anthropology in Lutheran-existentialist terms now feels outdated, not least since its individualist assumptions clash with more recent relational understandings of the self. Ernst Käsemann was already moving in a promising direction, with his understanding of the body as the self-in-relation, but what has been lacking for some forty years has been a coherent, well-researched reading of Paul’s anthropology that draws on contemporary insights into what constitutes us as persons and what shapes our identities as embodied agents. Eastman has now filled this significant gap.

Of course there is no single contemporary understanding of the human being, and within each disciplinary field there are strong disagreements and multiple points of difference. What Eastman has discerned, however, is a significant convergence in key aspects of contemporary research, a convergence sufficiently close to core features of Paul’s language to provide exciting new possibilities for interpretation. Through her explorations of developmental psychology, neuroscience, and the philosophy of personhood, she has identified common, or at least overlapping, insights into the self as irreducibly embodied and socially formed. In what she labels the second-person perspective, the self is formed not alone in self-referential cognition (a first-person I), nor in objective knowledge of things beyond oneself (a third-person he/she, it, or they), but in encounter with others, in the I-you address where relationships are not additional to the already-formed individual but are constitutive of the person. In other words, old models of individual autonomy are defunct, even if they persist in the popular imagination of the West; we become individuals only in and from relationships, good or bad.

Can this perspective help us make better sense of the way Paul talks of sin as not just something we do but something that shapes us (as in Romans 7)? Can it shed light on Paul’s perplexing language of participation in Christ (as in Galatians 2)? Can it draw Pauline studies into better dialogue with contemporary theology, which is already in interdisciplinary conversation along the lines explored here? As the following pages show, the answer to all these questions is a resounding Yes! What Eastman offers here is not an explanation of Paul’s anthropology, as if what he wrote is nothing other than what contemporary psychologists or philosophers are saying about the human person. Nor is it an anachronistic imposition on the Pauline texts, since she is careful to give those texts their own voice and to place them also in illuminating comparison with ancient philosophy, in the person of Epictetus. Rather, Eastman stages what she terms a conversation between Paul and contemporary perspectives on the person, a dialogue that helps us identify contemporary models or metaphors that fit both the Pauline texts and our own best understandings of who we are as embodied, relational creatures.

The fit does not require complete similarity, and it retains the integrity of Paul’s God-talk. But it sheds significant new light on puzzling Pauline texts, and—this is rightly of importance to Eastman—it enables us to communicate this element of Paul’s gospel in terms that resonate with the thought and experience of our contemporaries. There never will be a last word on Paul’s anthropology, because the task of interpretation is fresh in each generation and in each new context. But this book does give us rich new insight into Paul and well-conceived language with which to communicate his theology effectively today. That is a precious gift indeed.

JOHN M. G. BARCLAY

Lightfoot Professor of Divinity Durham University

Preface

The writing of this book has been a long journey, with many twists and turns along the way. It reflects a persistent fascination with the question of how Paul’s gospel intersects with the vicissitudes of daily life, a fascination that brings me back again and again to questions about Paul’s understanding of personhood—in short, his anthropology. My interest in what I might call participatory identity grew out of an earlier project on imitation language in Galatians.¹ I began to consider ways in which mimesis was related to participation in the ancient world, and to mull over the nonvolitional aspects of mimesis in human experience. That curiosity about imitation and participation took me considerably beyond the bounds of New Testament scholarship, first into studies of imitation in infants, and eventually into the fascinating discoveries of mirror neurons in a research lab in Parma, Italy. I began to see imitation as a largely unconscious medium of exchange through which we take parts of people into ourselves via a process of mimetic internalization, and they return the favor. This process happens between parents and children, but not only there. Indeed, as my students often tell me, once we have been alerted to the human propensity to imitate others and the neurological underpinnings of that propensity, we see it everywhere.

At the same time, I noticed the strong links between mimesis and participation in the ancient world, beginning with Plato and Aristotle but finding distinctive articulation in the first century in the Stoic philosophers. I began to suspect that my real topic was the language of participation in Paul, particularly the way in which a participatory account of human personhood might help make sense of Paul’s puzzling use of the prepositions in and with. Hence my turn to the topic of Paul’s anthropology, including his assumed understanding of what it is to be a human being, what makes for suffering, what makes for flourishing, and how people change completely and yet remain themselves. My wrestling with these questions juxtaposes Paul, his ancient context, and contemporary theorists of the person in philosophy and the cognitive sciences.

Although such interlocutors may seem far afield for many New Testament scholars, I have come to believe that such boundary-crossing conversation is crucial if we want to read Paul in ways that are both accessible and compelling beyond the limits of the guild of Pauline studies. From outside the guild, and even in private conversations with other New Testament colleagues, Pauline scholarship is not infrequently characterized as—dare I say it?—boring. Or if not boring, at the least somewhat arcane and distant from life in any broader sense. There are very many exceptions to this judgment, among which I note excellent recent volumes bringing theologians and biblical scholars together on central topics in Pauline exegesis.² Other scholars are working at the interface of scientific studies and Pauline interpretation.³ I want to push us further along that road toward meeting points with other conversation partners as well, precisely in the service of a theological interpretation of Paul’s letters that takes them seriously as a word of address to contemporary readers.

I am well aware of many lacunae in this study, which I offer as a prompt to a further exchange of ideas, not as the final word on Paul’s anthropology. In particular, I have not engaged with notions of the person as a self-in-relation, as found in Second Temple Jewish texts, for three reasons. In the first place, I have chosen to shine the spotlight on the Stoics, not because they are closer to Paul’s thought than are his Jewish contemporaries (they are not), but because their natural theology lends itself particularly well to comparison with the naturalistic methodologies of scientific investigations. For the same reason, I have limited my ancient interlocutors primarily to Epictetus as a spokesperson for a particular brand of Stoicism, because Epictetus’s thought intersects in such intriguing ways with current work in the cognitive sciences. Such limitation in breadth allows more engagement in depth with Epictetus’s robust, witty, and provocative personal voice.

Second, to bring Second Temple Jewish texts into the conversation adequately would require the equivalent of a second volume, doubling the size of this book. Rather, the topic deserves a separate, in-depth exploration that would build on excellent existing studies of Paul’s anthropology in its Jewish context and bring them into dialogue with contemporary second-person perspectives on human identity.⁴ Third, therefore, I reiterate that I consider this book an invitation to further work, not the final word on Paul’s anthropology in either ancient or current contexts. My hope is that the relatively narrow scope of the book makes possible a sharply delineated model of a new kind of conversation between specific ancient and contemporary voices, including early Jewish texts and potentially modern Jewish philosophers of the self.⁵

I also have not engaged with social-scientific studies of the Pauline literature. There already are many such studies available, as this is now a well-established field of research. I am asking different but related questions: how are the human agents within Paul’s communities constituted? May we speak of such agents in individual as well as corporate terms, moving beyond what I consider to be a false dichotomy between singular and plural notions of agency in Christ? And how might Paul’s view of persons be reframed in fresh, contemporary terms?

This last question naturally leads to further questions about ways in which Paul’s anthropology may be deployed as a resource for understanding and caring for people in extreme situations, situations that appear to threaten their very integration or status as a person. I have in mind conditions such as autism, dementia, extreme trauma, comas, and ultimately death itself. But these are not the only areas calling for further exploration; Paul’s voice needs to be added to contemporary philosophical debates about the category person, particularly in an age when human beings are frequently depicted as undifferentiated from other animals, on the one hand, and as potentially replaceable by intelligent machines, on the other hand. Furthermore, in an age of identity politics and persistent social inequalities, the interpersonal constitution of the self has significant implications for ways in which the church engages with questions of social justice. There are urgent issues involved in these debates; Paul, I think, has something constructive and liberating to say to them. But these matters exceed the scope of this book; indeed, I plan to discuss many of them in a subsequent volume. Here I have attempted to demonstrate a way of framing Paul’s anthropology in conversation with ancient and contemporary voices, as an impetus to bringing his voice to bear in contemporary questions about human identity.

In writing a book structured as a complex conversation, I have relied necessarily on many others. I am grateful to all those willing to share in the journey and clarify my thinking, and grateful to God, who moves in and among such connections. The genesis of this project traces back to many exchanges with J. Louis and Dorothy Martyn; like very many others, I suspect, I have experienced their friendship as an incarnation of grace. Their combined influence deeply shapes my reading of Paul, through Lou’s apocalyptic interpretation of Paul’s gospel and Dorothy’s remarkable integration of psychoanalysis and theology. My debt to both is immeasurable and joyful. Although Lou eschewed the language of debt and obligation, and Dorothy would agree with him, the present study is part of my attempt to pay it forward.

Along with the Martyns, many other friends and colleagues have contributed to the writing of this book. John Barclay, Kavin Rowe, and John Swinton all read earlier drafts of chapters and generously gave valuable feedback. Along the way, other friends as well have been tremendous encouragers and occasional guides for the perplexed. The list is long, and doubtless incomplete: Esther Acolatse, Alexandra Brown, Douglas Campbell, Liz Dowling-Sendor, Craig Dykstra, Beverly Gaventa, Paul Griffiths, Richard Hays, George and Deborah Hunsinger, L. Ann Jervis, Joel Marcus, Fleming Rutledge, Love Sechrest, Alan Torrance, J. Ross Wagner, Brittany Wilson, and Lauren Winner. In struggling with the interdisciplinary nature of this project, I have gained insight from my colleagues in the Duke Divinity School Initiative for Theology, Medicine, and Culture: Warren Kinghorn, Farr Curlin, and Ray Barfield. The students in my course Paul and the Person contributed in ways they may not know, as did doctoral students Aminah Al-Attas Bradford, Hans Arneson, Jody Belcher, Joe Longarino, Emily Peck-McClain, and Philip Porter.

Andrew Pinsent, director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford University, has been a tremendous supporter since we met at an Oxford conference on the second-person perspective in science and religion. He subsequently invited me to present papers at two other conferences sponsored by the Ian Ramsey Centre; I am the happy beneficiary of these conversations bringing together scientists, philosophers, and theologians around questions of divine and human action. Here at Duke I have learned much from participation in the Neurohumanities Research Group of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, under the gracious leadership of Deborah Jenson and Len White.

My heartfelt thanks go to my editor at Eerdmans, Michael Thomson, who has been a wise and very patient guide from the first idea of this book to its completion. The inimitable Judith Heyhoe, faculty editor at Duke Divinity School, read through the completed manuscript with a fine-toothed comb; Michael Burns read most of the manuscript as well, and the anonymous reviewer at Eerdmans offered pertinent suggestions to improve the manuscript. Together they saved me from many errors; any that remain are of course my own.

Portions of the book were written during a sabbatical made possible by the Issachar Fund. My thanks go to the Issachar Fund and to Deans Richard Hays and Ellen Davis for the generous gift of time. Without that gift the book would still be half-written.

My husband, Eddie, has given his unflagging support to this project from beginning to end, through difficult times and good times. He knows what this means. I dedicate this book to him.

1. Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue: Language and Theology in Galatians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).

2. See, e.g., Mark Elliott et al., eds., Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014); Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Constantine R. Campbell, and Michael J. Thate, eds., In Christ in Paul: Explorations in Paul’s Theology of Union and Participation, WUNT 2.384 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014); and Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harink, eds., Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012).

3. Joel Green has written on biblical studies and neuroscience but not specifically on Paul’s letters. See, for example, his Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008). Note also Colleen Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of Paul’s Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Recently Matthew Croasmun has investigated emergence theory in relationship to Paul’s notion of sin; see his ‘Real Participation’: The Body of Christ and the Body of Sin in Evolutionary Perspective, in Vanhoozer, Campbell, and Thate, In Christ in Paul; and his book The Emergence of Sin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Craig S. Keener’s magisterial new work, The Mind of the Spirit: Paul’s Approach to Transformed Thinking (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), came out just as this book was on its way to press. For an excellent study of Paul’s account of the role of the Spirit in human transformation, with some reference to psychoanalytic theories, see Volker Rabens, The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul: Transformation and Empowering for Religious-Ethical Life, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014).

4. Considerable groundwork for such an interdisciplinary project already exists; I note in particular John M. G. Barclay and Simon Gathercole, eds., Divine and Human Agency in Paul and His Cultural Environment (London: T&T Clark, 2006); Kyle B. Wells, Grace and Agency in Paul and Second Temple Judaism: Interpreting the Transformation of the Heart (Leiden: Brill, 2014); and Rabens, The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul, 147–67, 247–48. Seminal work on Jewish texts and the construction of the self includes Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Can These Bones Live? The Problem of the Moral Self in the Book of Ezekiel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000); Carol A. Newsom, The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran (Leiden: Brill, 2004); and Armin Lange and Eric M. Meyers, eds., Light against Darkness: Dualism in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and the Contemporary World (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).

5. For example, Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone, 1971), and Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), exercise considerable influence on philosophers and scientists who adopt a second-person standpoint for their work.

Introduction

The Puzzle of Pauline Anthropology

The tension between cosmology and anthropology characterizes the whole of Paul’s theology.

—Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans

Existence is always fundamentally conceived from the angle of the world to which one belongs.

—Ernst Käsemann, On Paul’s Anthropology

If we are to understand mind as the locus of intelligence, we cannot follow Descartes in regarding it as separable in principle from the body and the world. . . . Mind, therefore, is not incidentally but intimately embodied and intimately embedded in its world.

—John Haugeland, Mind Embodied and Embedded

With notable exceptions, the topic of Paul’s anthropology has not received much attention in recent years. Reasons for this neglect may range from a theological aversion to anthropocentric approaches to Pauline theology, to a wariness of reductionist readings of Paul, to a turn from seeing Paul as the champion of the individual to seeing him as concerned primarily, or perhaps only, with the community. This chapter begins with a quote from Ernst Käsemann, whose own work displays this tension and movement, as he himself acknowledged: We started from the position that Paul, more than any other New Testament writer, viewed man as an individual. We went on from this to call anthropology crystallized cosmology and to term every person the projection of his respective world and that world’s Lord. How is this antithesis to be bridged?¹ Indeed, whether Paul even thought in terms of persons is a debated question.² I think that he did, but not with an abstract or individualistic concept person. Rather, he displays a functional understanding of human beings as relationally constituted agents who are both embodied and embedded in their world. Exploring that understanding is basic to the purpose of this book.

In my judgment, the time is right for rethinking such a notion of the person in Paul’s thought. In the first place, we are witnessing a widespread, multipronged surge of interest in the topics of personhood, human cognition, and relatedness, fueled in part by advances in neuroscience and experimental psychology, but also by current concerns in philosophy and theology.³ To a large extent, biblical scholarship has been absent from these debates, and certainly Paul’s voice has been on the margins at best.⁴ That absence marks a missed opportunity, because reframing matters of Pauline anthropology in conversation with contemporary theories of the self opens up new angles of vision, particularly in regard to the participatory aspects of Paul’s thought. These angles promise a way past the impasses created by attempting to squeeze Paul into dualistic and individualistic frameworks. We have the opportunity to rethink the ways in which we understand as well as appropriate Paul’s understanding of what it means to be a person.

Furthermore, this reframing need not be either anachronistic or reductionist. It need not be anachronistic because an in-depth look at ancient as well as current pictures of personhood reveals intriguing points of convergence as well as difference in the functional sense of the self, or the human agent. This is not to say that there are not profound underlying differences between apparently similar claims in, for example, Epictetus, Paul, and a contemporary neuroscientist such as Vittorio Gallese. It is to say, however, that all three are concerned with questions of human agency, development, and flourishing, with enough commonality to allow an enriching and enlightening mutual conversation. If I were to say that neuroscience explains what Paul was talking about when he said, for example, It is no longer I who lives but Christ lives in me, I would indeed be imposing an anachronistic framework on Paul’s thought. Rather, I want to say that some current theories in neuroscience and other experimental cognitive sciences disclose a constitution of personhood that is amenable to Pauline thought in ways that individualistic and autonomous understandings of the self are not. The goal is not explanation, in terms of either historical or scientific causality; the goal is to find new ways of pointing to and expressing Paul’s meaning and, along the way, find that the pointers look intriguingly similar to some other expressions of the self in the ancient world.

Reframing Pauline anthropology in conversation with ancient voices as well as contemporary theorists in science and philosophy also need not be reductionist. This further claim will be strongly contested by scholars who think that, in order to bring Paul’s thought (or any theistic faith) into conversation with modern science and philosophy, it is necessary to shear it of any transcendent, divine causality.⁵ Many philosophers and scientists today, however, reject such an a priori commitment to a closed universe and indeed are part of a vigorous debate on the very question of whether the universe can be closed, or more precisely, whether a closed, purely materialistic account of the cosmos and of human consciousness can be adequate to the data.⁶

Again, the goal of juxtaposing Paul, ancient philosophy, and modern theorists of the person is not to gain explanatory power; it is to provoke a mutual conversation that may illuminate Paul’s thought in new ways and, at the same time, bring Paul’s voice into current debates about personhood. In the following pages I shall sketch out an interdisciplinary approach to Paul’s anthropology that is grounded in Christology, takes seriously his conviction that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is both transcendently other and intimately involved in human history, and engages with contemporary as well as ancient depictions of what is intrinsic to being a person.

The word sketch in the last sentence is important. This is not a thorough survey of Paul’s anthropological terms, nor is it an exhaustive investigation of every possible aspect of Paul’s view of the person.⁷ This is not a theory of everything. It is, rather, an attempt to reframe an approach to Paul’s anthropology by opening a discursive window between Pauline scholarship and current work in developmental psychology and neuroscience. When we also invite specific ancient understandings of the person into the conversation, the result is a rich interchange of ideas with surprising interfaces and differences. In generating such an interchange, my goal is to push the reset button on Paul’s answer to an ancient question that never gets old: What is man that Thou art mindful of him? (Ps 8:4 RSV).

As we shall see, Paul’s answer lives at the nexus of cosmology and anthropology—to echo the quote from Ernst Käsemann that begins this chapter. Utilizing the language of philosopher John Haugeland, we might say that Paul operates with an understanding of the mind as intimately embodied and intimately embedded in its world.⁸ For the apostle, that world has cosmic as well as personal and social dimensions. Investigating this interrelationship between embodiment, cognition, and embedded participation in a larger matrix will require attention to key texts displaying what I call participatory identity, as well as to Paul’s complex use of body language and his operative models of knowing and experiencing God, others, and oneself. I briefly introduce two such texts below and then discuss them in depth in subsequent chapters. But prior to such in-depth discussion of the Pauline texts, two intervening chapters will introduce the other partners in the conversation—Epictetus as one representative of an ancient view of the person, and the theories of some current philosophers, experimental psychologists, and neuroscientists. An overview of Paul’s depictions of the body will then round out part 1 of the book, laying the groundwork for a close reading of key Pauline texts in part 2.

The remainder of this introductory chapter sketches out the puzzle of Pauline anthropology, methodological questions, and terminology.

The