The Practice of Hope

Ideology and Intention in 1 Thessalonians

Nestor O. Miquez

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780800698249
• eBook ISBN: 9781451415155
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Chapter 1

Introduction:
Paul’s Relevance Today

In this book I consider, almost twenty centuries later, the relevance of the counter­hegemonic Pauline proposal. What relevance could Paul have today, and what should our reading of him look like? In what way today, in very different historical circumstances, is this “recovery” of the counterhegemonic value of Pauline symbolism still valid? This question has more answers today than when I first asked it of myself twenty years ago in my academic work because I have found persons who have asked the same question, even outside of the Christian realm. I believe that historical circumstances have made it current. The appearance of various works of political philosophers who study Paul—all of them appearing after the time I wrote my original thesis—seems to answer the question of the fertility of Paul’s political thought for today positively.

These positive answers have appeared because the shape that our world has taken, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union (a year after I presented my original thesis), can be characterized as “empire.”1

The concept of Empire is presented as a global concert under the direction of a single conductor, a unitary power that maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths. And in order to achieve these ends, the single power is given the necessary force to conduct, when necessary, “just wars” at the borders against the barbarians and internally against the rebellious . . . Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and future within its own ethical order. In other words, Empire presents its order as permanent, eternal, and necessary.2

Therefore, the symbolic Pauline world of confrontation against the Roman Empire appears stronger, more decisive, and of more value today than in Paul’s day and than when I first wrote. As a matter of fact, some current political philosophers have turned to Paul as a source of reflection in the midst of a “postmodern empire.”3

How should we read Paul in such a context? Can a symbolic world created almost two thousand years ago to confront one empire be recovered with validity for today in the midst of a new, globalizing empire? Is there any value in proposing a new political reading of Paul in this sense, or should we resign ourselves to a “theological purity” that does not interfere with worldly issues, as achieved by certain Pauline exegesis of the last centuries? These are questions that go beyond the framework of personal elaboration and must be posed, if they prove to be productive, for discussion in the Christian community and beyond it. These questions cannot be resolved only in discussion but also in praxis. That is to say, the question of Paul’s relevance goes beyond doctrinal discussions: it demands a hermeneutical circle with the active participation of all the members of the community of faith, not just the educated ones, and finds completion in an action that transforms the social, political, and economic reality in which we move. The relevance of our interpretation of Paul will depend on its capacity to help promote and contribute to this discussion and to demonstrate its relevance in a praxis that creates alternatives to the imperial mode in which we now live.

In this undertaking we have to avoid facile correspondences such as seeing the Roman Empire in today’s empires, as if history had not modified anything. Equating the two would be to deny our own reality and the history of the Gentile, Pauline church of the year 50 and would turn the latter into a “model” for churches in the third world. If the “counterhegemonic faith” of the artisans of Thessalonica and the ideas Paul articulated as their “organic intellectual”—about which more below—are still relevant, then they are relevant across a historical distance from our time, with requisite mediations. History has passed by. Paul died without seeing the parousia he hoped for.

However, the empire—being an empire—is not the only thing that is different; there are other moments and technologies. The situation of Christianity has changed as well: the political-military leadership of the church has become concrete at different times and places, in real regimes, with diverse strategies and different operations. These historical materializations of the Christian church are, indeed, different from those Paul announced. Even his message, which according to the present work appears as counterhegemonic, has been implemented in hegemonic ways throughout these last eighteen centuries. And from that history there is no turning back. We may analyze, explain, and interpret that history, but we cannot go back to an ideal zero point. We have to bear it, with its contradictions and historical concretions, in our successive quests to make the symbolic Christian worldview something meaningful for today, especially if we want to make of it an alternative to the new imperial ideologies, which have also been fed by a certain Christian history and continue to use it to justify themselves and their propaganda.

This discussion, that history, and those writings are decisive for the inhabitants of the present century who still value as fundamental those events in the first years of the Roman Principate that formed the origin of what we still call “the faith in Jesus, the Messiah.” Interpreting Paul is a requirement for those of us who still read Paul’s letters with the vision of those “beloved brothers and sisters of God” of Thessalonica. The meaning these texts carry is at the root of our own notion of the world. For that reason, we cannot but recover them as guiding texts for a project in which we encounter our brothers and sisters in hope. The hermeneutical task is this: to discover the meaning of a shared history, a history inscribed in texts but that exceeds the texts themselves, because it has been transmitted by and takes place in a community that is heir to the first community that created that history with its own life. Biblical hermeneutics certainly rests on the polysemy of texts, but in our case it rests also on the acknowledgment of the same guiding axis of faith that, throughout history, has taken risks in interpreting those texts. Today we read the texts of the intellectuals who nourished the ideological matrix of the Roman Empire—Virgil, Musonius Rufus, Suetonius, Pliny, Cicero, or Seneca—to understand the cultural dynamics, the ideological struggles, and the conceptualizations that ruled in the formation of that empire. But “the cultural community” of the ruling class of the Roman Empire has disappeared. We also read the texts of Paul today, but within communities that sustain the faith of Paul. Within those communities, we dispute the value and meaning of those symbols, for ourselves and for those outside, in what has been called “the battle for meanings,”4 and that struggle becomes the guide of our faith and action. That is the difference. At some point, that original community decided, through mechanisms we are not going to judge now, that those texts and not others—which somehow contained data that made sense to their faith and that arose during “the stage of gestation”—were their normative texts.

Some anthropologists say that human beings are a product of “fetalization”: that being born “prematurely” (compared to the degree of development that other higher species reach in their period of gestation) has generated the anatomic and cultural forms that allowed our differentiation and our own dynamic adaptation. Being born “fetalized” gives humans the flexibility that allows us to go beyond mere repetition of former generations; our development comes to completion (or, sadly, fails to do so) because we are able to adapt to the external environment into which we are born.

The same thing happens with our scriptures, especially in the case of the New Testament. The New Testament constitutes a “fetalization” of the Christian message, which allows us to read it and develop it anew in each context. It presents an open possibility for diverse developments to arise. However, as has been said, we cannot afford to ignore other developments that have permeated the reading of these texts. This tension between the history of interpretation and the possibility of going back to the sources is what keeps biblical hermeneutics alive.

Thus when “the tradition” and “the magisterium” unilaterally appropriate the text for themselves and develop its meaning in one direction and make that direction normative, such appropriation becomes “anticanonical,” since the magisterium sets strong limits and maintains hierarchies in a community that was born, if the present thesis holds some truth, differentiating itself from the hierarchies and forms of appropriation of its own time. This should not surprise us. Hierarchies and delimitations are mechanisms which the dominant sectors use to appropriate—socially and ecclesiastically—the “means of symbolic production” that is the New Testament.5 Our effort, in contrast, is to be “canonical”: to recover the biblical material as a “fetal” registry, flexible and open, as a community space, as part of a dialogue that opens the text as common possession. Our effort is to open the text again as a way of recovering it for the subordinate classes and dominated peoples on whose experience that text was constructed, and for the struggles that continue to give life to those hopes today: in other words, to socialize the text.

We must not ignore the history of the Christian community (or, better, communities), with its historical swings, its proposed appropriations by the most powerful, and the partial recoveries of many of its most inspired prophets. However, we want to be able to interpret the church critically, on the basis of its foundational actions and of the challenges of the present time. It thus makes sense to speak of an “updating” in which both our present reality and history are a part. In this sense, we always find ourselves at a “Pauline juncture.” We are heirs of a tradition that has nourished and situated us in the world (just as Paul was situated in part within his Israelite origin), but that tradition can be valid only as long as we break the continuity with a new meaning born out of contemporary experience, which makes that tradition anachronistic. Paul recognizes that he is Jewish; he laments on behalf of his Jewish brothers and sisters (Rom. 9:1-4); he uses the scriptures that he received as a legacy from Israel and leans on them. But at the same time, he breaks that faithfulness because of his encounter with a new meaning, abdicates the rituals of Judaism, and reformulates its texts under a new light. The memory of the particular must be submitted to the construction of something new, to the emergence of a new subject, a “new creation.”

Our situation is Pauline, then, and simultaneously it is not. The canonical text, the letter we have studied, was written, as I will indicate below, at a time in which the lower classes had not developed a clear consciousness or the analytical tools that would have allowed them to evaluate the mechanisms causing their submission. Part of our goal (in this and other writings) has been to show that the emerging community of believers created a symbolic world that was largely able to challenge that submission in accordance with the real historical circumstances in which it is was born. This included a theology and ethics that were constructed as instruments of confrontation with the ideologies of domination and oppression. And this community did so with the elements at its disposal. The consciousness of class of the modern type, the struggles and theories of gender, the understanding of the mechanisms behind prejudice, and the scientific knowledge of the political-ideological mechanisms of domination were not available to them; yet Paul, with all his ambiguities, was able to advance to the place where he could defy these dynamics, at least within that new reality he calls “in Christ.”

And yet things have changed. The subordinate classes, sectors, and peoples today, with a greater consciousness of the mechanisms that cause their submission, have created the tools of analysis and of struggle that, although imperfect and necessarily improvable, have made effective social and political movements possible. However, our “third world” has not yet found ways to destroy fully the mechanisms that cause the exploitation, discrimination, and oppression to which our peoples are doomed in both grand and daily history. Now it is possible to incorporate new analytical elements and other forms of consciousness from the facts of our own history. My question, in this case, has to do with the value a reading like the one I present here might have in the formation of a symbolic, counterhegemonic worldview that, alongside other instruments, proves to be efficient in this struggle.

Some experiences seem to suggest that, despite their partial and present frustrations, this path is valid. In my original thesis I sought to follow this path. This is s...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Excursus I
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Excursus II
• Excursus III
• Notes