1 and 2 Corinthians

Yung Suk Kim, Yung Suk Kim

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780800699352
• eBook ISBN: 9781451426359
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Texts @ Contexts series gathers scholarly voices from diverse contexts and social locations to bring new or unfamiliar facets of biblical texts to light. In 1 and 2 Corinthians, scholars from a variety of cultural and social locations shed new light on themes and dynamics in Paul's most intriguing letters to a complex church. Subjects include race, identity, and privilege; ritual, food, and power; community, culture, and love. These essays de-center the often homogeneous first-world orientation of much biblical scholarship and open up new possibilities for discovery.

1

Identity, Power, and Race

1

Identity and the Embodiment of Privilege in Corinth

Love L. Sechrest

Introduction

Years ago, I learned about the seductive appeal of the “prosperity gospel” from acquaintances in a black church in a small town in the rural South. These new friends were generous and loving, and threw open the doors of their hearts and homes to me with scarcely a thought for their own scarcity. They were as open-handed in their giving to the church as they were to me, a virtual stranger. Yet, when it came to a discussion about the prosperity gospel and predatory gimmicks designed to increase contributions from people who are often poor and oppressed, we soon found ourselves at an impasse. Though I denigrated the greed that powers this movement, my friends stunned me with their passionate defense of church leaders in fine suits, fancy cars, and elaborate homes: “Who wants to follow a broke-down pastor?!” In their view, legitimate pastors must have access to the accoutrements of wealth and power; a “broke-down” pastor is simply not a compelling witness to the power of the gospel. This vignette gives insight into the complicated tangle of faith, wealth, race, and the aspirational desire for status and privilege. Though rooted in the not-too-distant past, this thinking is not that far removed from some of the problems Paul faced in Roman Corinth, problems that surface particularly in the correspondence now preserved in 2 Corinthians.

This essay explores the nature of Paul’s vision of Christian ministry and the association between physical identity and privilege. Though interpreters speculate about the arguments that gave rise to Paul’s responses in 2 Corinthians, many suspect that tension emerged from Paul’s failure to embody then-contemporary aspirations about a leader’s demeanor. Paul assumes the glory of his ministry accomplishments, heritage, and ethnic identity, but emphasizes his brokenness, humiliation, and suffering as an “earthen vessel,” interpreting these qualities as the preferred expressions of participation in Christ. Here I consider the implications of this rhetorical strategy for a modern society in which white bodies signify privilege and power but which regards black and brown bodies as humble, cheap, and disposable. We shall see that Paul was, at one and the same time, both privileged and humble, occupying a position of privilege in his own culture on the one hand, while enslaving himself to recipients of his ministry on the other. We begin with a consideration of privilege and identity, before examining the way these concepts interact with the situation in 2 Corinthians.

The Embodied Nature of Social Identity

Constructs of identity are embodied; that is, they fundamentally involve the nexus of heritage, personality, physical appearance, and social connections. Educators, theologians, and critical theorists alike are exploring the ways in which we understand identity, the human person, and society (Green 2008; Westfield 2008; Tatum 1997). In racial and ethnic studies, the embodied nature of identity organically emerges from the fact that these concepts involve value judgments about skin colors, hair textures, facial features, and body types beyond the simple fact of physical difference. Recent work in the social sciences no longer focuses on the essentialist enumeration of physical characteristics that belong to particular groups, but instead explores the ways that society inscribes social meaning and privileges on particular bodies. The social history of the United States can be narrated in terms of the ways interactions in public spaces in the United States manifest embedded value judgments about bodies, ordering them by gender, ethnoracial identity, and apparent socioeconomic position.^[1] In this society, white bodies signify privilege and power, while black and brown bodies are figured as either expendable or threatening, or both.

The notion of privilege is one common theoretical concept that attempts to model how persons inhabit social spaces (Feagin 2006: 33–48; Tatum 1997: 7–9). Privilege mediates position in a hierarchical ordering of ethnoracial groups by characterizing access to social resources. These resources may be material resources like wealth, credit, property, and access to safe neighborhoods and schools; alternately, resources may be immaterial and less easy to quantify, such as assumed social status, access to beneficial social networks, employment opportunity, and the presumption of innocence in the legal justice system (McIntosh 1990: 32–35). Privilege is relative, varying by the complexities of multiple identity attachments, and context sensitive, varying by social location or setting. The relative privilege may be seen in the fact that a black female college professor will enjoy the privileges of educational attainment, but that such privileges will be generally less visible than those accorded to her male colleagues from other ethnic groups (Westfield 2008). Nevertheless, context matters—if a black female professor’s privilege can be positively influenced by educational achievement in certain settings, a white male professor’s privilege may be diminished in some settings if, for instance, he publicly identifies as a homosexual. Though recipients of privilege are often unconscious of its influence, privilege confers advantages for both the pursuit of happiness and the cultivation of character; it not only smoothes the way for its beneficiaries, but it also confers a poise and self-possession that can function as intangible but nonetheless genuine social resources that confer competitive advantages on the bearers of privilege.

Complicating the concept of privilege is religious social location. Within the larger category of “Christian” in the U.S. scene, there is considerable ethnoracial diversity despite the disembodied, universalistic theorizing of Christian identity. Disembodied constructions of Christian identity appear in modern discourse about Christian theology, and are typically embedded in the idea that Christian identity and origins transcend ethnicity and race (Hodge 2007; Buell 2005; Sechrest 2009; Boyarin and Boyarin 1995). Such disembodied constructs of Christian identity that depict it as a nonethnic, universal group unmarked by particularity are aided by Enlightenment and modernist assumptions about the ideal objective observer, as well as the influence of body-soul dualism in the Western philosophical tradition (Douglas 2005: 3–103).^[2] These constructions are not uncommon in New Testament studies, even those that self-consciously interrogate the intersection of identity theory and biblical studies (Cosgrove 2006; Duling 2008).^[3]

Kelly Brown Douglas examines the interaction between racial identity and core Christian beliefs, finding among other things that the cross/crucifixion complex is a central element that has facilitated Christian oppression of the ethnic “other” inasmuch as it sanctions suffering. Indeed, Paul is sometimes mentioned as the locus of a problematic discourse about oppression that becomes racially loaded in the current context (Patterson 1998: 229–32). Douglas discusses the traditional reckoning of the crucifixion in the context of womanist thought, wherein some protest the idea of redemptive suffering as damaging for oppressed peoples, while others argue that traditional atonement categories have succored and nourished black Christians in the midst of historical oppression. Douglas steers a middle way, maintaining that when understood as a single indivisible construct, the incarnation and resurrection affirm the importance of human bodies while simultaneously participating in God’s self-revelation to humanity (Douglas 2005: 89–103). According to Douglas, the incarnation/resurrection complex affirms: (1) God’s identification with human suffering in the context of oppression and unjust uses of power; (2) the incarnation as a declaration of the intrinsic dignity of human flesh as a witness to and medium of God’s self-revelation; and (3) God’s effective rejection of the ideal of redemptive suffering by the resurrection, inasmuch as it restores Jesus to embodied life. However, contrary to Douglas and others who maintain that there is an essential collusion between Pauline theology and hyper-Platonic thought, Paul himself espouses similar values in 2 Corinthians, especially with reference to the intrinsic dignity of human flesh as a conduit of God’s power. Though Paul differs from Douglas on how suffering can be redemptive, 2 Corinthians does contain Paul’s conviction that the promise of the resurrection stimulates active and fearless engagement with the world. Paul’s bold Christian witness is grounded in privileges that emerge from reflections on his rich ethnoracial heritage on the one hand and his identification with the embodied suffering and resurrection of Jesus on the other. Far from denigrating the body, Paul’s countercultural ministry affirms the essentially embodied nature of Christian life and witness in all its messiness.

Paul’s Ethnic Identity and Privilege (2 Corinthians 3–4)

Paul’s extended reflection on Christian ministry in 2 Cor. 2:14—6:10 is an argument that proceeds in four moves that together address the contrast at the center of the conflict in this epistle: How can authentic ministers fail to exhibit a glory that is comparable to the glory of God in Christ? In the first move, 2:14—3:6, Paul introduces the topic of sufficiency, maintaining that God is the basis for adequacy when ministry conveys life and death to its recipients. Drawing on Roman triumphal procession imagery, Paul depicts himself as God’s captive who tangibly manifests knowledge of God to others; those who accept the gospel perceive the message and its messengers as a pleasing aroma leading to salvation, while knowledge of God is the odor of death and decay for those who reject it. In the second move of the argument, Paul contrasts his ministry with Moses’ ministry, the most revered leader in Israel’s past (3:7—4:6), and in the third section, he develops a pottery metaphor, where he contrasts God’s glorious power with the fragile and common human conduit of that power (4:7—5:10). He characterizes his work as the ministry of reconciliation in the fourth and final move, in 5:11—6:10, ending it with a peristasis, or catalog of suffering, offered as proof of his authenticity. Although we are here concerned with the second and third sections of this discourse, the major issue throughout 2:14—6:10 concerns a tension that we can also find at the heart of problems in race relations, and that is the clash between physical differences on the one hand and embodied social status and privilege on the other.

In 3:7—4:6, through a rereading Exod. 34:29-35, Paul introduces the new covenant ministry by contrasting the life-giving spirit with the “killing” letter, ultimately describing this as a contrast between Moses’ ministry and Paul’s via a series of antithetical terms.^[4] Post-Shoah interpreters are understandably uncomfortable with this initial comparison and with the series of negative images used for Moses’ work throughout this paragraph; including “ministry of death,” “ministry of condemnation,” as well as the possible references to the abolition of the old covenant (for example, 3:11, 14).^[5] A closer reading suggests that these images for the Mosaic ministry were likely chosen not as a realistic or informative description of that ministry for outsiders, but instead communicates to insiders the extent to which Paul’s own ministry surpasses Moses’.^[6] Paul’s description of Moses was intended for the consumption of insiders, and Paul seems to assume that his audience will agree with two propositions: first that Moses’ ministry was glorious, and second that it is valid to compare the righteousness and life in his own ministry with the condemnation and death in Moses’ (Thrall 1994: 1: 240). By contrast, when discussing the nature of the Mosaic law with outsiders in Romans 7, it is clear that he is addressing people whom he has never met; his description of the law is much more lengthy and nuanced since there he has to argue for his understanding. In the end, it is difficult to imagine a more vivid disparity than that between the description of the law as holy, just, and good in Rom. 7:12 and Moses’ killing ministry of death and condemnation through the letter in 2 Cor. 3:6-9. We can reconcile these different depictions by realizing that the former careful characterization represents his core beliefs, while the latter was an ad hoc straw man never intended as a standalone exposition, for use only with colleagues in the context of a comparison.

In other words, the Mosaic ministry ministers death only inasmuch as it vividly contrasts with the resurrection life mediated through the new covenant (see 2 Cor. 4:14) (Sanders 1983: 138). Paul’s esteem for the old covenant is evident in the way that he chooses to contrast “glory” with “more glory” rather than using a more negative term as a contrast to glory, such as “dishonor” (atimia; 1 Cor. 11:14-15; 15:43; 2 Cor. 6:8) or “humiliation” (tapenōsis; Phil. 3:21).^[7] When Paul describes the veil over the reading of the old covenant that is only removed in Christ in 3:14-17, his reasoning seems focused on the proper interpretation of the old covenant through the Spirit versus a focus on its destruction, a conclusion that makes sense of Paul’s habitual appeal to the Torah throughout the epistles. Indeed, when Paul does develop a foil to contrast with the glory of the new covenant ministry, he will not look to the old covenant but will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table Of Contents
• Copyright
• Other Books in the Series
• Series Preface, Updated: Texts in/at Life Contexts
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Identity, Power, and Race
• Ritual, Culture, and Food
• Community, Women, and Sexuality
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Ancient and Other Extra-Biblical Sources Index