Paul's Emotional Regime

The Social Function of Emotion in Philippians and 1 Thessalonians

Ian Y. S. Jew

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780567696441
• eBook ISBN: 9780567694157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In his letters Paul speaks often of his emotions, and also promotes certain feelings while banishing others. This indicates that for Paul, emotion is vital. However, in New Testament studies, the study of emotions is still nascent; current research in the social sciences highlights its cognitive and social dimensions. Ian Y. S. Jew combines rigorous social-scientific analysis and exegetical enquiry to argue that emotions are intrinsic to the formation of the Pauline communities, as they encode belief structures and influence patterns of social experience. By taking joy in Philippians and grief in 1 Thessalonians as representative emotions, and contrasting Paul's approach with that of his Stoic contemporaries, Jew demonstrates that authorized feelings have socially integrating and differentiating functions; by reinforcing the shared theological realities upon which emotional norms are based, group belonging is bolstered. Simultaneously, authorized emotions fortify the theological boundaries between Christians and others, which strengthens group solidarity in the Church by accentuating its members' insider status. Using this framework heuristically, Jew explores how the interplay of symbolic, ritual, and social elements within Paul's eschatological worldview reinforces emotional norms, and demonstrates that attention to emotion can only deepen our understanding of the social formation of the early believers.

1

Introduction

1.1. Introductory Comments

The New Testament attests strongly to the fact that Paul displayed a wide range of emotions in his life and ministry, and expected the same from his converts in the churches that he had founded. However, the study of emotion in the Pauline letters is still in its infancy; and to my knowledge, there is, as yet, no monograph-length treatment of Paul and emotion. To date, scholarly work has focused largely on Paul’s rhetorical use of pathos, though in recent years there has been a nascent interest in probing the relationship between his construals of emotion and early Christian eschatological faith. However, more fundamental questions regarding the role of emotion in Paul’s writings have not been addressed.

Accordingly, this present investigation aims to get at the heart of what Paul is doing with emotion in his letters. Through historical analysis and exegetical study, and in dialogue with present-day social-scientific approaches to emotion, I will offer an account of the function of emotion in Paul’s letters that engages deeply with his theological discourse and pastoral agenda, while also taking careful account of the complexes of sociality, symbolic meanings, and cultural influences that shape the sociocultural milieu in which his churches are set.

1.2. Emotion and Early Christianity: Survey of Research

1.2.1. Studies of Emotion in the Wider New Testament

1.2.1.a. Recent Studies

There are several older studies in the New Testament that have a specific emotion such as love or joy as their focus, but they are targeted at a non-specialist readership.¹ As far as I am able to discover, there have been in recent years only a handful of monographs that have emotion as the main focus; however, they are generally wanting in theoretical and analytical depth.

Stephen Voorwinde’s two monographs both deal with the significance of Jesus’s emotions for aspects of Christology: in the first of them, Voorwinde seeks to establish that the emotions of the Johannine Jesus throw significant light on the ongoing debate surrounding his humanity/divinity, and in its sequel Voorwinde extends his scope to include the synoptic gospels in order to ascertain if they together with John’s gospel present a coherent picture of Jesus’s emotions.² However, Voorwinde offers only a cursory appraisal of what emotions are: for him, they are experiences of feeling that activate action.³ Voorwinde’s interest in Jesus’s emotions lies in how they confirm his identity rather than in their function in the gospel narratives. While there is some recognition that emotions emerge from situational reasoning, Voorwinde’s discussion is somewhat lacking in theoretical rigour.

In a wide-ranging study, Matthew Elliott applies current research in psychology to emotion in the New Testament writings.⁴ Elliott’s expressed desire to interpret emotion in the light of both modern studies of emotion and its ancient context is certainly laudable.⁵ Unfortunately, his exegetical approach is somewhat facile, and there is minimal engagement with the Greco-Roman sociocultural setting for emotional life. Furthermore, though Elliott stresses that emotion is connected to ethics,⁶ he does not adequately explore its implications for the early Christian communities. While Elliott’s efforts to utilize a cognitive approach to understanding emotion have certain echoes in my approach, any indebtedness to his work is negligible.

In a recent, groundbreaking volume of theoretically sophisticated case studies of emotions displayed by divine and human figures in the biblical texts, a team of biblical scholars investigate emotions such as joy, hate, grief, and disgust.⁷ The approaches that are employed in these essays come from varied disciplines such as cultural psychology, literary theory, linguistic science, ancient and modern philosophy, and cognitive science, and the essays demonstrate how such resources can be fruitfully applied to the exploration of emotions across a range of biblical genres. However, while the essay collection provides evidence of a burgeoning scholarly interest in the emotional terrain of the Bible, unfortunately it hardly interacts with emotion in the Pauline letter corpus and shows only a limited engagement with specifically early Christian emotional life.⁸

1.2.1.b. Stephen Barton

One scholar whose short studies are helping to advance the study of emotion in early Christianity is Stephen Barton. In 2011, the first of his explorations of emotion in the New Testament was published;⁹ this article has become a seminal contribution to this emerging area of scholarly interest. Barton’s approach is exemplary: after surveying recent developments in emotions research in the social sciences and judiciously using these theories to open up the question of early Christian emotions,¹⁰ he brings key interpretative perspectives to bear on the issue of grief in 1 Thessalonians, situating such grief alongside wider sociocultural views of grief in the Greco-Roman world.¹¹ Using grief as a case study, Barton argues convincingly that early Christian eschatological faith and emotional life are intimately connected to each other.¹² In not insignificant ways, my own theoretical stance takes its cue from some of Barton’s proposals: first, that emotions, being cognitive and evaluative, are a form of rationality that may offer another avenue towards understanding early Christian rationality as a whole; second, that emotions play a role in expressing identity and marking social boundaries and points of transition, for example, through ‘feeling rules’; and third, that emotions arise in the course of social relations and are integral to processes of social engagement.¹³ Important for Barton as an analytical tool is the concept of the ‘emotional regime’, the import of which is the capacity to locate emotions within wider social-symbolic realities.¹⁴

Barton continues to probe emotion in early Christianity in a subsequent study, adopting again a multidisciplinary and broadly constructionist approach; this time he focuses on joy in Luke-Acts and Philippians, taking note also of how joy is inflected in earlier biblical tradition.¹⁵ Several of Barton’s conclusions are especially noteworthy. He argues that while the basis of joy is eschatological, ‘its expression is social, bound up with the quality of ecclesial sociality’.¹⁶ Moreover, joy is the individual and corporate manifestation of what really matters – the progress of the gospel and the progress in faith of those who accept this gospel.¹⁷ Furthermore, since joy has to do with an entirely new and countercultural way of classifying, and being in, the world, it has to be inculcated. Thus, for Barton, Philippians is ‘both a display of joy and a pedagogy in joy’.¹⁸

In a recent essay, Barton explores the relationship between anger and sin in Ephesians, concluding that anger has to be understood in the light of the letter’s overall moral-theological vision of unity in the Church.¹⁹ Again, Barton’s approach is instructive: he brings perspectives on anger in Jewish thought and in Greco-Roman philosophy into conversation with a careful reading of Eph. 4.26a, while being even-handed in his use of modern theories of emotion. Useful too is Barton’s highlighting of ‘the potential for the emotions, as a form of cognition, to be in alignment with, and an expression of, the truth’,²⁰ that is, the realities associated with Paul’s notions of divine redemption; and the fact that new ways of feeling, along with new ways of thinking and behaving, have to be learnt – which underlines the important role that processes of moral instruction and discipleship play in the Church.²¹

1.2.1.c. Katherine M. Hockey

In her very recent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Emotion in Stoicism
• 3 Joy in Philippians
• 4 Grief in 1 Thessalonians
• 5 The Pauline Emotional Regime
• Bibliography
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright Page