Vulnerability and Glory

A Theological Account

Kristine A. Culp

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781611640809
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Disasters indicate the complex peril of earthly existence. Suffering and risk are global realities. Yet, the biblical depiction of persons and communities as "earthen vessels" also suggests that vulnerable creatures can be strengthened to receive and bear the grace and glory of God. Culp demonstrates how vulnerability to devastation and to transformation is the very basis for life before God. The glory of God may be witnessed in resistance to inhumanity and idolatry, and expressed in delight and gratitude for the good gifts of life.

PART 1

Vulnerability and Community

CHAPTER 1

From Paul’s Earthen Vessel to Augustine’s Mixed Body

We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not belong to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.

—2 Corinthians 4:7–10

The apostle Paul explained to the Corinthian Christians that their “clay”—their vulnerable, earthen existence—receives and bears God’s glory. We come from the earth, are given breath and life, and will perish; and yet, Paul wrote, the glory and power of God are made manifest in vulnerability, especially in the life and the death of Jesus. Three hundred some years later, when Christianity gained an established place in the Roman Empire, the problem was no longer how to bear the glory of God under persecution. Instead, Augustine, bishop of Hippo, saw moral and religious ambiguity in the church; he viewed it as a decidedly “mixed body.” In order to reject what we might today call a sectarian view of Christianity, he formulated the distinction between the visible and invisible church. The boundaries of the church were overrun by a dubious crowd of humanity, yet he viewed the church’s pure order as being preserved in God. Augustine portrayed the rule of God as stretching beyond the church to the entire society and beyond time to the eternal city of God. The whole of history became the field of divine transformation. However, his concern to safeguard order also opened the way to a triumphalist view of the church.

This chapter moves from Paul to Augustine as they and other theologians sought to interpret the transforming reality of God in relation to the vulnerability of creaturely life and the ambiguity of Christian communities. This treatment is by no means exhaustive. It focuses on the trajectories of the metaphor of treasure in earthen vessels and of the logic of the relation of visible and invisible church, while also attending to other biblical and theological tropes. Through such tropes, these early theologians indicated and depicted the theological realities that they believed and experienced. Later theologians—I focus on Martin Luther and John Calvin—reinterpreted and resituated many of the same tropes. In this chapter and the following ones, I explore the dynamic complexity of shifting theological depictions and felt sensibilities associated with them. If contemporary theological thinking is to be adequate to the complexities of the past and the present, it must be able to evoke and critically engage these dense interactions of language, meaning, felt import, situation, and situatedness.

PAUL: VULNERABLE VESSELS, GLORIOUS TREASURE

“We have this treasure in clay jars” (2 Cor. 4:7). Paul’s words to the Corinthian church echoed the creation story in which God forms the human from the dust of the earth and breathes life into it (Gen. 2:7). As the first human being, Adam, was “from the earth, a man of dust” (1 Cor. 15:47), so is the Corinthian church. The divine pneuma—breath, spirit—inhabits and enlivens these perishable vessels. The animating spirit of God is known in its luminous power through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Paul referred to this treasure as the “light of the gospel” (2 Cor. 4:4), that is, “the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (4:6). He explained to the Corinthians that the “extraordinary power” that infuses their earthenness “belongs to God and does not come from us” (4:7). They are created from the earth, given breath and life, and are perishing, “wasting away.” At the same time, they are being transformed: the inmost stuff of their existence is “being renewed day by day” (4:16).¹

These clay vessels suggest earthenware used in the temple as well as in mundane places. Paul’s earthen pot, skeuos ostrakinon, also alludes to Jeremiah’s allegory of the irreparable shattering of the potter’s vessel (Jer. 18:1–12). Paul and other agents of the gospel may have felt as “breakable” as everyday pottery. In his letter to the Corinthians, however, Paul fashioned clay pots as a testimony of power rather than as a portent of judgment. The apostle’s catalog of affliction contrasts with the incomparable reality of God.² “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:8–10). As Paul and others endure persecution without being crushed, God’s glory is made manifest in their vulnerability. “For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh” (4:11).

These treasure-bearing vessels stand in not only for Paul, but also for the whole Corinthian body. Like the first human, Adam, the Corinthians are subject to strife, hardship, and death. Yet they already also exist “in Christ”: through baptism they have been incorporated into the very body of Christ. Paul’s trope of treasure in clay jars and the synecdoche of the body interpreted threats of affliction as existing in interrelation with manifestations of glory. In 2 Corinthians 4, the same earthenness that makes them susceptible to suffering, corruption, and death contrasts with and, in some sense, is also a condition for empowerment, renewal, and transformation.

In other places, Paul construed the earthen stuff of human life and particularly the “flesh” (sarx) more negatively, as more threatened and threatening. First Corinthians portrayed the Corinthians as particularly susceptible to discord and contamination: they are an assembly that is sometimes divided by status and also a body whose boundaries are threatened by hostile agents. According to Dale Martin, underlying Paul’s depictions of threat were two competing explanations of disruption and disease. Martin contrasts the logic of an “invasion etiology of disease,” evident in Paul’s anxieties about pollution and firm boundaries, to an “imbalance etiology” found in Greco-Roman medicine and indicated by concerns for equilibrium and moderation. Each of these etiologies involves a physiology and corresponding therapy and can be correlated with a political theory. Martin elaborates: “The etiology of balance reflects a sense of control over one’s body and the environment. Fears of invasion and loss of power over one’s self are not paramount.” In it, disease occurs when the body becomes imbalanced or, analogically, when the stability of the political order is disturbed by strife between the classes. Therapeutic interventions involve restoring proper balance and reestablishing the body’s “natural” hierarchy. By contrast, in Paul and in the invasion etiology in general, “the body is not a secure microcosm of the balanced universe but a site of cosmic battles between good and evil.” This view, Martin notes, “evinces a social position of helplessness in the face of outside powers. The world is a much more precarious place, with threats on every side.”³ Note how the etiology of invasion and the threat of persecution coalesce: in 2 Corinthians 4:8–10 Paul’s catalog of afflictions conveys the sense of being threatened on every side.

Martin concludes that Paul “struggles to disrupt the hierarchy of ‘this world’ and restructure both it and the body to reflect the topsyturvy status system of apocalyptic eschatology and faith in a crucified Messiah.”⁴ Paul’s revolutionary vision was sometimes constrained by a physiology that remains hierarchical, as indicated by his treatment of the women prophets in 1 Corinthians 11.⁵ Other passages and images, including that of clay jars bearing glorious treasure, convey a less mixed message.

Paul’s depiction of the animating power of God made manifest in clay jars and his disruption of the status of “this world” will reverberate through the ages. The logics of imbalance and invasion will have analogues in later interpretations of personal and communal existence. As we shall see, the trope of treasure in earthen vessels will come to bear different meanings, partly as the effective etiologies of Augustine and other theologians shift from concern about external risks, especially persecution, to concern about the unity of the church and moderation in Christian life. These changing emphases correlated with changing views of transformation and also related to whether and how hierarchical status, ideology, and polity were disrupted or maintained.

In the ancient world, change and flux themselves were viewed as threatening; the etiologies of invasion and of imbalance both suggest this. The word vulnerability is also caught up with the view of change as threat; it typically connotes a risk to harmful change being effected by prevailing powers. While vulnerability as such is not found in Paul’s Letters to Corinth, there are analogues. Paul offered his reader varied depictions of demise: destruction, putrefaction, affliction, rejection, pollution, and bondage to sin. However, he also outlined a horizon of hope that involves positive change: “We will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (1 Cor. 15:51b-52a). Paul’s appeal to creation and renewal, as well as to resurrection and redemption, underscored possibilities of positive transformation.⁶ Persons are also vulnerable to healing and strengthening by the extraordinary power of God.

In this book I develop this broader construal of vulnerability. I consider how susceptibility to devastation and transformation are entwined and how capacities for healing and harm are linked. Vulnerability is always experienced in particular bodies and situations, and is often signaled by threats of trauma and torture; yet in this interpretation, vulnerability is not embodiment or emplacement as such. Vulnerability is susceptibility to being changed, for good and for ill.

Paul’s deceptively simple metaphor of clay jars brings us close to the heart of matter. It conveys a range of threats by associating malleable and breakable vessels with the dust of creation and of death. It signals, too, a range of possibilities: of creation pronounced “good,” of everyday vessels suited for holy use, and of divine pneuma moving through and manifest in human life. The interrelations of threats and possibilities with those of bodies, creation, mortality, transformation, and glory, are difficult to convey other than through the layers of allusions and associations that rich metaphors offer. By contrast, note the pervasive, nearly rote, use of the dialectic of flesh and spirit (or body and spirit) in much of Western Christian thought. To be sure, careful exegesis can complicate a dualistic rendering of this pair. Nonetheless, use of the body/spirit dialectic, especially as interpreted in relation to dialectics of visible and invisible and of historical existence and spiritual essence, has often served to flatten and reduce complex relationships. With renewed attention to the layers of meanings condensed in metaphors and this construal of vulnerability, I attempt to broaden the bandwidth, as it were, adding dimension and dynamism to our understanding of creaturely plights and possibilities and their interrelation in the glory of God.

IRENAEUS: RELIABILITY AND RENEVVAL

Paul exhorted the Corinthians to be mindful that their earthenness bore the glory of God. A century or so later, a subtle but decisive shift had occurred. Irenaeus placed confidence in the Christian assembly because it was a reliable vessel that is ever being renewed by the Spirit of God. He explained how the trustworthiness of the vessel and the treasure are interdependent:

We receive our faith from the Church and keep it safe; and it is as it were a precious deposit stored in a fine vessel, ever renewing its vitality through the Spirit of God, and causing the renewal of the vessel in which it is stored…. For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the spirit of God is, there is the church and every kind of grace.⁷

On the one hand, the treasure renews the vessel: the Spirit of God is ever at work renewing the vitality of faith in the church. On the other hand, the reliability of the vessel ensures the treasure: the church has passed on and preserved the true teaching of the faith from the apostles. There were reasons for Irenaeus to seek confidence in the vitality of the treasure and the reliability of the vessel. Authorities threatened Christians with torture and horrible deaths while Gnostic views challenged Pauline teaching about divine transformation of mortal life. For Irenaeus, the reality of the church stood as testimony that God’s power prevails over such threats.

Since the apostle Paul’s own martyrdom, the threat of persecution had remained over the church in the Mediterranean world. Irenaeus became bishop of Lyon in the Roman province of Gaul after his predecessor, Pothinus, was martyred. Altogether, 47 Christians, 24 males and 23 females, were martyred in Lyon in 177–178 CE.⁸ In this context, a central concern for Irenaeus and his contemporaries was, in the phrasing of historian Peter Brown, “how the frail, mortal body might become a reliable container for the Spirit of God.”⁹ What would enable Christians to bear affliction and not be crushed? To be struck down but not destroyed? Irenaeus answered: the restoring power of God. Having already created the human race from dust, God has now made a recapitulation in the Word of God become flesh. God has repaired and restored humanity, gathering up the human race in Christ’s humanity and, in Christ as the second Adam, repeating and annulling the first Adam. Christ has demonstrated and the Spirit of God has empowered a fullness of life that prevails over torture and the fear of death.¹⁰

Irenaeus insisted that Christians “gradually become accustomed to receive and to bear God.”¹¹ The martyrs of Lyon, especially the young slave woman Blandina, received and bore the glory of God in an exemplary manner. Note that glory was associated with luminosity and vitality, with an evident life-giving power. For Paul, God’s power was manifest particularly in creation and new creation; here Blandina’s luminous endurance attested to God’s transcendent power over against the empire’s prosecution of death. According to the account preserved in the memory of the church, “Blandina was filled with such power that even those who were taking turns to torture her in every way from dawn to dusk were weary and exhausted.” The crowd was “bloodthirsty” and the Roman governor eager “to please the mob.”¹² Blandina survived ordeals of whipping, being mauled by wild animals, and being seared by fire, before dying in a ring with a bull, “while the pagans themselves admitted that no woman had ever suffered so much in their experience.”¹³ After being tortured to death, the martyrs’ dead bodies were guarded and denied burial for several days, presumably also to deny them resurrection. In effect, imperial authorities claimed power to determine life and death and also to obliterate everlasting existence in God. In response, Christian testimony about the martyr...