The Impact of Bodily Experience on Paul's Resurrection Theology

Kai-Hsuan Chang

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780567700957
• eBook ISBN: 9780567700940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Kai-Hsuan Chang engages with the longstanding scholarly debate concerning the development of Paul's resurrection theology, by investigating the correlation between his bodily experiences and his diverse articulations about resurrection. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Chang considers Paul's ideas about resurrection as fundamentally grounded in recurrent patterns of bodily experience, arguing that such experience of some religious activities in Paul's time-death rites, spirit possession, and baptism-contributed to the formation and development of his resurrection theology. Chang demonstrates that developments in Paul's ideas about "bodily transformation at resurrection" - reflected in 1 Corinthians 15 - resulted from a change in the experiential patterns on which his new idea is constructed, rather than "transformation during heavenly ascent" as seen in Jewish traditions of resurrection. He thus applies cognitive linguistic tools to two considerations; first, whether Paul had contextual reasons to generate his innovation in 1 Corinthians 15, and second, whether Paul's innovation recurred or had continual effects in Christian groups. In so doing, Chang shows that Paul's innovation directly addressed a contextual issue of death rites in Corinth and exerted a continuing effect on Paul's later ideas of transformation, spirit possession, and baptism.

1 Introduction: Thinking within the Body

Paul struggled with the hope of resurrection in Christ, and he struggled physically. It was difficult for Paul and his communities to conceive and articulate this hope in detail because the idea of resurrection was contradictory to the nature of the human body—everyone could see that the body wore away daily and that it would eventually decompose into dust. The Corinthians asked, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (1 Cor 15:35 NRSV). However, Paul also articulates a theology that demonstrates that his view of resurrection changed and developed throughout his ministry, prompted by the interplay between his physical struggles and his theological reflection on resurrection. Paul was inspired by a variety of physical experiences in religious activities, such as the ritual experience in baptism (e.g., 1 Cor 12:13; Gal 27–28; Rom 6:3–4) and the ecstatic experience of the Spirit (e.g., 1 Cor 14:14–15; 2 Cor 12:1–4), in addition to the daily experience of mortality. At times, these religious activities provided Paul with alternative experiences of the body and, consequently, an alternative physical basis for conceptualizing the hope of resurrection. This development resulted in the diverse articulations about resurrection throughout his corpus of writings.

In this book, we will explore and explain the development of Paul’s resurrection theology by looking at the correlation between his bodily experiences and his diverse articulations about resurrection. Faced with puzzling variations in Paul’s claims, including those that he makes about resurrection, the law, Jews and Gentiles, and eschatology, scholars have long wondered whether, how, and to what extent Paul’s thought might have changed or developed during the extent of time within which he composed his extant letters. While some variations can be explained as contingent expressions addressing different contextual issues, this explanation does not logically exclude the possibility that, in some cases, Paul had actually developed his ideas through his interactions with these contexts. Resurrection, among other topics, is a focal point of the modern scholarly discussion about Paul’s development. Thus, by emphasizing the bodily aspect, this study is an exploration of the way that Paul’s resurrection thought might have developed through contextual interactions. It argues that his thought about resurrection might be influenced not only by ideas available in his intellectual interaction with cultural backgrounds but also by a fuller range of his contextual experience. Specifically, it demonstrates that the bodily experience in some religious activities in Paul’s time—death rites, spirit possession, and baptism—contributed significantly to the formation and development of his resurrection theology.

Such an exploration of the influence of experience on thought requires a methodological link between Paul’s intellect and his bodily experience. Colleen Shantz has posed this methodological question in her book Paul in Ecstasy: how should we consider the emergence and formation of Paul’s ideas while recognizing that he is “a full-blooded human agent” who does more than think and write?¹ Indeed, the demand for an embodied understanding of Paul and his mind is pressing and justified since it is generally agreed in New Testament studies that Paul should not be considered as a systematic theologian and that his letters are occasional products emergent from his contextual interactions with particular communities. However, as Shantz observes, in spite of more and more exceptions, a mind-body dualism is still lurking behind New Testament studies, and the body tends to remain peripheral in scholarly understandings of Paul.² The rather disembodied portraits of Paul’s mind, as Shantz indicates, are partly due to the methodological difficulty of analyzing texts in terms of the body. After all, our most reliable access to Paul is through the texts that he produced or interacted with, and the one thing that we can directly identify in the texts that might have interacted with Paul’s ideas are also ideas.³ There exists a methodological gap between the body, on the one hand, and texts and articulated ideas, on the other. Thus, much attention has been paid to discursive and literary evidence, and the categorization of Paul’s interactions with his environment that have contributed to the formation of his ideas has been largely limited to intellectual activities: borrowing or synthesizing ideas, accommodating various worldviews or values, and arguing with purported opponents who advocated different ideas. The absence of the body in our understanding of Paul is particularly problematic when dealing with the formation of Paul’s resurrection-related ideas. Resurrection is itself a hope about the body and is naturally conceptualized in relation to the body, either in accordance with or in tension with the experience of the body.

1.1 Embodied: The Way the Human Mind Works

The concept of embodiment provides the theoretical basis for this study’s methodology to explore the interaction between the body and text. In opposition to the body-mind dualism, embodied cognition studies and many cognitive linguists claim that our cognition is “embodied” in the sense that our somatic experience provides us the basis for the formation of many concepts that are most fundamental to our thinking and, in this sense, directly influences our conceptualization, the construction of meaning, and language.⁴ According to the concept of embodiment, Paul’s somatic experience had direct impact on his ideas and linguistic articulations.

Our experience and construal of reality is largely mediated through the sensory-motor systems of our physical bodies. Thus, because of the very nature of our bodies, we experience the world differently from other species and accordingly have a unique perception of the world.⁵ In other words, our experience and perception are embodied—they are bodily shaped and conditioned. For example, since the human visual system has three kinds of color channels, we have a specific experience of color that differs from that of rabbits, who have two color channels. Consequently, as Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green indicate, our cognition is also embodied because “we can only talk about what we can perceive and conceive, and the things that we can perceive and conceive derive from embodied experience.”⁶ Edward Slingerland also indicates that there is “a growing consensus in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive science” that human thought is largely derived from recurrent patterns of bodily experience.⁷ Thus, it is not possible to investigate the human mind—and so language—independently from the body. As psychologist Arthur M. Glenberg and his collaborators state, “the fundamental tenet of embodied cognition research is that thinking is not something that is divorced from the body; instead, thinking is an activity strongly influenced by the body and the brain interacting with the environment.”⁸

That our mind and language are both somatically grounded is particularly observable in our metaphorical thinking and expressions. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson indicate, a more concrete conceptual domain can function as a (usually somatic) basis from which a “conceptual metaphor” emerges that allows a more abstract domain to be understood.⁹ For example, a metaphorical expression “we have a long way to go before this project is done” is structured in relation to a concrete, recurrent bodily experience of walking on a journey, which functions as a somatic basis allowing us to understand the expression itself.¹⁰ Other metaphorical expressions that describe being in states like love or depression, such as “I am in love” or “she is out of her depression,” further illustrate this point. In these expressions, abstract concepts like love and depression are metaphorically conceptualized through our repeated somatic experience of containment and containers. As Evans and Green indicate, due to the nature of our physical body, we experience an enclosed region in space (such as a room, a house, or an elevator) as a container that can constrain our activity, and this sort of embodied experience allows us to conceptualize states such as love or depression in which we usually feel unable to escape the situation or change our mood or behavior.¹¹ By utilizing such metaphorical projections, recurrent patterns of somatic experience are an integral part of the functioning of human cognition and directly form our perception, conceptualization, and linguistic construction and articulation of the world.¹² Thus, our recurrent embodied experience not only shapes the way we perceive and make sense of the world but also fundamentally influence the way we conceptualize more complex and abstract ideas. In this sense, Paul, and everyone else, had to think within the body.

This kind of impact of recurrent experience on human cognition and, consequently, on the construction of complex ideas is also a prominent phenomenon in ritual and religious experience in addition to experience in daily life. As a kind of bodily practice, ritual and religious activities create repeated patterns of bodily experience. Thus, religious activities not only express or symbolize ideas but also provide recurrent experiential patterns that generate ideas and linguistic expressions, a process that participants in religious activities might not be consciously aware of.¹³ Based on the concept of embodiment, the interface between bodily experience in religious activities and ideas articulated in texts is considered in this study as reciprocal and interactive. In other words, while practice and experience in religious activities reflect the theological ideas of Paul and his communities, these activities might also contribute to the development of ideas through experiential patterns.

Recently, based upon embodied cognition theory, Frederick S. Tappenden applied cognitive linguistic tools to the resurrection-related ideas in Paul and in Jewish traditions. In so doing, he breaks down resurrection ideas into experiential patterns. As I will introduce in Chapter 2, he demonstrates that these complex ideas about resurrection are fundamentally grounded in recurrent patterns of somatic experience and are imagined and expressed through conceptual metaphors. For example, through our repeated experience of verticality, such as perceiving a tree or climbing ladders, resurrection is usually conceptual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Thinking within the Body
• 2 A Seed of Paul’s Development: The Reversal Schema
• 3 “We Will All Be Transformed”: Transformation at Resurrection
• 4 “We All Are Being Transformed”: Experienced Transformation
• 5 “Baptized into His Death”: The Convergence of Two Aspects of Transformation
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Ancient Source Index
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright Page