Paul and the Anatomy of Apostolic Authority

John Howard Schutz

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781611644968
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

John Howard Schutz's milestone analysis of Paul's authority shaped a generation of thought about Paul. This insightful work continues to be relevant to Pauline scholarship.

The New Testament Library offers authoritative commentary on every book and major aspect of the New Testament, as well as classic volumes of scholarship. The commentaries in this series provide fresh translations based on the best available ancient manuscripts, offer critical portrayals of the historical world in which the books were created, pay careful attention to their literary design, and present a theologically perceptive exposition of the text.

CHAPTER 1

AUTHORITY AND LEGITIMACY

INTRODUCTION

In the broadest sense this study is concerned with the problem of authority and holds that authority is an interpretation of power. While the essay itself is confined to an analysis of Paul’s apostolic authority, it comes from and hopefully will say something about a wider concern.

For the student of the earliest Christian history and literature the problem of authority is very real even if its discussion must often be more oblique than direct. Renewed interest in such questions as the relationship of heresy to orthodoxy in the early Church is partial testimony to the centrality of this problem.¹ Similar historical problems cluster around the use of that convenient if imprecise term Frühkatholizismus, the perimeter of which we are still trying to define.² Nor is the question of heresy and orthodoxy merely a matter of historical interest. It has manifold theological implications which become clearer as rigidly dogmatic positions soften.¹ In fact, the theological questions raised by Christianity’s development of a canon of scripture are even more difficult to solve than the historical questions. In this situation historians and literary critics find themselves aware of the accidental and occasional nature of canonical limits, unable to translate directly to their own work the canon’s intended function of authority.

Certainly the matter of authority, even to limit our discussion to the Church, is not confined to scholarly interest. One need only glance at the mood of Roman Catholic thought to see that the oldest and most stable sector of the Christian community is in the process of rethinking the problem of authority. This has already come to expression in such tangible forms as Vatican II and its wake, and is exemplified in the recent controversy on birth control. Particularly in the case of the council, Catholic thought has raised questions which drive all Biblical scholars directly back to their sources.²

By no later than the middle of the second century the Christian Church had begun to sketch out the institutions of authority on which it would place particular reliance. Chief among these was the canon of scripture itself and the apostolic tradition which in its broadest sense was an appeal to the apostles as a designated group of authorized bearers of tradition. Although in retrospect this move toward the self-conscious explication of the framework of authority seems early enough, behind it lay a century of Christian thought, history and literature. In that century, which we can only dimly see, Paul played a central if not singular role. Whether the collection of his letters is testimony to his importance or more nearly the occasion of it for those who lacked immediate knowledge of the early days of the Church, that collection also thrust Paul into a position of authority for a later age. Thus, if one turned to scripture or the apostolic tradition, one could scarcely escape Paul.

For the period of Paul’s activity the status of those developing criteria is uncertain. If he was useful for fighting heresy in a later age, it nevertheless remains true that he struggled against opposition in one form or another in his own age without the benefit of such specific institutional forms of authority as later became available. And struggle he did. In an earlier age F. C. Baur could shock the theological world by suggesting the polarity of thought within early Christianity centering around the figures of Peter and Paul. Baur’s rather simplistic scheme of development has long since been abandoned, while the idea of dissension and disagreement within earliest Christianity is hardly thought novel. Today, one is more likely to be shocked by the plethora of suggestions concerning Paul’s ‘opponents’ in Galatia, Corinth, and elsewhere. If scholars have supplied more opponents than even Paul could have managed, the trend of this investigation is nevertheless clear and correct – Paul’s letters are to be understood against the background of their specific occasion, and that occasion is more than a few times essentially polemical.

The effect of all of this is clear. When the Church made Paul a ‘catholic’ theologian and took him into its baseline of orthodoxy it incorporated him into the structures of ecclesiastical tradition and authority. Yet we must try to see the historical reality first and that reality is specific, occasional and, thus, anything but theologically catholic. In the process of re-historicizing Paul we have become increasingly aware of how he was engaged in controversy before the days of formalized institutions of authority, even before the days of ‘heresy and orthodoxy’. How then, and why, did Paul proceed? What gave him his authority? How did he understand and exercise it?

A simple answer might be that Paul shows the embryonic forms of authority which were to develop more fully in later generations. That answer would be correct in some sense, but it suffers from being general and reducing the problem of authority in the first generations to its least common denominator.

No text can be read in an interpretive vacuum, and so it will be necessary to make plain the historical and conceptual presuppositions which put us at our starting point. That point, again, is the statement that authority is the interpretation of power.

APOSTOLIC AUTHORITY AND APOSTOLIC LEGITIMACY

In more than a century of critical discussion, one vexing and intractable problem offered by the New Testament and other early Christian literature has been ‘the name and office of the apostle’, to use J. B. Lightfoot’s phrase from an influential definition of the problem in his commentary on Galatians.¹ One might hope that a century would prove sufficient time for solving so specific a problem. It has not. Although in the history of scholarship there have been periods of general agreement on the nature of the problem and the directions in which a solution should be sought, not even that is true currently. From the manifold literature which has appeared on this subject just within the past few years it seems that there is agreement only in rejecting the last discernible consensus. Beyond that everything is fluid.

Both the persistence of the problem and the differences among proposed solutions are instructive. So central is the figure of the apostle to the missionary growth and the historical continuity of early Christianity that his identity remains a matter of primary importance for both the theologian and the historian.

In what may be called the first full flush of ‘catholic’ Christianity, at least one writer was quite clear about the origin and functions of apostles:

The Apostles received the Gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus the Christ was sent from God. The Christ, therefore, is from God and the Apostles from Christ. In both ways, then, they were in accordance with the appointed order of God’s will. Having, therefore, received their commands, and being fully assured by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with faith confirmed by the word of God, they went forth in the assurance of the Holy Spirit preaching the good news [εὐαγγελιζόμενοι] that the Kingdom of God is coming. They preached from district to district, and from city to city, and they appointed their first converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of the future believers. And this was no new method, for many years before had bishops and deacons been written of; for the scripture says thus in one place ‘I will establish their bishops in righteousness, and their deacons in faith.’¹

The author is Clement, bishop of Rome, writing to the Corinthian Christians at the end of the first century.² He locates the apostles not only in history as successors to Jesus’ preaching mission, but also in what might be called salvation-history since ‘they were in accordance with the appointed order of God’s will’. They are those who received commands from Jesus and have been granted a resurrection appearance. They speak God’s word and appear under the aegis of the Holy Spirit. Just as their relationship to Jesus is analogous to Jesus’ relationship to God, so they are part of the divine economy as testified to by the concluding quotation from Isaiah 60: 17.³

Clement’s genetic description is important not for its simplicity or for some apparent plausibility, but because it serves the central purposes of his letter. Here we have channel markings designed to establish the length and breadth of that pure stream of tradition and authority by which the Church proceeds and by which it is sustained. Fractious and insubordinate elements in the Corinthian community need reminding of this. One way of reminding them is to stress the historical connections and implications. Clement was himself quite well aware that he was heir to this apostolic tradition, as were those in Corinth whose hands he wished to uphold. Only in this way could legitimate leadership be recognized. But the breadth of the channel is even more important than its length. The question of authority is even more central, if also more implicit, than the question of legitimacy. The very fact that a bishop of Rome can presume the authority to write to the Corinthian Christians to admonish them for failure to heed their own duly constituted leaders shows how central is the whole question of authority in this appeal to the apostles. Furthermore, it is implicit in Clement’s approach that authority is not merely a matter of historical continuity. It has a theological dimension as well.

In short, what Clement says about the authorized leaders of the Church, the bearers of its tradition, involves assumptions about both their authority and their legitimacy, though he does not make that distinction clear. On the contrary, the concepts of authority and legitimacy have been collapsed and equated. This is true not only of the apostles, figures from the past, but also of the bishops, their successors in the present. In both cases, authority is implicitly derived from the understanding of legitimacy. Such is the case where ‘for the first time we find a clear and explicit declaration of the doctrine of apostolic succession’.¹ But what of an earlier stage where such succession cannot yet be presupposed? What is the relationship of apostolic authority to legitimacy when the scope and role of the apostolic ‘office’ is not yet so clearly defined?

Whatever the problems involved in Clement’s view, its scheme has had a remarkably tight hold on the way in which even critical scholarship has addressed itself to the question of apostolic authority. Here too the matter of authority has not always been carefully enough distinguished from that of legitimacy. Perhaps this is because it was so long assumed that the apostles were to be identified with the Twelve. When Lightfoot opened up new paths by sharply distinguishing between these two groups, he began what has become a continuing search for two or more ideal types of the early ‘apostle’. While recent study tends to see the role and status of the Twelve as problematical, most scholarship still seeks to reconcile what Lightfoot set asunder by insisting that the primary question of Pauline apostleship is the question of Paul’s relationship to that group. So the key problems have long been those of relationship: of the Twelve to the ‘apostles’; of the Twelve to the larger company of disciples; of Paul to the apostles in Acts, etc. In each case the common thread is the question of the appropriateness of the term ‘apostle’ to one or another group. Understandably, a great deal of attention has been focused on the linguistic problem of the derivation and original meaning of the term ἀπόστολος in hopes that clarity about its antecedent use might elucidate early Christian understanding of the office.

This raises a serious question with which we must be concerned at the outset. Is it clear that the sharp definition of an ‘office’, the precise description of role and status, is the first question to be settled in coming to understand the role of the early Christian apostle? To find the coordinates by which an ‘office’ of the apostle might be located will help illuminate the matter of apostolic identity, but only from one direction. It helps us determine who is and who is not rightfully called an apostle. It approaches the question of identity exclusively through the category of legitimacy. But as we shall see, legitimacy and authority are not the same thing, and the primary question is not who is an apostle, or even how an apostle, but why an apostle and how does he lay hold on and exercise his authority.

In all of this the centrality of Paul is unmistakable. His unambiguous description of himself by the term ‘apostle’ and the very volume and style of his writings makes him the most accessible specimen to be found in the New Testament. But early foreclosure on the broad topic o...