The Ritual World of Paul the Apostle

Metaphysics, Community and Symbol in 1 Corinthians 10-11

Michael Lakey

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780567695192
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567685629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Michael Lakey explores the theological significance of the rituals of Baptism and the Lord's Supper in Pauline theology, with the argument culminating in an analysis of the significance of ritual dining in 1 Corinthians 10:14-22 and the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. By contrast with 'social world' forms of comparison between rituals in the Pauline communities and other communities in antiquity, this study focuses primarily upon the theologically integrating function these rituals perform in relation to Paul's theology and ethics.

Lakey builds upon Clifford Geertz's systemic understanding of religion by showing how, for Paul, Baptism and the Lord's Supper facilitate specific connections between his metaphysics on the one hand, and the form or pattern of life he enjoins upon his churches on the other. This volume considers precisely what - given his theological and ethical premises - Paul's underlying beliefs regarding these ritual events may have been, allowing for a preliminary discussion of specific lines of post-interpretation in the early patristic period.

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Ritual, Theology and New Testament Studies

This monograph is chiefly a study in Pauline theology, one that takes as its principal focus the two ritual practices of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. It seeks to explore the significance of these rituals by means of an analysis which culminates in a reading of two key passages, 1 Cor 10:14–22 and 1 Cor 11:17–34.¹ This reading is advanced in relation to a reconstruction of specific elements of Paul’s thought and practice gleaned from passages in 1 Corinthians, Galatians and Philippians. By situating a reading of the Lord’s Supper pericopae in the context of a wider discussion of Paul’s cosmology, metaphysics, ecclesiology and ethics, the aim is to reveal some of the ways in which, as symbols, these two rituals both constitute and are constituted by the world view of which they are a particularly dense and integrative expression.

It is noteworthy that recent scholarship demonstrates a turn towards the study of the rituals of the early Jesus movement,² whether in their own right or as an index of some other theological or historical concern. Studies have focused upon what rituals might indicate about the origins, theology, social world, context, emergence and trajectories of the early church or of specific movements within it, and they have done so from numerous disciplinary perspectives. Recent contributions include Stephen Turley’s fine exploration of the significance of Roy Rappaport’s notions of ‘performance and embodiment’ in relation to ablutions and dining in Galatians and 1 Corinthians.³ In terms of sheer depth and comprehensiveness, it is impossible to overestimate the significance of David Hellholm’s contribution in the form of recent, collaborative works on Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.⁴ In drawing widely from the fields of biblical, ancient Near Eastern and patristic studies, these works attest to the nodal nature of ritual in making sense of the emergence of the Jesus movement and its social practices. In terms of the constructive function of dining rituals, Hal Taussig’s study of the relationship between different modes of enacting a common meal and the social identities reified thereby is important for giving leverage over the question of the distinctive ethos of Jesus communities.⁵ Other studies include Jorunn Økland’s incisive analysis of the relationship between ritual space, identity, cosmology and sex in 1 Corinthians,⁶ and Larry Hurtado’s body of work, which treats Jesus movement worship as the crucible in which its Christology is wrought.⁷

Within the wider body of Pauline scholarship there also exist several studies of substantial quality that address topics besides ritual, but which might provoke further consideration of ritual. In his magnum opus on Paul, N. T. Wright offers several substantial reflections upon the religious and ritual context of the ancient Mediterranean and upon Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as instances of Pauline religio.⁸ Yet in his discussion of Paul’s ‘symbolic praxis’, Wright’s analysis of primary symbols such as the unity of the people of God focuses more upon Paul’s ideas than it does upon the ritual behaviours by which these ideas are constituted, made cogent and socially performed.⁹ This is in no way a criticism. Rather, it is to observe that the breadth and scope of Wright’s ambition in his work does not permit every single avenue to be explored comprehensively. Not unrelated observations might be made regarding other works. John Barclay’s seminal study of Paul and grace embeds discussions of baptismal issues and commensality, where appropriate, into his exegesis of Pauline texts.¹⁰ However, the work as a whole is oriented towards elucidating Paul’s theology in relation to divine grace rather than to asking questions regarding incipient sacramentalism. Other examples include Troels Engberg-Pedersen, whose recent work includes a fine discussion of Paul in the light of Stoic physics and an illuminating account of Pauline epistolography as a ‘bodily practice’,¹¹ and Ben Blackwell, who offers a superb analysis of Pauline soteriology in the light of Irenaeus and Cyril of Alexandria.¹² In both cases, the theological subject matter provokes further reflection upon what ritual performances might be congruent with it.

In terms of immediate antecedents to the present study, my own previous work on the crisis regarding female attire during the performance of pneumatic speech in worship in 1 Cor 11:2–16 has, in part, occasioned the present volume. The former study situated female veiling in worship in the context of Paul’s cosmology, ecclesiology, anthropology and eschatology, relating it thereby to the hermeneutic by which he attempts to warrant his gendered norms for his congregations. As such, it was found that, for Paul, veiling is an embodied ritual practice that densely integrates his beliefs about the places and natures of men and women in the world and in the church. This involves also commending a particular sort of narrative performance of this symbol in the social sphere, and underpinning both the beliefs and the performances with appeals to various scriptural and popular philosophical warrants.¹³ The dense integration here between a view of the world, normative assertions regarding behaviour and the performance of a symbol is redolent of Clifford Geertz’s analysis of religion. According to this,

Religious symbols formulate a basic congruence between a particular style of life and a specific … metaphysic, and in so doing sustain each with the borrowed authority of the other.¹⁴

The question naturally arises from this as to what such an analysis might reveal regarding other ritual symbols mentioned in Paul’s correspondence, both in terms of the theological, ethical or symbolic meanings they enact and in terms of their constitutive role in integrating and sustaining the overall cogency of Paul’s world-view model. The present consideration of the practices of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper is an initial move in the direction of such an analysis. It utilizes Geertz’s systemic account of religion as a heuristic model and, on that basis, offers a reconstruction of some salient features of Paul’s metaphysical thought and his distinctive form of life, relating both to the rituals of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

1.2 The Significance of the Present Field

In terms of the significance of this investigation, there are several areas for which a systemic consideration of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Paul has potential ramifications. These include the following:

1) Theologically, nearly all churches and ecclesial communities have advanced some form of hermeneutical claim concerning the continuity between their own baptismal and eucharistic ritual practices and their foundational texts and prior traditions. Any consideration of these claims necessarily entails a careful reading of Paul, who is arguably the earliest textual witness to these activities. Nevertheless, the very fact that some ecclesial traditions mine Paul for an interpretative warrant for their ritual theologies and behaviours invites consideration of Paul himself. It perhaps goes without saying that the wider ecclesial tradition has not and does not receive or perform Pauline texts with anything like consensus regarding their meaning, their underpinning theology, what they accomplish or indeed what their implications might be in the sphere of ethical practice. Hence, a study of ritual in Paul has an important critical function in informing and clarifying these debates.¹⁵

2) Historically and liturgically, the rituals of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper present a complicated, though hardly unprecedented, set of challenges. For example, one of the key questions in historical studies of liturgy is whether there was a primitive, emergent form of the eucharistic rite, and if so what communally held meanings it might have had. In the case of formal liturgy, the earliest extant texts go back only so far: to a period that Paul Bradshaw correctly characterizes as pluriform, local, contested and pre-formalized.¹⁶ Add to this that the Pauline materials, belonging to a period antedating this, only hint at possible liturgical elements; they contain nothing that remotely corresponds to an actual rubric. Hence, Gal 3:26–28 may well reflect some form of baptismal affirmation, but the text does not clarify whether this is an affirmation about baptismal unity or something actually uttered when devotees are baptized. Even Paul’s reference to the words of Institution being a tradition ‘received from the Lord’ (cf. 1 Cor 11:23–25) only hints in the direction of actual recitation. A consideration of ritual in the context of a systemic account of Paul’s world-view model and form of life does not resolve these questions, but it does provide a richer background against which one might assess how subsequent figures in the interpretative tradition have used him.

3) Finally, a systemic study of the meaning of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper rituals is exegetically helpful. This is not, in the first instance, a reference to the various excellent sociorhetorical and social world studies of Paul and his practices, though richer and thicker modes of theo/sociological description are essential for any account of Paul nowadays.¹⁷ Rather, it is to observe that Pauline epistolography, even when evincing conflict or disagreement between Paul and his churches, is insider communication. The extent to which correspondence anticipates a highly specific set of model readerly competences is directly proportionate to the extent to which that text becomes opaque to unanticipated readers who are not as well attuned to the requisite textual and interpretative strategies.¹⁸ As insider communication, the Pauline correspondence seldom makes explicit either the details or full significance of the ritual scripts to which Paul makes appeal. Modern readers arrive mid-correspondence as unanticipated readers, with a consequence being that the texts can appear opaque or, paradoxically, open to all sorts of divergent readings. A systemic reading of the ritual symbols of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which situates them in the context of Paul’s world-view model, does not resolve this difficulty entirely, but it goes some way towards ameliorating it. That is, the notion of religion as a cultural system, even one that is inchoate or in transition, entails some level of congruence between Paul’s metaphysic, form of life and symbol, such that each element of his world-view model is able to shed some light upon some of the unstated aspects of the other elements. Whilst this conclusion is by no means certain, it does offer a wider vantage point from which to consider this topic.

1.3 The Methodology of This Study

The recognition that there is a mutually constituting relationship between a world-view model and the practices that sustain it and make it plausible is neither new, whether in the fields of social science or of biblical scholarship, nor is it unique to Geertz. Something analogous to this relationship is evident in the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. They describe the way in which the social objectivization of world-view models, roles and norms and their consequent acquisition by individuals are complementary moments in a larger dialectical process. Within this, ritual is important for the generation of what they describe as ‘plausibility structures’: The patterns of thought and action that make something, such as a religious claim, appear naturalized and believable.¹⁹ Though framed by different concepts and expressed in very different terms, the relationships between the conventional, the individual and the ritual worlds are equally evident in the work of Roy Rappaport. For Rappaport, rituals do not merely perform the meanings to which they refer; they themselves objectify and enact those meanings, such that those who participate are thereby concretely obligated.²⁰

In terms of a summary of Geertz’s approach and its relevance here, Geertz proposes that central to the function of a religious system is the generation of particular modes of consciousness. These he terms moods or mindsets.²¹ In Pauline terms, one might think of faith, hope, love, joy (e.g. 1 Cor 13:13, Gal 5:22–23). A mindset is cultivated when a concrete pattern of life (e.g. cruciformity, life by faith, imitatio Christi, life in the spirit, thanksgiving, doxological orientation) associated with a particular mood is embedded in a congruent picture of reality: a metaphysic, world view or cosmological narrative.²² Crucial to this process of embedding is the symbolic order. Symbols, including ritual and sacrament, not only oil the wheels of the embedding process; they form the primary means by which the world-descripti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Literature Review: Baptism and The Lord’s Supper
• Chapter 3 ‘A Specific Metaphysic’: Paul and Cosmic Order
• Chapter 4 ‘A Particular Style of Life’: Paul and Community Order
• Chapter 5 ‘Religious Symbols’: Paul and Ritual Order
• Chapter 6 The Ritual World of Paul’s Early Interpreters: Baptism as a Case Study
• Chapter 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of References
• Index of Modern Authors
• Copyright