Pastoral Letter to Theo

An Introduction to Interpretation and Women's Ministries

Paul Elbert

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781556355462
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275767
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A Pastoral Letter to Theo addresses some of the fundamental concerns of recent research into biblical interpretation by Adele Berlin and Kenneth Archer. It also takes into account the communicative literary and rhetorical techniques that were prominent in the Greco-Roman world when the New Testament documents were composed. Elbert suggests that attention to levels of context, plot, repetition, and characterization or personification comprise a proper method for understanding a New Testament writer's original meaning and intent. Generally, the potentially groundbreaking thesis in much of Elbert's work is for a literary link between the "Spirit" language in Paul's letters and the later narrative of Luke-Acts. Specifically, A Pastoral Letter to Theo reflects heartfelt, pastoral concerns based on detailed contextual study of early Christianity and Christian experience. The book contextually examines in detail several passages pertaining to the ministry of women in missionary-minded early Christianity and concludes that this ministry was thought to be vital for the evangelistic enterprise.

1

The Fourth Gospel and Related Observations

John 3:16 can and should be used absolutely, as in a gospel tract, to tell sinners what God is like. John 3:16–21 also can and should be preached contextually to believer-disciples to reinforce Christian faith. John 7:39, “But this he spoke about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive; for the Spirit had not yet been (given), because Jesus was not yet glorified,” however, needs more explanatory context because it assumes connective elements and an informed original readership. While it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between narration and authorial commentary, at John 7:39 the intentional commentary is obvious. Here we have a precise and intrusive comment by the author to explain what the words of Jesus actually mean. The author probably considers this to be an important clarification of the timing of an event in which believers were to participate. Given that in the Fourth Gospel these narrative asides are employed over a hundred times for several purposes, such as clarifying thoughts of characters, we must assume that the author expected John 7:39 to be taken seriously.

It could be suggested that the reason a major prophecy by a significant character (John the Baptist) about the central character (Jesus), describing a forthcoming spiritual phenomenon to be initiated by the central character and identified as a “baptism in the Holy Spirit” (John 1:33), appears somewhat underdeveloped in the Fourth Gospel—to modern rhetorical eyes—is not because this Spirit-language was not being used in early Christianity, but rather because it was being actively used. To leave out what was already well-understood for reasons of conciseness was a practical narrative-rhetorical tactic functioning in first-century Greco-Roman education that goes back to Homer. Accordingly, John could easily expect his original readers to readily grasp the connection between 1:33 and 7:39 and to recognize that what is being narrated here is speaking to readers’ own personal experiences of Spirit-reception currently described as a baptism in the Holy Spirit by the now heavenly Jesus. Perhaps this may be more reasonable—from a Greco-Roman rhetorical perspective—than assuming that the language from Jesus tradition at John 1:33 and 7:39 was not being used in early Christianity.

Further, an assumption of readers’ own Spirit-reception is coherent with the claims about the various detectable spiritual phenomena the Spirit will initiate beyond narrative time (John 14:16–17, 26; 15:26; 16:13–14). These unusual phenomena are best understood as being both plausible and believable to original active readers. On my reading these spiritual phenomena are activities of the Holy Spirit that readers are expected to be familiar with—activities stemming from their own baptism in the Holy Spirit by the heavenly Jesus. As to authorial intention, these spiritual events are expected to be plausible and believable not just because these future phenomena are claimed to exist due to the fact that they are described in storytime, but because they are expected by the author to be genuinely understood to exist experientially by an active readership in spacetime.

When preaching from the Fourth Gospel today, hearers need both connective and immediate context when that preaching includes John 7:39. The Spirit-Paraclete, sent by the Father to counterbalance the departure of the earthly Jesus (John 14:16–17, 25–26; 15:26–27; 16:7–15), now mediates the presence of the heavenly Jesus. The didactic and other revelatory functions of the Spirit, granted at the Lord’s discretion, provide recognizable guidance and encouragement within the lives of those who believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God. We need to be expecting these revelatory activities of the Spirit of truth and looking forward to their productive utilization. When heaven is silent, we may take comfort in the reign and rule of the soon coming king.

Participants in the proof-texting tradition of the sixteenth century onward generally tended to ignore or marginalize John 7:39 in its narrative and New Testament context. Phenomena of this miraculous nature were confined to an “apostolic age.” John 7:39, an editorial clarification by an intelligent author, thus may become a nontext. Scholars, on the other hand, always realized that the passage spoke of something real in original reader’s lives, but in general have not explored a probable connection of the futurity of believers receiving the Spirit (7:39a) with the foregrounded prophecy of Jesus baptizing in the Spirit (1:33b), also in the future.1 New “narrative exploration,” as suggested by Thomas, is in order.2 In any case, within the rhetorical culture of the first-century Greco-Roman world, a literary digression like John 7:39, which offered an important clarification of meaning, was understood to have a definite purpose. Active readers in that world who interacted with a literary text perked up their ears. They became curious. A predictive digression by a respected author about his central character was duly perceived as no idle or simplistic tactic. Such a literary device was knowingly placed in a text to engage the attention of active—not passive—readers, readers who would talk back to a text, ask questions, and interpret according to their own experience and contemporary expression of that experience.

John 7:39 could first be designed to directly engage the experience of active Greco-Roman literary-minded readers, referring to an experience from the heavenly Jesus that they would already understand, encouraging them to read the text of the Fourth Gospel in light of that experience. Active readers would probably not just be looking for what this editorial clue might do for understanding the experience of characters in the story of the text itself, like John 20:19–23, which because of its limited nature would probably not be taken as a textually internal fit to 7:39. In terms of the contemporary narrative-rhetorical practice of characterization/personification it would be an excessively narrow outcome for 1:33 and 7:39. Further, since active readers would need no help to work backwards from this later scene to earlier material, they could reasonably expect the guidance from 7:39 to refer to something beyond the text, to an experience beyond narrative time. Believers other than those immediately in view in the text itself are carefully mentioned as a priority of the earthly Jesus (John 17:20; 20:29). Active readers might well ask what 7:39 could be intended to do for their reading of this document in light of their own Christian experience, knowledge, and tradition, based on preaching, teaching, and previous presentations of Jesus material (as cited in Luke 1:1) with which they were acquainted. So, John 7:39 surely appears originally designed to stimulate interest for active readers. It is a narrative aside worthy of serious consideration and would resonate with readers who already employed the descriptive Spirit-reception language of John’s narratively foregrounded prophecy in their own engagement with the heavenly Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Nevertheless, Christians today who take an active and serious interest in the narrative explanation or digression found in John 7:39, both with respect to contemporary Christian experience and to experience and descriptive information probably functioning among original readers of the Fourth Gospel, may not be welcomed into the interpretive conversation of some. Those who would employ 7:39 as a part of their ministry today with respect to predictive strands of the Fourth Gospel that apparently stem from the experience described there and from other parts of the New Testament might be placed under a cloud of suspicion by some for raising new possibilities. To this mindset, John 3:3 is still in effect, but John 7:39 must surely fade away. For later readers of this document, its literary, theological, and pneumatological import must cease. The fact that 7:39 is foregrounded by an important prophecy (John 1:33) about the ministry of Jesus—the heavenly Jesus as far as active original readers are concerned—may be ignored within wider New Testament contexts. The issue that a significant prophecy about Jesus’ future ministry of baptizing in the Holy Spirit (1:33) does not seem to readily fit the event described in John 20:19–23 for a select few, and that the writer may have wanted to help readers avoid that conclusion by an insightful digression, is an issue that passively fades away.

So, dear Theo, if you find that your voice cannot be given a hearing within the interpretive conversation, please allow me to suggest that you ask yourself this question: “What would the New Testament writers do if they were in my place today?” As you yield yourself to Jesus and seek to be pleasing and productive in his sight, I expect that you will be given an appropriate answer. The depths of the narrative presentation of the insightful and competent author of the Fourth Gospel will never cease to be explored. This great theological composition deserves our utmost respect. A style of chasmal and snippety interpretation loaded with “apostolic-age” presuppositions cannot really do justice to the witness of the beloved disciple.

Also, there may be implications to be drawn from the possibility that John 7:39 was penned by the same person as the John of Acts 1:13; 8:14–15, certainly a distinct historical probability that cannot be overlooked. The experiential statements in the Fourth Gospel about what realities the Holy Spirit will actually initiate within believers who receive the Spirit (like John 14:16–17, 26; 15:26; 16:13) cannot just be spiritualized as in the aforementioned Calvinistic equation of New Testament prophecy with preaching in general. The precise teaching function of the Johannine chrisma, translated as “anointing” or “unction” and as “Salbung” in German and “oints” from “oindre” in French (1 John 2:20, 27), should also not be spiritualized, equated with reading, or confined to an “apostolic age.” On the contrary, it should continue to be explored on its own merits based on how it is described, given that original readers were expected to understand its function. These texts, which descriptively reveal interesting and precise revelatory experiences—details that I suggest are related to the same communicative and rhetorical motivation for deliberately inserting John 7:39 into the narrative—may be duly venerated as scripture by some, but then interest in the potential revelatory participation that these texts convey may be squelched, inappropriately confined to characters in the Fourth Gospel itself, or restricted to an original readership. Such a chasmal and disruptive presumption between original and later readers—obviously at odds with any reasonable understanding of authorial intention—seems excessively contemporary, not rooted in the character of Christian faith as a thinking faith that is duly attentive to Greco-Roman narrative-rhetorical constructs, to preceding classical literary constructs, and to a serious consideration of the intention of intelligent first-century Christian authors.

Along a similar historical vein, in Evangelical Protestant tradition the book of Acts itself was reduced by some to mere history, supposedly entombed in an “apostolic age,” so what happens in this narrative, on this presupposition, is not only unwanted by some contemporary readers entrenched in the proof-texting tradition of “apostolic-age” interpretation, but also simply immaterial. Preaching from Acts, in this vein, would properly focus on points of morality or ethics; the theological and pneumatological significance of the narrative is either marginalized or extinguished. With rare exceptions, the modern dispensational/cessationist tradition stemming from a historic concretization of “apostolic-age” hermeneutics assisted by the Reformation usually either insists or implies that “Pentecost can never be repeated.” Luke appears to disagree, but that is overridden because Luke and his characters, both male and female, are encapsulated in an artificial, extra-biblical epoch and are not afforded a voice. Women, like Philip’s prophesying daughters, are especially targeted for cessation. What happens in the storytime of Acts—with respect to characterization of Peter, John, Philip, Philip’s daughters, Paul, Priscilla, and Apollos—is immaterial to spacetime actuality today, an attitude strangely incongruous with apparent authorial intent toward Luke’s original reader (Theophilus). Luke’s thought is reinterpreted accordingly so that his writing appears to fit this seemingly strange dogma of chasmal separation that, historically, can be observed to mutate over the past two centuries within Evangelical Protestant tradition to increasing complexity by its continuous embellishment.

Peter’s apparent projection of the gift of the Holy Spirit beyond narrative time at the end of his sermon in Acts 2, a gift that in ancient literary personification and among original, rhetorically minded, active readers would be construed as the same gift that Peter himself just received (Acts 2:38c–39), is discounted in favor of repeating Calvin’s self-serving dictum that this does not apply to us today. I will return to this point later in more detail, but it looks like the John of Acts 1:13–14 and of Acts 8 could not have believed this particular dictum, otherwise why would he travel to Samaria to minister the gift of the Holy Spirit to baptized believers? In fact, again, the “apostolic-age” style of proof-texting and its frequent, narratively incoherent interpretations takes little recognition of the examples and precedents of Spirit-reception in Luke-Acts as adequately characterized by Peter, John, and Philip (Acts 8:14–17), Ananias and Paul (Acts 9:17), and by Paul’s question in the context of strengthening disciple-believers (Acts 19:2a), an easily understandable question very much in keeping with the syntax of Luke’s composition of questions. The subject of Spirit-reception is one that Jesus introduces as a matter of prayer to disciples in Luke 11:5–13, which Luke carefully then extends from Luke 24:49 on into his second book prepared for Theophilus (Luke 1:3; Acts 1:1), a believer who might have previously expressed an interest to Luke as to what expectations he should have regarding his own interest in Spirit-reception. Luke certainly writes as if he has a real person before his mind’s eye, a person who will understand him.

Nevertheless, Luke 11:5–13 is often unacknowledged as even being a part of Jesus’ teaching on prayer. Traditionally, it is not included in the “Lord’s Prayer” or in the “Our Father.” Nevertheless, it is astutely foregrounded by an important prophecy (Luke 3:16) of which the earthly Jesus appears narratively to be quite aware in his teaching on prayer. (Note that Mark and Matthew cite John the Baptist’s prophecy, but then they drop it from the story line, perhaps, I suggest, because of known familiarity on the part of their readership and not because they would otherwise ignore such an important narrative element and historical component of Christian tradition.) Given Luke’s rhetorical development of this topic from John’s prophecy, it is difficult to disconnect both Luke 3:16 and 11:13 from Luke 24:49, although in a part of Protestant interpretive tradition this kind of incohesive move is often taken. Here, I suggest, we see how allegiance to past cessationistic elements of a faith tradition can override what an intelligent author probably intended for Theophilus to readily grasp by narrative repetition and attention to contextual development. It is fair to say that Luke’s evident interest in fulfillment of prophecy as a literary and narrative-rhetorical theme, based on John the Baptist’s prophecy that Jesus will baptize in the Holy Spirit, is ignored in an “Evangelical Historical Critical Method” of interpretation that, I argue, might best be replaced with a “Theologically and Pneumatologically Sensitive Narrative-Critical Rhetorical Method.”

1. Porsch’s straightforward observation on “Das >Noch-nicht< des Geistes” of 7:39b, illustrates the need for exploration in this regard, namely that “Die Feststellung »denn noch war nicht Pneuma« (V.39b) soll die vorhergehende Aussage erklären und begründen, daß den Geist erst die bereits (in der Zunkunft) Gläubiggewordenen empfangen werden (V.39a),” Pneuma und Wort, 65.

2. Thomas, “Spirit in the Fourth Gospel.”

2

First Corinthians and Related Observations

First Corinthians 11:5a, “But every woman praying or prophesying with the head uncovered (or unveiled, akatakaluptō, disgraces her head,” on its own is quite understandable. Paul believes women will and should prophesy, God willing, if their heads are covered in a socially acceptable manner. In many worship settings today in Western and other countries, head coverings of some sort are understood to be an unrequired part of a past culture and the participation of women who minister in prophecy is not tied to the cultural constraints of a past time or place. However, in many Orthodox churches today women do wear veils and this tradition is to be respected. In any event, within an interpretive style of proof-texting that requires a temporal chasm between the original and all later readers of the New Testament, First Corinthians 11:5a is of little interest. Many charisms and revelatory activities of the Spirit are eliminated by the presumption of this temporal chasm.

This unexamined presumption—that all interpersonal spiritual gifts unnatural in appearance were supposedly removed from the province of Christendom by a divine edict when the New Testament documents were finished—is in need of reappraisal, in spite of a distinctive dispensational/cessationistic “interpr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgment
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Fourth Gospel and Related Observations
• Chapter 2: First Corinthians and Related Observations
• Chapter 3: First Timothy and Its Context
• Chapter 4: Luke’s Second Volume and a Personal Testimony
• Chapter 5: Romans and Related Observations
• Chapter 6: Romans in Light of Modern Translation Methods
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography