Suffering and the Christian Life

Rachel Davies, Rachel Davies

• Editorial: T&T Clark
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780567687241
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Teologia

This volume approaches questions concerning the status and meaning of suffering in Christian life and Christian theology through the lens of a variety of theological disciplines – biblical, historical, practical, political and systematic theology. Scholars from this range of fields concentrate on a number of questions: Is love intrinsically linked with suffering? Are suffering and loss on some level fundamentally good? How is – and how should – suffering and diminishment be viewed in the Christian tradition? Featuring leading voices that include Linn Tonstad, Bernard McGinn, Anna Rowlands, John Swinton and Paul Murray, this volume brings together essays touching on concrete issues such as cancer, mental health, and the experience of refugees, and discusses broad themes including vulnerability, kenosis and tragedy. In correlating these themes with the examination of texts ranging from Paul's letters to works of the Cappadocians, Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross and Mother Teresa, Suffering and the Christian Life offers fresh and accessible academic approaches to a question of vital personal, existential significance.

Chapter 1

Suffering, Sin and Death in Paul

Dorothea H. Bertschmann

Paul is famous for his work not only as a missionary and apostle to the Gentiles but also as the apostle of suffering, who endured great hardship for the sake of the Gospel.¹ Paul talks about these sufferings from the first to the last of his letters.² He mentions the θλίψεις, the tribulations, which threaten to unsettle his young converts in Thessaloniki (1 Thess. 3.1-5), and he talks about the privilege of being able to suffer for Christ to the church in Philippi, especially in Phil. 3.10-11, where he states, ‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.’

In 2 Corinthians we see Paul defend himself against charges of being a less-than-impressive apostle, afflicted with numerous sufferings and weaknesses. In a paradoxical move he wears these hardships and sufferings as a badge of honour: they reflect and embody his proclamation of the crucified Lord. All the floggings, beatings, shipwrecks, dangerous journeys, sleepless nights, all the hunger, thirst, cold, the destitution (‘nakedness’), pressure, persecution and worrying about the churches (cf. 2 Cor. 11.22-33) arise from Paul’s unique vocation as the apostle to the Gentiles.

But how does Paul make sense of the sufferings his converts undergo? In Phil. 1.29 Paul calls suffering for Christ a privilege graciously granted by God. But could suffering also be good for something in an instrumental sense?

Various traditions have related suffering to the growth of ethical qualities or virtues.³ In an important variation of this, the Christian spiritual tradition sometimes sees suffering as a painful but benevolent divine intervention which leads to the mortification of the flesh, where the flesh is seen as the site of sinful desires. We already find this notion in 1 Pet. 4.1, where the author writes, ‘For whoever has suffered in the flesh has finished with sin.’ The notion of suffering as παιδεία, as fatherly discipline, which is necessary for growth, is related to this motif.⁴

We might expect Paul, who seems to have a critical view of the ‘flesh, and its passions and desires’ (Gal. 5.24, similarly Rom. 13.14), to have a close affinity to this mortification of the flesh tradition. In this study I will test this proposition by looking closely at Paul’s participation language of ‘dying with Christ’ and ‘suffering with Christ’ respectively, focusing on Paul’s letter to the Romans. I will conclude that Paul’s ‘dying with’ discourse must not be fused too quickly with his ‘suffering with’ discourse. In a second step I will argue that the ongoing susceptibility of the body to sin and death might open the door more widely to notions of mortification. In a final section I will argue, however, that this possibility is ultimately not followed up by Paul. Instead he discusses suffering within a discourse of tragic mortality and hope. Put differently, Paul does not follow the route towards a concept of mortification, despite some elements in his theology pointing in that direction.

Before we turn to our key texts, a brief comment on Paul’s participation language is needed.

‘Dying with’ and ‘suffering with’

Paul is famous for his dense statements about the death and resurrection of Christ on behalf of humanity. There is something in these salvific events which is universal and cosmic and precedes an individual’s response.

Within the letter to the Romans, which is our special focus, Paul unfolds this especially clearly in Romans 5, where he stresses that Christ died for us ‘when we were still sinners’ (5.8), or died for us ‘when we were still enemies’ (5.10), and where he paints Christ with cosmic brush-strokes as the last Adam, who undoes the fall of the first Adam and brings about a new humanity (5.12-21).

But successive waves of scholarship have recognized that Paul has a further mode of speaking of Christ’s death and resurrection, speaking of them as something believers share in and partake of. This way of talking about a very personal union between Christ and the believer has sometimes been labelled Paul’s mysticism, as in Albert Schweitzer’s pioneering work, and has been more recently discussed in terms of ‘participation language’, ‘conformity’ and even ‘theosis’.⁵ In this chapter, I will use what I take to be the least charged term, namely ‘participation’.

Participation language in Paul is indicated by the Greek prefix συν in the text, meaning ‘with’ or ‘together’. Paul famously talks about being co-crucified, or crucified with Christ, in Gal. 2.19. In Romans 6 and 8 he talks both of ‘dying with Christ’ and of ‘suffering with Christ’.⁶ These statements clearly have in common that they both describe an aspect of union with Christ. Furthermore, they have similar structures: identification with Christ in something negative leads on to identification with Christ in something positive, with a certain inner dynamic expressed in conditional or final constructions. In Rom. 6.8 this is stated as, εἰ δὲ ἀπεθάνομεν σὺν Χριστῷ, πιστεύομεν ὅτι καὶ συζήσομεν αὐτῷ (if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live together with him). Romans 8.17 reads, εἴπερ συμπάσχομεν ἵνα καὶ συνδοξασθῶμεν (since or if we suffer with him, so that we will be glorified with him). But are these structural parallels akin to mathematical parallels, which never meet? Or do we have overlapping and intersecting concepts? Is dying with expressed and lived out through suffering with?

Both great pioneers of Pauline Christ-mysticism/participation language, Schweitzer and Tannehill, indeed see ‘suffering with’ as synonymous with ‘dying with’. Schweitzer dedicates one chapter in his influential The Mysticism of St Paul to ‘Suffering as a Mode of Manifestation of the Dying with Christ’.⁷ He states that ‘the dying which the believer experiences with Christ is made manifest in suffering which destroys, or tends to destroy, his life’.⁸ Schweitzer furthermore explicitly claims that ‘Paul treats all suffering as dying, and characterizes it by that term’.⁹ Tannehill refers to ‘dying with’ as the once-and-for-all starting point of the Christian life, whereas ‘suffering with’ describes the daily outworking of grace in a believer’s life. According to Tannehill, ‘The past dying with Christ and the present dying with Christ in suffering are not two unrelated things, but the same thing taking place on two different levels.’¹⁰

Against these weighty voices, in this chapter I want to suggest that though these concepts are indeed not unrelated, they are not synonymous either; that while Paul might treat all suffering as dying, he does not treat all dying as suffering, at least not in Romans 6 and 8.

Romans 6.8: ‘Dying with’

In Rom. 5.12-21 Paul has sketched how Adam’s trespass resulted in the universal rule of sin, which leads to death: ἐβασίλευσεν ἡ ἁμαρτία ἐν τῷ θανάτῳ (sin ruled as a king through death) is how Paul sums it up. This is contrasted with the rule of grace through righteousness, which leads into (εἰς) eternal life through Jesus Christ (5.21). The same opposites of death and life, with their associates sin and grace or sin and righteousness, continue to structure chapter 6. Paul writes in Romans 6:

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? ² By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? ³ Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴ Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

⁵ For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. ⁶ We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷ For whoever has died is freed from sin. ⁸ But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹ We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. ¹⁰ The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. ¹¹ So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.¹¹

The text presupposes an understanding of baptism as the individual believer’s identification or unification with Christ. Participation is expressed in two ways here. On the one hand we have vocabulary which compares or identifies the believers’ fate with Christ’s: believers are experiencing and embracing patterns of death and life just like Christ (ὥσπερ...οὕτως, v. 4.); they share in the likeness/ὁμοίωμα of his death (v. 5); and just as Christ died once for all and lives now to God (ὅυτως in v. 11), believers have to consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God. On the other hand, the union of believers with Christ is expressed in σύν-language. They are said to have been buried with Christ (συνετάφημεν, v. 4), and they are grown together with him (σύμφυτοι) and co-crucified (συνεσταυρώθη, v. 6). They have died with him and will or may live together with him (ἀπεθάνομεν σὺν Χριστῷ; συζήσομεν αὐτῷ, v. 8).¹² All these layers of sharing in Christ’s death and life are predicated upon the fact that believers have been baptized into or onto Christ (v. 3).¹³

What then does the identification or unification with Christ’s death mean? It seems reasonably clear that believers die symbolically or sacramentally in baptism, whereas Christ’s death includes the physical, biological reality. The concept of death, like the concept of life, is complex and multi-layered throughout Romans 5–8, and we next have to look at the various meanings of death and life in the text.¹⁴

De Boer concludes his study in Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology by distinguishing three levels of ‘death’. The first is physical demise, the end of a human life. In continuity with Old Testament notions of death, the separation of a dead person from God’s presence is underlined. De Boer rightly states that ‘all other meanings that death may have are predicated on this...