interpretations. The critics’ differences were stated in a variety of ways but very seldom on the basis of the text.
The critics found it easy to disregard matters of direct textual interpretation, especially when the reading of the text calls into question one or another of the deeply believed axioms of Western Protestant culture. The ability to perceive that what the Bible says is different from what we have always assumed it meant is very difficult to acquire and to act upon. This problem is the same for people who consider themselves “liberal” as for those who consider themselves “evangelical.”
It is not simple for an author to deal with this kind of critical response. It rejects what had been argued without dealing with the textual and historical basis on which the argument rests. One can argue with the nonbiblical assumptions that the critic holds and that have kept him or her from reading the text straightforwardly without being conscious that they are nonbiblical. But to lift up and argue with the unavowed philosophy of one’s own culture is difficult.
The other path, which requires more patience, is simply to go back yet again to the text, to read yet again, still more modestly; with still less confidence that we already know all that it says; with still more attention to historical context and literary coherence; with still more concern to understand, from the inside, the mind of the writer(s); with still more trust that “the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his Holy Word.”
John Robinson, the Puritan pastor who first spoke the above words within his farewell sermon to the Mayflower “pilgrims” as they left Plymouth, may have had in mind the creation of a theocracy in New England. Congregationalists who have often quoted this text in recent generations may have read into the same words a too-modern openness to declare “ancient goods uncouth” and to ride with the currents of modernity. Nonetheless the confession, taken alone, states the quintessence of the “biblicism” of the radical reformation.
Scripture spoke in our past to Waldo and Wycliff, to Luther and Marpeck, to Edwards and Campbell, to Spurgeon and Rauschenbusch—to their present needs and mission, which are now our inspiring past. In like manner, in our present it can be Scripture itself that by the Holy Spirit can again say something more than to repeat, into a world to which it was not originally addressed, the witness of those predecessors. What is wrong with fundamentalism is not that it holds too tightly to the text of Scripture (although that is what it thinks it does). It is rather that it canonizes some postbiblical, usually post-Reformation formulation, equating it so nearly with the meaning of Scripture that the claim is tacitly made that the hermeneutic task is done.
I could properly argue that the hermeneutic task is never done, by appealing to the New Testament teaching about the continuing presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit. Or I could also quite properly argue that the hermeneutic task is never done by pointing out that our world puts to us questions that we have never faced before in the same shape. But for the present essay I propose to make the point by reading one chapter carefully. I propose to show it by expositing the simple fact that questions of language, vocabulary, syntax, and grammar are quite evident in 2 Corinthians 5 which are not dealt with directly by the major commentaries, and which, when taken seriously, undercut the cherished interpretations of the past. I cherish these past interpretations as much as my critics do. I study them more than many of my critics do. Yet that respect for the past and even the ability, personally, to find the formulations of the witness of the past inspiring, or even satisfying, is not the primary goal of the Scripture scholar.
Resources for Reading the Text
If we wish to reread critically a text with a very familiar meaning, so that it can say something new, there are several kinds of resources that can help reopen our eyes for a fresh reading. Sometimes they may be simple matters of grammar and lexicography. Such are present in 2 Corinthians 5, especially (as we shall see later) in the key text that is usually translated “he is a new creature,” where both the definition of the individual word “creature” and the construction of the sentence with “he is . . .” as usually rendered, are counter to standard grammatical rules.
A second resource for refreshing one’s reading is the broader question of literary coherence: how does one sentence lead into another? This test cannot always apply. Some kinds of texts do not claim to be literally coherent; this may be the case for collections of proverbs, and it may be the case if at some point the text we have is the result of editing which combined several earlier documents. Some people claim this is the case for 2 Corinthians, but even that kind of hypothesis would not cut every passage into small pieces. Thus it is fitting to ask this more holistic question of literary coherence. When we do this, we observe that the sequence of the first few sentences of the chapter does not yield an evident thought process if we presuppose, as is usually done without thinking about it, that all of the sentences are declarative. If, however, we take some of the sentences not as declarations but as questions, the thought process becomes evident and coherent.
A third kind of resource for refreshing one’s reading is to increase one’s empathy with the background within which the author was writing and with the overall purposes of the document. For centuries the writings of the Apostle Paul were read as if they were meant to be sources of finely coined phrases ready to be integrated into a system of theology. Then more recently, they were read by many as a series of statements about the self-understanding of the believer as he sees his life in the light of faith. Without denying the element of truth in each of those past (post-Renaissance) assumptions, scholars in recent generations have seen how much more helpful it is to begin at the beginning with the fact that a missionary who had planted some churches, and was concerned for the faithfulness of other churches that he had not planted (as at Rome), is writing letters to those churches because of his concern for how they deal with specific problems of being the church. He cares especially about the problems of being a missionary church that proclaims and incarnates a Jewish message in a Gentile world.3
This fact about the ministry of the Apostle Paul was never denied in the past, but it was thought to have little to do with the understanding of the particular concerns of particular paragraphs and propositions. To be more aware of the pervasive presence of the Jew/Gentile agenda brings to life many sections of the Pauline writings which otherwise seemed much less clear.
We might reasonably expect to be aided in our access to the meaning of our passage by being reminded that the particular criticisms against which the apostle is defending himself in chapter five as well as in much of the rest of the second letter to the Corinthians have to do with the fact that he is committed to bringing into being communities where Jew and Gentile alike confess the faith of Abraham. There were other Christians (including among them Hellenistic Jews) who wanted a more open attitude toward Gentile wisdom and culture. Such an attitude, they argued, should not go to the trouble of dragging along, as a part of the mission method and message, the burden of Jewish ideas, Jewish prayers, the Jewish Scriptures, and fellowship with the Jewish church in Syria and Jerusalem. There were other fellow believers (including among them very possibly some Gentiles whose conversion to Jewish practice was ritualistic, i.e., pagan in style)4 who insisted that what the Gentiles had to enter into was the totality of a pre-Messianic and less-than-missionary Jewish lifestyle. Under attack from both sides, the Paul whom we are now reading in 2 Corinthians—the Paul of Acts, and the Paul of Ephesians—has to be understood as doing a third and unheard-of thing, namely, creating a community that is at the same time aggressively open to the Gentile world and firmly committed to Abraham and to his children as the only way to know the God of Abraham. It is the defense of this missionary particularism that makes sense of all of the ministry of Paul, and specifically of his self-defense in our text.
The necessary rereading that this approach calls for would of course demand detail that a single essay cannot provide. In this essay I must limit myself to two specimens, neither of them conclusive, yet each of them quite significant standing alone, and, when combined, are certainly
