Prosopal presence: our current conundrum
When we meet online, are we meeting ‘face to face’? My colleague Elizabeth Shively gave us an excellent sermon this morning in our series on 1Thess.; I won’t repeat what she said (its on our church FB page, and well worth the watch), but before she began my attention was caught by a word in the reading. Throughout the letter Paul expresses his regrets that he is absent from the Thessalonian believers, his longing to see them, and his eagerness for news of them. In 3:10 he prays ‘Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face’ (NRSV) ‘May see you face to face’ translates τὸ ἰδεῖν ὑμῶν τὸ πρόσωπον; it was the word πρόσωπον that caught my eye (I was following the reading in the original, as I usually do); it’s a word I’ve thought about a lot. Paul made a similar point , using the same word, twice, in 2:17: ἀπορφανισθέντες ἀφ᾿ ὑμῶν … προσώπῳ οὐ καρδίᾳ, περισσοτέρως ἐσπουδάσαμεν τὸ πρόσωπον ὑμῶν ἰδεῖν… (‘…separated from you—in person, not in heart—we longed … to see you face to face.’ NRSV) Here, there is a contrast between being with them ‘in person’ (πρόσωπον) and ‘in heart’ (καρδίᾳ), reminiscent of 1Cor. 5:3 ἀπὼν τῷ σώματι, παρὼν δὲ τῷ πνεύματι (‘absent in body [σώμα], present in spirit [πνεύμα]’), as well as the same expression of desire to see facially [τὸ πρόσωπον]. How does Paul’s urgent longing to be re-united with the Thessalonian sisters and brothers relate to our enforced absence from each other today? The Corinthian text is easy: we are apart bodily without question, and together in spirit, without question. The Thessalonian ones are more difficult. πρόσωπον is more difficult, as already the translations from the NRSV above indicate: does it mean ‘face’ or ‘person’? Well, yes; the semantic range stretches at least that wide—see the historical note at the end of this post. But in this linguistic imprecision our current experience of church fellowship sits: many of us, at least, are seeing the faces of our sisters and brothers through video conferencing; we are talking, interacting, so there is some real togetherness, some experience of coming together for worship and fellowship. We are not bodily present, however, and so we are not fully personally present to each other. We are living in a grey area in the middle of the semantic range of the word πρόσωπον. Paul longed to be with the Thessalonians prosopally; did that mean just seeing their faces, or bodily presence, or what? Of course, these are not distinctions he could have made; lacking videoconferencing solutions, bodily presence was necessary to seeing faces. Almost everything he talks about longing for in the letter is achievable in online meeting: he wants to pastor them, to observe and interrogate their growth in faith, to be able to correct error, to offer exhortation and encouragement. All of this is possible online. In the end, however, is the instruction to ‘greet all the brothers and sisters with a holy kiss’ (5:26); there comes a point where bodies matter. If Paul could have met with the Thessalonians over Teams or Zoom, he would have jumped at the chance, I am sure; he could have heard of the answers to his constant prayers, and offered the encouragement and advice he longed to give—but he would still have wanted to kiss them. I don’t think many of us need to be told that our online gatherings are sub-optimal; kissing may not be quite our culture, but hugging might be, and singing without question is; we want to be together bodily. But Paul in Thessalonians certainly reminds us that what we have is not nothing; we can meet face to face, after a fashion, we can hear of each other’s faith, and offer encouragement and counsel. We are not simply apart, though we are scattered. If we are to be church well through this time, I suspect it will be in part by reflecting seriously on the limits, but also the possibilities of this grey prosopal space we are now meeting in; perhaps thinking about Greek semantic fields can help us with that? Historical note: [This is all from memory, as I am separated from my library…] πρόσωπον is a very difficult word to translate, and visibly changes meaning over time. In earliest extant usage (Homer), it referred fairly simply to the face; from there, it came to be the term for the mask an actor in a Greek drama would wear, from which sense another meaning of ‘character’ (in a play), and so ‘actor in a narrative’; from this the sense of...
Read More‘Show, don’t tell’: bad preaching and mock reality TV for kids
Our seven year old daughter is presently obsessed by a CBBC show called ‘The Next Step’. I stand up and leave the room when the show comes on. Recently I finally worked out why. It’s because it is far too like bad preaching. And I hate bad preaching (particularly when I am the preacher).
Read MoreLucy Peppiatt on 1 Cor. 11 and 14
Lucy Peppiatt’s Women and Worship at Corinth (Eugene: Cascade, 2015) is a very good book. I don’t say this because I agree with the conclusions, although I do; I don’t even say it because Lucy is a good friend and a former student of mine, although she is; I say it because her book is comprehensively researched and carefully argued, and that combination is what makes a book ‘good’ in the academic world I inhabit. Lucy treats three difficult texts in 1 Corinthians: 11:2-16; 14:20-25; and 14:34-36. She proposes that they may be best read by assuming that in each case Paul is in part quoting his opponents’ views back at them. For this argument, she draws gratefully on Douglas Campbell’s major recent work on Romans, and his extensive investigations into the nature of rhetorical arguments in the world in which Paul wrote his letters. I confess to remaining unconvinced by Doug’s arguments on Romans, but his research on rhetoric is solid, and Lucy’s deployment of it here seems – to me at least – far stronger. Why? Three reasons, roughly in order of significance: 1. the texts in question are self-contradictory unless we invoke some argument like this; 2. we know that Paul is quoting the Corinthians’ views back at them in other places in 1 Cor., which makes an extension of this principle plausible; 3. Lucy’s reconstruction of the basic theological argument of 1 Cor. – that it is cruciform, and God has reversed the standard power hierarchies of the world – make readings of the gender texts which suggest Paul is here reinforcing hierarchies implausible. Lucy’s research is thorough; I do not know if she has read every scholarly commentary on 1 Corinthians, but (admittedly as a non-specialist) I cannot think of one (in English, at least) that she has not read and interacted with; she works extensively with scholarly essays and journal articles also. As she points out, the sort of ‘rhetorical’ conclusion she is offering here has been proposed before in relation to each of the three texts, but no-one has used Campbell’s work on rhetorical pointers to suggest that the three texts share common literary features which allow us to identify Corinthian quotations within them. Previous work argued that the logic could be sorted out here or there if we imagined an act of quotation; Lucy argues that there is textual evidence of an act of quotation in each case. Her case is not confined to identifying Corinthian quotations: she holds the three ‘headship’ clauses of 1 Cor 11:3 to be Paul’s own, and investigates carefully the (endlessly-debated) question of the meaning of kephale, for instance. That said, the rhetorical arguments are her real advance over earlier interpreters, or so it seems to me. Lucy gives us a reading of the texts that is centred on the cross, and the re-ordered society that the church should be under its crucified Head. In this society, ministry is based on gift and calling, not on gender, and the powerful gifts of God’s Spirit are normal and necessary for the building up of the Body. I am no New Testament scholar, and would not presume to judge the detailed points of the argument; but this reconstruction is theologically convincing, and fits well with the broader themes of the epistle, and of the Pauline corpus more generally, for me to be convinced by...
Read MoreJohn Chrysostom on 1 Cor. 11:3
One of the things that struck me in reading the Ware and Starke book was how much this sort of defence of complementarianism depends on 1 Cor. 11:3 – ‘But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God’ (NIV). Simply put, even if we could demonstrate an eternal functional subordination in the triune life, we would have no warrant to draw an analogy to gender relations apart from this single verse. But the verse cannot bear that weight: however we read it, ‘head’ is being used in (at least) two senses. Particularly if we are talking about things like authority, the Father-Son relation is just not the same as the Christ-human relation. That surely does not even need arguing… …but in case it does, here’s the argument, from St John Chrysostom’s Homily 26 on 1 Corinthians. Lucy Peppiatt put me on to the text in her (excellent) Women and Worship at Corinth (of which much more in a day or two…); I don’t know a modern English edition, so I have done a (fairly quick and dirty) translation of my own (from Migne, but I think his text is OK): ’The head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God.’ Here the heretics attack us, contriving from these words to diminish the Son. But they trip over themselves! If the head of woman is man, and the head is of the same substance (‘homoousios’) as the body, and the head of Christ is God, then the Son is of the same substance (‘homoousios’) as the Father! They say that they are not trying to show here that the Son is of a different substance to the Father, but that he is subject to authority (‘archetas’ – does this argument sound familiar at all?) How should we respond? First, when we speak of the incarnate Son’s being subjected, we do not mean that the divine Son is subject – that’s just how we talk of the economy of salvation. But anyway, how are you going to prove the point from the passage? If they say the Father has authority over Christ as a husband does over his wife, then they have to say that as Christ rules over men, so the Father rules over the Son – the passage says ‘the head of every man is Christ’! Who would dream of saying such a thing? If the Father is as much greater than the Son as the Son is greater than us, this really diminishes the Son! So, we shouldn’t use the same arguments about our human existence and God’s divine existence, even if we use similar language. We have to recognise God’s transcendence – God is so great! If they don’t admit this, they end up with all sorts of absurdities – God is the head of Christ, and Christ is the head of man, and man of the woman; if we take ‘head’ in the same sense every time, then the Son will be as distant from the Father as we are from the Son – and the woman will be as far from us as we are from the divine Word, and what the Son is to the Father, we are to the Son, and the woman is to the man. Who could accept all that? If you understand the word ‘head’ differently speaking of men and women from the way you understand it speaking of Christ, then you have to understand it differently speaking of the Father and the Son too! (If you’ve not come across him, John was a great preacher in Antioch towards the end of the fourth century, and became archbishop of Constantinople; he is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar as one of the three great teachers of the church, along with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus; to pre-empt the criticism that usually comes at this point, it is fairly certain that he does not say this stuff because he has been infected with feminism, or lost sight of the gospel through reading Germaine...
Read MoreTheology and Exegesis: an example
To pick up on the theme of my earlier post on the place of theology in exegesis, Justin Taylor has a blog post up today on the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, which serves as an ideal example of what I was talking about. Justin frames the question by asking ‘is [eternal generation] really a Biblical idea?’ He notes that the idea has been seriously challenged in contemporary theology, but suggests that, although he lacks space in the post, a ‘full exegetical defense’ could indeed be offered. (‘Eternal generation’ is the doctrine that the Father’s begetting of the Son is an eternal act; it is a necessary doctrine in classical Trinitarianism.) If ‘biblical idea’ means ‘a doctrine that could be derived by exegesis,’ then I don’t think eternal generation is a Biblical idea – although I have nothing invested in this opinion, and would be happy to be proven wrong. I am fairly sure that no-one in the fourth century thought they could read eternal generation off the pages of Scripture – indeed, it was more often an idea defended in the face of apparently-clear exegesis: Prov. 8:22, a central text in the debates, seemingly teaches a creation in time of Wisdom/the Son (pretty much everyone agreed that Wisdom here is to be understood as the Son – they were apparently less worried about the Bible using feminine pronouns for persons of the godhead than we are). I do, however, think eternal generation is (very close to) a necessary idea, in that we need to believe it (or something extraordinarily similar to it) to have any chance of understanding the Bible. It is one of those ideas that I described in the previous post as ‘imagining what must be the case for everything in the Bible to be true’. (Why the parenthetical hesitations? On the one hand, I feel compelled to assume – for theological reasons; see my Listening to the Past – that the Trinitarian settlement reached at Constantinople was a wholly successful doctrinal development; on the other, as an evangelical, I have to accept the possibility, at least, of a different conceptual development that was similarly adequate to naming the God we meet in Scripture – one based, perhaps, on Chinese or African philosophy rather than Greek. Such a development, though, would have to affirm that the Father-Son relation always is, and that it is a relation of origin, so would have some doctrine very like eternal...
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