A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [140]
Chapter 15: Jesus and the Kingdom of God
1. Much is made of Paul’s reference to homosexuality in this passage (1:26–27), but Paul doesn’t refer to people who have an inborn sexual orientation toward the same sex. The whole idea of sexual orientation would probably have been inconceivable to Paul as a man of his times. He explicitly refers to people who have inborn attraction to the opposite sex and then choose to engage in homosexual behavior, probably as part of orgies or as expressions of domination, both of which were common in Roman culture. I should add that the wrath of God of which Paul speaks here (1:18) does not dangle sinners over the flames of hell as so many preachers have done. Hell is never mentioned in Romans. In fact, in this passage, the consequence of sin is to be “given up to it.” God’s wrath is revealed by letting people reap the consequences of their foolish or evil behaviors.
2. Repeatedly in Romans, just when Paul feels he succeeds in making a point, he then seems to anticipate how he will be misread by people who want to caricature what he has said and render it more extreme than he intends. So we see a repeating pattern: statement (via illustration), possible objection, qualification, and clarification (sometimes via illustration).
3. Thousands of pages have been written trying to derive from the details of this passage coherent doctrines of sin and sanctification and perhaps anthropology too, oblivious to the larger rhetorical structure and aim we have been tracing. Again, too often we treat a personal letter—dictated to a scribe, full of semisuccessful metaphors that require frequent qualifications, imaginatively fertile though at times logically frustrating—as if it were a technical dissertation written by a mechanical engineer, a material finding written by an accountant, a work of scholarship written by a senior theologian at an Ivy League seminary, or (recalling our second question in this quest) a legal opinion written by a constitutional lawyer.
4. If “Christ” means “God’s anointed liberating king,” then to be “in Christ” means to be “in the liberating king,” which, it seems to me, is another way of saying “in the kingdom of God.” If readers keep that in mind whenever they read Paul, I believe they will see more deeply how Paul’s gospel is the same as Jesus’s gospel. (If readers aren’t careful, they will work with the disastrous assumption—to me, at least—that “in Christ” means “in the religion called Christianity.”)
5. Paul’s phrase “be merciful to all” recalls Jesus’s teaching in his “kingdom manifesto” (the Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:43–48) that God causes God’s sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous. Luke’s version resonates even more strongly with Paul’s word “mercy”: “[God] is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (6:35–36).
6. We should remember that Paul wrote his letters before Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written down. In Paul’s day, the stories and sayings of Jesus would have been preserved through oral tradition, which was later chronicled by the four Evangelists. In this way, Paul’s moral teaching, which at every turn parallels or paraphrases Jesus’s teaching, is not simply a practical add-on at the end of his “doctrinal” letters; it is a fulfillment of Jesus’s mission for apostles, namely, to teach others to practice the way of life Jesus taught the original disciples by word and example (Matt. 28:18–20). We could say that Paul’s doctrinal reflections set the stage for his primary work of spiritual formation or disciple making.
7. In two of my earlier books, I proposed that Jesus would almost certainly not use the term “kingdom of God” if he were here today. Today the term is an anachronism; in his day it named the dominant social, political, cultural, and economic reality. I propose a variety of possible “translations” into our context, including peace revolution, new love economy, sacred ecosystem,