When Susan Grove Eastman informed a fellow convention attendee that she was engaged on a e-book on Paul’s letters, the response was maybe unsurprising: “All I learn about Paul is his unhealthy press.”
Certainly, lately Paul has gotten a substantial amount of unhealthy press, significantly as mainline church buildings and clergy have highlighted Jesus as a trainer and ethical instance on the expense of Christ as Lord. It appears nearly a badge of honor amongst latest seminary graduates to diss Paul. I think a variety of this resistance comes from individuals who have by no means actually learn Paul or studied the work of his extra sympathetic interpreters.
Eastman is not only a sympathetic interpreter of Paul; she is an individual whose life has been modified by a deep studying of Paul’s letters. “They’ve,” she writes, “taken me captive, captured my consideration, enthralled me, engrossed me, and laid declare to me, with an urgency that exceeds mere ‘educational’ curiosity.” As one who, like Eastman, has skilled the facility of Paul’s phrases—phrases that captivate me, quicken my pulse, and take my breath away—I’m grateful for her resistance to modern and standard knowledge’s dismissals of the apostle.
Oneself in One other is a group of essays Eastman wrote between 2008 and 2022, now revealed in a single quantity as a part of the Cascade Library of Pauline Research. These essays come up out of the varsity of apocalyptic interpretation of the New Testomony, which may be traced to Ernst Kasemann and J. Louis Martyn. Eastman studied with the latter at Union Theological Seminary. In addition to Eastman, different inheritors and interpreters of this attitude embrace such influential students and preachers as Fleming Rutledge, Douglas Harink, Beverly Gaventa, Paul Zahl, and Philip Ziegler.
Maybe much more necessary than her defiance of Paul’s unhealthy press is Eastman’s resistance to makes an attempt to restrict Paul to the first-century context. Eastman seeks to realize “a recent listening to” for Paul’s thought by placing him in dialog with “new interlocutors past the guild of New Testomony scholarship.” This leads to fascinating essays which deliver Paul into dialog with the horror of Rwandan genocide, the modern use of psychiatric remedy, and the way we perceive folks on the autism spectrum.
The gathering of essays is split into two elements: “Exegetical and Theological Investigations” and “Pauline Theology in Concept and Apply.” What holds them collectively is Eastman’s core argument that Paul’s theological anthropology is altogether totally different from the individualistic interpretations of his work which have characterised trendy preaching, whether or not of the mainline or evangelical tribes.
Typical use of Paul has accepted trendy understanding of the person as autonomous and remoted. Accordingly, interpreters perceive experiences like repentance, justification, and salvation by way of a person’s inside non-public life, saying little concerning the social and relational dimensions of life in Christ. Eastman argues persuasively that this construal of Paul tells us much more about us and our trendy individualism than it does about Paul and his theology.
For instance, she writes that trendy interpreters describe the expertise of the Holy Spirit in such a manner that it “would look like one thing particular person, non-public, inside one’s personal subjective sense of oneself.” Nevertheless, “interpersonal expertise is a component and parcel of Paul’s participatory anthropology, which renders boundaries between the self and others permeable with out being totally dissolved.”
All of this has apparent implications for the church, which too usually loses itself in an entirely individualized model of Christianity. That is much more true now, as many church buildings wrestle with the aftermath of the COVID adaptation to on-line worship. The gathering of the physique of Christ has turn out to be digital together with being elective. Whereas Eastman doesn’t touch upon this specific improvement, she writes that “to be ‘in Christ’ is to be in relationship with folks within the midst of whom Christ dwells via his Spirit, and thereby to share experiences not solely with Christ but additionally with each other.”
When Eastman turns explicitly to extra modern challenges, resembling the usage of psychiatric remedy or our understanding of autism, she continues to hold ahead a Pauline anthropology, which insists that the self by no means exists by itself. For Eastman, the aim of psychiatric therapy ought to not be producing self-determining “free-standing, self-sustaining people who can stay ‘on their very own,’” however fairly relational connection and interdependence.
This framework additionally has implications for a way we perceive growing older, which is a subject Eastman may usefully have interaction in future work. How usually will we hear growing older folks say that their aim is to “be unbiased” and to keep away from “being depending on anybody,” particularly their very own kids? Paul, mediated via Eastman, may ask, “Who taught you to assume this fashion?”
Whereas Eastman writes with an ear and coronary heart open to modern society, this e-book’s viewers will doubtless be New Testomony students and scholarly preachers. One needs that she may attain a wider and extra well-liked viewers—and probably the sort of one that says, “All I learn about Paul is his unhealthy press.”
