My companion in reflecting on Paul’s Letter to America, Professor Erin Brigham, chose to focus first on the fact that the Rev. Dr. King is addressing the Christian churches of the United States in the mid-20th Century, and then, given Dr. Brigham’s own faith commitments, concentrates more closely on what the Rev. Dr. King has to say to the Roman Catholic Church.
Dr. Brigham helpfully compares the 1958 and 1963 versions of Paul’s Letter to America, bringing out how the Rev. Dr. King modulates his critique of the Roman Catholic Church over those two performances of the same text; in the first, while a traditionalist pope was in office, there is a tone of criticism, and in the 1963 version, while the reformer pope, John XXIII was in office, there is more approval and appreciation.
St. Paul, of course, addressed his epistles to local Christian communities, and so the Rev. Dr. King sounds an authentic note by making the Christian churches in America the addressee of this Pauline-style letter. Paul praises and criticizes the churches addressed by his letters; King does the same in his letter to Christians in America. There is a smooth narrative surface in King’s sermon; that is, we recognize the tone of King’s epistle as being like Paul’s with respect to being addressed to Christian communities of each man’s time.
In this reflection on Paul’s Letter to Christians in America, I turn to what appears to be a glaring contrast between Paul’s epistles and King’s letter in the style of Paul. This apparent disjuncture is how each writer – Paul and King – treats Empire. King directly criticizes the American Empire; conventionalist accounts of Paul have, over a long period of time, painted a picture of Paul as a Roman citizen whose enemies are spiritual and cosmic, not flesh and blood representatives of Rome.
Given this supposed preoccupation of Paul with cosmic enemies to the Church, and purported lack of interest in criticizing Rome, Paul and King seem quite different from one another. Paul is contending on a heavenly field, while King is on the ground taking on societal forces and indeed the American Empire. However, there is a substantial body of contemporary scholarship that has argued that the conventionalist view of Paul is distorted and misleading.
A related and important contrast seems to be how each letter writer, Paul and King, advocates for how to confront the opponents of the Church in their time. King makes an open appeal to the use of nonviolence as the way that Christians contend with the American empire. What are we to make, on the other hand, of Paul’s imagery of spiritual warfare? Is there a real or apparent difference between King’s nonviolent approach and Paul’s adjuration to “put on the full armor of God” (Ephesians 6) in the Church’s struggle with the spiritual powers?
Does Paul confront the Roman Empire?
Let me summarize two arguments that reposition Paul in relation to the Roman Empire, showing him to be more like King in his unveiled critique of the American empire, and not the “spiritual theologian” of conventionalist portraits.
First Jeremy Punt argues that: “Paul’s political theology was essentially Jewish, not unlike that of the prophets…As a Jew Paul did not retreat from the powers, resigning them as evil manifestations of paganism to the wrath of God, but challenged them as integrally connected to the everyday political context enveloped by the Empire’s long shadow.”
Another voice that repaints Paul’s relationship with the Roman Empire is that of Walter Wink, an innovative and remarkable Bible scholar and activist of the 20th Century. In the contested topic of the identities of “evil powers” in Paul’s letters, opinions ranged between two poles: evil powers are either spiritual entities or civic authorities. Wink, though, took a non-dualistic approach, and saw the powers as “heavenly and earthly, divine and human, spiritual and political, invisible and structural.” (Wink, 1984:100; also Wink, 1992). The powers are psycho-spiritual webs constituted through collective human belief and energy, since the spiritual powers are “the inner aspect of material or tangible manifestations of power” (Wink, 1984:104, quoted in Punt).”
How shall we fight?
If we accept Wink’s both/and analysis of the Powers in Paul’s letters, and Punt’s contention that the more we see Paul as a Jew, the more we see Paul’s opposition to Rome, then what about how to fight the Roman power in its spiritual and temporal guises? Here I think we can say that only a superficial and too-strictly delimited reading of Paul can imagine the Christian would use spiritual weapons – swords, breastplates, helmets – in conventional ways of war – violently, that is. Instead I would urge us to remember the sublime, stirring hymn to love in Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians. Paul is the unequivocal exponent of overflowing love (agapé), and the metaphoric armor of God must be seen as ironic restatements of the world’s ways into the pathways of God. So, in fact, King and Paul are in step with one another, not only in their direct confrontation of Empire, but also in their methodology of contention, which can truly be said to be creative nonviolence. So, I’ll begin concluding with an extended quotation from King’s sermon in which he tells us how we should struggle against the power of evil.
“May I say just a word to those of you who are struggling against this evil. Always be sure that you struggle with Christian methods and Christian weapons. Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that he has heaped upon you. Let him know that you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself. Let him know that the festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro. With this attitude you will be able to keep your struggle on high Christian standards.”
I’ve been finishing this reflection in Easter Week, Easter Sunday 2023 being three days ago. Tomorrow I’ll be preaching at the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley, California, and the Gospel for Thursday in Easter Week presents a resurrection appearance of Jesus to his disciples from the Gospel of Luke. This Gospel story brings to my mind why I find it so important that both Paul and Martin Luther King, Jr. both confront the empire powers of their own day, and meet their dominating power with nonviolence and love.
In Luke’s resurrection account, the disciples suppose Jesus to be a ghost, a phantom. Jesus reassures them that he is flesh and blood, not a shade. Why is Jesus’ bodily reality in the resurrection so important, in this case, to me? Jesus’ resurrection body, perhaps surprisingly, is not blemish free and perfect, but rather is marred by the terrible wounds of the crucifixion death used by the representatives of Rome to execute Jesus.
The wounded by vital, living Jesus assures me that empire never has the last word. Love, Paul declares, never ends. Jesus’ resurrection gives me the courage that I often lack in the face of empire’s vast power.
Too, this resurrection story in Luke speaks to the how – nonviolence as an expression of love – of working to undo empire’s distorting, dominating effects. After Jesus shows the disciples that he is real, he then charges them with the proclamation of forgiveness. How astounding, this man who has not been extinguished by the empire comes back not intent on revenge or turning the tables and becoming the new emperor, but rather proclaiming overflowing love. Again, I feel the strength of love, the strength to love.
