Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The letter of Leo to the Gallican churches, and the edict of the emperor, give us the first example of a defensive and offensive alliance of the central spiritual and temporal powers in the pursuit of an unlimited sovereignty. The edict, however, could of course have power, at most, only in the West, to which the authority of Valentinian was limited. In fact, even Hilary and his successors maintained, in spite of Leo, the prerogatives they had formerly received from Pope Zosimus, and were confirmed in them by later popes.546 Beyond this the issue of the contest is unknown. Hilary of Arles died in 449, universally esteemed and loved, without, so far as we know, having become formally reconciled with Rome;547 though, notwithstanding this, he figures in a remarkable manner in the Roman calendar, by the side of his papal antagonist Leo, as a canonical saint. Undoubtedly Leo proceeded in this controversy far too rigorously and intemperately against Hilary; yet it was important that he should hold fast the right of appeal as a guarantee of the freedom of bishops against the encroachments of metropolitans. The papal despotism often proved itself a wholesome check upon the despotism of subordinate prelates. With Northern Gaul the Roman bishops came into less frequent contact; yet in this region also there occur, in the fourth and fifth centuries, examples of the successful assertion of their jurisdiction. The early British church held from the first a very isolated position, and was driven back, by the invasion of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, about the middle of the fifth century, into the mountains of Wales, Cornwallis, Cumberland, and the still more secluded islands. Not till the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons under Gregory the Great did a regular connection begin between England and Rome. Finally, the Roman bishops succeeded also in extending their patriarchal power eastward, over the praefecture of East Illyria. Illyria belonged originally to the Western empire, remained true to the Nicene faith through the Arian controversies, and for the vindication of that faith attached itself closely to Rome. When Gratian, in 379, incorporated Illyricum Orientale with the Eastern empire, its bishops nevertheless refused to give up their former ecclesiastical connection. Damasus conferred on the metropolitan Acholius, of Thessalonica, as papal vicar, patriarchal rights in the new praefecture. The patriarch of Constantinople endeavored, indeed, repeatedly, to bring this ground into his diocese, but in vain. Justinian, in 535, formed of it a new diocese, with an independent patriarch at Prima Justiniana (or Achrida, his native city); but this arbitrary innovation had no vitality, and Gregory I. recovered active intercourse with the Illyrian bishops. Not until the eighth century, under the emperor Leo the Isaurian, was East Illyria finally severed from the Roman diocese and incorporated with the patriarchate of Constantinople.548 § 60. The Papacy. Literature, as in § 55, and vol. i. § 110.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "Calvin détruisit Genève pour la refaire à son image et, en dépit de toutes les révolutions, cette reconstitution improvisée dure encore: il existe aux portes de la France une ville de strictes croyances, de bonnes études et de bonnes moeurs: une ’cité de Calvin.’ " A remarkable tribute from a scholar who was no theologian, and no clergyman, but thoroughly at home in the history, literature, manners, and society of Geneva. Marc-Monnier speaks also very highly of Calvin’s merits as a French classic, and quotes with approval the judgment of Paul Lacroix (in his ed. of select Oeuvres françoises de J. Calvin): "Le style de Calvin est un des plus grands styles du seizième siècle: simple, correct, élégant, clair, ingénieux, animé, varie de formes et de tons, il a commencé à fixer la langue française pour la prose, comme celui de Clement Marot l’avait fait pour les vers." George Bancroft. George Bancroft, the American historian and statesman, born at Worcester, Mass., 1800, died at Washington, 1891, served his country as secretary of the Navy, and ambassador at London and Berlin, with the greatest credit. "A word on Calvin, the Reformer." From his Literary and Historical Miscellanies (New York, 1855), pp. 405 sqq. "It is intolerance only, which would limit the praise of Calvin to a single sect, or refuse to reverence his virtues and regret his failings. He lived in the time when nations were shaken to their centre by the excitement of the Reformation; when the fields of Holland and France were wet with the carnage of persecution; when vindictive monarchs on the one side threatened all Protestants with outlawry and death, and the Vatican, on the other, sent forth its anathemas and its cry for blood. In that day, it is too true, the influence of an ancient, long-established, hardly disputed error, the Constant danger of his position, the intense desire to secure union among the antagonists of popery, the engrossing consciousness that his struggle was for the emancipation of the Christian world, induced the great Reformer to defend the use of the sword for the extirpation of heresy. Reprobating and lamenting his adhesion to the cruel doctrine, which all Christendom had for centuries implicitly received, we may, as republicans, remember that Calvin was not only the founder of a sect, but foremost among the most efficient of modern republican legislators. More truly benevolent to the human race than Solon, more self-denying than Lycurgus, the genius of Calvin infused enduring elements into the institutions of Geneva, and made it for the modern world the impregnable fortress of popular liberty, the fertile seed-plot of democracy.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Even now, many in Alego can tell you about the day that a shaman from another province came to kill one of our neighbors. This neighbor had courted a girl from nearby, and the families had agreed that they should be wed. However, another man hungered for this girl, and so the jealous suitor hired a shaman to kill his rival. When our neighbor heard of this plan, he became very afraid, and came to Onyango asking for advice. Your grandfather listened to the man’s story, then picked up his panga and a hippo-hide whip, and went to wait for the shaman at the foot of the road. Before long, Onyango saw the shaman approaching, carrying a small suitcase of potions in one hand. When the shaman was within shouting distance, your grandfather stood in the center of the road and said, “Go back to where you come from.” The shaman didn’t know who Onyango was, and made like he was going to pass, but Onyango blocked his way and said, “If you are as powerful as you claim, you must strike me now with lightning. If not, you should run, for unless you leave this village now, I will have to beat you.” Again, the shaman made as if he was going to pass, but before he could take another step, Onyango had beaten him to the ground, taken his suitcase, and returned with it to his compound. Well, this was a very serious matter, especially when your grandfather refused to return the shaman’s potions. The next day, the council of elders gathered beneath a tree to resolve the dispute, and Onyango and the shaman were both told to appear and state their case. First the shaman stood and told the elders that if Onyango did not return the suitcase at once, a curse would be brought on the entire village. Then Onyango stood, and he repeated what he had said earlier. “If this man has strong magic, let him curse me now and strike me dead.” The elders leaned away from Onyango, fearful that the spirits might miss their target. But they soon saw that no spirits came. So Onyango turned to the man who had hired the shaman and said, “Go and find yourself a new woman, and let this other woman be with the one to whom she is promised.” And to the shaman Onyango said, “Go back to where you came from, because there will be no killings in this place.”

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  People, I have learned, have a way of taking root in one’s still-developing mind without our knowing it, especially people, like Baldwin, who live in the world of words. How else, then, to explain my every effort to tell in a novel as best I could the stories of slave masters, black and white, and how slavery crushed their souls every morning they got up from their beds and thanked their god for their dominion over others. If I knew the importance of telling that, it was because Baldwin and his kind had planted the idea long ago. (I give him so much credit because he was in the minority of all the black writers I was reading who understood the importance of giving white people their due as full-fledged human beings. Even before I knew I would get into this writing thing, Baldwin told me this: You do not have to fully humanize your black characters by dehumanizing the white ones.) Traveling with Baldwin through Notes ’ “The Harlem Ghetto,” “Journey to Atlanta,” and “Notes of a Native Son,” I was given a grander portrait of the man I had known only through fiction. His fiction certainly had an unprecedented and absolute life of its own, and I might have tried to imagine the man I was dealing with, but those essays afforded me something beyond the postage stamp–sized pictures of him and the few sentences of biography that came with my paperback editions of, say, Go Tell It on the Mountain or Another Country . He would have been Baldwin had I never read those essays, but he would not have been real enough to deign to share a moment or two with me. The fiction offered a person of enormous humanity. The essays offered a man, a neighbor, or, yes, an older brother. I had gone through the Washington, D.C., riots after King’s assassination, an explosion that took place some twenty-five years after the Harlem riots Baldwin describes in “Notes.” Different city, different actors, but the same script as that used in the nationwide riots of the 1910s, also a conflagration that included Washington. I was mainly on the periphery of matters that April 1968.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  In my experience, most men, when hard, don’t act as if their penis is their own, but as if they have suddenly become subject to some kind of erectile radar device that forces them to relinquish all responsibility for its erratic behavior. A-Man, however, presents a complete paradox. Filled with the same juices, the same desires, the same hardness, he never loses his head. He uses his desire to create an event, to push boundaries, to do something not done before. He is the only man I’ve seen who can walk around a room with a killer erection and still look like a man with a mission—focused, alert, self-contained, and mischievous. He has the most noble erection I’ve ever met. Sometimes we discuss just where exactly is his cock going in my body. Somewhere into the center, behind my belly button. We have even measured with the tape measure. Hard to tell the exact angle. What is sure is that he stirs my guts from right to left, forward, upward, sideways, and back. It really gets your attention, having a large cock in your ass, concentrates the mind. Each time, rebirth. Nearly a hundred and fifty so far. That is a lot of starting your whole life over. You might think, after all that ass-fucking, why am I still counting? I’m anal! There you have it. Back to the terrible twos. The best way to feel, to know, a man’s cock is through one’s ass, where the walls cling to every inch all the way to the head. A pussy has less feeling, fewer nerves, less strength, less muscular power—and, often, less interest. A pussy, genetically, wants impregnation, the juice; an asshole wants the ride of its life. Both holes, I would postulate, reconcile the problem of mortality as caverns for creation: vaginas for babies, asses for art. Speaking of Michelangelo, there is the question of trimming the bush, the male bush. A-Man trims. In the beginning he didn’t, and then one day I suggested that a trimmed rim around the base of his cock would look superb, like a samurai warrior. “Depilation is the act of a fastidious lover,” states the Kamasutra. He thought about it for a minute and then promptly went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bathtub. As I held the flashlight, he trimmed. And trimmed, and trimmed. He went far beyond the original idea and just cut down the whole bush—sides, top, balls, underballs, everything. Now there’s no going back to the bush. I have much better hand and mouth contact, no little curly hairs in my mouth, and his cock and balls look beautiful. Why doesn’t every man trim? Vanity. The hair camouflages their shame. No hair, no shame. THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT All this talk about size. From where to where do you measure? From the front side? Belly side?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This was becoming my own experience. I was writing about the three Abrahamic faiths, but could not see any one of them as superior to any of the others. Indeed, I was constantly struck by their profound similarity. I was equally delighted by the insights of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers: none of them had a monopoly of truth. Working in isolation from one another, and often in a state of deadly hostility, they had come up with remarkably similar conclusions. This unanimity seemed to suggest that they were onto something real about the human condition. At quite an early stage in my research, I was fortunate to come across a phrase that sprang out at me from a footnote in Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s magisterial work The Venture of Islam. It seemed to sum up my experience during the last year and showed me how a religious historian should proceed. I immediately copied out the passage and pinned it to the notice board beside my desk. I tried to read it every day, especially when I felt weary or jaded with the effort of penetrating minds that sometimes seemed light-years from my own circumstances. Hodgson is discussing the esoteric tradition in Islam, and cautions his readers not to approach it patronizingly, from a position of enlightened rationality. He cites what the eminent Islamist Louis Massignon had called the psychosociological “science of compassion”: The scholarly observer must render the mental and practical behavior of a group into terms available in his own mental resources, which should remain personally felt, even while informed with a breadth of reference which will allow other educated persons to make sense of them. But this must not be to substitute his own and his readers’ conventions for the original, but to broaden his own perspective so that it can make a place for the other. Concretely, he must never be satisfied to cease asking “but why?” until he has driven his understanding to the point where he has an immediate, human grasp of what a given position meant, such that every nuance in the data is accounted for and withal, given the total of presuppositions and circumstances, he could feel himself doing the same.5 Compassion does not, of course, mean to feel pity or to condescend, but to feel with. This was the method I had found to be essential while writing Muhammad. It demanded what Saint Paul had called a kenosis, an emptying of self that would lead to enlargement and an enhanced perspective. And I liked Hodgson’s emphasis on the importance of feeling and emotion. It was not enough to understand other people’s beliefs, rituals, and ethical practices intellectually. You had to feel them too and make an imaginative, though disciplined, identification.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This became my own method of study. Henceforth I tried not to dismiss an idea that seemed initially alien, but to ask repeatedly, “Why?” until, finally, the doctrine, the idea, or the practice became transparent and I could see the living kernel of truth within—an insight that quickened my own pulse. I would not leave an idea until I could to some extent experience it myself, and understand why a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim felt in this way. I found that one of my new luminaries, the late Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith, himself a Christian minister, had made his students live according to Muslim law when he was teaching Islamic studies at McGill University. They had to pray five times a day, prostrating themselves in the direction of Mecca, observe the fasts and dietary laws, and give alms. Why? Because, Cantwell Smith believed, you could not understand the truth of a religion by simply reading about its beliefs. The tradition became alive only when you lived it and observed those rituals that were designed to open a window on transcendence. But (I can almost hear an exasperated reader ask) what is this truth? Does this woman believe in God, or not? Is there, or is there not, anything out there? Does she believe that the God of the Bible exists? Does she, or does she not, worship a personal God? These are surely the truth claims of religion, and all this talk about compassionate empathy and religion as an art form is merely a distraction from the real issue. To believe or not to believe: that is surely the religious question, is it not?

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  If I asked A-Man to be monogamous, then I would always know I had taken his freedom, and I loved him basking in his freedom. I did not want to control him. I remembered him saying once, “You go out with a chick, you sleep with her once, and she hands you an armful of ‘do nots,’ and you’re looking at her great tits and her hot pussy and you’re looking at the ‘do nots’ in your arms and you hand them back. ‘Hey, I think these are yours.’” I had admired that—that’s why he was A-Man and not Any Man. He was not going to compromise himself for pussy, like so many men do. And I didn’t want to compromise a man with my pussy, I wanted a man to be true to himself . . . while desperately wanting my pussy. But this was only idle speculation, for I knew that A-Man would not be monogamous, even if I asked. He had told me long ago that he had tried being a boyfriend several times and always failed miserably. Better not to even try. I agreed. Failure is the great anti-aphrodisiac. Besides, if I wanted him to be only with me then I would have to return the favor and be only with him. And I knew that I couldn’t do that. I loved him too much. I was too vulnerable to give myself entirely to him. Without a commitment that might be broken, at least any pangs I might be feeling about the mousy brunette were not compounded by the self-righteous pain and anger of betrayal. So, I told myself, Do you know what you have to be if you’re not monogamous? Not jealous? No, jealousy is inevitable. Worth it. You’ve got to be worth it. He’s got to be worth it. The fucking has got to be worth it. Worth the occasional, gut-ripping insanity of jealousy. WAR As the days passed, however, I started feeling this overwhelming need to assert my authority over the mousy brunette. When I next saw A-Man I slyly suggested that we all get in bed together to assuage everyone’s pain with love and sperm. He smiled at me, loving that I was the kind of woman who would solve a problem with an orgy. Well, better than bayonets. He then said that he had actually suggested this to her during that first confrontation but that she had only cried harder in response, confessing that she would be too jealous. Damn. I knew if we could get her in bed, I could win. Suddenly winning became imperative. Winning what, exactly, I wasn’t sure, but the stakes seemed very high indeed. It was not about having him exclusively, it never had been; it was about knowing I was the most beloved.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Christ’s life was the incarnate revelation of a nonviolent God, and it was consummated by his death from the violent injustice he had opposed justly and nonviolently. His death was a sacrifice, was something “made sacred,” as we saw above, because it was the ultimate witness to the character of his God and the ultimate invitation for us to participate with him. And we participate by dying—metaphorically and really—to civilization’s violent normalcy or by dying—literally and really (unfortunately often still necessary)—from the same dominational evil we oppose. JUSTIFIED BY GOD’S GRACE AS A GIFT Grace as free gift. We are now “justified by God’s grace as a gift” (3.24). What does that mean? In Romans, Paul’s Greek word charis is usually translated “grace” and understood to mean a free gift. He speaks about being “justified by his grace as a gift” (3:24), about “the free gift in the grace of one man, Jesus Christ” (5:15), and, like a drumbeat, about “the free gift…the grace of God and the free gift…the free gift…the free gift…the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness” (5:15–17). But be very careful here. There is no such thing as a free gift. There can only be a free offer, which becomes a free gift when it is accepted. As a physical analogy, think about the air we breathe. It is always and equally available for everyone in any normal place or time. We do nothing to obtain it, nothing to merit it, and it is there unconditionally for good people and bad people alike. On the one hand, it is absolutely transcendent, since we depend on it totally. On the other, it is absolutely immanent, since it is everywhere inside and outside us, all around us. Indeed, we hardly notice the air unless something goes wrong with us or with it. Air, however, is a free offer that only becomes a free gift when we accept it and cooperate with it. We are always free either to take in too little air and choke or to take too much and hyperventilate. Furthermore, if we choose asphyxiation or hyperventilation, we should not say that the air is punishing us. It is always a matter of collaboration and participation with what is already there everywhere. Paul’s good news (gospel) is that God’s righteousness—that is, God’s very character as distributive justice—is a grace, a free gift offered to us all absolutely and unconditionally for our justification—that is, for our collaboration with God in the transformation of God’s world. In other words, God’s primary distribution is of God’s own self, own nature, own being, own character, or, as Paul prefers to say, God’s own Spirit. It is from that primary distributive justice, which is God’s gift of self, that the secondary distributive justice, which transforms the world, must come.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Athenodorus immediately accompanied Octavian back to Rome and stayed with him for the next thirty years, as that student became the divine Augustus, emperor of the Roman world. Athenodorus finally returned home to Tarsus about a dozen years before Paul was born and, as its university’s principal, pro ceeded successfully to reform that city’s constitution and lead its government. William Mitchell Ramsay, the first professor of classical archaeology at Oxford, concluded in his The Cities of St. Paul that “Tarsus in the reign of Augustus is the one example known in history of a State ruled by a University through its successive principals.” 1 In that environment a smart boy like Paul would have received not only a specific education in his own Jewish tradition, but also some general knowledge of the Greek philosophical schools and Greek rhetorical strategies. And, especially in that contentious environment, he would have been schooled in apologetics for internal and polemics for external usage. It was an education magnificently suited for a permanently away-from-home apostle who had learned to carry scripture in memory, to interweave citation with citation, and to argue orally on his feet as well as propose an argument as text. The major negative gift of Tarsus was malaria, but that conclusion moves within the higher reaches of scholarship known as—conjecture. Think for a moment, however, about that Cilician plain locked between the mountains and the sea. Think of its rich fertility and agricultural prosperity fed by three rivers that annually drained the melting snows of the Taurus range. Despite the best Roman drainage engineering, that environment also meant marshes, mosquitoes, and malaria. Paul’s first stay in the newly created Roman province of Galatia was not part of any planned program of missionary activity because, as he reminded the Galatians in a later and rather fiercely pugnacious letter: You know that it was because of a physical infirmity [in Greek, weakness of the flesh ] that I first announced the gospel to you; though my condition put you to the test, you did not scorn or despise me, but welcomed me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. What has become of the goodwill you felt? For I testify that, had it been possible, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. (4:13–15) Was Paul’s “physical infirmity” an isolated incident or was it part of the wider “thorn in the flesh ” mentioned in 2 Corinthians 12:7? First, “thorn” (Greek skolops ) means more than a minor pinprick.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Martin Luther King Jr. was killed because of his love for his people and his passion for a different kind of world. In these examples, dying for others does not mean dying in their place. Rather, these martyrs died because of their love for their people and their passion for a different kind of life for their people. Love and passion led them to their deaths. Their deaths were an epiphany of the depth of their love and passion. In ordinary language, the word “sacrifice” is often used in the same way. In the examples above, the mother sacrificed her life to rescue her child, the soldier sacrificed his life to save his friends, Romero sacrificed his life for the Salvadoran people, and so on. Once again, there is no notion that these people died as substitutes for somebody else—they sacrificed their lives, but not because a substitute was required. We move from ordinary language to the anthropological meaning of sacrifice, namely, as a ritual practiced in many premodern societies, including the world of the Bible. “Sacrifice,” as the Latin roots of the word suggest (from sacrum facere, “to make sacred”), meant making something sacred by offering it to God. In the ancient world, sacrifices most often involved animals. In some cultures there were also sacrifices of grain and precious objects. What they had in common was that they were gifts to God. The sacrifice of animals often involved a meal as well. The animal was offered to God, made sacred by being given to God, and then portions of it were eaten by those offering the sacrifice—the meal became a sacred meal, a meal with God. Sacrifice, gift, and meal commonly went together. Sacrifices served different purposes. Some were sacrifices of thanksgiving. Nothing was wrong, nothing was asked for, gratitude alone was the motive. There were sacrifices of petition, in which something was wanted from God. These were most often offered in times of community peril. Some were sacrifices of reconciliation, a means of repairing or overcoming a breach in the relationship with God. Here the dynamic of gift and meal is es pecially evident. On the level of human interaction, how do you mend a relationship that has been broken? How do you “make up” with someone you have wronged? You give a gift or share a meal, or both. So also sacrifices as a means of reconciliation were about giving a gift to God and sharing a meal with God. Together they were a means of at-one-ment: becoming one with God by eating sacred food with God. Sacrifice was not about substitution.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  But this is increasingly unpersuasive to many Christians. Beyond these passages, some see Paul not simply as being wrong about specific issues in specific verses, but as the “spoiler” who pervasively distorted the message of Jesus. Several books, some written by scholars, argue that Paul changed the teaching and message of Jesus into a set of abstract doctrines about Jesus, and thus transformed the religion of Jesus into a religion about Jesus. For these, Paul was wrong not just in a few passages, but comprehensively. Jesus is good, but Paul is bad. We do not share these negative views of Paul, even as we are quite willing to say he was wrong about some things. To see Paul positively does not mean endorsing everything he ever wrote. But we are among his admirers. We see him as an appealing apostle of Jesus whose vision of life “in Christ”—one of his favored phrases—is remarkably faithful to the message and vision of Jesus himself. When we take into account the different circumstances of their activity—Jesus addressing Jews living in the Jewish homeland and Paul addressing Jews and Gentiles in the cities of the Roman Empire beyond the Jewish homeland—Paul emerges as a faithful apostle of the radical Jesus who became his Lord. For many people, meeting this Paul will be like meeting Paul again for the first time. MEETING PAUL AGAIN We begin by placing Paul in time and space. In Chapter 3, we will treat the life of Paul in some detail. For now, we provide some markers, beginning with Jesus. Jesus was born around 4 BCE, possibly a year or two earlier. In the late 20s, he began his public activity and was soon executed by Roman imperial authority, most likely in the year 30 CE. We don’t know when Paul was born, but the most probable guess is the first decade of the first century. The basis for the guess is simple. Paul lived, and lived robustly, into the 60s of the first century. It is unlikely that he was in his seventies or eighties by then. Thus, Paul and Jesus were roughly contemporary, Paul not much younger than Jesus. Though both were Jewish, they grew up in very different settings: Jesus in a small Jewish village in Galilee; Paul in Tarsus, a significant city in southern Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. Jesus lived his life in the Jewish homeland. Paul was a product of the Jewish “Diaspora,” a term referring to Jewish communities outside of the homeland. We first hear of Paul in Acts a few years after Jesus’s crucifixion. In Acts 7, in Jerusalem, he is present at the killing by stoning of a follower of Jesus named Stephen, commonly spoken of as the first Christian martyr. The story of Stephen’s martyrdom ends in Acts 8:1 with the terse comment: “And Saul approved of their killing him.” Saul—his name would be changed to Paul after his conversion—was probably in his twenties and almost certainly not much over thirty.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Though the meaning of some passages remains uncertain, either because we don’t know enough about the circumstances or because Paul was sometimes unclear, his genuine letters generate an understanding of Paul and his message that is remarkably consistent with the message of Jesus. Paul’s message challenged the normalcy of civilization, then and now, with an alternative vision of how life on earth can and should be. The radical Paul, we are convinced, was a faithful follower of the radical Jesus. A JEWISH CHRIST MYSTIC In the rest of this book we will be discussing Paul’s life and letters, mission and theology. But here, immediately, we emphasize the most important foundational fact about him: Paul was a Jewish Christ mystic. We begin with the word “mystic” and its cousins “mystical” and “mysticism.” Because of their diverse and ambiguous connotations in contemporary culture, they need explanation. The most common connotation of these words in popular usage is dismissive. To say something “sounds mystical” or “sounds like mysticism” means you don’t need to take it seriously. It is something vague, fuzzy, ungrounded, perhaps otherworldly, and irrelevant. In the academic world, the term is not dismissive, but ambiguous. It is used by some scholars in a very narrow and precise sense and by others in a much broader sense. Those who define it very narrowly see it as an unusual and very specific religious phenomenon. They see mysticism within Judaism and Christianity as a postbiblical development and would not use the terms “mystic” or “mysticism” for anything stemming from as early as the biblical period. We are among those who define it more broadly. In five words, which of course need to be expanded, mysticism is union with God. A mystic is one who lives in union or communion with God. The difference between union and communion is relatively minor: the first involves a sense of “one-ness” with God; the second, a sense of connection with the sacred that is deep, close, and intimate, even though a sense of “two-ness” remains. Most mystics have mystical experiences—by which we mean ecstatic experiences in which there is a vivid sense of the presence of God, or the Sacred, or the Real, terms that we use interchangeably here. An ecstatic experience, as the roots of the Greek word suggest, is a nonordinary state of consciousness. One is “out of” or “beyond” ordinary consciousness and in this state has an overwhelming sense of experiencing God. God becomes an experiential reality. In this sense, mystics know God. They do not simply believe in God, but have moved from believing to knowing. A century ago, William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience provided the classic broad definition of mystical experiences. Such experiences, he said, involve a vivid sense of union and illumination . Since we have just spoken about the former, we turn to the latter. “Illumination” has more than one connotation in the context of mystical experiences. The experiences often involve light.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  And all of those gifts, good or bad, helpful or unhelpful, came from the same urban feature: location, location, location. The first positive gift was vista and involved the advantages of a frontier city between the Greek and the Semitic worlds. We think today of the Mediterranean fault line between West and East as extending along the Dardanelles to the Bosphorus and splitting the modern city of Istanbul into European and Asian sections. At the turn of the era, you could more easily imagine it as extending along the Cydnus River and splitting into two parts, as it were, the ancient city of Tarsus. Tarsus looked toward both the West and the East. Those born there could easily imagine going north through the Cilician Gates in the Taurus Mountains and then west toward Asia Minor and Greece. They could just as easily imagine going east through the Syrian Gates in the Amanus Mountains and then south toward Israel and Egypt. Tarsus gave Paul an early vision of sea and mountain, gorge and river, gave him an early vista of difficult actualities, but open possibilities. The second positive gift was labor and involved an appreciation for what could be accomplished by hard work. The Tarsians made their city even as their city made them. To the south and the Mediterranean Sea, they had engineered a secure harbor from their river’s gift of a large lagoon. To the north and the Anatolian plateau, they had engineered a wagon road through their mountain’s gift of a deep defile. Tarsians connected together the open vista of the Mediterranean Sea, the steamy marsh of the Cilician plain, the icy cold of the Taurus range, and the baked heat of the Anatolian plateau. Geography was destiny, to be sure, but hard work could change geography and thus change history as well. The third positive gift was education and involved Jewish synagogue teaching in a Greek university city. In Strabo’s Geography, written when Paul was a young man, Tarsus’s university status gets very high marks. It “surpassed Athens, Alexandria, or any other place that can be named where there have been schools and lectures of philosophers.” It also had “all kinds of schools of rhetoric,” and, indeed, “it is Rome that is best able to tell us the number of learned men from that city; for it is full of Tarsians and Alexandrians” (14.5). Athens and Alexandria might have scoffed at that comparison but, if so, they would have done it quietly. After all, it was a Tarsian philosopher named Athenodorus who was teaching the nineteen-year-old Octavian at Apollonia in northwestern Greece, when his pupil’s great-uncle Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  If Paul is not working—and, of course, he is not—from modern ideas of general democratic equalities and fundamental human rights, whence came that concept of the justice of baptism-based equality? First of all, other first-century Jews made that same claim for the justice of equality—and not just for Jews, but for all peoples. The philosopher Philo of Alexandria concluded his Special Laws with these aphorisms: “Equality is the mother of justice” and “Justice is the offspring of equality” (4.42.231, 238). Also, in his study On the Contemplative Life, he explained that the Therapeutics, female and male ascetics who had abandoned urban life for a desert “monastery,” did so because the city “engendered injustice by reason of the inequality which it produced, while the contrary disposition and pursuit produced justice by reason of its equality.” For that same reason, the Therapeutics rejected slavery as “absolutely and wholly contrary to nature, for nature has created all free, but the injustice and covetousness of some who prefer inequality, that cause of all evil, having subdued some, has given to the more powerful authority over those who are weaker” (1.2; 2.17; 9.70). When one of the Jewish Sibylline Oracles imagines what God’s perfect world will look like on its arrival, it claims: “The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences…. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be on a par together” (2:313–38). So we moderns should not think we invented everything. We return to our question: How did Paul understand God’s creation of a present beachhead for the justice of equality in this world within Christian communities? Recall that “grace and peace” in all the greetings of Paul’s seven authentic letters comes from “God the Father” (in the earliest one) and “God our Father” (in all the rest). We also have these terms: “Our God and Father” (1 Thess. 1:3; 3:11, 13; Gal. 1:4); “the God and Father” (2 Cor. 1:3; 11:31; Rom. 15:6); “God the Father” (Gal. 1:1; Phil. 2:11; 1 Cor. 8:6; 15:24); “the Father” (Rom. 6:4); “Abba! Father!” (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:15). Think about the term “Father” for a moment. On the one hand, it seems an inappropriate male title for a God who is transcendentally beyond gender. Would not “Mother” be equally good or “Parent” much better? On the other hand, granted that patriarchal bias, why “Father” and not any of the many other exclusively male titles from that same world? Why not “Emperor”? Why not “King” or “Warrior” or “Judge”? Why, precisely, “Father”? Paul’s vision for the world is a transcendental projection of his vision of home and family. That is the only other model he has to work with.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  First, it is a woman who carries—and therefore reads and explains—Paul’s letter from Corinth’s eastern port to the Christian groups at Rome. “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor ( prostatis ) of many and of myself as well” (16:1–2). Phoebe is Paul’s patron. Second, two married couples receive extraordinary praise. One is the premier Christian-Gentile couple: “Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus, and who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles” (16:3–4). Notice, that Prisc[ill]a is mentioned first in that designation. The other is the premier Christian-Jewish couple: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives [fellow Jews] who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was” (16:7). Third, of the total of twenty-seven individual Christians in the above list, ten are women (Phoebe, Prisc[ill]a, Mary, Junia, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, an unnamed mother, Julia, an unnamed sister) and seventeen are men (Aquila, Epaenatus, Andronicus, Ampliatus, Urbanus, Stachys, Apelles, Herodion, Rufus, Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, Philologus, Nereus, Olympas). But of those praised, five women (Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, and that unnamed mother) and six men (Epaenatus, Ampliatus, Urbanus, Stachys, Apelles, Rufus) are singled out for special attention. Fourth, Paul uses the verb “to work hard” ( kopiaō ) to mean dedicated apostolic activity. He applies it to himself twice, in Galatians 4:11 and 1 Corinthians 15:10. But here he uses it four times and exclusively for women, for Mary (16:6), Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis (16:12). Finally, we return to that Junia just mentioned (16:7), to a case that would be comic if it were not tragic. For the first millennium of Christianity, commentators recognized correctly that Junia was a female name. She was the wife of Andronicus as Prisc[ill]a was the wife of Aquila. Then, for the second millennium of Christianity, she was turned into a male. Junia, so the claim went, was short for the male name Junianus. That, however, was patently untrue because, although there were over 250 known cases of a female Junia in antiquity, there was not a single one of a male Junia as the abbreviation of Junianus. The reason for that rather desperate claim was also quite clear. If Junia were allowed to remain a female, then, since she was “prominent among the apostles,” it was obviously possible for a woman to be an apostle. Paul, of course, had no problem with that combination of gender and function.

• From An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845)

  Far different from such a theory is the picture which the ancient Church presents to us; true, it was governed by Bishops, and those Bishops came from the Apostles, but it was a kingdom besides; and as a kingdom admits of the possibility of rebels, so does such a Church involve sectaries and schismatics, but not independent portions. It was a vast organized association, co-extensive with the Roman Empire, or rather overflowing it. Its Bishops were not mere local officers, but possessed a quasi-ecumenical power, extending wherever a Christian was to be found. "No Christian," says Bingham, "would pretend to travel without taking letters of credence with him from his own bishop, if he meant to communicate with the Christian Church in a foreign country. Such was the admirable unity of the Church Catholic in those days, and the blessed harmony and consent of her bishops among one another."[266:1] St. Gregory Nazianzen calls St. Cyprian an universal Bishop, "presiding," as the same author presently quotes Gregory, "not only over the Church of Carthage and Africa, but over all the regions of the West, and over the East, and South, and Northern parts of the world also." This is evidence of a unity throughout Christendom, not of mere origin or of Apostolical succession, but of government. Bingham continues "[Gregory] says the same of Athanasius; that, in being made Bishop of Alexandria, he was made Bishop of the whole world. Chrysostom, in like manner, styles Timothy, Bishop of the universe. . . . . The great Athanasius, as he returned from his exile, made no scruple to ordain in several cities as he went along, though they were not in his own diocese. And the famous Eusebius of Samosata did the like, in the times of the Arian persecution under Valens. . . Epiphanius made use of the same power and privilege in a like case, ordaining Paulinianus, St. Jerome's brother, first deacon and then presbyter, in a monastery out of his own diocese in Palestine."[267:1] And so in respect of teaching, before Councils met on any large scale, St. Ignatius of Antioch had addressed letters to the Churches along the coast of Asia Minor, when on his way to martyrdom at Rome. St. Irenæus, when a subject of the Church of Smyrna, betakes himself to Gaul, and answers in Lyons the heresies of Syria. The see of St. Hippolytus, as if he belonged to all parts of the _orbis terrarum_, cannot be located, and is variously placed in the neighbourhood of Rome and in Arabia. Hosius, a Spanish Bishop, arbitrates in an Alexandrian controversy. St. Athanasius, driven from his Church, makes all Christendom his home, from Treves to Ethiopia, and introduces into the West the discipline of the Egyptian Antony. St. Jerome is born in Dalmatia, studies at Constantinople and Alexandria, is secretary to St. Damasus at Rome, and settles and dies in Palestine.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  There is at least as much justification in invoking his name to-day as the champion of a great movement for a more righteous social life. He was neither a theologian, nor an ecclesiastic, nor a socialist. But if we were forced to classify him either with the great theologians who elaborated the fine distinctions of scholasticism; or with the mighty popes and princes of the Church who built up their power in his name; or with the men who are giving their heart and life to the propaganda of a new social system—where should we place him? CHAPTER IV WHY HAS CHRISTIANITY NEVER UNDERTAKEN THE WORK OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION? I n the preceding chapters we have studied the origins of Christianity. It rested historically on the religion of the Hebrew prophets, and the great aim of the prophets was to constitute the social and political life of their nation in accordance with the will of God. The fundamental purpose of Jesus was the establishment of the kingdom of God, which involved a thorough regeneration and reconstitution of social life. Primitive Christianity cherished an ardent hope of a radically new era, and within its limits sought to realize a social life on a new moral basis. Thus Christianity as an historical movement was launched with all the purpose and hope, all the impetus and power, of a great revolutionary movement, pledged to change the world-as-it-is into the world-as-it-ought-to-be. The organization in which this movement was embodied, after three centuries of obscurity and oppression, rose triumphant to be the dominant power of the civilized world. Christian churches were scattered broadcast over the Roman Empire. Their numbers were so great and their organization so flexible and tenacious that the final attempts of the Empire to uproot the Church proved futile and the Empire capitulated and made terms. Christianity supplanted heathenism as the State religion of the Empire. Its churches were endowed with the ancient properties and rights of the temples. Its clergy were given immunity from the taxes and exactions which crushed all other classes. Its members filled the civil service. Its great bishops had the ear of the men in power. The population of the ancient world entered the Church en masse , and though the great majority may have had little experience of the inner power of the new faith, yet the people lay open to the instruction and guidance of the Church. The bishops came to be the leaders of the local nobility which controlled the municipal life of the Roman cities. In the East the great Justinian formally placed the administration of public charity and the supervision of the public officials under the bishops.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The proper burial of the dead was even more important to the sentiments of the ancient world than to ours. Just as to-day, the poorer classes organized in societies which guaranteed their members an honorable burial. The churches performed this service for their members. In public calamities, like pestilence or the invasion of nomadic brigands, they stood by their members and sent aid to a distance. The duty of working was strictly urged in the primitive Church; holy idleness was the outgrowth of later asceticism. But if a man was out of work, the churches assumed the responsibility either of finding him a job or of caring for him. Thus the means of life were guaranteed him in either case. The church at Rome, living in the midst of vast pauperism, could boast that it had no beggar in its membership. The troubles coming upon them for their faith made Christians even more migratory than the rest of the city population of that day. But wherever they went, they were sure of Christian hospitality and the first aid needed to get a foothold in a strange place. Hospitality was one of the fundamental Christian virtues in primitive Christian life. It was so open-handed that it invited exploitation by professional beggars. The heathen writer Lucian made the gullibility of the Christians part of the plot of his novelette, “On the Death of Peregrinus Proteus.” By the end of the third century charity began to be institutionalized. There were Christian lodging-houses for strangers, homes for the aged, the sick, the poor. In the first and second century it was more a matter of direct neighborly help from man to man. Probably the chief help was not given in the form of money, but of human service and influence. In Paul’s epistles we get glimpses of influential families in whose homes the church-groups met and upon whom the task of hospitality and watch-care chiefly devolved. They put their property, their influence and social standing, at the service of the Christian community. Paul speaks of such with deep respect. Stephanas, who came from Corinth to visit Paul at Ephesus, was a man of that kind. He probably made this journey on behalf of the Church at his own expense, just as men of wealth would undertake to defray some public function at Athens, or paid for common expenses in the voluntary associations of Greek social life. The poor and the alien were without political rights or social importance, and found protection by close relation to some citizen of wealth and standing. The relation of client and patron was widespread and of great social importance.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The purpose of his book was not to furnish an impartial and critical account of the beginnings of Christianity, but to give an edifying sketch of the wonderful progress of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome. His tone is that of a modern pastor giving a centenary history of his church, or of a missionary describing the progress of Christianity in a Karen tribe. Writing at such a distance and for such a purpose it is very natural and right that he should dip his brush in the liquid gold of enthusiasm and say, “Not one of them claimed anything of his possessions as his own, but all things were common to them.” Yet the fraternal fervor must have been strong, for even Ananias and Sapphira felt that they had to make at least a show of complete renunciation to measure up to the standard set by the Christian community. But whatever the extent of this generosity may have been, it was always generosity, and not communism in any proper sense of the word. No one was required to turn his property into the common fund on admission, as in all communistic colonies. And above all there was no common economic production. In fact, there seems to be no trace of communistic production in ancient Christian literature. The rudimentary communism of primitive tribal life was gone and forgotten. The possibility of a higher communistic ownership of the instruments of production had not yet risen above the horizon of common thought. Individual and family production was the only kind commonly known. Thus these first Christians produced separately and consumed in common. It was religious and instinctive fraternity, but not communism in any strict sense. Wherever people meet closely on a footing of equality, sharing is inevitable. In the family we always hold most of our possessions for common use. Students in dormitory, soldiers on the march, sportsmen in camp, share freely. It is impossible to have a man sit by you as your brother and let him go hungry while you feed. Therefore as a usual thing we do not let him sit by us or we deny that he is our brother. But whenever calamity or joy sweeps away the artificial barriers, men at once begin to share. Religion had the same effect in Jerusalem, and often since.