Pauline ethics is fundamentally ecclesial in character . . . Paul sees the church as inheriting the corporate vocation of God's covenant people, Israel.
Paul is concerned with defining and maintaining a corporate identity for his young churches, which are emphatically countercultural communities. His letters should be read primarily as instruments of community formation.
God is at work through the Spirit to create communities that prefigure and embody the reconciliation and healing of the world.
This runs counter to much of our emphasis and sometimes too-narrow reading of Scripture as if it concerns only one's personal life - one's individual ethics and morality - and the related idea of one having one's own personal Saviour. Indeed one must personally commit to Christ, trusting His saving Person and Work, yet much of our thoughts about individuality in the Western world owes more to the humanistic philosophies of the Enlightenment, to the writings of such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, than to the Scriptures.
God see things whole - clans, cultures - 'the peoples' of the earth (as well as having a personal love for each one of us). Most of the New Testament letters of St. Paul are written to 'you' (plural). The idea of making a 'personal commitment,' of having merely an individual morality and ethic, is alien - or at least not primary - in New Testament thinking and, as well, in most of the world cultures and peoples of our present times - except in the West.
The community of faith, the local church, is the primary addressee of God's imperaties. . .To do 'ethics' apart from ecclesiology is utterly unthinkable for Paul.
There is no salvation outside of Christ and 'in Christ' we join in a Body, a Community of believers who together - around the world and through the ages, as the people of God, enter into God's salvic purposes.
( interacting with Richard B. Hayes: Ecclessiology and Ethics)
Paul is concerned with defining and maintaining a corporate identity for his young churches, which are emphatically countercultural communities. His letters should be read primarily as instruments of community formation.
God is at work through the Spirit to create communities that prefigure and embody the reconciliation and healing of the world.
This runs counter to much of our emphasis and sometimes too-narrow reading of Scripture as if it concerns only one's personal life - one's individual ethics and morality - and the related idea of one having one's own personal Saviour. Indeed one must personally commit to Christ, trusting His saving Person and Work, yet much of our thoughts about individuality in the Western world owes more to the humanistic philosophies of the Enlightenment, to the writings of such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, than to the Scriptures.
God see things whole - clans, cultures - 'the peoples' of the earth (as well as having a personal love for each one of us). Most of the New Testament letters of St. Paul are written to 'you' (plural). The idea of making a 'personal commitment,' of having merely an individual morality and ethic, is alien - or at least not primary - in New Testament thinking and, as well, in most of the world cultures and peoples of our present times - except in the West.
The community of faith, the local church, is the primary addressee of God's imperaties. . .To do 'ethics' apart from ecclesiology is utterly unthinkable for Paul.
There is no salvation outside of Christ and 'in Christ' we join in a Body, a Community of believers who together - around the world and through the ages, as the people of God, enter into God's salvic purposes.
( interacting with Richard B. Hayes: Ecclessiology and Ethics)
