Paul and the Gift, final post

The goal of Paul’s mission is the formation of communities whose distinct patterns of life bear witness to an event that has broken with normal criteria of worth. Paul expects baptism to create new life-orientations, including forms of bodily habitus that express the reality of resurrection—life in the midst of human mortality. The gift needs to be realized in unconventional practice or it ceases to have meaning as an incongruous gift. It creates new modes of obedience to God, which arise from the gift as “return” to God, but without instrumental purpose in eliciting further divine gifts. The transformative power of grace thus creates a fit between believers and God, which will be evident at the eschaton. Judgment “according to works” does not entail a new and incompatible principle of soteriology; it indicates that the incongruous gift has had its intended effect in embedding new standards of worth in the practice of those it transforms.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 569

<idle musing>
That winds up this (long) book. I hope you enjoyed it and learned from it. I know I did. I'll never look at grace the same again! Next up is a few posts from Mario Liverani, Assyria: The Imperial Mission.
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Not a replacement

Paul’s theology is not directed against Judaism; neither does he consider assemblies of Jewish and Gentile believers as the replacement of Israel. On his reading, Israel is most truly itself when it is solely dependent on the root of God’s unconditioned mercy; and that is fully and definitively the case when it draws on the “wealth” poured out to Jew and Gentile in Christ.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 566 (emphasis original)

It's a conversation

Paul stands among fellow Jews in his discussion of divine grace, not apart from them in a unique or antithetical position. At the same time, he stands in the midst of a debate, and none of our Jewish authors can be taken as spokesmen for a single, simple, or uncontested notion of grace.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 565, emphasis original

Theologically dangerous!

It was certainly possible for some gifts to be construed as “unmerited” (as we have found both in Paul and in some other Jewish literature), but this was not a normal, and certainly not a necessary, connotation of the terms we generally translate as “grace.” In fact, an unmerited gift from God was theologically problematic, and could threaten the justice and the rationality of the universe. Although Christian theologians (and modern dictionaries) regard it as self-evident that “grace” means a benefit to the unworthy, in ancient terms this was a striking and theologically dangerous construal of the concept.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 563

It's supposed to work that way…

Against modern notions of “altruism” we found that benefits were generally intended to foster mutuality, by creating or maintaining social bonds. This expectation of reciprocity, with its (non-legal) obligations, created cyclical patterns of gift-and-return, even where there were large differentials in power between givers and recipients.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 562

Perseverance of the saints?

As we have seen, the motif of “wealth” evokes the superabundance thematized in Romans 5:12-21, and there are statements here that emphasize the priority of God’s call or gift (9:11; 11:2, 35) in a way that supports its lack of correspondence to human worth. If Paul traces here a final singularity in the purpose of God’s mercy (11:32), this is far from a principled insistence that God can only be benevolent: as we have seen, there are multiple references to God’s hardening, wrath, and severity, alongside God’s grace, both in relation to Israel (11:7—10) and in relation to Gentile believers (11:20—22). Paul’s threat that branches may be cut off if they do not remain in God’s goodness (11:17—24) calls into question any dogmatic, Augustinian commitment to “the perseverance of the saints.”—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 557 (emphasis original)

Why supercessionism doesn't work

To believe in Christ is nothing other than to live from “the root.” If Israel’s identity was always derivative and “eccentric,” created and sustained by the calling of God, its nature is neither erased nor altered by its response in faith to God’s calling in Christ. The olive tree allegory renders impossible the claim that Israel has been superseded by Gentiles or absorbed into a non-Jewish realm known as “the church.” To the contrary, it is Gentiles who are “grafted in,” but what they join is a people and a mode of existence utterly dependent on “the gifts and the calling of God” (11:29).—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 553

The future and present hope of ingrafting

Paul’s stress on the root, and on the rationale of election, is a sign that he presses to explain how Israel came to be, and in that explanation desires to understand its present crisis, its future hope, and the extraordinary supplementation to the stock of God’s “inheritance” in the form of believing Gentiles. If its source of life (its “root”) is the creative call that “raises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (4:17), one can readily explain both the ingrafting of Gentiles and the hope that, by the power of God (11:23), Israel will be reconstituted and complete again.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 552

Grafted in

But God is grafting Gentiles not into the tree (Israel) but into the root, whose richness sustains both natural and unnatural branches, both Jews and Gentiles. Thus, for Paul, heritage is created by grace: offspring are born by promise to be children of God (9:8). It is because Israel was formed in this way from the beginning that it is first in time, with a “natural” afliliation to divine mercy. Gentiles are brought into relation not to an ethnic deity … but to the God of whom Israel is a product and a witness.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 551n75 (emphasis original)

"Required to live the life they have been given"

Paul does not perfect the efficacy of grace as a form of monergism, because it is clear for him from the baptismal event that the very life in which the believer acts and decides is a life sourced, established, and upheld by Christ (a “life from the dead”). Within this frame, and on this basis, plenty of statements can be made regarding believers as responsible agents who are required to present their bodies in one direction rather than another. Christian obedience is thus vital, but only ever in a responsive mode: it arises in conjunction with faith and gratitude as the answer to a prior gift. The gift is entirely undeserved but strongly obliging: it creates agents who are newly alive, required to live the life they have been given.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 518

<idle musing>
I really like that: "Required to live the life they have been given." That sums up discipleship and Christianity, doesn't it?
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One gift

Hence, the obligation now incumbent on believers is not to “gain” grace (or salvation), nor to win another installment of grace. There is a single χάρισμα of eternal life ([Rom] 6:23) that runs from the Christ-event to eternity (cf. 8:32), not a series of “graces” won by increases in sanctification. Paul certainly expects that the moral incongruity at the start of the Christian life will be reduced over time, as the believers’ slavery to righteousness draws them toward holiness (6:19). In that sense, what began as a morally incongruous gift will be completed as a morally congruous gift.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 517–18

Live in what's already true!

When Paul turns from description to exhortation ([Rom] 6:11–13; 8:12–13), what he expects from believers is not that they create a new existence, but that they express what has already been created by and in Christ. Whatever may be said in the indicative is true of them only because it is true already of Christ; that primary reality can be neither created nor revoked. The secondary reality, their derivation from Christ, exists in a form that is contrary to its surrounding habitat: life in the midst of death. And such a life only subsists to the extent that it is active. To “present yourselves as alive from the dead” (6:13) and to “put to death the deeds of the body” (8:13) are the positive and negative poles of a demand to practice or exercise the new life that has been given. That new life cannot be said to be active within believers unless it is demonstrably acted out by them.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 503 (emphasis original)

Luther's bad exegesis of Romans 6–8

Luther attempted in several ways to express the permanent, and structurally basic, incongruity of grace in the life of a believer, most famously in the phrase simul justus et peccator. The strongest exegetical base for that notion comes from Romans 6-8, but it draws on what now seems to most a faulty reading of Romans 7-8 as a dialectical depiction of two dimensions of the Christian life. If, to the contrary, 7:7-25 describes life “in the flesh” before becoming a believer (cf. 7:5), not a continuing aspect of the believer’s life, Luther’s simul . . . peccator looks less convincing.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 501–2

<idle musing>
Personally, I never bought into Luther's bad exegesis. A book was recently published that takes a look at the exegesis of Romans 7 over the years: Conquerors Not Captives: Reframing Romans 7 for the Christian Life, by Joseph R. Dodson. Take a look at it.
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The gift is inseparable from the Giver

The gift which is being bestowed here [in salvation] is never at any time separable from its Giver. It partakes of the character of power, in so far as God himself enters the arena and remains in the arena with it. Thus personal address (Anspruch), obligation (Verpflichtung) and service (Dienst) are indissolubly bound up with the gift. When God enters the arena, our experience is that he maintains his lordship even in his giving; indeed it is his gifts which are the very means by which he subordinates us to his lordship and makes us responsible beings.—Kaesemann, “The Righteousness of God,” 174, cited in J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 499

A good reason to refuse payment

It is probably because he did not want to be seen as the donor of the gospel (putting its recipients under obligation to him, rather than to God) that he refused to take fees while founding a church.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 498n7

This is no license to sin

Already in [Romans] 5:12–21 there are indications that the Christ-gift is not morally vacuous, an unconditional gift that winks at human sin: it contains transformative power. The recipients of this grace are said to receive the gift of righteousness (5:17) and to be constituted righteous (5:19): where sin once reigned, now grace reigns “through righteousness” to bring about eternal life (5:21). The language of “reigning” (βασιλεύω) figures grace as a counteracting power whose authority replaces that of sin; far from offering a license for sin, the Christ-gift establishes an alternative regime of power.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 497

Transformation

God’s grace is displayed in the midst of human unrighteousness, not because God is morally indifferent (that would undermine his capacity to judge the world, [Rom] 3:6), but because he intends to transform the human condition. As apostle to the Gentiles, Paul is perpetually conscious of the incongruity of grace as gift to the ungodly and disobedient; but his goal is not their continuing disobedience, but “the obedience of faith” (1:5). Deriving from faith, this obedience is the product of a life created through God’s incongruous gift; as obedience, it is committed to patterns of behavior that befit its new allegiance. That the life of a believer thus remains an incongruous gift at the same time as it conforms to the holiness of God is a paradox we shall carry into the study of Romans 5-8.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 492

In continuity w/Second Temple Judaism (sort of)

There is no reason to think that Paul hereby sets himself in principled opposition to Second Temple Judaism. Although he criticizes a Jewish pride in the Law that is not matched by practice (2:17–29) and is no doubt aware of alternative construals of the Abraham story (4:1–2), he does not here present the Jewish tradition, or his fellow Jews, as wedded to a soteriology of “works” in contradistinction to “grace.” One can well imagine why many Jews (and not just Jews) would have found Paul’s perfection of divine incongruous gift theologically dangerous; Paul knows himself that this is so (3:8; 6:1). But there is nothing inherently “un-Jewish” about Paul’s theology on this matter: as we saw in Part II, he is part of a contemporary Jewish debate about the operation of divine mercy and gift. Within this debate, what is distinctive about Paul is not that he believed in the possibility of God’s incongruous grace, but that (a) he identified this phenomenon with a very specific event (the love of God in Christ), that (b) he developed this perfection for the sake of his Gentile mission (founding Jew-Gentile unity on novel terms), and that (c) he thereby rethought Jewish identity itself, tracing from Abraham onwards a narrative trajectory of the power of God that creates ex nihilo and acts in gift or mercy without regard to worth.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 491

Something beyond Seneca's imagination

The gift of one’s life — the costliest gift imaginable — would hardly be given to an undeserving cause: as Seneca comments, if a person is worthy (dignus), I shall defend him even at the cost of my own life; if he is unworthy (indignus), I will do what I can to aid him, but not at such a cost (Ben. 1.10.5).72 Yet Christ died in those inconceivable conditions — a gift that, Paul seems anxious to insist, is no mere throwing away of life, but an expression of love, the deepest personal commitment. This love is figured as God’s rather than Christ’s (5:5, 8; contrast Gal 2:20), since the death of Christ is God’s handing over of his only Son (8:32); but the difference is not great (cf. 8:39: the love of God in Christ). This gift is neither a trivial token, tossed to whomever it might reach, nor a costly gift carefully targeted at the highly deserving. It is the costliest gift, given with the deepest sentiment and the highest commitment to those who, at the time of its giving, had nothing to render them fitting recipients. It is this strange and nonsensical phenomenon that Paul parades in 5:5—11 (cf. 9:6—18). On the basis of this extraordinary gift, Paul can take confidence: if enemies have been reconciled in such a fashion, how much more will the reconciled be saved (5:10)!—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 478

A new kind of being

God’s righteousness has effected a new kind of being, whose faith is the signal that their life is constructed not in the normal configuration of human existence, but from Christ. The fact that this mode of dependence is evidenced in both Jew and Gentile, among all who believe despite their common condition of sin ([Rom] 3:22–23), is a sign that the gift on which it hangs was given without discrimination and without regard to worth.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 477