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Tanakh:
It's important to keep in mind that this was written to the Israelites
during a time in which they were seeking to establish their identity as
a people. Note the way that genealogy fits into justification. (Ok, I
lost most of my notes for this section, so you'll have to just remember
what I had to say about the Tanakh.)
Paul:
Wrote more of the New Testament than any other writer. We know nothing
directly of Paul except what is found in the New Testament and Christian
tradition.
Jewish background. From his own letters as well as the book of Acts, we
know that Paul was a Pharisee, a Jew with an intense knowledge of and
devotion to the Jewish Law and the traditional interpretations of that
Law that had developed between the writing of the Jewish Scriptures and
the time of Christ. The closest thing to Paul today might be a teacher
in a Yeshiva - like a Jewish seminary - for orthodox Jews.
Paul says: "Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh
also. If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh,
I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of
the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, as to the law a Pharisee,
as to zeal a persecutor of the Church, as to righteousness under law blameless.
But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ."
(Philippians 3: 4-7)
As to persecuting the Church, the most extensive record of that is in
Acts chapters 8-9. Paul - also known as Saul - was present when Stephen,
the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death. He not only did not stop
the stoning, he actively encouraged it. After that stoning, he requested
permission from the high priest to go to Damascus to round up Christians
there and bring them to Jerusalem, where they would face a similar fate.
Paul was, before his conversion, so faithful to Jewish Law that he persecuted
"heretics," as the Christians would have seemed to him, since
they claimed that Jesus, a mere man, was God.
But on the way to Damascus, Paul was converted. Jesus himself appeared
to Paul, revealed himself, blinded Paul, and thereby transformed one of
the fiercest opponents of the church into one of its greatest apostles.
Before talking a little more about the role of Paul the apostle, however,
it is important to note one other important background influence on Paul.
Though immersed in the Jewish Scriptures, Paul also knew - and knew well
- the most important Greek philosophy of his day. This influence is apparent
in subtle ways throughout his letters, both in terms of the rhetorical
style of some of his arguments and some of his particular ideas. Stoicism
in particular seems to have found its way into Christianity through the
letters of Paul. But the clearest indication of his awareness of Greek
philosophy comes from a speech of his delivered in Athens, the home of
the best of Classical Greek philosophy. In this speech (see Acts 17:22-31)
Paul quotes two sources from classical Greece, Epimenides and Aratus.
It is not altogether clear how much philosophy Paul knew, but he clearly
knew some.
After converting to Christianity, Paul traveled extensively on four separate
missionary journeys, establishing churches throughout the Mediterranean.
Paul's letters were written to these churches. Most of them deal primarily
with specific issues facing the church to which Paul wrote. Romans is
somewhat unusual among Paul's letters in that it begins with very general
theological and philosophical reflections.
One particular episode in Paul's life as an apostle is perhaps important
for situating this letter. In his letter the Galatians, Paul describes
a conflict between himself and the apostle Peter over the status of the
Jewish Law. In the early church, only Jews were Christians, but eventually
more and more Gentiles became converted. This led to a serious problem
for the Church, because it was not clear whether these Gentiles should
obey the Jewish Law. Jews who converted were taught the gospel -- that
people are made right with God not through their own righteous adherence
to the Law but through Christ's righteousness on the cross -- but Jews
still followed Jewish Laws. But what about Gentiles? Would a Gentile need
to convert to Judaism first and only then become a Christian?
The issue led to the first church council in Jerusalem (see Acts 15),
where the whole church decided that Gentiles did not need to adhere to
the whole Jewish Law nor convert to Judaism, as long as they kept a few
rules. This was not quite the end of the matter, though, and the details
of the Church's mission to the Gentiles continued to be worked out. In
his letter to the Galatians, Paul gives a brief summary of his life, drawing
specific attention to his authority as an apostle. Part of this summary
says the following: Read Galatians 2.
Notice two things here. (1) Paul is considered the apostle to the Gentiles,
whereas Peter is Apostle to the Jews. (2) Paul stands up to Peter when
Peter is wrongly disassociating himself from the Gentiles.
à The importance of Gentiles in the Church was absolutely crucial
for Paul. Hence Romans 1-3.
That's background. Now let's turn to the argument in Romans.
The first thing to notice is that the passages on which I told you to
focus - 1:18ff. And 2:13-16 - are part of a larger argument. The parts
that I had you focus on deal with the access that Gentiles have to knowledge
about (1) God and his nature and (2) the moral law.
But this argument for Gentile access to this knowledge is only a premise
in a larger argument. Can anyone help with the larger argument? What is
Paul's ultimate focus in Roman's 1-3? (Here you might look especially
at Romans 3: 21-26.)
1. Gentiles and Jews alike know who God is and what they ought to do.
2. Therefore they are responsible ("without excuse") for failing
to do what they ought.
3. But "all sin," so all Gentiles as well as all Jews sin without
excuse.
4. So none can boast in good works, but all are redeemed through Christ.
The ultimate focus in on Christ's work of redemption. The Law - whether
given to Moses or written on the hearts of all - is just the means by
which one comes to know the depth of one's sin. It is the mirror that
shows that we need to be redeemed. Thus ultimately Paul's argument is
not about morality at all, but about Christ. But to get the argument to
work, to show that all are without excuse and therefore in need of Christ's
redemption, Paul needs to show that all people - Jew or Gentile - know
what is morally required and do what is wrong anyway. And to show that,
he needs to argue that there is a way to have access to the Law other
than the way that the Israelites have access. It must be written on every
human heart.
Also, note that Romans 1 and 2 are not about the same thing, although
they both feed into the same argument. Rom. 1 is about knowledge of God,
which leads to knowledge that we should worship god and not set up idols.
Rom. 2 is about moral truths more generally. One way to understand the
difference is that Rom 1 sets up the justification for the first three
commandments - even for the gentiles - whereas Rom 2 provides justification
for the last seven. Both, though, establish standards that the Gentiles
fail to meet, and thus show that Gentiles need Christ too.
For discussion, we might want to think about (1) whether Paul's account
in Romans is a genealogy of morality? What is the genealogy? Is the "law
written on their hearts" consistent with a variety of stories about
how the law came to be written there? Also, we might discuss (2) whether
it is really true that all people have access to the moral law, and (3)
whether such access is really necessary for moral accountability.
Aquinas:
Aquinas's life is not quite as exciting as Paul's, but it starts wild
enough. Thomas Aquinas was born in 1224 or 1225 into nobility, the son
of the Count of Aquino (hence the name "Aquinas"). His parents
put him at the age of 5 into a Benedictine Abbey, where they hoped he
could become a priest or even bishop, thereby having ecclesiastical power.
But at the age of 14, when Thomas went off to the University in Naples
to study theology, he was attracted to the Dominican order. This call
to monastic life with its lack of worldly benefits did not exactly please
Thomas's parents, so his higher up in the Dominican order tried to take
young Thomas to Bologna in Italy. On the way, his brothers kidnapped him!
They held him prisoner for a year, until they finally gave in to his determination
and faithfulness to the Dominicans. And thus ended the exciting childhood
of St. Thomas. After that, he worked his way through his studies in theology,
studying at teaching at several of the greatest universities in France
and Italy, and publishing an enormous amount of philosophy and theology
before his early death at the age of 49 in 1274. His greatest work is
the Summa Theologica, from which the readings for today were taken. In
addition to this work, however, Thomas wrote commentaries on Aristotle,
the Bible, and Lombard (an earlier medieval philosopher and theologian);
books directed against heretics; and shorter works in theology, metaphysics,
and ethics.
The Summa Theologica is divided into three main parts, and the middle
part itself is divided into two parts. It was written between 1265 and
1273. The basic structure is:
I : Nature of God, Creation, Angels, Six Days of Creation, Man, Providence.
I-II: Moral Theory
II-II: Specific Virtues
III: Christ and the Church
The section we are reading is from the middle of the first part of the
second part. (The middle of I-II.) I've given you a handout with the list
of all the sections in I-II. The general flow of I-II is as follows:
Man's End
The Will
Good and Evil in general
Passions
Habits
Virtues
Sin
Law
Old Law
New Law (Gospel)
Grace
What this means is that we are only getting a small part of a small part
of Aquinas's overall argument. I picked this section because it is the
closest to the readings from Moses and Paul and will set up the issues
I wanted to discuss, but you should know that this is only the smallest
sliver of Aquinas. In particular, one feature that Aquinas picks up from
ancient Greek philosophy that does not appear in our readings is an emphasis
on teleology in ethics. For Aquinas, the fundamental question in ethics
is what the ultimate goal of human life is, what we are all aiming for.
This is what he discusses in the earliest questions of the book. The section
on Law is really just a discussion of the way that we know the rules that
will help us achieve the ultimate goal of life and that will keep our
time on earth moderately sane while we wait for the ultimate end, which
comes only in heaven.
(For those who are interested, you can find the whole Summa on the web
at http://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/home.html.)
The format of the Summa, and of many of Thomas's works (though not his
commentaries), is question and answer. Thomas presents a question, followed
by a series of arguments in favor of one answer to the question (usually
the wrong answer), followed by an argument for the opposite answer, followed
by his own answer to the question, followed by responses to the initial
arguments. Aquinas's own answer usually sides against the initial arguments,
though often it combines elements of both extremes. That is, often Aquinas
takes a middle road between the "objections" and the "on
the contrary," though sometimes he just sides entirely with the "on
the contrary." For future reference, if you ever need to read Thomas
quickly, you can just go through and read the questions and "I answer
that" sections, and you will get the main points. For this class,
you should read everything, since Thomas often gives detail in his responses
to the objections that he does not give in the "I answer that,"
and since I only gave you 12 pages of Aquinas, it would be pretty pitiful
if you had to skip some of it to get through the reading.
Ok, now for looking at the reading for today. The section that we read
outlines different sorts of laws, and for our purposes, it will be most
important to get clear on the relationships between eternal, natural,
and divine law.
Type of Law . . . . . . . . . . . Origin of the Law . . . . . . . . .
. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . Proximate. . . . . . Deeper . . . . Genealogy
Eternal law . . . . Nature of thing . . . . God . . . . ??Creation
Natural law . . . .Reason/Conscience .God . . . . . .??
Human law. . . . .government/NL . . . .God. . . government makes laws
Divine law. . . . . God . . . . . . . . . . . . God . . . . special revelation
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . (e.g. God on Sinai)
What is eternal law? The law that governs things, laws of gravity, etc.
For Aquinas, everything has a nature, so it is part of the nature of rocks
to fall towards center of the earth, of the stars to move in circles,
of plants to grow and live, etc. All of these are aspects of the eternal
law.
Natural law? Eternal law legislated to itself by a self-conscious rational
creature. Reason, conscience.
For class discussion . . . Is the divine "origin" of natural
law in Paul and Aquinas part of genealogy, justification, or something
else?
Do Paul and Aquinas rule out any genealogies? Is what they say about
moral laws consistent with saying that "morality comes from some
wise ancestors who just wrote down what they thought seemed right"?
Or "from evolution in that morality is an evolutionary advantage?"
or "from being taught by parents?" or "from the manipulation
of powerful governments to create peaceful citizens?" or ....?
(Think in this context about God as creator of Adam and Eve and natural
evolution. Are these theories inconsistent, or is there a way to pull
them together? God creating through evolution, say. Would this work for
morality too?)
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