The Homily and the New Evangelization

Although the word ‘homily’ can be used for any sermon, our focus here is the homily in a more precise sense, namely the preaching done in the course of a liturgy.  When we think of the preaching work of Jesus we probably first imagine him out and about, on the road, by the lake, on a mountain, or in people’s homes. But we know that he taught also in the Temple and in the synagogues (Mark 1:21; Matthew 13:54; John 6:59; 18:20) and that it was his custom to visit the synagogue on the Sabbath (Luke 4:16).

Jesus’ Homily in the Synagogue at Nazareth

            The homily Jesus gave in the synagogue at Nazareth may be taken as the prototype or pattern for any homily (Luke 4:16-30). The Introduction to the Lectionary identifies four aims for the homily (§41) and at Nazareth Jesus addresses all four. These aims are

·                    to lead the hearers to an affective knowledge of Holy Scripture

·                    to open them to gratitude for the wonderful works of God

·                    to strengthen the faith of the hearer

·                    to prepare them for communion and for the demands of the Christian life.

            How does Jesus’ homily at Nazareth meet these aims? First, he chose a text from the Book of Isaiah, the passage which speaks of the Spirit of the Lord coming to anoint the Lord’s messenger, deputing him to evangelise the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, to bring sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’, Jesus says, and we are told that they ‘wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth’ (Luke 4:21-22). Literally it means the words about grace that he spoke. The passage from Isaiah tells of the grace, or favour, of the jubilee year in which a fresh beginning makes new life possible. They are heartened and encouraged by this. Later in the Gospel of Luke we hear of disciples whose hearts burned within them as he opened the Scriptures for them (Luke 24:32) but already at Nazareth all spoke well of him.

            ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’. This may be taken as the fundamental task in preaching a homily, to show how the Scripture that has just been read is being fulfilled in the lives of those who are listening.  The second aim of the homily is to open people to gratitude for the wonderful works of God. These works are read about in the Scripture readings not just to recall great events in other places and at other times but with a view to showing how they continue to be effective here and now. The Word of God is ‘sacramental’, therefore, bringing to pass in the lives of believers the realities of which it speaks. We might say that it is good news only when those who listen are helped to see how the Word that has been proclaimed is working in their lives.

            Jesus preaches in order to strengthen the faith of those who hear: this is the third aim of a homily. The text of Isaiah was presumably already well known to his congregation and he seeks to interpret its meaning for them. The difference in his teaching, we are told elsewhere, is that Jesus spoke with authority and with wisdom, often confirming what he taught by signs and wonders (Mark 1:27; Matthew 13:54; Luke 13:10). But at Nazareth his preaching breaks down and the situation becomes complicated.

            So what went wrong? (This is presuming that something did go wrong: perhaps what happened is an example of how effective preaching can be!) Thinking of the fourth aim of the homily, we can see that Jesus is trying to prepare them for communion and for the demands of living according to his new way, but this does not go down well with them. If there is to be encouragement in the preaching of a homily there is also to be challenge. Gracious words call to generous living: to be holy as God is holy, compassionate as God is compassionate, loving one another as Jesus has loved us.

            On the one hand Jesus in his homily says that the promises of God’s grace are being fulfilled even as they listen. These promises are being fulfilled in him, in his presence among them with his teaching and his works of power. Who would not be strengthened and encouraged?

            On the other hand he begins to explain the implications of this time of grace by showing how it calls his listeners beyond their place of comfort to reckon with deep and demanding aspects of God’s gracious work. He reminds them of how earlier prophets brought God’s word and power beyond the confines of Israel. His preaching breaks down as he invites them to break open their hearts and lives, to be receptive once again to the grace of the Living God. The ancient text has come alive and its blessings are welcomed but its demands are not. The mood turns from wonder to anger and he must pass through the midst of them to get away.

The Evangelizing Word, Ancient and New

            What might we learn about the homily and the new evangelization from this experience of Jesus at Nazareth? A first point worth pondering is that he is at home, ‘where he had been brought up’ (Luke 4:16). Home ought to be the place where he is most welcome but it becomes a place that rejects him. We can take ‘home’ to refer to places where the liturgy of the Church continues to be celebrated and where homilies continue to be given. We might think that such places have no need for the ‘new evangelization’ but are rather places from which it is done. ‘Home’ in this sense refers to countries, individuals, parishes, religious communities, and so on that have become content with their appropriation of the Word of God. When one speaks within a liturgy is one not preaching to the already converted? Won’t the new evangelization be done elsewhere, on the road, by the lake, on a mountain, on television and radio and the internet, but not in synagogues, or temples, or churches where people have already been evangelized?

            It is true that the homily is part of the ordinary teaching and life of the Christian Church. As such it becomes routine and can be predictable.  The Word that has found a home with us is in danger of becoming domesticated by us: we think we know what it is about, what its demands are, and what its reach is. One of the reasons why a new evangelization is needed is because people seem to have become tired of Christianity. It is aimed at individuals, communities and cultures that are ‘post-Christian’: they have heard and even tried the gospel but for various reasons have become lukewarm about it or perhaps given it up altogether. For them, the gospel message has lost its bite and its sting.

           One challenge from the new evangelisation to homilists is to show how the Word with which people have become comfortable remains a two-edged sword. Another is to show how the Word to which people have become indifferent continues to offer grace, light and life.

            Homilies given at liturgical celebrations of rites of passage provide opportunities to take up these challenges. People not yet evangelized will be present at such events as will people whose faith has grown weak or even died. At baptisms, weddings, confirmations, receptions into the Church, ordinations, religious professions, and funerals, as well as at Masses celebrated for graduation events, conferences, anniversaries, jubilees, and so on the one who speaks the homily has an opportunity to preach the good news to people who have never heard it and to those who might hear it afresh.

            In fact the term ‘evangelize’ is used in the text from Isaiah that Jesus quotes at Nazareth. The Spirit has anointed him to bring good news to the poor. This is what the term evangelization means, bringing good news. People may fail to receive this news either because it does not seem good to them or because they do not regard themselves as poor in ways that this news can do anything about. Much effort is put into making the good news seem good again. Part of this is helping people to see how the ways in which they know themselves to be poor are in fact met and healed by the Word of God present in Jesus. It may also mean helping people to realize that they are poor in ways they did not suspect.

            An essential part of the new evangelization is to keep the goodness of the gospel alive and fresh in those who already believe and have committed themselves to following Christ. All the great documents on evangelization from Paul VI to John Paul II to Benedict XVI agree that an essential element in it is the witness of vibrant and joyful Christian communities following Christ in faith, hope and love. The routine preaching of homilies is crucial in sustaining the life and witness of such communities.

The Importance of Failure

            The ones most in danger of domesticating the Word of God, in whom familiarity is most likely to breed contempt, are those who handle it from day to day. Teachers, catechists, deacons, theologians, readers, priests, and sisters – all can become so familiar with the Word and so committed to particular ways of communicating it, that in them also it can lose its sting and become domesticated.

            To be applauded for one’s ability to present the Word of God is a mixed blessing. Experience shows that praise is very often quickly followed by rejection or indifference: think of Jesus, Paul, and all great preachers of the gospel. This is why those moments in which preaching breaks down are to be welcomed. We have seen how Jesus’ homily at Nazareth broke down. In the Gospel of John we see that a much longer homily on the bread of life, which he gave at the synagogue in Capernaum, also ‘failed’: ‘after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him’ (John 6:66).  In the Acts of the Apostles we hear of Paul preaching at Athens and making good headway with an audience of philosophers and other intellectuals, until he began to speak of resurrection, and judgment, and eternal life (Acts 17:22-34).

            The breaking open of the Word cannot happen without the breaking open of hearts and lives. This applies in the first place to those who would think of themselves as ‘evangelizers’.  If the Word is true, and we believe that it is, then its grace can only flow where the barriers to truth are being removed. There are countless ways in which human beings defend themselves against truth, ways in which we are blind, imprisoned, oppressed and poor. One of the dangers for people involving themselves in the life of the Church is that they can turn holy things into obstacles between themselves and God. Saint John of the Cross speaks at length about this in his Dark Night of the Soul. The deadly sins are never more deadly, he says, than when they have our spiritual desires to work on.

            So we must be ready for moments when the work of teaching and evangelizing breaks down. It is admirable and right that we engage with the movements of thought in our culture, seeking to ‘take all thought captive for Christ’ (2 Corinthians 10:5). But we must remain alert for the moment of breakdown. Inevitably there will be something in what we preach that people will find objectionable, offensive, extreme, ridiculous, out-dated, a threat to common sense, or infuriating for some other reason. This is the world that is within us also and this adds to the difficulty: the first people needing evangelization are those who would evangelize others.

            Paul speaks about his state of mind and heart when he arrived in Corinth after his bruising experience in Athens. He came, he says, in fear and trembling, deciding that in his preaching he would not use arguments that belong to philosophy but would claim to know nothing except Christ crucified, a foolishness and weakness that are the wisdom and the power of God. There is sense in speaking of making the gospel ‘relevant’ to people’s lives, of showing how it connects with them. On the other hand the gospel is not a wisdom of this age that is passing away: if it is for this life only that we have hoped in Christ then we are, of all people, the most unfortunate (1 Corinthians 15:19). We must also, therefore, be ‘irrelevant’ because we are called to preach a gospel that does not just endorse and confirm all that we find in place but that promises a new life in a new heavens and a new earth.

Contexts of the Homily

            We are considering the homily in a specific sense, to refer to preaching done within a liturgy. The Irish Dominican liturgist and theologian Philip Gleeson has written that ‘homilies are worse than useless if they do not humbly serve the celebration of which they are a part’ (p.144). He quotes the German Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg who says ‘the sermon should serve, not dominate, in the Church. It should serve the presence of Christ which we celebrate in the Eucharist’.  All that is involved in a good celebration of the liturgy is therefore relevant to the homily since it is the context in which the homily happens. Not everything depends on the homily, however, even for the purposes of evangelization, since many other aspects of the liturgy – the music, the symbolism, the times of quiet, the great prayers of the Church, the assembly itself – might well be more effective in calling people to gratitude and to deeper faith.

            Another context of the homily is the lifestyle of the preacher. In an earlier moment of new evangelization, the beginning of the 13^th century, the Order of Preachers was established precisely with this conviction: that the credibility of preaching depended not just on the knowledge and understanding a preacher might have of the Word and of people’s lives, but also on the witness of the preacher’s own life. Saint Thomas Aquinas speaks of this when he discusses the lifestyle of Jesus.  How ought Jesus to have lived considering his mission of bringing good news to the poor?

            The best possible form of life, Aquinas says, is the one whereby a person is called to share with others, through preaching and teaching, what has been contemplated. Jesus’ mission was to bear witness to the truth (John 18:37) and this required a public life of preaching. Jesus had to live openly among people, therefore, and not as a monk or hermit. He had to live a balanced life of prayer and preaching since preaching without prayer would be meaningless. Because he came to free people from the oppressions of sin, Jesus had to live among sinners, sharing the living conditions of the people and conforming to their circumstances. He lived among them in poverty rather than in power and wealth since poverty is appropriate to the task of preaching. Jesus taught the apostles that they must live in simplicity and detachment if they were to carry through effectively the mission he was entrusting to them.

            This wider context of the homily – living among people, sharing their lives, in prayer and simplicity – was the way in which Jesus needed to live if he was to fulfill his mission, and he also lived like this, Aquinas says, ‘to give an example to preachers’. We can also say that because he passed on to them the mission he had received from the Father, the bearers of good news in any age and in any place are best advised to live like this if their work of evangelization is to be fruitful.

Conclusion

            We have been considering the homily, a particular kind of preaching done within a liturgy. We have seen how this description applies to some of the preaching recorded in the New Testament. It may seem that preaching in this sense will more often than not be to people who are already committed to the faith and are practising it. But even routine homilies are opportunities to reach others who are not so convinced as well as to strengthen the faith of believers and challenge them to a more generous following of Jesus.

            For the new evangelization it is clear that people need to understand the function of the homily and that those entrusted with it should be very well prepared. We have seen how St Thomas Aquinas says that this requires prayer, sharing people’s circumstances, and living in simplicity.

            Documents of the Church on evangelization, on the liturgy, and on preaching, offer practical advice about the means through which the homily may be done well. Most recently we have the post-Synodal exhortation Verbum Domini whose section on ‘The Liturgy, Privileged Setting of the Word of God’ (§§52-71) is relevant to what has been considered in this chapter. ‘Our own time must be increasingly marked by a new hearing of God’s word and a new evangelization’, Benedict XVI says in Verbum Domini §122. The homily within a liturgy is one of the ways in which that new hearing, and that new evangelization, are done.

Resources

Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium, chapter 3, II and III, §§135-159, Vatican Press 2014

Gleeson, Philip, OP, ‘The Homily: Serving, not Dominating’, in Vivian Boland OP, ed., Watchmen raise their voices: A Tallaght book of theology, Dominican Publications, Dublin 2006, pp. 135-44

Heille, Gregory, OP, The Word on the Web – http://www.kn.att.com/wired/fil/pages/listpreachergr.html

Hilkert, Mary Catherine, OP, Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination, Continuum, London and New York 1997

The Word is Flesh and Blood

Launch of The Word is Flesh and Blood*

St Mary's Priory, Tallaght

16 February 2012

_______________________________

We launch this book for Wilfrid just ten days before the Academy Awards in which it seems that the most successful film will be a silent one, The Artist. I have not yet seen it but have been struck by what it might mean for us, that people are ready for a silent film. We can at times feel ambivalent and even negative about words. Words are meant to facilitate communication and communion between people but they can also be experienced as a hindrance to that communication and communion. Like other currencies, the value of words can fall and rise: ‘words are cheap’, we hear in one context; ‘thank you for these precious words’, we hear in another.

In all the deeper experiences of life – love and birth, suffering and death – words become inadequate, and we turn instead to silence, to music, perhaps to poetry, a kind of musical speaking, or to prayer, and we struggle on. The most wonderful things, the most terrible things, leave us flabbergasted, gob-smacked, at a loss for words.

What about the Word, then, the ‘Word of God’? Professor Dawkins’ hair will fall out completely because not only do we believe that there is God but also that we have been addressed by God, that God has spoken and speaks to us: in creation, in scripture, throughout history, through the Church, above all in Christ. Are we mad?

When the Dalai Lama came to Blackfriars he said he agreed with everything the Christian speakers had said about the human search for ultimate reality through meditation. A perceptive questioner put this to him: ‘Does ultimate reality seek us?’, to which the Dalai Lama replied ‘no, we seek ultimate reality but it does not seek us’. Christians however believe that God does seek us: ‘this is the love I mean’, we read in the first letter of Saint John, ‘not our love for God, but God’s love for us’.

A book about Scripture that was still valued when Wilfrid was teaching us here was The Word of God in Words of Men. How can we dare to think that any of our human words – the language we use for commerce and war, for technology and politics – that these same words can be put at the service of the Word of God, that they can be made to carry a meaning that is transcendent, human words lifting us to the infinite?

But our speaking can aspire to be a speaking of the Word of God because God has first spoken to us. To adapt the text from 1 John, ‘this is the speaking I mean, not our speaking to God, but God’s speaking to us’. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Word is flesh and blood for we believe that Jesus of Nazareth, prophet and teacher, is the revelation and the presence among us of the Eternal Father. It is a strange translation, not just from one language to another, but to call a person ‘the Word’, or to call ‘the Word’ a person. We do it easily because it is so familiar but it is mighty strange.

Wilfrid taught us that the Hebrew word dabhar, for a word or a name, when it was used of God speaking was always a creative word, for God’s word brings into being the reality it signifies. God’s word is always, as the prophet Isaiah puts it, ‘a word that does not return empty but succeeds in what it was sent to do’.  God’s final Word, God’s most profound Word, God’s eternal Word, is the utterance of Himself that is the Son, and we believe that this Word, the Eternal Son of God, became flesh in Jesus Christ, our brother and our saviour.

The Word is flesh and blood. Jesus Christ is the Word of God for us, in his human nature, in his acts as a human being, in his teaching, in the impact he had, in his healings and exorcisms and forgiveness of sins and restorations to life. Wilfrid’s work takes him back again and again to the gospels, texts he describes as realistic and wise, gracious and spiritual. Even when he is writing about parts of the Bible that seem far from the gospels Wilfrid remains focused always on the God of the Bible, already being revealed to the patriarchs and prophets and wise teachers of the Old Testament. The God of the Bible is definitively revealed in Jesus of Nazareth who teaches us, and shows us, that God is a prodigal father, prodigal in compassion and love.

So the answer to our question, how can we dare to think that human words can ever aspire to carry the Word of God, is Christ. Speak of him and you are speaking human words; tell of him and you are speaking of the divine Word. By a nice coincidence here is what Saint Ambrose of Milan has to say about this in today’s liturgy:

‘It is also written: Open your lips, and let God’s word be heard. God’s word is uttered by those who repeat Christ’s teaching and meditate on his sayings. Let us always speak this word. When we speak about wisdom, we are speaking of Christ. When we speak about virtue, we are speaking of Christ. When we speak about justice, we are speaking of Christ. When we speak about peace, we are speaking of Christ. When we speak about truth and life and redemption, we are speaking of Christ. Open your lips, says Scripture, and let God’s word be heard. It is for you to open, it is for him to be heard. So David said: I will hear what the Lord says in me. The very Son of God says: Open your lips and I will fill them.’

We believe that our lives find their meaning in this conversation, the communication and communion that unite God and humanity, the marriage of God and God’s people. There is the further mighty strange translation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, the living bread giving his flesh for the life of the world, the Lamb sacrificed from the foundation of the world. Our loving service of the Word of God obliges us to enter also into communion with his sacrifice, the fate of the Incarnate Word at the hands of a world dominated by fear and division.

The book we launch this evening is as much about the Eucharist as it is about the Bible. Jesus, the bread of life, is also the living bread, his flesh given for the life of the world and his blood poured out for us and for our salvation. The creative words of God find their way to the lips of human beings as sacramental words that not just describe or indicate but that bring about the realities of which they speak.

But that’s enough, an aperitivo for the book. These and other themes are considered with care and scholarship in the chapters of The Word is Flesh and Blood. The book was edited and written joyfully. Wilfrid can take responsibility for that. It was a very easy task to undertake. Busy people responded immediately and enthusiastically to our invitation to write something in Wilfrid’s honour. That in itself is testimony not only to how well respected he is as a colleague and as a scholar, but also to how well loved he is as a friend and as a brother.

*The Word is Flesh and Blood: The Eucharist and Sacred Scripture, edited by Vivian Boland OP and Thomas McCarthy OP, Dominican Publications, Dublin, 2012. This book is a festschrift in honour of Wilfrid J. Harrington OP on his 85th birthday.

Human Nature and Destiny According to St Paul

This paper is in three parts, the first acknowledging the difficulty of the task required by my title, the second to recall the main facts about Paul’s anthropological language, and the third to look for an answer in terms of genealogy. 

The difficulty of the task 

Speaking of the concept of ‘spirit’, pneuma, central in Paul’s account of the nature and destiny of the Christian, Henri de Lubac (Theology in History, 1996, p.129) concludes that for Paul what par excellence makes a human being, ‘what constitutes man in his worth among the beings of this world, much more, what makes him a being superior to the world, would be an element that, rather than being ‘of man’, would be ‘in man’. There is, it seems to us, in this Pauline pneuma the same kind of ambiguity, notional because real, as in the divine ‘image’ or divine ‘breath’ of creation, such as Christian tradition interprets them. From one author to another, and sometimes in the same author, the same ambiguity will give place to oscillations, which will not go, however, to the point of compromising, before a rather recent date, the idea of a tripartite anthropology. We conclude, with a recent interpreter, that the Pauline concept of pneuma is a concept 'of which our modern anthropologies absolutely cannot take account'’. 

E.P.Sanders, in Paul and Palestinian Judaism, argues that Paul’s thought does not move from plight to solution but from solution to plight. It is not as if we know what human nature and destiny require and then come to see that Christ and His salvation meets their requirements. It is rather than having come to faith in Christ and His salvation we see what human nature and destiny require. So Sanders writes that Paul’s anthropology is only the implication of his theology, Christology and soteriology (p.446). In a Wednesday audience just before Christmas Benedict XVI spoke in this way about Paul’s understanding of original sin. It is in the light of grace, the ‘much more’ of Romans 5.12-21, that we come to understand what original sin means. Sanders speaks of the need for a new ‘category of perception’ or even ‘category of reality’, between naive cosmology / transference on one side and revised self-understanding on the other, a category which he says he does not have but which he believes Paul does (p.523), a category of perception / reality that holds together ‘covenantal nomism’ and ‘participationist eschatology’ (which are the categories into which ‘protestant’ and ’catholic’ interpretations of Paul might be thought to fall). There is no one source for Paul’s view of the human dilemma, Sanders concludes, except perhaps the death and resurrection of Jesus on which his gospel, his theology, is based. 

Philippians 2.12-13 neatly focuses the difficulty of the task: ‘ work out your own salvation with fear and trembling for (gar, ‘because’) God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure’. So what do we want to talk about in talking about human nature and destiny? Or, more precisely, who do we need to talk about in talking about human nature and destiny? 


What Are We Talking About? Paul’s Anthropological Language 

An obvious place to begin if we stay with the ‘what’ question is 1 Thessalonians 5.23, ‘may the God of grace himself sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit (pneuma) and soul (psyche) and body (soma) be kept sound and blameless, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Paul’s prayer is that God might sanctify them entirely, ‘holistically’ we might say, and rightly so since the Greek is holoteleis, and he spells this out by wishing them a sound (another use of ‘holistic’), and blameless, spirit, soul and body. Here is a tripartite divi­sion of the human person.  Is not this perhaps the basis for Paul’s account of human nature?

This text has been received in a number of ways.

One is to regard it as a throwaway comment, a loose use of language, not a technical description of human nature and so not to be insisted upon in any way, a division of human nature that can safely be ignored.

A second response has been to say that this text needs to be taken seriously and that in doing so Paul needs to be saved from ‘Platonism’. Famously, Plato proposed what looks like a ‘tripartite anthropology’ in his Republic and the fear is that this text might owe more to Hellenistic traditions (regarded as a bad thing) than to biblical understanding. Even a cursory glance back at the Republic shows that Plato’s tripartite division is not at all the same as Paul’s (the charioteer and his two horses, reason, desire and assertiveness, compared with spirit, soul and body), that it is closer to psychology than to anthropology in the sense in which we are using it. But Origen’s use of 1 Thessalonians 5.23 in terms of Platonist philosophy made this second response seem obligatory to some.

A third response is to say that the verse needs to be taken seriously but that here pneuma needs to be explained (meaning, actually, explained away). This is in order that the later, more common, dualistic understanding of human nature as soul and body is not disturbed by this verse. Scholasticism seems to require this, Cartesianism seems to require it, some of the Church’s solemn teachings on the soul seem to require it, an account of human nature in terms of body and soul simply.

Henri de Lubac, in the work already referred to (‘Tripartite Anthropology’, found in Theology in History, 1996, pp.117-200), takes this verse seriously, traces the history of its interpretation in the responses already noted, argues for the biblical origins of this division of spirit, soul and body, and shows its theological significance – this verse leads us into Paul’s accounts of creation, Spirit and grace and cannot itself be understood without those accounts.

There is only one other NT text that seems to support this tripartite division of the human being. Hebrews 4.12 speaks of the Word of God dividing soul [psyche] from spirit [pneuma] as it divides joints from marrow, judging the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

For many reasons, some already referred to, exegetes have tended not to allow the simple conclusion, from these texts, that this is the Christian or even the Pauline anthropology. Furthermore this tripartite division was never really taken up by subsequent tradition as that anthropology, though de Lubac’s work is an important critique of this failure. Much more common, as we know, was the two-fold di­vision of the human being into body and soul.

A further difficulty is that neither this tripartite one nor any other is used so consistently by Saint Paul that we can call it his account of human nature. Throughout his writings he divides the human being in various ways speaking not only of body, soul and spirit but also of ‘flesh’ (sarx), ‘mind’ (nous) and ‘heart’ (kardia). With each such term, he speaks not of a part or faculty or aspect of human nature but rather of the human being (or humanity generally) from a particular point of view. He never speaks of the human being ‘as such’ or ‘in herself’ but always in relation to God and to the world’s history and to Christ’s work and at one or an­other stage of the history of salvation. So there are always a number of criteria operat­ing. It is not enough to say that Paul thinks in terms of a number of parts or aspects or levels or activities in the human being, but of the whole person from a variety of overlapping perspectives.

He speaks, for example, of the ‘old man’ and the ‘new man’ [Colossians 3.9-10], a distinction that has its roots in Jewish eschatology, and of the ‘outer man’ and the ‘inner man’ [Romans 7.22], a distinction that is said to be hellenistic in origin (and so closer to later understandings of body and soul). The outer man refers to the perishable body and the inner man to the rational nature. The old man refers to the human being under the power of sin and the new man to the human being saved by grace. At times Paul identifies the ‘new man’ with the ‘inner man’ [2 Corinthians 4.16b; Ephesians 3.16]. He contrasts the decisions and aspirations of his ‘true’ or ‘inmost’ self with the demands of a ‘law at work in my members’ [Romans 7]. He uses yet another Jewish distinction in speaking of the ‘first Adam’ and the ‘final Adam’, referring in the first place to Adam and Christ but also implicitly to humanity under sin and humanity under grace.

A fundamental distinction for Paul is the contrast between life according to the ‘flesh’ and life according to the ‘spirit’. No matter how often the point is made this distinction tends to be misunderstood (and, in fairness, there are texts in Paul that support this misunderstanding). Paul is not saying that the human body is bad and on the side of sin and that the human ‘spirit’ is good and on the side of God. By ‘flesh’ he means the whole person living under the power of sin and by ‘spirit’ he means the whole person living under the power of grace.

In places Paul is even content to speak of the human being in terms of ‘body’ and ‘soul’ [1 Corinthians 5.3; 7.34; 2 Corinthians 12.2-3]. Body may simply mean the physical body or it may take on the sense of ‘flesh’, either in the sense of vul­nerability and frailty, or even of the human being without God and subject to sin. With the term ‘soul’ Paul refers to the living being at what we might call the earthly and natu­ral level, to such qualities as vitality, consciousness, intelligence and volition [1 Thessalonians 2.8; Philippians 2.30; 2 Corinthians 12.15; Romans 11.3; 16.4]. Life on this level is ‘psychic’ and not yet ‘spiritual’ [1 Corinthians 2.14].

At times Paul identifies spirit with ‘mind’ [nous], with the qualities of knowl­edge and will which make human beings apt for relationship with God, so that the Spirit of God may be received as the principle of new life within us, bear­ing witness with out spirit that we are children of God [Romans 8.16]. In Paul’s use of it, ‘mind’ designates the human being as a knowing and judging subject with a capacity for intelligent understanding, planning and decision [1 Corinthians 1.10; 2.16; Romans 14.5]. His use of ‘mind’ links with his use of ‘heart’, the latter term denoting the more responsive and emotional reac­tions of the intelligent and planning self. The heart loves, grieves, plans, lusts, suffers, doubts and believes, is hardened and impenitent but can be strength­ened. The ‘heart’, in turn, links with yet another Pauline term, ‘conscience’, the faculty of moral judgment in the human being [Romans 2.15].

Who Are We Talking About? An Answer From Genealogy

What if Paul’s understanding of human nature and destiny is more readily accessible in terms of the ‘who’ question than of the ‘what’ question? In other words that instead of asking ‘what are we and how are we made up’, we ask ‘who are we, where have we come from and where are we going’. Here I concentrate on the first part of the Letter to the Romans, the work that comes closest to giving us a systematic account of Paul’s gospel.

In Romans 1-8 there are three accounts of the origins of human history, 1.18-23, 5.12-21 and 7.7-13, described by A.Feuillet as ‘narrative maps’ that describe the human predicament in a number of ways. That this narrative approach can be further characterized as genealogical is my own suggestion and it arises from noticing that in Romans 1-8 Jesus Christ is described as son of God, son of Adam, son of Abraham, and son of David.

Let me say a bit more about genealogy. The best-known genealogy in the New Testament is that of Jesus given in Matthew 1.1-17. This tells how Jesus is the son of Abraham, son of David, and son of Mary and Joseph, fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian captivity, and fourteen from the Babylonian captivity to Jesus Christ.

But there is also a genealogy of Jesus given by Luke, immediately after Jesus’ baptism (3.23-38). This one works backwards, saying he was the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, who was the son (eventually) of David, the son of Abraham, the son of Adam, the son of God. Jesus is described in the opening verses of Romans as ‘descended from David according to the flesh’ and ‘designated Son of God by his resurrection from the dead’ (Romans 1.3,4). He is a son of Abraham, the promised ‘seed’ of Abraham, a fact that is crucial to the theological histories of Romans and Galatians, and he is the son of Adam, even the second or last Adam, a fact that is central not only in Romans but also in the letters to the Corinthians.

I am suggesting that another way of approaching the question of human nature and destiny in Paul is to look at these narrative maps in Romans 1-8 and the genealogical history found there. In what these chapters say about the family of Adam, of Abraham and of David and the relationship of that family to another, heavenly, family, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, we find a rich theological answer to the questions ‘who are we, where have we come from, and where are we going?’

The first narrative map, Romans 1.18-23, tells of the need of all people for the righteousness revealed by God in the gospel. This is not a matter of law and its observance or non-observance but of faith and its justifying power. The key figure in the resolution of the difficulties to which this map testifies is Abraham who believed God and was thereby reckoned as righteous (Romans 3.21-5.11). Everybody knows how central Abraham’s faith is to Paul’s reflections in Romans and Galatians. He is faithful, even ‘our father in faith’, and so becomes a model of the faithful one, his son or seed, Jesus Christ (Galatians 3.16).

But there are two other aspects of Abraham’s story that are important for Paul. One is that Abraham had a son, Isaac, whom he loved and whom he was asked to sacrifice. But God spared the son of Abraham while acknowledging the faith Abraham showed in being prepared to be obedient even to the point of death. Abraham and Isaac become types then of another Father and Son, the Eternal Father and his Son, Jesus, whom the Father did not spare, instead giving him up for us all. This last comment comes in the great climax to these chapters in Romans 8.32.

A further aspect of Abraham’s faith that is central to this story is that he believes that God can even raise the dead. There are some hints that this faith is seen even in Abraham’s acceptance that in spite of his great age (‘one as good as dead’: Hebrews 11.12) he will have a son. We see Abraham’s faith in a God who raises the dead also in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac: ‘he considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead’ (Hebrews 11.19). But it is present from the beginning of Abraham’s relationship with God when he is told that he is to be the father of many nations ‘in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Romans 4.17).

The second narrative map, Romans 5.12-21, contrasts the situation of humanity in Adam with our situation in Christ. As by one man’s disobedience many came to experience sin and death so – and not just so but ‘much more’ – by one man’s obedience many come to experience grace and life. The power of sin, death and law, strengthening from Adam to Moses and beyond is undone by the saving death and resurrection of Jesus. So this narrative history opens onto an account of baptism. Our old self has died, nay been crucified, with him. We have been brought from death to life, no longer under law but under grace. This re-creation of Adam is brought about by the second or last Adam, Jesus, the son of Adam.

The third narrative map, Romans 7.7-13, seems more psychological than anthropological or historical. It describes an inner conflict that agitates and hinders human fulfillment: ‘I do not understand my own actions’, Paul says (7.15), ‘wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?’ (7.24). The answer to his question is ‘thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (7.25). For Paul Jesus is the Son of God and his death and resurrection is the source of the Spirit. Romans 7 belongs with Romans 8, that great symphony of life in the Spirit which is only fully appreciated in its contrast with Romans 7, a darker composition reminding us of what life in the flesh involves. In Romans 7 we find many of the concepts of Paul’s anthropology: law, sin, flesh, inmost self, members, mind, death, life. Romans 8 presents the contrast: human nature is set free by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death (8.2). It may seem that Romans 7-8 invites us to return to a dualistic anthropology in terms of flesh and spirit but the philosophical and psychological categories need now to be understood always in relation to the historical and – I have suggested – genealogical narratives we find in these chapters.

So what happens through these chapters? We are given three narrative maps, stories about the human situation that tell about the weakness of our nature and the difficulty of our plight. This is not a diagnosis apart from the message of the gospel but something illuminated by the gospel and understood properly only in its light. What we are taught is that we belong to the family of Adam and of Abraham, of Moses and of David. This family has won the loving attention and saving intervention of another ‘family’, the Father, the Son and the Spirit. In the course of these chapters God is revealed as a Father (3.21-5.11) who did not spare his own Son through whose death and resurrection (5.12-7.6) the Spirit is at work adopting us and making us to be children of God (8). This is our genealogy also. Who am I? Who are you? As human creatures we belong to the first family, that of Adam and Abraham, and as believers we belong now also to the second family, that of the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

Paul’s understanding of human destiny is not so much a question of God adding something to our nature, as it is God taking us into a new milieu, to be with Christ and to be in Christ. This cannot happen without the transformation of our being and our capacities but it is not that we find a place for God in our world (‘the solution to our problems’) but that God makes a place for us in His world (‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’). The principle of Christian action is the Spirit/spirit for ‘the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (Romans 8.16).

The destiny of the human being for Paul is Christ, to be in Christ, to be Christ, Christ living in us. Another way of putting this is to speak of freedom: ‘for freedom Christ has set us free’ (Galatians 5.1); ‘now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life’ (Romans 8.21).

There is much else that could be said. Romans 9-11 consider Jesus as the son of David and the particular question of the failure of Judaism as a whole to believe in Jesus as the Christ. Romans 12-16 carry the reflection further, to the new Israel, the Christian community and various aspects of its sacramental and moral life. Already in Romans 7 there is a (neglected?) reference to the body of Christ. We have died to the law through the body of Christ so that we may belong to another, to that same Christ who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God (Romans 7.4). For Paul, human nature has been made ready for this marriage through the righteousness of God, the faithfulness of Jesus and the grace of the Spirit. The ‘flesh’ that is problematic is replaced by the ‘body’ that enables communion and fruitfulness. For Paul our nature’s fulfillment is in presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, and our destiny is to enter into the spiritual worship of genuine love (Romans 12.1,9).