😇 Xmas 2
Readings: 📜Jeremiah 31:7-14; 🎶Psalm 147:12-20; 📜Ephesians 1:3-14; 📜John 1 :1-18.
From the TRNG Room:
Central Thesis/Theme
In this episode, I wrestle with the growing tension I feel between Pauline Christianity and the Jesus I encounter in the Gospels. The Christmas readings this week force me to confront my discomfort with Paul's privileged position and philosophical approach versus Christ's radical accessibility to the poor and marginalized. I'm arguing that if we must choose between Paul's epistles and the Hebrew scriptures, I'd choose the latter—not to reject Paul entirely, but to prioritize the Christ of the Gospels and the story he fulfills over the institutional church-building project I see in Paul's letters.
Key Textual/Historical Insights
The readings present a progression from prophetic promise to incarnational fulfillment. Jeremiah announces God gathering scattered Israel from exile with consolation and joy. The Psalm celebrates God's sustaining provision and unique covenant with Israel. Ephesians articulates a high Christology of cosmic redemption and predestined adoption. John's prologue grounds the eternal Word in flesh, emphasizing recognition failure and the gift of becoming God's children. My paraphrase work reveals how Paul's Greek philosophical vocabulary—charis, doxa—doesn't naturally flow from Septuagint language, raising questions about whose theological framework we're actually following when we read his letters.
Theological Argument
I'm making a case for Gospel-centered interpretation that subordinates Pauline authority when it conflicts with Christ's example. Paul's Roman citizenship and military imagery reveal a privileged position that shapes his theology in ways that diverge from Jesus's actual ministry to the poor. The Acts narrative shows Paul leveraging his citizenship while the Jerusalem apostles who actually walked with Jesus show remarkable restraint in accepting his authority. I'm not advocating for removing Paul from canon, but I am insisting we stop ignoring difficult Old Testament texts while treating Paul's more palatable institutional vision as normative Christianity. If Jesus primarily attended to the lowest, poorest, and most marginalized, our theology must do the same.
Contemporary Application
My military service and subsequent disillusionment inform this reading. Just as Rome granted citizenship to veterans while denying rights to military families, America deports combat veterans—revealing how privilege operates in imperial systems. Theologians who claim they "don't know what to do with" Joshua or Judges while building sophisticated Pauline frameworks are exercising a luxury that veterans and their families don't have—the luxury of ignoring violence. When scholars and church leaders can simply bypass texts that make them uncomfortable, they're replicating the same privilege dynamics I see in Paul. We need a Christianity that meets people where they are, like Jesus did, not one that builds institutions requiring money and property to access the Gospel.
Questions Raised
If Paul's theology conflicts with Jesus's actual ministry practices, which should take interpretive priority for Christians?
How does privilege—Roman citizenship, property ownership, educational access—shape whose interpretation of scripture becomes authoritative?
What does it mean that the Jerusalem apostles who walked with Jesus showed such restraint toward Paul's self-proclaimed apostleship?
Are theologians who ignore difficult Old Testament texts practicing a form of Marcionism by selection rather than explicit rejection?
Can institutional church structures built on Pauline models actually serve the poor Jesus prioritized, or do they inevitably center those with resources?
Reflection
Hello and welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon. Our readings come to us today from Jeremiah 31, Psalm 147, Ephesians 1, and John 1. I didn't quite finish paraphrasing the John reading. It's relatively straightforward.
John has a particular kind of thing that he's doing, and it's very philosophical. I won't get into John because I honestly trust Johannine literature more than I trust Pauline literature. And here's why: the more I read Paul—or Saul—the less I like him, and there are some reasons for that.
I would sooner get rid of Paul than the Old Testament. The reason for that, or where that's coming from, I don't know
[00:07:00]
if it's a rational reason, but I take the Gospels to be more authoritative than Paul's epistles. If something that Jesus does or says—if Paul doesn't align with Christ, I'm going to side with Christ. And we get Christ in the Gospels, we get Paul in Paul and Luke, who seems to be a pretty levelheaded outsider ally to this thing, this Jesus movement. He's a Gentile. He's pretty upfront about it. He's writing what he claims to be an epistle, a letter to Theophilus—the friend of God. And in Acts, Luke's second play, second act of Luke-Acts,
we get an interesting vision of Paul. And
[00:08:00]
in Acts 22, we get the story of Paul being arrested in Jerusalem. And the description that Luke gives of the situation is pretty telling. Paul is a Roman citizen, but he's accosted by an angry mob, and the Tribune Claudius Lysias and his soldiers rescue him. When they ask who he is, Paul says he's from Tarsus, which is a significant city—not an insignificant city.
But the Tribune tells his soldiers to beat him. This is a standard Roman procedure for getting information out of someone. They're about to flog him when Paul asks, "Is it lawful for you to flog a man who is a Roman citizen and uncondemned?"
[00:09:00]
This stops everything. The centurion goes to the Tribune and says, "What are you about to do? This man is a Roman citizen." Claudius comes to Paul and asks, "Are you really a Roman?" Paul confirms it. Claudius says, "I bought this citizenship for a large sum." And Paul replies, "But I was born a citizen."
Think about what that means. Paul was born with privileges that Claudius Lysias, a Tribune commanding soldiers, had to buy. Paul's Roman citizenship wasn't something he earned—it was inherited. And throughout Acts, we see Paul leveraging this privilege repeatedly.
[00:10:00]
When he's in trouble, he appeals to Caesar. He uses his citizenship as a get-out-of-jail-free card. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it shapes how he operates in the world, how he builds the church, and how he writes his letters.
Compare this to Jesus. Jesus had no such privileges. He was born in occupied territory to a working-class family. He had no citizenship rights, no appeals to make. When he was arrested, he couldn't say, "Wait, I'm a Roman citizen." He was just another subject of the empire.
[00:11:00]
And the way Jesus builds his movement reflects this. He doesn't go to the people with houses and property first. He goes to the poor, the sick, the marginalized. He goes to tax collectors and prostitutes and fishermen. He makes himself accessible to the lowest of the low.
Paul, on the other hand, seems to build the church around people who have resources. He talks about deacons and bishops and people who have houses where the church can meet. He uses complex Greek philosophical language—charis, doxa, all these technical terms.
[00:12:00]
And I'm not saying that's bad, but it's different from what Jesus did. Jesus spoke in parables that anyone could understand. He taught in the streets and on hillsides. He didn't require specialized knowledge to access his teaching.
Now, when I look at Acts and see Paul leveraging his Roman citizenship, I can't help but think about my own experience as a veteran. I was born free too, in the sense that I was born an American citizen. But over the last decade or so, I've realized I don't actually have the rights I thought I did.
[00:13:00]
Why are we denying rights to our own service members? Rome did it too. They would have people fight their wars who did not have Roman citizenship. You get Roman citizenship at the end. And here we are in America, deporting our combat veterans.
Anyway, that's a post for another day. So when I get to Paul, I can't read his letters except through the lens of privilege. And what he does with his privilege is not appeal to the lowest of the low using simple, ordinary language. He's using all these things—grace, charis, and all that. And it's like, Jesus didn't talk like that, and neither does it seem James or Peter.
And so this ick feeling I get from Paul is like he's entitled. Now that isn't to say he's not saved or a saint or smart or whatever, but it is to say I'm not following Paul. I wasn't baptized by Paul. And Paul would agree. Paul would say, "Look to Christ." And I'd be like, "Okay, here's where, here's what I see in Christ, and here's where
[00:14:00]
maybe I don't see that reflected in you." Because he's got a mission, he's got a vocation and a calling and he's gonna do it. And the people in Jerusalem—they don't reject him. They don't say, "Wait, you are claiming to have met the guy we've never met you and we spent Christ's entire ministry with Christ, but somehow you've got some kind of call from him."
I admire the Jerusalem council for being like, "You know what? We don't like you, but God is God and Christ can work in all kinds of different ways. Sure, whatever. Do your thing."
And Pauline Christianity—it does not feel to me to be the same kind of Christianity that I see in the Gospels, and it doesn't feel like the same kind of story that I see in the Hebrew Bible, in Torah and the prophets. And part of that goes back to Paul's epistles. Like where is he getting—like charis and
[00:15:00]
doxa and all these other Greek words that aren't really popular in the Greek language of the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible in Greek? And new things are not bad, but they don't always intuit for me.
And that's why I said at the top of this, I'd sooner get rid of the epistles than I would the Old Testament. And part of that is I want to counter any Marcionite claims. And frankly, I think a lot of theologians and exegetes—if you don't want to deal with two to three books of the Bible, like Joshua and Judges and Numbers—how are you any better than Marcion, who just wanted to get rid of it?
What's the difference between wanting to exclude it and doing so on the one hand, and on the other, just ignoring it entirely? I've heard several theologians and Bible scholars say explicitly to their audiences, "I don't know what to do with Joshua. I don't like what I see in Judges." And so we have this really superficial
[00:16:00]
interpretation of it. And that's a privilege that they can just ignore this violence. But the violence that I encountered at my people's behest as a serviceman—that's a privilege, that's a luxury I don't get. That's a luxury that 20-some-odd million service members and their families don't get.
It reeks of privilege. And when I smell privilege and entitlement, I want to make the two connect. I want to make sure that you realize that your entitlement, your privilege has come at a cost. Somebody paid that price for eleutheria, for freedom, for citizenship. And just because you haven't paid the cost doesn't mean you get to ignore that. That doesn't mean that you get to just go on in life and think you're gonna teach people without acknowledging that cost.
And the last thing I'll say, which does have to do with Paul: he uses all this military imagery, which
[00:17:00]
I would think I would really hate because it feels very stolen valor. But he doesn't use it in a way that cheapens military service. He presents himself as a general commanding troops. He calls Timothy a good soldier of Christ and blah, blah, blah. And I actually don't mind that.
That's why I would not actually strike Paul from canon. I would just say—the Johannine literature is very lofty and theological, and Paul's kind of the same way. And if you want that or if you need that, or if that's what scratches that itch for you—if you like Shakespeare but not Vonnegut, that's fine.
But I do want to point out, and I don't want other people to ignore the fact that Vonnegut or Shakespeare—they're not, maybe, less... anyway. What scratches the itch for you does not necessarily make it right. To make something as right as it can be, it must speak to as many people as possible.
And I think we're at a point where the Pauline instinct of like leaders who
[00:18:00]
lead and who need money to do that thing—that's very different than what Jesus did, going to the poor where the poor were, and hearing the poor for what the poor said. Like the Syrophoenician woman. He goes, he finds himself, he puts himself in positions where the poor have ready access to him. And those are the first people that he listens to, not the people with property.
The deacons and the bishops of the early church with houses that people can meet in—Jesus goes there. He doesn't ignore them. He doesn't ignore the privilege and the economic influence that these people have. But when he's there, he still seems to direct his primary attention to the lowest and the least and the worst, and the cast-off.
Like the woman who breaks the bottle of oil on his feet at some dude's party. He's not concerned with the host. He's concerned with the person that's doing the right thing and is doing so with a humble heart and is putting everything on the
[00:19:00]
line just to make a point about what they want and what they need and where to get it. They go to Christ because Christ heals.
I don't know who Paul is healing. I think he's building something. And I think maybe that's what bothers me—I think we have what we need when we meet with one another and the story, the good news, the way is illuminated. We don't need all these buildings. We don't need bishops and deacons and priests.
They're helpful. I wouldn't fire them. I go to church every Sunday. I just came from church. But if you think that's what we need, if you think that's where the gospel happens, I have to wonder whether or not you've really seen what I find so beautiful and satisfying in looking at Christ and looking at the story that
[00:20:00]
he fulfills and the story that he tells with his life and the inheritance or the dynasty or the foundation that he leaves his followers.
To me, it looks very different than what I see and understand Paul is trying to do.
Well, them's the fighting words for this week. Support Grunt Works on Venmo with username PewPewHQ, or visit pewpewhq.com/tfw to collaborate, send prayer requests, or read more of The Fighting Word, my exegetical project centering rank-and-file believers.
Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, or if you're on Apple Podcasts, leave us a rating and a review. Thanks for federating the faith with me. This has been Brother Logan. Semper Fidelis.
