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Page 1: Preview Joseph Spencer's _For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope_
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For Zion

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Salt Lake City, 2014

Greg Kofford Books

For ZionA Mormon Theology of Hope

Joseph M. Spencer

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Copyright © 2014 Joseph M. SpencerCover design copyright © 2014 Greg Kofford Books, Inc.Cover design by Jenny Webb.

Published in the USA.

All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, Greg Kofford Books. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Greg Kofford Books.

Greg Kofford BooksP.O. Box 1362

Draper, UT 84020www. koffordbooks.com

Also available in ebook.

2018 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spencer, Joseph M., author. For Zion : a Mormon theology of hope / by Joseph M. Spencer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: Spencer provides an outline of a Mormon theology of hope, drawing on the writings of Saint Paul, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Job, and the Doctrine and Covenants, and explores the inseparability of hope in contempo-rary Mormonism from the law of consecration and stewardship. ISBN 978-1-58958-568-3 (pbk.) 1. Hope--Religious aspects--Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 2. Zion (Mormon Church) I. Title. BX8643.H67S64 2014 230’.9332--dc23 2014015699

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Contents

Introduction, ixI. Hope

1. Epistle of Hope, 32. Faith and Hope, 153. Hope and Love, 25

4. The Time of Hope, 355. The Space of Hope, 47

6. Israel’s Hope, 57Interlude

7. Romans Rewritten, 71II. Zion

8. Zion in Prophecy, 819. Zion as Project, 95

10. Zion in Transition, 10711. Zion Revised, 121

12. Stewards in Zion, 13313. Zion’s Hope, 147

Bibliography, 159Index, XXX

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Hope hopes for everything, except that which it could possess.Jean-Luc Marion

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Introduction

In the first of his Letters to a Young Mormon, Adam Miller writes, “You’ve promised to give God everything—your time, your talents, your money—but you’ll spend a lifetime learning how to consecrate even a part. You cannot forfeit responsibility for this how. You cannot wait for some-one else to do [it] for you. If you do not work things out for yourself, they will never be done.”1 The law of consecration is now, as it has always been, “the great stumbling block.”2 It is a rock of offense and therefore a stone that we, the builders of Zion, are as likely to reject or ignore as we are to utilize. And yet, scripture assures us, this same stone will—or at any rate, must—become the head of the corner, the only sure foundation on which Zion can be built. We thus spend too much of our time building promising but ultimately foundationless edifices, only again and again to watch them crumble. Until we finally roll the stone of consecration into its rightful place, we can only expect more of the same.

But, as Miller suggests, rolling that stone into place is the task of a life-time. If our current building efforts feel like a Sisyphean labor—inevitably failing at every effort—we can be assured that giving ourselves to rolling the stone of consecration into place will only feel all the more Sisyphean. And yet, at least on one potentially dangerous reading, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”3 Perhaps in giving up one Sisyphean labor for another, we shall find that we have given up the “futile and hopeless”4 for the happy. Miller describes this in the following in beautiful words:

You will find as you “work out your own salvation” that “it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13). But this discovery, this heart-starting revelation that you are not alone, comes only in doing the work itself. Working, you will find that you are not your own and that God is at work in you. You will find that God, in both rough and subtle ways, is working in and through you to do

1. Adam Miller, Letters to a Young Mormon, 10.2. Hugh Nibley, Eloquent Witness: Nibley on Himself, Others and the Temple, 417.3. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 91.4. Ibid., 88.

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things you can’t do and create things you don’t entirely understand. Working, you’ll find grace.5

Whether getting serious about the law of consecration and stewardship is actually the slow but happy work of rolling a foundation stone into place (and hence is a work in which God and grace will be found), or whether it is a maddening task appointed by the gods that are no gods (the futile labor one undertakes only to honor ever-silent but imposing idols),6 I believe it is worth the effort. For my own part, in any event, I have covenanted to undertake that effort.

It is far too weak to state that living the law of consecration is “worth the effort.” Consecration is our only hope. Indeed, as I aim to show over the course of this book, consecration is inseparable from hope. Consecration is the hope of the Restoration, the singular task of the last days in which Christian hope is perfectly embodied. To become quite clear about the nature of hope is to begin to see that the Restoration is the law of consecration. In a crucial sense, there is nothing else that needs doing, nothing else on which to focus. Everything else that makes up the movement that began with Joseph Smith is meant to serve as an instrument for the fulfillment of this one law. As Hugh Nibley has put it, “the midpoint and focus of the whole operation is Zion. Zion is the great moment of transition, the bridge between the world as it is and the world as God designed it and meant it to be.”7

The work of building Zion is, of course, eminently practical. The poor must have their needs and wants met, real stewardships must be appointed and received, and the full redemption of Israel must become a relentless pursuit. What I undertake in the following pages, however, is theological reflection. I have no practical advice, no program for moving forward, no suggestions for application. I stand with Miller: “You cannot forfeit respon-sibility for this how. You cannot wait for someone else to do [it] for you. If you do not work things out for yourself, they will never be done.” The task I have appointed myself in writing this book is not to determine the way forward; instead, it is simply and solely to clarify the stakes of moving forward. In other words, it is to break down and make clear the context and importance of consecration—Zion’s real and only hope.

To do so, I have divided this study into two parts, separated by a tran-sitional interlude. The first half of the book is dedicated to a theological investigation of hope, drawn from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans.

5. Miller, Letters to a Young Mormon, 12, emphasis in original. Miller takes Paul’s words here from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

6. See Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 88–91.7. Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion, 4.

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Introduction xi

His letter in particular demonstrates that hope is entirely inseparable from what we too simply call “economic” concerns. And it brings into stark re-lief the fact that hope and consecration absolutely cannot be disentangled from the fulfillment of what Latter-day Saints call the Abrahamic covenant. Zion’s hope has always been, still is, and will always be the redemption of Israel through the consecration of the Gentiles’ riches. The second half of the book is in turn dedicated to a close theological reading of the revela-tions concerning consecration in the Doctrine and Covenants—in particu-lar the revelation that introduced consecration to the Saints (Section 42). That revelation, both in its original and the revised form it assumed when it became canon, tells us more about the nature of hope in the Restoration than any other document. The revelation is just as clear as Paul’s letter: the focus of consecration and stewardship is still the fulfillment of God’s most ancient promises to Israel. To make the connection between Paul’s letter and Joseph Smith’s revelation perfectly clear, however, I provide a transi-tional interlude between the two halves of the book. There I look, however briefly, at the Book of Mormon. That book, in addition to everything else it accomplishes, serves to refocus Paul’s hope—which he fully believed would be fulfilled in his own day—on the prophesied latter day of the Book of Mormon’s emergence among the Gentiles. It thus paves the way from the ancient letter to the Romans to the modern revelation on consecration.

As for the details, they will have to be encountered on the way. A couple of technical details must be mentioned. Except where noted,

I have offered my own translations of biblical texts. When quoting the Book of Mormon, I invariably use Royal Skousen’s The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, if only out of what has become a kind of habit for me.8 My use of the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants is more complicated, however. Because so much of the second half of this study is focused on tracing the history of consecration between 1831 and 1835, I begin by cit-ing manuscript sources rather than the canonical text. Only when I come to the fully revised text of Doctrine and Covenants 42 do I draw on the canonical text found in current editions of the Latter-day Saint scriptures, which has not changed since 1835 (except in punctuation and apparatus). Quotations from the Pearl of Great Price are taken from the current official edition (albeit with occasional revisions in punctuation).

I might mention just a few names of people who have helped me along the way in this project. As always, thanks are due first and foremost to Karen, my best interlocutor and eternal companion, and to our children,

8. See Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2009).

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whose support and patience are deeply encouraging. In addition, I should mention my appreciation for conversations about the nature of hope, which I have had most obsessively with Adam Miller, but also with James Faulconer, Kim and Mike Berkey, Keith Lane, and a number of my col-leagues at the University of New Mexico. I have also benefited immensely from discussions on the nature of consecration, most obsessively with Robert Couch, but also with Nate Oman, Russell Fox, Kristine Haglund, and Jeremy John (Karen, mentioned above, consistently participated in these discussions). I owe a great debt of gratitude to Jenny Webb for her work on the cover of this book. Loyd Ericson at Greg Kofford Books de-serves mention for his gracious encouragement of the project. And there are others, I am sure, whom I am forgetting to mention, but I hope they know of my appreciation nonetheless.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this work to the memory of Hugh Nibley. I had precious little opportunity to get to know Brother Nibley while he was alive, but I have benefited greatly from his exemplary ap-proach to the Restoration. Although my approach to consecration differs in certain ways from his—ways I have not spelled out in this book, but ways that should be obvious to anyone looking for them—I could not agree more with him that consecration deserves our unrelenting attention. If we were all as serious about consecration as Nibley was, I do not doubt that there would be no poor among us today.

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I

Hope

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1

Epistle of Hope

Less than a decade after his work with the Gentiles had been officially acknowledged by the authorities in Jerusalem,1 Paul was already finding that his always-stronger conviction about the theological implications of Christ’s resurrection was making him many enemies among Jewish Christians. This had become particularly clear in the course of a crisis in the city of Corinth, where Paul had established a congregation just before at-tending the Jerusalem council in which his work was acknowledged. After Paul attempted, in parts of what is now the first letter to the Corinthians, to clarify the gospel he had originally preached in Corinth, he received word that many—perhaps a majority—of the Christians in that city had joined in a kind of opposition to his vision of Christianity. Although a series of letters and visits from Paul quelled the crisis,2 and although this happy end-ing seems to have made Paul feel that his work in Asia and Greece was coming to a close,3 he knew that he could not really begin to turn his atten-tion to Western Europe (his plan was to preach in Spain) without first try-

1. The meeting seems to have taken place in 51 ad. An account of it appears in Acts 15, though it is important to note that Luke seems to have had relatively little and relatively unreliable information about the event. A firsthand, but very brief, account appears also in Galatians 2. For a good overview of these events and the issues surrounding them, see Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life, 130–57. For LDS perspectives on the Jerusalem council, see Richard Lloyd Anderson, Understanding Paul, 51–53; Sidney B. Sperry, Paul’s Life and Letters, 54–65; Thomas A. Wayment, From Persecutor to Apostle: A Biography of Paul, 93–110.

2. On the Corinthian crisis more generally, see Murphy-O’Connor, Paul, 252–322. The various letters Paul wrote to quell the crisis have been gathered, in haphazard order, into what is known as the second letter to the Corinthians.

3. Paul’s last visit to Corinth “took place in an atmosphere of harmony; the congregation was fully on its founder’s side again. On the basis of this positive time with the Corinthians, Paul felt that he might well consider his mission in the eastern half of the empire as firmly anchored and start preparations for a new phase of mission in the west.” See Dieter Georgi, Remembering the Poor: The History of Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem, 110.

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ing to keep what had happened in Corinth from happening again among his converts more generally.4

Opposition to Paul was centered, naturally, in Jerusalem, where the largest contingency of Jewish Christians (as opposed to Gentile Christians) was to be found. Paul accordingly made plans to visit Jerusalem before heading west, hoping to restore confidence in his work before leaving his eastern congregations to fare for themselves. He knew that such a visit would be complicated. He fretted openly about whether his “service to Jerusalem” would be “acceptable to the saints” there, and he even wrote of his worry that he would need to “be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea” (Rom. 15:31). Despite these worries, however, he seems to have seen the visit as necessary to the larger success of his mission. If he could not smooth things over with the so-called “Judaizers” (those who understood Christianity to be a Jewish sect and therefore loudly complained that Paul’s gospel was at odds with true Christianity),5 his departure for Spain would likely result in an unraveling of all he had worked for two decades to build.

Paul had another, related reason for making a visit to Jerusalem before leaving for the West. For several years, in accordance with the official agree-ment struck during the Jerusalem council already mentioned, Paul had been collecting funds for the support of “the poor” in Jerusalem.6 Having apparently had remarkable success in gathering these funds,7 Paul thought it best that he deliver them in person to the Christians in Jerusalem. In part, this gesture would demonstrate Paul’s fidelity to the council that had officially acknowledged his work some years earlier. Perhaps more impor-

4. Thomas Wayment is still more pessimistic: “The new frontier for Paul was in the west; he sensed that the opposition in the east had effectively ended his chances there.” Wayment, From Persecutor to Apostle, 187.

5. The most direct of Paul’s responses to the Judaizers is found in his letter to the Galatians. See Murphy-O’Connor, Paul, 193–98.

6. Paul himself mentions this part of the agreement in Galatians 2:9–10. Also of major significance is Romans 15:25–29. The most detailed discussions of the collection in Paul’s writings, however, are found in 2 Corinthians 8–9. On the latter, see especially Hans Dieter Betz, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9: A Commentary on Two Administrative Letters of the Apostle Paul; and David J. Downs, The Offering of the Gentiles: Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem in Its Chronological, Cultural, and Cultic Contexts, 131–46. (Also relevant, though more distantly. is Philippians 4:10–20.) See Dieter Georgi, Remembering the Poor, 62–67. It should be noted that many scholars regard the phrase “the poor” as a title that referred to Israel and not to the actually impoverished. See the discussion in Georgi, Remembering the Poor, 33–35. For LDS perspectives on the collection, both more practical than theological, see Anderson, Understanding Paul, 139–41 and Wayment, From Persecutor to Apostle, 188–89.

7. See Georgi, Remembering the Poor, 123.

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tantly, it would give Paul an opportunity to make clear that his gospel was anything but a rejection of historical Israel—Israel according to the flesh—because it was, rather, a profound affirmation of the fact that (as he would put it in his letter to the Romans) God grants salvation “to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile” (Rom. 1:16). As Mark Nanos has explained,

Even though Paul is bringing the gospel to gentiles it is in the service of Israel’s eventual restoration, which will be incomparably superior to the present cir-cumstances that have been benefiting the gentiles, even as life is incomparably superior to death. He expects his “stumbling brethren” to recognize in his ministry to the gentiles that the eschatological promises [of the prophets] are being fulfilled; but they [the Israelites] are missing out on their prophesied privilege of serving as restored Israel’s light to all the nations.8

If one takes the Jewish background of Paul’s activities into account, it could not be clearer that he understood “the eschatological miracle of the pil-grimage of the [Gentile nations] to Jerusalem,” repeatedly prophesied in the Hebrew Bible, to “coincide with the collection of [funds by the] Pauline congregations (consisting in the majority of Gentiles) taken up for the Jesus-believing congregation at Jerusalem.”9 It is in this sense that, as Dieter Georgi says, the story of Paul’s collection for the poor in Jerusalem “can be viewed truly as a mirror of the apostle’s missionary effort as a whole.”10

I will be coming back to the collection later. (Indeed, it will prove to be absolutely central to this book.) For the moment it is enough to recog-nize that it played a significant role in Paul’s visit to Jerusalem as he made preparations to head west.

Having decided he would visit Jerusalem, but recognizing the difficul-ties such a visit would pose, Paul decided to undertake one further pre-cautionary move. Before setting out from Asia for Judea, he produced a

8. Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul’s Letter, 248; emphasis in original. Krister Stendahl goes further: “The end of [Paul’s] reflections on Israel consists of his tearing into the Gentile church and Gentile Christians, accusing them of contempt toward the people of Israel. Paul perceived the first signs of Christian anti-Semitism. He was the first theologian who saw the specter of gruesome things to come.” Krister Stendahl, Final Account: Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 6.

9. Georgi, Remembering the Poor, 101. The most familiar Old Testament prophecy of these events to Latter-day Saints is, of course, Isaiah 49:22–23, largely because it appears with some frequency in the Book of Mormon. See 1 Nephi 21:22–23, 22:6–9; 2 Nephi 6:6–7, 10:7–9. It might be noted that at least one recent scholar, David Downs, has called this approach to the collection into question, though in my view unconvincingly. See Downs, The Offering of the Gentiles, 3–9.

10. Georgi, Remembering the Poor, 15.

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letter that outlined in the starkest terms the implications of the gospel as he understood it, dealing most carefully with the complicated question of the relations between Jews and Gentiles in light of the Messiah’s triumph over death. He addressed it, importantly, to the saints in Rome, in part because he hoped that it would thus serve to introduce his gospel to the most im-portant city in the West (through which he would be traveling on his way to Spain), but also in part because he hoped that it would have the widest possible circulation—so that it would be read by his critics and enemies in Jerusalem before he arrived there. Günther Bornkamm explains,

What [the letter to the Romans] in fact turns on are the questions connected with the apostle’s theology and its aims, which he was shortly to have to justify and stand up for in Jerusalem, and which were also to continue as the basis of his coming mission to the Gentiles: justification by faith alone, for Gentiles as well as Jews (chaps. 1–4), deliverance through Christ and his Spirit from the destructive powers of sin, death, and the Law (chaps. 5–8), the destiny of Israel, God’s chosen people, the hardening of its heart and eventual salva-tion (chaps. 9–11), and, finally, the apostle’s further mission to the ends of the earth and the praise of God on the lips of all the nations (chap. 15).11

The context of Paul’s writing the letter to the Romans effectively demanded that it contain the most systematic, careful theological expression yet pro-duced of Christianity’s central claims and message—at least as Paul un-derstood these. And at the heart of this most important of early Christian documents is a lengthy investigation of the nature of Christian hope.12

Of course, Paul had had things to say about hope before. It had in fact appeared as part of the theological triad of faith, hope, and love already in the earliest of Paul’s extant writings, his first letter to the Thessalonians,13 and it had been a relatively constant focus in Paul’s several exchanges with the saints in Corinth.14 Moreover, disciples who would soon be writing in his name would have more to say about hope after him.15 Hope would thus play an important role in the letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians,16 a

11. Günther Bornkamm, Paul, 93. See also, E. P. Sanders, Paul, 1–3.12. Some have even called the letter to the Roman’s Paul’s “letter of hope.” See John

Paul Heil, Romans—Paul’s Letter of Hope (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1987).13. See 1 Thessalonians 1:3; see also 2:19, 4:13, 5:8.14. See 1 Corinthians 9:10; 13:7, 13; 15:9; 2 Corinthians 1:7; 3:12; 8:5; 10:15.15. This is perhaps ironic, since Paul’s letter to the Romans did not forestall

what he feared in Jerusalem. His mission effectively ended after he produced the letter on hope. On Paul’s actual visit to Jerusalem and its aftermath, see Murphy-O’Connor, Paul, 341–71.

16. See Ephesians 1:18, 2:12, 4:4; Colossians 1:5, 23, 27.

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Epistle of Hope 7

somewhat lesser role in the pastoral epistles,17 and a theologically central role in the letter to the Hebrews.18 For my purposes here, however, I will be ignor-ing both what Paul had to say about hope before he wrote his letter to the Romans and what Paul’s disciples would say about hope after him.19 It is to the singular letter to the Romans that I will give my exclusive attention here.

There are three crucial discussions of hope in Paul’s letter to the Romans.20 The first is found in Romans 4:18–22, in the thick of Paul’s analysis of Abraham’s faith. The second is found in Romans 5:1–5, in which Paul addresses the con-cerns of the Roman congregation. The third is found in Romans 8:18–25, at the theological climax of the letter. I want to analyze each of these passages in some detail (the next four chapters will be given to close readings of these pas-sages). Before that, however, it seems necessary to say a few things about the theology of the letter to the Romans more generally. This will prove crucial to the interpretation of Paul’s several discussions of hope.

Paul rather constantly had to battle against a central misunderstanding of the gospel he preached. If the Law was deactivated or rendered inop-erative by the messianic event,21 as he claimed, is the Christian free to do whatever she wants? This somewhat general concern became a full-blown crisis in Corinth during the year or two before Paul wrote his letter to the Romans. The problems that arose there, and the strategy Paul employed in his correspondence with those involved, are most helpful for understand-ing the concerns that drove Paul to write to the Romans the way he did. Put in a nutshell, the people Paul hoped to assuage with his letter to the Romans may well have been pointing to the Corinthian crisis as they criti-cized Paul’s gospel. If Paul’s preaching could precipitate that kind of thing, then obviously, his critics likely thought, there was something wrong with his version of Christianity. The letter to the Romans therefore seems to have been an attempt to explain how Corinth could happen while nonethe-less defending the gospel as Paul had been preaching it.

“All things are lawful,” some of the Corinthian saints had written to Paul (1 Cor. 6:12; 10:23), and they seem to have meant it. From Paul’s

17. See 1 Timothy 1:1; Titus 1:2, 2:13, 3:7.18. See Hebrews 3:6; 6:11, 18–19; 7:19; 11:1.19. I will also ignore, incidentally, discussions of hope by other apostles in the

New Testament. This deserves to be mentioned since the first of Peter’s general letters is often, as is the letter to the Romans, called the “epistle of hope.”

20. There are several untheological references to hope in Romans 15 (see verses 4 and 13), as well as a more passing reference to hope in Romans 12 (see verse 12), but I will leave study of these passages for another occasion.

21. I follow here the interpretation of Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, 95–108.

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first letter to the Corinthians, one learns that the effect of Paul’s preach-ing among them had been in part to convince them that the deactivation of the Law meant that they were free, finally, to give uninhibited sway to their selfish, private, and often perverse fantasies. (The list of corruptions in Corinth Paul writes to correct begins, in fact, with incest!) The inevitable result of this misappropriation of Paul’s message was conflict. From the beginning to the end of Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthian saints, his concern was to overcome the petty divisions that had upset the con-gregation. With every member of the local congregation pursuing her own private desires, clashes were inevitable.22 Paul identifies two rather telling symptoms. First, disagreements among Christians in Corinth were severe enough to need arbitration, and the saints were appealing to non-Chris-tian authorities to settle their differences (see 6:1–8). Second, meetings in which the Lord’s Supper was celebrated had become an entirely private af-fair, with each member of the congregation attending only to her own meal (see 11:17–34). There was in Corinth anything but a corporate effort to pursue faithfulness to the Christ event. The coming of the Messiah meant for them only that they were selfishly free from constraint.

In Corinth, then, the preaching of Christ had led to an essential dis-orientation. The Law had prohibited selfish and perverse actions, but if the Law had been rendered inoperative, then selfish and perverse actions seemed to be the order of the day. The saints in Corinth saw themselves as without a guiding principle to determine what should be done and what should not be done. Addressing those who thus believed they were free to do whatever came into their heads, Paul found he had to make clear that the deactivation of the Law did not in fact leave Christians without a guiding principle for action. In place of the Law that had been fulfilled was now what Paul called “the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2): love.23 In Paul’s terse formulation, in which he quotes the Corinthians’ own formulation in order to mark its limit: “‘All things are lawful,’ you say, but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful,’ yes, but not all things build up. Don’t seek your own advantage, but one another’s” (1 Cor. 10:23–24). Or, as he put it also: “Knowledge,” particularly concerning the deactivation of the Law, “puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something doesn’t yet know as he ought to know; but anyone who loves God is known by him” (8:1–3). Knowledge, in fact, as Paul also explained, would eventu-

22. The Latter-day Saint is reminded of Doctrine and Covenants 1:16: “every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world.”

23. See the beautiful commentary on the Pauline law beyond the law in Theodore W. Jennings, Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

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ally “come to an end” while love “never ends” (13:8). The “loss” of the Law does not make way for selfish pursuits; rather, it finally frees the Christian from the self-centered project of working for her own salvation so that she can focus on lovingly building a Christian community worth living in.24

This was the response Paul made to the Corinthians in their misun-derstanding, and it was arguably enough—or the beginning of what would be enough—to solve the problems in Corinth.25 More, however, was need-ed to waylay the concerns of those who worried that Paul’s approach to Christianity would inevitably lead to the kinds of problems Corinth experi-enced. It would not be enough simply to explain that the deactivation of one guiding principle (the Law) gave way to another (love). It would be necessary to explain how the Christ event itself could be misinterpreted in the way the Corinthians misinterpreted it, and to show how that problem might be avoided. It was to this double task that the letter to the Romans was, on my interpretation, dedicated. More generally, the first half of the letter provided a kind of anthropology that aimed to adequately explain how Corinth could have happened. More narrowly, the several discussions of hope in the first half of the letter aimed to show how Corinth could have been avoided.

What needs to be said about the basic anthropology worked out over the course of the letter to the Romans? Its most salient features are worked out in the very first chapter:

It’s immediately26 within preaching, within the transfer of faith, that divine righteousness is revealed—as it’s written: “the one who’s righteous will live by faith”—while divine wrath is revealed from heaven against all lack of di-vinity, against all human unrighteousness, against all those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.27 What’s known of God is manifest among them,

24. Interestingly, parallel to Paul’s theological solution to the problems in Corinth was his practical solution—the attempt to begin to gather funds for “the poor” in Jerusalem from them. See Georgi, Remembering the Poor, 50.

25. On the difficulties in Corinth more generally, see Murphy-O’Connor, Paul, 252–322.26. I add “immediately” to Paul’s words to emphasize the contrast he draws

between the revelation of God’s righteousness within preaching and the revelation of God’s wrath from afar. I similarly add “while” to the text a few lines later in order to make the contrast starker.

27. John Murray claims that “the usage of the New Testament in respect of this term does not provide any support for the notion of ‘holding down’ or ‘suppressing.’ Most frequently it means to ‘hold fast,’ ‘possess,’ ‘retain.’ If this meaning is not suitable in this case, then the only other meaning which the usage would warrant is that of ‘restraining’ or ‘holding back.’” John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition, and Notes, 1:37. I grant Murray’s clarification, but I fail to see how “restraining” or “holding back” differs strongly from “holding down” or “suppressing” when it comes to the transfer of faith.

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because God has made it manifest to them: his eternal power and divine na-ture—things indiscernible since the creation of the world—have been under-stood and discerned through the things he’s made. So they’re without excuse. Although they knew God, they didn’t glorify him as God or give thanks to him; rather, they grew vain in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened. In a word, professing wisdom, they became fools. And they have economized28 God’s glory by making of it so many static images—things re-sembling mortal human beings or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God handed them over to the impurity they fantasize about,29 leav-ing them to dishonor their bodies among themselves—those who in the lusts of their heart replaced God’s truth with the lie and worshiped and served the creation in the place of the creator. (Rom. 1:17–25)

Obviously, there is much to be said about this passage.30

To begin, it should be noted that the passage opens by contrasting two distinct revelations. On the one hand, divine righteousness is immanently revealed in the work of preaching; on the other, divine wrath is transcen-dently revealed from heaven against human unrighteousness. With Adam Miller, I think it best “to assert that these two revelations are, in fact, one. . . . The difference between them is a question of appearance. Whether the revelation is seen as ‘good news’ or as ‘wrath’ depends on the disposition of the person to whom it appears.”31 There is, in other words, only one revela-tion, but it is experienced in two drastically distinct ways—as immanent or as transcendent, as God’s righteousness or as God’s anger—depending on one’s relationship to truth. Where truth is preached, where the “transfer of faith” takes place, the revelation is one of God’s righteousness. Where truth is suppressed in unrighteousness, the revelation is—or at least will eventu-ally be—one of God’s anger.

What is the “truth” that human beings suppress in unrighteousness? In a word, truth is “what’s known of God,” what “God has made . . . manifest,” namely, “his eternal power and divine nature.” It is God’s very nature that human beings suppress in their unrighteousness, obscuring his grace and his nearness by regarding him only as a distant and wrathful deity—as a violent sovereign who, from afar, wills only to punish and to make misera-

28. This word is usually rendered “changed.” I use “economized” to draw out the economic resonances of the Greek word, which has reference as much to economic exchange as to transformation.

29. I add the note about fantasizing in order to highlight Paul’s emphasis on the perverse desires of the unrighteous.

30. I have offered a preliminary reading of these verses in Joseph M. Spencer, “Towards a Pauline Theory of Gender: Rereading Romans 1:26-27,” 2–4.

31. Adam Miller, Badiou, Marion and St Paul: Immanent Grace, 24.

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ble.32 Why do human beings feel a need to suppress this truth? Because, as Paul explains, the truth is something clearly “understood and discerned through the things God’s made.” The createdness of the world is itself “in-discernible,” but it can nonetheless be readily discerned if one attends with care to what makes up the world. Indeed, the truth is so readily available according to Paul, that human beings are “without excuse.” Every failure to “glorify . . . God or give thanks to him” is rooted in willful refusal because “they know God.” The consequence is that the wicked “grow vain in their thinking, and their senseless hearts are darkened.” Those who pretend to be wise turn out to be fools—fools because they refuse to see what is right under their noses.

The truth, then, is immanent to the world, although the very structure of the world as human beings experience it veils the truth, rendering it in-discernible except as a kind of vague threat of an eventual cataclysm to come at the end of time. Thanks to human unrighteousness—and remember that Paul will go on to claim that “there’s no one who’s righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:10)—the truth is displaced into a beyond, being transformed in the process.33 Divine righteousness manifested in the nearness of the kingdom of God becomes divine wrath eventually to be made manifest from the mean-while-silent heavens. Human beings in all their unrighteousness construct their world in a way that will leave no room for God, at least until He finally decides to plunge the world into apocalyptic disaster.34 People need God to dwell in transcendence so that he does not get in the way of their desires, “the lusts of their heart.” As C. S. Lewis nicely puts it, “We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves,’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’”35 The truth of God’s love and grace is too much to bear because it might impose limits on one’s pursuit of pleasure, because it might speak ill of one’s impure fantasies.

Ironically, though, the world that human beings assemble in order to keep God out as long as possible can be constructed only of materials God

32. See James E. Faulconer, Romans 1: Notes and Reflections, 73–75.33. Incidentally, Paul here criticizes unbelievers precisely for what Friedrich

Nietzsche famously criticized believers: the displacement of goodness into the beyond. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, 133. Alain Badiou, incidentally, argues that Nietzsche’s hatred of Paul is symptomatic of an essential rivalry between them. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 60–62.

34. This is, incidentally, the thesis of the Gospel of John: The world is precisely what excludes God, but the Christ event marks the rupture of that world—for a moment.

35. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 31.

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has given to them. Hence, the fully secularized human world is a pastiche of created things, a weave of gifts that severally witness God’s love and grace but that collectively pretend that He is elsewhere and uninterested. Paul puts it this way: “they have economized God’s glory.” To make sense of this, it is worth again drawing briefly on C. S. Lewis, who portrays an “Intelligent Man” who journeys from hell to heaven only with the hope of bringing back something solid enough to make a fortune: “I’m not going on this trip for my health. As far as that goes I don’t think it would suit me up there. But if I can come back with some real commodities—anything at all that you could really bite or drink or sit on—why, at once you’d get a demand down in our town. I’d start a little business. I’d have something to sell.”36 This is the very structure of the world, of the world as economy. Everything on the market is a gift from God, but it has been transformed into a commodity so that profits accrued can be employed to pursue one’s private desires. In the place of God’s infinite and immanent glory—which has been displaced into the beyond—one finds only “so many static images,” so many idols.

The idol trade human beings thus establish, desperately hoping that the supposedly wrathful heavens remain silent for another generation to allow them to continue in their beloved fantasies, amounts to what Paul calls “the lie,” which replaces “God’s truth” as human beings worship “the creation in the place of the creator.” But the lie does not persist and the wrath of God, it turns out, does not wait. God has, according to Paul, al-ready “handed [the unrighteous] over to the impurity they fantasize about, leaving them to dishonor their bodies among themselves.” The event in which “divine wrath is revealed from heaven . . . against all human un-righteousness” thus happens when the prohibitions that give strength to perverse desires are lifted in response to popular demand. And the ironic result is, after a brief period of ecstatic enjoyment, disillusionment and depression. Human beings need prohibitions to enjoy their transgression. The “No!” of the taboo engenders the fantasies that make transgression genuinely enjoyable.37 Paul himself explains this point later in the letter to the Romans: “I wouldn’t have known what it is to lust if the law hadn’t said, ‘Thou shalt not lust!’” (Rom. 7:7). Or as one reader of Paul puts it, “the law is what gives life to desire.”38

Desire stripped of its force at the moment of its fulfillment, fantasies realized but only as utter boredom, transgression deprived of its trans-

36. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 13; emphasis in original.37. See Georges Bataille, Erotism:Death and Senusality, trans. Mary Dalwood

(San Francisco: City Lights, 1986). 38. Badiou, Saint Paul, 79.

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gressiveness as the banal order of the day—such is the wrathful revela-tion the unrighteous see in the messianic deactivation of the Law. Such is what the saints in Corinth largely saw in the announcement of the gospel. Recognizing that “all things are lawful,” they were overwhelmed by the possibility of pursuing every perverse fantasy they had ever entertained. But the consequent explosion of perverse activity and frenetic selfishness gave way—or would soon have given way, had Paul not intervened—to en-nui, which turns out to be the most torturous form of God’s wrath.39

So goes the basic anthropology Paul lays out in his letter to the Romans. Obviously, I have offered here a thumbnail sketch, focusing only on the first chapter of Paul’s long discussion. But I believe I have said enough to make the picture relatively clear. There is a perfect reciprocity between human unrighteousness (fallen humans being little more than bundles of trans-gressive fantasies and impure desires) and the economic order of the world (that order being little more than a market for trading idols). Every idol on offer is a polished mirror in which a transgressive human fantasy adores it-self, enjoying the image of transgression much more than the act. The idol, in the words of Jean-Luc Marion, “freezes in a figure that which vision aims at in a glance” and only thus “close[s] the horizon” to keep God’s suppos-edly wrathful transcendence out of the picture.40 Stabilizing the economy of the idol trade, and therefore automatizing the life of transgressive desire, is a set of prohibitions: the Law. But the Law has been rendered inoperative by the messianic event of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, and the result is that human beings, trapped in unrighteousness, flounder in ever more deeply affecting boredom. They do so, that is, unless they become righteous: unless they “are made righteous” (“justified,” as the word is usu-ally translated) by faith, delivered (“saved,” as the word is usually trans-lated) by love, and—this is the crucial point—anchored by hope.41

But what has Paul to say about hope?

39. As Adam Miller says: “Fantasy, fear, and boredom: the hallmarks of sin. Boredom: the hallmark of sin?” Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, 12. When Slavoj Žižek argues that Pauline life “beyond the law” has to be regarded as the life of the undead, utter monstrosity, it seems to me that he refuses to regard the possibility that Paul genuinely distinguishes between two forms of being without law. See Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 176–90.

40. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, 26.41. The profound connection between hope (Paul’s interest in Romans 4, 5, and

8) and human createdness (Paul’s interest in Romans 1) is outlined by Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 91–98.

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