Many Catholic/Protestant doctrinal differences have their roots in misreadings of the Apostle Paul. EWTN’s David Anders explains the relatively simple message of Paul and why modern ideas of Paul so often miss the mark.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I am Cy Kellett, your host, delighted to welcome Dr. David Anders, who you know from EWTN Called To Communion with Dr. David Anders, which airs each day on the EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network. And from time to time when I am listening, and I must say I am a listener and a fan of that show, it’s just a wonderful bit of radio. From time to time I’m listening and there seems to be some disagreement among Christians about the person Paul, the author of a great deal of the New Testament, a very, very important person in the history of Christianity and one that there is some dispute about. Thought we’d invite Dr. David Anders here to talk about Paul. Dr. Anders, thanks for being with us.
David Anders:
Hey, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Cy Kellett:
So, all right, all this dispute about Paul, I want to start with the most obvious thing which I learned from Dr. Richard Dawkins. Paul is the inventor of Christianity. Is that correct?
David Anders:
Paul didn’t know that there was such a thing called Christianity.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, well, all right. Where does Paul fit in all of this? Because here’s this extraordinary figure, and as most people know, not a follower of Christ during his earthly ministry. As a matter of fact, an opponent of Christ and the earliest church. Miraculously converted to the faith and then becomes, I suppose the only way to say it, is the great theologian of the earliest church. Is that correct?
David Anders:
Sure. Yeah, I think so. I’d like to go back and explain my comment that Paul didn’t know there was a thing called Christianity.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay, please do.
David Anders:
Because from St. Paul’s point of view, he was interested in bringing to fruition the prophetic promise that the God of Israel would be worshiped throughout the nations. This was the Messianic expectation. He had come to believe that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah who would occasion or bring about this long anticipated Jewish expectation that the kingdom of God would come the day of the Lord would arrive and the nations would accept the God of Israel. I mean that you find that in the prophets, you find it in Isaiah, you find it in Ezekiel and Jeremiah and all the rest of them. Paul simply saw himself as the vehicle chosen by God called in the way that say Jeremiah was called to be a herald to announce this great salvation. He had absolutely no consciousness whatsoever at all that he might be or could ever be construed as being founding some new religion over and against and apart from Judaism.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Wow.
David Anders:
That way of construing the issue, Paul is the founder of Christianity, is extremely anachronistic and it presupposes that there is a thing in the world called Christianity and that there’s a thing in the world called Judaism and that those categories are conceptually clear and apparent to somebody like Paul, all of which is just false. There’s actually quite a lot of scholarship on just this question. Now I’m going to give you a provocative title, all right? But don’t take me too literally here there is a, there’s a new rising School of Jewish Pauline Scholarship. These are Jew Jews, not Christians who studied Paul from a Jewish point of view. There’s a woman by the name of Pamela Eisenbaum, who has a book entitled, “Paul was not a Christian.” It is in defense of this particular thesis.
That doesn’t mean that Paul should somehow be alien to Christians today. I’m not saying that right. This idea that there is some kind of distinct religion called Christianity in the first century, and that Paul saw himself as leaving Judaism and joining another sect is not at all accurate to his way of thinking. And getting into that can be some of the subject of our discussion about Paul’s theological reflection because you talked about him as the great theologian.
Cy Kellett:
Well, yeah. I suppose then Paul, he is a Pharisee by his own account. That’s correct. Right?
David Anders:
Oh, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. He’s trained in a certain way of reading the scriptures and probably much more highly trained than the apostles. The original 12 apostles are in that. He brings that into his way of explaining who Christ is and what Christ has done. Is all of that fair to say?
David Anders:
Yes. Paul ultimately comes to the position that the pharisaical acts of Jesus of the Old Testament is wrong, and he makes the astonishing claim that without the spirit of God, without the spirit of Christ, that it is actually impossible to correctly understand the Old Testament. He says that there is a spirit that comes from God and then there’s the other one. That the rulers of this age had they known the mind of God, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory, but that these things are made known to us only by the spirit of Christ, but we have the mind of Christ. This is Corinthians I, chapter two. Yes, he was trained in rabbinic exegesis, and there’s some hints of that in his letters. He ultimately rejects rabbinic exegesis for a radically new hermeneutic, grounded in the messiahship of Jesus.
Cy Kellett:
He doesn’t hesitate to go to the synagogue to share. This is primarily what he does first of all in his, he goes to the synagogue in whatever city he comes to and intends to convince the folks there that this that we’ve been waiting for it. It’s come upon us now.
David Anders:
Who listened to him in the synagogues who actually heard his appeal and accepted his message?
Cy Kellett:
Timothy.
David Anders:
Well, yeah, yeah. And who was Timothy and who was Timothy? What was significant about Timothy? Was Timothy a Jew?
Cy Kellett:
I don’t remember. I think maybe half. Was he half Jewish or he was not a Jew? Yeah, he
David Anders:
Was an uncircumcised child of a Jewish mother and a pagan father.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay.
David Anders:
Paul later had him circumcised to avoid giving offense to the Jews. So the point of that story is that the people who listened to Paul and responded to his message in the synagogues were by and large what we call God. They were gentiles who had associated themselves with the Jewish community and to the reading of the Torah, but had not accepted circumcision and the entire yoke of the law, the whole burden of the law. They had not taken on full Jewish identity by accepting the whole mosaic code. When Paul preached the message, you don’t have to submit to circumcision in order to be counted members of the covenant, people of Israel, the God fearers in the synagogue were like, “Woo-hoo, sign me up, buddy.” They were ready made for that message. He says “Now because of Jesus, you don’t actually have to do that in order to be be heirs of Abraham and inheritors of the promise.”
Cy Kellett:
One thing I meant to ask you, and I didn’t ask you to start this, but I said he was not a follower of Jesus, and in fact, he was an opponent of Jesus and of the earliest church is any evidence that he ever, for example, heard Jesus preach himself?
David Anders:
I think that not. Paul makes a distinction in his letters in Corinthians I, between things that he had from the Lord, information that he had from the Lord, and information that he came to as a person of prudent judgment. When he refers to the information that he had from Lord, it seems to be that he is referring to oral traditions about Christ that he had learned from the church. There were no written gospels at the time of Paul’s ministry. The gospels were actually written after Paul. And so the only thing that he knew about Christ was either from the oral tradition of the church that had instructed him or by way of private revelation.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. All right. Now to come into the controversies of our time, there are controversies about Paul in every direction, but primarily Paul is significant at this time at this era of Christianity I would think because of the great disagreement over salvation that comes into the church at the time of the reformation, at the time of Martin Luther and then the other reformers. It’s noticeable to a Catholic, or at least it seems to me as a Catholic, that in these Protestant and Catholic back and forths, the texts of Paul are used by Protestants far more than the Gospels or any other letters. In other words, that the justification for Protestantism seems to be primarily, although not exclusively, but be primarily in Paul. Why is that?
David Anders:
Well, it has to do with the history of the interpretation of Paul from Augustine to the 16th century. Now up until the fourth century, the early fathers cited Paul, they quoted Paul, they revered Paul, but they did not look to Paul’s letter to the Romans or his letter to the Galatians and to his specific teaching about justification by faith rather than works of the law. They didn’t look to those texts and passages to frame their understanding of salvation. All right? The Lutheran scholar, Chris [inaudible 00:10:51] makes this observation. He says, “Up to the time of Augustine, the church was by and large under the impression that Paul dealt with those issues with which he actually dealt.” Namely what happens to the law that is the Torah, the law of Moses when the Messiah has come, and what are the ramifications of the Messiah’s arrival for the relation between Jews and Gentiles?
In other words, when Paul writes about the law and grace and faith in Romans and Galatians, his primary interest is what does this have to do with the inclusion of all these God fearers, with all these gentiles into the people of God? It was not a general question about the nature of salvation. It was a specific question about whether the mosaic code should be imposed on this particular demographic. Once that question got settled, I mean the Council of Jerusalem settled it in the first century. By the second century, Catholicism is a largely gentile religion. The question of the relevance of the law to Christian life was pretty much a done deal. Nobody considered that anymore. It had already been settled. It had already been concluded. These texts of St. Paul about the law and grace basically ceased to be relevant in Christian life. That was the perception.
The aspects of Paul that predominated in Patristic exegesis was rather Corinthians I 2 that I already mentioned to you for second Corinthians three, which is the letter kills in the spirit gives life and origin. The great Alexandrian saw in the principle of allegorical exegesis. Paul’s teaching in Corinthians about Christ as the second Adam was picked up by Irenaeus and framed his understanding of salvation. Irenaeus said that what we lost in Adam, we regain in Christ, namely to be in the likeness and image of God. There are Pauline themes in Patristic literature, but not the law in grace that had been kind of set aside as well we’ve been there, done that. We’ve answered that question.
What happens with Augustine who’s writing in the late fourth and early fifth centuries is Augustine is really the first theologian in the Catholic tradition to go back and look at the letter of Romans and the letter to the Galatians and the teaching on justification by faith and to view them not simply as a local question about Gentile converts in the Jewish law, but a global question about, as a picture of our salvation of everyone’s salvation as we are reconciled to God. Augustine introduces a reading of Paul whereby justification becomes the primary metaphor for understanding how we relate to God. Until Augustine, that was not the case. Now, Augustine’s conclusion is that for Paul and for Christians, the way we’re reconciled to God is through faith. God pours his love into our heart and changes us and makes us morally righteous.
He literally makes us to be just, and the Latin word [foreign language 00:13:58] means to make just. That’s the way the church read St. Paul from Augustine all the way up to Martin Luther. What Luther introduced was a radical idea, a novel idea that no one had ever heard of before, which is that God makes the believer to be just not by infusing Christ’s righteousness, not by changing his character, but rather by imputing the righteousness of Jesus. So for Luther, God would look at a sinful person and say, I’ll just treat you as if you were righteous but for Jesus’s sake, that’s called imputed righteousness. That’s what Luther invents. Now, Luther thinks that he finds that teaching in St. Paul, but he only does so by radically misreading this teaching about the relationship of grace and the law.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. What an extraordinary story. I guess the main thing though then is to ask you what it was that Paul was doing because you gave a general description of it. This is Paul wrestling with a local problem local, both in time and space that gets resolved. When Paul says that we’re justified by faith and not by works of the law, what is he actually talking about?
David Anders:
Yeah, so he’s saying that Jew and Gentile alike become members of Christ’s family, God’s family, Abraham’s descendants not in virtue of keeping the mosaic code circumcision and the dietary laws and the new moons and the Sabbaths, but in virtue of their faith in Christ. That’s what makes them members of God’s family. The fruit of that, the gift of that faith is the outpouring of God’s spirit. The doctrine of the spirit’s critical for Paul and with it the infusion of charity. Paul will say in Romans chapter 2, he says, is this not the Jew who’s won outwardly with the circumcision done in the flesh by the hands of men? He is a Jew who’s a Jew inwardly in that circumcision that is done in the heart by the spirit, and that is the man, the man whose heart has been changed, who keeps the [foreign language 00:16:16], that’s Greek for the righteous requirements of the law or the spirit of law, if you will, or the heart of the law, the essence of the matter.
It’s not these dietary laws and circumcision, it’s love and justice and faithfulness that are poured into our hearts, infused into our hearts by the gift of the spirit that comes through faith. While the mosaic law is of no relevance to us in the Gentile church anymore, this infusion of righteousness, this sharing in Christ’s spirit, this coming to have the mind of Christ, that’s what becomes the key issue. Paul writes in Philippians II, “Having you this mind that was in Christ Jesus, who though being in very nature, God didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself humble and took on the likeness of his servant.” That’s the character of life that the Christian is to imitate through this gift of the spirit. That’s what brings salvation to us. That’s what unites us to God, and that comes through faith.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. It’s beautiful the way you tell it, but with all respect to Paul, I want to suggest something to you that part of the problem might be Paul himself in that he’s hard to understand. He doesn’t write in a way that you don’t run into the problems of understanding reading Luke or even say the first letter of St. Peter or the second letter of St. Peter. Part of the problem with why we might have struggle over Paul today, even given all that you’ve said, is that it’s actually really hard to follow Paul.
David Anders:
Well, yeah, because he’s writing occasional texts and not systematic theology. One of the major errors of the reformation, I think, is to treat the Bible as if it’s a coherent textbook of theology, doctrine or morality, as if the purpose of scripture was to give us a coherent account of the Christian life. That’s not the point of scripture. Nothing in the Bible says that about itself. Certainly the form of the thing belies the assumption. You pick up the Bible and it’s a disparate book, a various genre cobbled together over thousands of years by different people without a clear form of organization to it. One could treat it quite ad hoc, if you will. The Catholic position has always been that the Bible is more or less unintelligible apart from the structure of Catholic tradition that provides that coherence.
Cy Kellett:
That’s what we need in order to grasp Paul. You’re not a fool if you open up the letter to the Romans and go, “I don’t know what he’s doing here.”
David Anders:
Let me suggest a hermeneutical key to Paul. All right? This sounds really obvious except that Luther flat out denied it. Okay? Here’s what I think the hermeneutical key is to Paul. Read Jesus. Read Jesus, read the gospels. Really get your head around Christ’s project. What I mean by that is the pervasive question that comes up over and over and over again in Jesus is that Jesus will throw something in your face like the man with the withered hand in the synagogue. Is it right to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil, to heal a man or to let him die?
Why do your disciples eat with unwashed hands? He’s constantly provoking the morays and traditions of his day in the interest of demonstrating the priority of human dignity. The constant criticism that Christ has with his contemporaries is you guys tithe mint, dill, and cumin. You follow the legal prescriptions of the mosaic code, but you neglect the weightier matters of the law like love and faithfulness and justice in mercy, and over and over and over again in Jesus’ teaching, we encounter this theme that it is right for a man to divorce his wife for any reason? Jesus says “No.” The Pharisees say, “Well, but the law says he can.” Jesus’ answer is, “Well, yeah, but the law’s wrong. The law was a concession to human weakness. The law was a relativization, if you will, a diminution of the divine plan, which was that male and female fidelity, and that a husband would love his wife and not cast her aside.”
“Hey, should we stone this woman caught in adultery?” Jesus says, “No.” “Well, but the law says we should stone her.” “Okay, well let you who has no sin cast the first stone.” Jesus constantly relativizes the mosaic law. He’s not denying it, but he is relativizing it and deflecting away from its harsher commandments in the interests of human dignity, the dignity of women, the dignity of the man with the withered hand, the dignity of the tax collector, the dignity of the poor. Everything about Jesus’s project is to try to elicit that human sympathy, that recognition that there is a human being in front of me with dignity, who deserves compassion regardless of their social status, regardless of their cleanliness, their ritual purity, regardless of what morays or taboos they may have violated. I have to treat every human being as a child of God. That’s the constant refrain in Jesus’ language.
What Paul does, in my judgment, all of Paul’s epistles is just a deepening exploration of that one dominical theme. That one theme that we learned from Jesus over and over and over again is the very same theme in Paul elaborated with the sophisticated theological system. Where Jesus relativizes the law and says, “Yeah, we’re not going to stone people. We’re not going to cast away our wives. We’re not going to refuse to heal people out of deference to the Sabbath.” What Paul does, he says, “Yes, yes, yes. Here’s how that works. Do you remember allegory?” Then he shows you how to allegorize the texts of the Old Testament. Right? Jesus relativizes the ritual. Paul takes that ritual and now applies it as a symbol for the Christian life. I myself am being poured out as a drink offering [inaudible 00:22:38]. He takes the ritual of the temple. He takes the ritual of a temple and now applies it immediately to the Christian life, offer your bodies as living sacrifices. This is your spiritual act of worship.
There’s this deep, deep continuity between the writing of St. Paul and the message and the person of Jesus Christ. Now, the reason I say that’s radical is that Luther’s position was that the teaching of Jesus was impossible. That taking at face value, the teaching of Jesus should scare the you know what out of you because it’s impossible to perform. That Paul would come along with the kind of answer to the anxiety allegedly induced by taking Christ at his word. For Luther, he called this the contrast between the law and the gospel. Every imperative command he saw as law, gospel was this promise of free grace. Luther implicitly places a kind of barrier, a kind of division between the message of Paul and the straightforward teaching of Jesus. Now, where this gets really blown up is in modern dispensational Protestantism, fundamentalist Protestantism that actually teaches that the gospels are irrelevant to Christian life because they apply to a different dispensation.
That’s a radical form of the Lutheran thesis. My claim here, and this is in really accord with the best biblical scholarship, is that far from saying two different things, Paul and Jesus are saying exactly the same thing. Yet, Paul is just elaborating it with this theological apparatus that relies on a detailed teaching of the spirit and an allegoration of the Old Testament texts, and then a spiritualization of Old Testament sacrifice.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay.
David Anders:
Does that make sense to you? Are you following me?
Cy Kellett:
Yes, I am following you, and I’ve actually heard what you’ve said about, I’ve heard people challenge us Catholics about the gospels in just that way about P and I didn’t know what it was referring to, but this idea that there’s a kind of difference between the what’s taught in the gospels or what Jesus himself teaches in the gospels and what Paul says. That’s a striking division. In a certain sense that takes Jesus out of the picture.
David Anders:
Christianity, takes him out of Christianity.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
David Anders:
I want to ask you a provocative question. We’ll put you on the spot here.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
David Anders:
How many times does Jesus tell us positively to believe some abstract theological doctrine, like a proposition about the nature of God or salvation and just say, “You must believe this.” How often does Jesus do that?
Cy Kellett:
I can’t think of, I mean, he faith in himself as a person, belief in himself as a person. But I can’t think of an abstract. I’m not thinking of any.
David Anders:
Never. Jesus never presents us with a creedle formula to which he demands assent. Never does that.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. Yeah.
David Anders:
In fact, the sort of positive affirmations of you must believe this, this, and this, it really is not part of Christ’s message. I’m not saying those things are unimportant. I’m just saying you don’t get them in the gospels. What you find in Jesus’s pedagogical method is something radically different. What does Jesus do? Well, March chapter 4 tells us that Jesus never spoke a word to the people without speaking in parables. Everything he taught publicly was in the form of a parable. That’s not because parables are simple moral tales, easy to understand. On the contrary, Matthew 13 tells us that Jesus spoke in parables precisely because they’re hard to understand. He did not want to be easily understood. He wanted to be provocative. He wanted to be thought-provoking, didn’t want to be easily understood. How else did Jesus teach? Well, I already mentioned one way. He teached by sort of demonstrative provocation, walk into a synagogue, tell a man with a withered hand to stand up, turn to the crowd and say, “Do I heal him or not? Tell me what to do.”
Now, did Jesus teach when he did that? Yes, but he didn’t teach discursively like, “Okay, we’re going to put the blackboard up. I’m going to show you the Baltimore catechism.” He didn’t teach like that. Yeah. What he did was he revealed to the people their own hardness of heart, he showed them that they were unwilling to make a stand in favor of human dignity by forcing them to give an answer and they refused to do so. Text tells us that he was angered and sorrowful in his heart cause of their hardness of heart. Jesus behaves, he would deliberately transgress social morays. He would eat with tax collectors and sinners. He would eat with prostitutes. He would spend time with lepers. He taught his disciples to eat with unwashed hands.
All of these things that Christ did were designed to provoke a response, to generate an insight, to unveil a truth about people’s character. Why? Because he was trying to reorient them in the world, not to an abstract belief system, but to the actual dignity of human beings and an imitation of the love of God who causes the rain to fall on the righteous and the wicked. The teaching of Jesus is deeply, deeply, deeply oriented towards the reformation of character. And that’s where this profound continuity with St. Paul comes in, right? The whole point of the gospel for Paul is that we should have the mind of Christ.
Now, the whole ministry of Jesus is about trying to elicit, provoke, invite, tease, and cajole this transformation of consciousness so that we live these sacrificial lives in favor of the poor and the weak and the outcast. Paul says, “That’s the goal.” The goal is to have this mind in you that was in Christ Jesus.
Cy Kellett:
When you see Paul that way, you have a firmer ground on which to understand, for example, the famous wedding reading on love, the constant kind of calling people away from bickering, any kind of division. He’s a strangely both provocative and at the same time irenic figure, Paul.
David Anders:
Yeah. Well, I mean, to my judgment, I think the Pauline ethic is pretty simple. I think it boils down to two things. It’s treat others better than yourself. Live charitably in community, reconciling differences, and don’t sleep around.
Cy Kellett:
That’s it.
David Anders:
I think that’s the whole Pauline ethic.
Cy Kellett:
Isn’t that something? Well, that nobody’s listening to him on the don’t sleep around one nowadays. Well, I shouldn’t say nobody.
David Anders:
We’re not listening to him on the get along part either.
Cy Kellett:
I think that’s right.
David Anders:
We’re hopelessly ideologically divided. Even within the church, and we were at each other’s throats hammer and tongs. We are totally not obeying this exhortation from the apostle.
Cy Kellett:
That’s what I was thinking. This is a dumb generalization, but when you said, it made me think, “Well, outside the church, the sleeping around one doesn’t go, but inside the church, we just won’t get along with one another.” In neither places is he being honored by being followed. That’s probably true in large part, that’s why Paul is teaching these things is because they are so difficult for the human person to persevere in that we give up constantly on, we think the we’re past, oh, I’m past being at peace with that person, or we give into to sexual temptations or whatever the temptations are. We’re weak, frail things. I suppose that’s why Paul is teaching these things.
David Anders:
So I think Paul and Jesus is teaching is so relevant today because at least the way I read Christ for Christ, the big issue is that cultural morays, religious expectations, the traditions of my fathers are a barrier to me actually recognizing the dignity of my neighbor. Jesus constantly critiques that. Paul similarly identifies ideological and political factionalism as a major obstacle to unity in the church and in the world. That’s why Paul can write in Corinthians I. One guy says, “I follow Peter.” One says, “I follow Paul.” One says, “I follow [inaudible 00:31:36].” That kind of factionalism in the church, and we might add in society, is totally unacceptable. Whether it’s your religious ideology, which is what Jesus critiques, Paul too, or your political ideology or whatever it might be, it was so tempting to think that the way I’m going to spread the gospel or do good in the world is I’m going to bring my massive wisdom to bear and tell everybody else what they should believe and do. That’s how I’m going to save the world.
That’s, I think, what Jesus and Paul critique. Rather charity, genuine love for another human being will transgress boundaries. I’ll put myself out in ways that make me uncomfortable and that maybe my group and my set don’t approve of. That’s what Jesus did. We are just as ideologically divided as we ever have been. Let me tell you one thing, and that we probably going to run out of time soon, but is a, there’s a psychologist named Keith Stanovich who wrote a book called The Bias That Divides Us. My Side Bias, I think is the title of the book, the Bias That Divides Us, and it’s about this pervasive human tendency that we all have to consider people in my group to be the holy, the righteous, the good, the rich, the smart, the wonderful and you guys over there on the other side are bad.
All right? There’s a couple things that come out in there that’s really interesting. One of them is Stanovich recounts an experiment, a social science experiment. Here’s the experiment. You take a room of subjects and you show them a video, and here’s the video. The video is a political protest where the protestors are kind of roughed up by the police. Here’s the trick in the experiment, you tell the audience, you tell your subjects, you tell one group, “These are pro-life protestors that are being beat up by the cops.” You tell the other group, “These are guys that are protesting the military’s ban on gays in the military, and they’re being beat up by the cops.” The video itself does not indicate who’s getting roughed up by the cops. One group you tell, these are pro-life protestors. One group you tell these are pro-gay protestors.
Then you ask the question, “Were the police fair in their use of force? Was this justifiable force of the protestors?” Here’s the really interesting conclusion. Political conservatives will say the police were absolutely fair if they believed the protestors were liberals, but if they believe the protestors were conservatives that say, “Oh, the police were totally not fair.” You get the opposite result from the liberals. If you ask a liberal, “Were the police fair?” “Oh yeah, they’re absolutely fair if they’re beating up on pro-life people. Absolutely unfair if beating up on the pro-gays in the military people.” The circumstance, I mean, it was the same scene shown to both groups. All that goes to show is, I don’t care if you’re a conservative or a liberal, I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, whatever, we all have this bias.
Jonathan Height, I believe in his book, The Righteous Mind cites a similar experiment where you can take grammar school kids, Cy you probably did this growing up. I did this growing up. You ever play flag football? And the coach says, okay, half of you guys take your shirts off. You guys are the skins. You guys are the shirts. You divide the team up into the shirts and the scans. You can take some completely arbitrary scheme like that, divide a group of kids into two groups, have them compete against one another. The group assignments are totally random, totally random, and the teams will begin to coalesce into a tribal identity, and they are more likely to ascribe evil character and low intelligence to the other group.
Cy Kellett:
Isn’t that something?
David Anders:
There’s zero statistical difference between the groups. The only difference is I was randomly assigned to blue versus red, and so now I think all red people are bad. It’s deeply woven. It’s ingrained into the fabric of our DNA to do this.
Cy Kellett:
This temptation or this, I don’t even know if it’s a temptation or what it is. This is what Paul is, well, first of all, Paul, as a disciple of Jesus, as a follower of Jesus who did this perfectly, Paul in his way, apostolically is trying to convince people that the spirit of God has the power to liberate you from this or to liberate us from this.
David Anders:
Yes. For Paul, the tribal division of his day that he’s concerned with is Jew and Gentile, that that’s the division.
Cy Kellett:
Gotcha.
David Anders:
The model of reconciliation is the self emulation of Jesus, like Christ was willing to be crucified and killed to serve those that he would otherwise have been in enmity with. This is what inspired Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement, was that he would offer himself and the lives of his community in a non-violent protest in the hopes of loving their opponents into treating them charitably. That’s the spirit of the gospel.
Cy Kellett:
Yes, and it’s the spirit, not the word that saves us. It’s that spirit that has the power to save. I really appreciate this time. I’ll just ask you this before I have to let you go. Do you have a sense that Catholics and Protestants can do this, that we can, because certainly there are, there’s important theological differences in all that, but it’s also true that we’re two different teams now in a way. By the grace of God, do you see signs that maybe even in the interpretation of Paul, were moving we away from the team sport and moving more towards that unified, irenic peaceful community that Paul wanted?
David Anders:
What brought me to the Catholic church was Protestant scholarship on Paul, among other things. I began to question the Protestant interpretation of Paul that I’d grown up with. And what I turned to biblical scholarship, to really clarify my understanding, I found that the best biblical scholarship on Paul in the 20th century by Protestants had come to the conclusion that Luther was wrong. Luther had misread Paul. It was a whole movement called the New Perspectives on Paul, mostly Protestant scholars, now some Jewish ones too that opened my eyes to a different way of reading the apostle. That led me to the Catholic church. Most Catholics and most Protestants are not reading academic works on Paul. Right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
David Anders:
The divisions in their own families are much more visceral than that. I have a friend whose college roommate became a missionary. He became a Greek Orthodox, a Russian Orthodox, eastern Orthodox of some kind, and became a missionary in Eastern Europe in a traditionally orthodox country. He was describing to my buddy the sort of long seated antagonism that members of this orthodox community had towards the Catholic church. His response was, they just don’t know why they hate Catholics so much was like, oh yeah. It was such a visceral, culturally inherited tribalistic identity that the right thing to do is to hate Catholics. I think that’s true in religious domain. Today what the social scientists tell us is that religious divisions today are nothing compared to the political ideological divisions. It used to be the dating websites would tell you that religion was the deal breaker. Two people, if they could get along in everything, but they disagreed on religion, they wouldn’t date. That’s no longer the case. Religion is no longer the deal breaker in online dating. It’s politics. Who’d you vote for? Who’d you vote for?
Not just who you vote for, but how do you construe the various divisive social issues of the day? To my way of thinking, there are a lot of voices, Christian and not who are trying to call out this dynamic and say, “Look, this is going to destroy us.” I mentioned one think he’s Jewish, and I believe an atheist Jonathan Height who’s a politically liberal, but he is extremely attuned to the danger that we’re of our republic basically ripping itself in half through ideological division, more on the right side of somebody like Jordan Peterson is always going on about ideology and the danger to civil. People on the left and the right are both identifying this, but I don’t see that that awareness has actually affected the quality of civil discourse. I certainly know individuals, I know people personally who will unfriending you on Facebook if you vote the wrong way, or if you say the wrong thing or hold the wrong political opinion.
I don’t fault one side or the other. I see this from Catholics. I see this from non-Catholics, I see it from conservatives. I see it from liberals. I may a bit be a bit cynical about this, but I think that the people who are willing to be crucified for love of their ideological enemies, they’re saints. Right?
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
David Anders:
They’re rare. This is not a new thing in human history. And so I’m not looking for some sort of mass reconciliation. I think that the call is the one that’s always been there, which is the universal call to holiness the call for Catholics to take the charge and lead in charity, not in doctrinaire moralistic self-righteousness, but like Dr. King, the willingness to lay down their lives and their pride and their ideologies and their need to be right in order to show others that we genuinely care about you as a human being, regardless of what you think.
Cy Kellett:
And that sounds like exactly what St. Paul would’ve approved of. That sounds like the Christian message that St. Paul himself was in letter after letter, and I’m sure in meeting after meeting all of his life, trying to convey. Dr. David Anders, thank you very much. I really appreciate you taking the time with us.
David Anders:
Thank you, Cy. I enjoyed it.
Cy Kellett:
As I said, I’m a big fan of Call to Communion with Dr. David Anders, and among the people I know, I’ve met a lot of people who go, I know that show is really good. Well, if you haven’t had a chance to listen to it, please do listen to it. Thank you for listening to this podcast. We appreciate that you do. If you want to communicate with us, just shoot us an email at focus@catholic.com. focus@catholic.com is our website. If you’d like to support us financially, it costs a couple bucks to do this. You can do that by going to givecatholic.com. Givecatholic.com. If you would, I’ll ask you one again before we go. If you give us that five stars and maybe a few nice words that helps to grow the podcast as well, and we like it, we think it’s worth growing. If you do too, help us do that. Thank you very much for that. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time god willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.
David Anders:
You know, you said that we got the don’t sleep around part down inside the church. I’m not so sure about that.
Cy Kellett:
No, that’s the first generalization my mind went to. But as I was saying it, I was thinking the same thing. No, that’s not right.