The word “administration” is closer to the menaing than economy, methinks. And the address, as always with the epistles, is directed at a formation called “church” (household chruches at the time, “where two or three are gathered together in my name”), like cells… or as the Bible often refs, yeast, leavening.

Zisek says that Paul is a great Leninist; but seeing as how Lenin came on the scene much later, I’d at least reverse it to say, “Lenin was a good Paulist.” More to the point, however, this is not apples and oranges, but brontosaurs and ferrets — a dislocation in time, more profound than any dislocation of category.

Yoder wrote about Ephesians 2-3 way back in the day:

The work of God is the calling of a people, whether in the Old Covenant or the New. The church is then not simply the bearer of the message of reconciliation, in the way a newspaper or a telephone company can bear any message with which it is entrusted. Nor is the church simply the result of a message, as an alumni association is the product of a school or the crowd in a theater is the produc t of the reputation of the film. That men and women are called together to a new social wholeness is itself the work of God that gives meaning to history, from which both personal conversion (whereby individuals are called into this meaning) and missionary instrumentalities are derived.

Administration was bent to the purpose of making these Christian communities both visible and exemplary.

1 Timothy 1:4 sez: “nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. These promote controversies rather than God’s work–which is by faith.”

Here are the tranlsations of the same Greek word there, oikonomia, again suggesting the roles of management and administration in pursuit of mission. This oner brings to mind — as a former marxist — the endless and unproductive Stalin-Trotsky debates (the late Mark Jones lampooned them as the “Tralin-Stotsky debate”).

If I were looking for economics — IAW our modern perception of the word — I’d look first to the Hebrew Bible, where the connection between Sabbath and Jubilee is established, where it is taken up again and again in the prophetic books of that Bible, and that culminates in the Jubilary core of Jesus’ message, which repeatedly taps directly into that Jewish Jubilary aspiration and prophecy. Some exegetes now call this Sabbath Economics.

Also of interest re 1 Timothy and the other pastorals:

Norman Perrin summarises four reasons that have lead critical scholarship to regard the pastorals as inauthentic (The New Testament: An Introduction, pp. 264-5):

Vocabulary. While statistics are not always as meaningful as they may seem, of 848 words (excluding proper names) found in the Pastorals, 306 are not in the remainder of the Pauline corpus, even including the deutero-Pauline 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians. Of these 306 words, 175 do not occur elsewhere in the New Testament, while 211 are part of the general vocabulary of Christian writers of the second century. Indeed, the vocabulary of the Pastorals is closer to that of popular Hellenistic philosophy than it is to the vocabulary of Paul or the deutero-Pauline letters. Furthermore, the Pastorals use Pauline words ina non-Pauline sense: dikaios in Paul means “righteous” and here means “upright”; pistis, “faith,” has become “the body of Christian faith”; and so on.

Literary style. Paul writes a characteristically dynamic Greek, with dramatic arguments, emotional outbursts, and the introduction of real or imaginary opponents and partners in dialogue. The Pastorals are in a quiet meditative style, far more characteristic of Hebrews or 1 Peter, or even of literary Hellenistic Greek in general, than of the Corinthian correspondence or of Romans, to say nothing of Galatians.

The situation of the apostle implied in the letters. Paul’s situation as envisaged in the Pastorals can in no way be fitted into any reconstruction of Paul’s life and work as we know it from the other letters or can deduce it from the Acts of the Apostles. If Paul wrote these letters, then he must have been released from his first Roman imprisonment and have traveled in the West. But such meager tradition as we have seems to be more a deduction of what must have happened from his plans as detailed in Romans than a reflection of known historical reality.

The letters as reflecting the characteristics of emergent Catholocism. The arguments presented above are forceful, but a last consideration is overwhelming, namely that, together with 2 Peter, the Pastorals are of all the texts in the New Testament the most distinctive representatives of the emphases of emergent Catholocism. The apostle Paul could no more have written the Pastorals than the apostle Peter could have written 2 Peter.

FULL

Other points of interest in translations:

Greek for “sin” = hamartia
Greek for “debt” = opheileeema

In Aramaic the word for both is the same word. The Lord’s Prayer actually says “forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” That’s jubilary.

Also notable: In Aramaic, the language of Jesus, his term for the word that would later be called “father,” was abwoon, with a genderless root meaning somewhere between “great womb” or “blessed with children.” Here’s a good language program on that.

{“…Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’” (Mark 12:17)

Jesus was facing an attempt to entrap him in a debate about not paying taxes to The Enemy (Rome).

His reply: Caesar’s money? That’s part of Caesar’s system, not mine, and not God’s.}

I will be interested to read your understanding of God’s Economy as mentioned by Paul in Ephesians 3:9 and 1 Tim 1:4. Your brother in Christ Jesus

Greg Murry
MSG (USA Ret)

http://socialistworker.org/2009/07/09/inside-the-soldiers-resistance

There was an article in Tomgram I wanted to post on this same topic, but seems to have disappeared mysteriously in under 24 hours. I did not know that resistance was so widespread in the Vietnam war (again, asleep in small-town America, despite my own choice to resist). Just finished reading “Sex and War”, and I have questions: You spoke often in the book about creating a resistance movement in the military, and you speak of the military (or should I say military personnel) having a role in an envisioned better future. How can you create resistance in a military that, while conceptualized after Vietnam as a “professional” all-volunteer service with a high degree of “esprit de corps”; is becoming increasingly a professional choice of economic poverty? And, what roles do you see for military personnel in a more egalitarian, non-patriarchal society?

For anyone interested, it was published in the USA Today newspaper
and can be successfully ” Google “-ed.

Take Care Everyone,
Timothy R. Anderson

source: USA Today newspaper, page 13-A,
Monday, September 18, 2006.
written by Oliver ” Buzz” Thomas, of Tennessee.

” So why are so few of us taking the teachings of Jesus
seriously when it comes to this latest war ? Out here in the
heartland, only a handful of churches are even talking about it. ”

” The most plausible explanation is that we’re scared.
Some things, it seems, may trump religion. Fear is one of them.
If Christians are afraid, and who can blame them after the terrorist
attacks of 9/11/01 ? , it is not surprising that they’re
listening to other voices besides Jesus’s voice when it comes
to the war in Iraq. ”

” So, what should the three-fourths of Americans who identify
themselves as ‘Christian’ make of the Iraq War ? ”

” Americans of faith, it would seem, are obligated to do at least the
following:

^ Express concern for all suffering, including that of our
enemies. That means more than paying lip-service. As James,
the brother of Jesus, said, it does not suffice to tell a hungry
man ” God Bless You ! ” or ” We Will Pray For You ”

We must address his hunger.

The same can be said for the additional food, health care, police,
and countless other things that the Iraqi people need. ”

^ ” Recommit ourselves to the fundamental principles of
justice and human rights that have been a hallmark of our faith,
as well as of our nation. That means no more secret prisons, no
more secret trials, and no more torture. America cannot resort
to the worst practices of the Gulag ( where citizens were
declared ‘enemies of the state’ and whisked away to Siberian
work camps without the benefit of a fair trial or the assistance
of counsel ) and expect to be an accepted member of the world
community, much less a leader of it. ”

^ ” Repudiate the statements of any religious or political
leader who suggests that America has a special claim on God.
God may have a special claim on us, but we do NOT have a special
claim on God. Our beloved nation is a civil state, not a religious
one. Those running around claiming that we are “in the army of God”
or slapping up copies of the Ten Commandments on government buildings
threaten to turn us into the very sort of society we are
fighting against in this new war. ”

” ^ Force our elected officials to address the conditions
that have given rise to global terrorism in the first place.
Terrorism exists for a reason. One of those reasons is that
our society has been too unconcerned about the plight of
Muslim people around the world. ”

We need not and should not repudiate our long-standing
alliance with Israel to accomplish this. It’s simply that
our religious traditions teach us that to whom much is given,
much is required. The irony, of course, is that it
is in our own best interest to relieve Palestinian suffering.
The irony, of course, is that it is in our own best interest
to relieve Palestinian suffering. There is no better
recruiting ground for The Troops Of Terror than the
maddening monotony and grinding poverty of a refugee camp. ”

typed in by Timothy R. Anderson.

The various contortions by which patriarchal/state structures manage to warp gender-subversive, humble and pacifistic Christian doctrine into a cover for exactly the reverse (masculinism, arrogance and violence) are extraordinary and extraordinarily persistent…

That sums up a lot. Very well. You got a way with words, De. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve said here… with clarity.

Here is Dosteoevsky on the essence of that non-weaponized Jesus and his message:

Love all God’s Creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. And once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly, more and more every day. And you will at last come to love the whole world with an abiding, universal love.

Thanks, De, for seconding / validating what I have long felt about my own upbringing within a highly conservative Southern Baptist church – that existing to serve as a pathway to personal experience of the divine (part of what protestantism is supposed to be all about, I’m told) was somewhere way down on the priorities list, compared to serving as the social-structural underpinnings for white male supremacy. Boy, I could tell you some stories … don’t get me started. But I will say that if you happen to be in the Deep South and care to flip around a bit through the AM radio spectrum, you will find radio preachers (like Jimmy Swaggart’s boy) unabashedly professing actual support for torture, absent any scriptural justification that I can discern.

I went through a long period (+/- 15 years) of what I call “reactionary atheism” to all this, and only changed opinion and softened my stance due to certain unsought but undeniable spiritual awakenings. I think it’s important, for those of us who do find our center in various forms of spirituality, to remember how many people are driven to reactionary atheism in response to their negative experiences of religion, and to be patient and understanding of the hardened fronts people can put up to things like Christianity. Because those hardened fronts may have been very necessary at various points in their lives.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the revolutionary potential of Christianity in reforming not only the worst of western traditions that ‘Christendom’ has hoisted up, but the Church and the Community of Christ itself.

On the former, I agree with one of Stan’s articles concerning the relationship to other revolutionary and ethical movements to Christianity… In which these movements have largely relentlessly attacked the entire body of Christianity when it would have been enough to point out hypocrisies and fallacies in the current structures of the Church. As a result of this ban on recognizing the significant roles that Christians and Churches have played recently and historically in ethical movements, these other movements continue to alienate themselves from the western populace at large.

More could be said about the unneccessary struggles between these ethical traditions and Christians, including the exclusive scrutiny these traditions apply to Abrahamic faiths and not the histories of eastern or ecclectic traditions… But I’ll move onto my next point. [I will however say that it is a bit disheartening to see how the secular Right can join with the religious Right on issues like gun ownership and civil rights [even though they've largely botched both efforts] but the secular Left and Independents… especially in my generation… seem to continuously balk at joining the religious Left in important efforts.]

Being someone who’s talked to and ran with folks in all sort of secular and non-Abrahamic traditions and movements… Discordians, Buddhists, Sufis, Ecological Neo-Pagans, SubGeniuses, Libertarians, Anarcho-Syndicalists, Populist Agrarians, Communalists, Pacifists, Militants, Self-Sufficiency Ethusiasts, Survivalists, Neo-Luddites, Futurists, Chaos Magickians, Satanists, Neo-Stoics, Skeptics, Militant AntiFascists, etc. — [As if half of these have anything to do with the dichotomy... I think I'm listing them out of amazement of how many beautifully weird and wonderful people I've had the pleasure of knowing] I’ve come to the conclusion that barring some larger event that unites these various interests and sub-cultures a lot of them, unfortunately, will hold some negative connotation attached to greater Christianity [again, mistaking it for 'Christendom'].

So it seems that any challenge to Constaninized Christendom with the goal of preserving the potentials of Christianity will have to emerge from within Christianity itself… As the outside seems to largely be acting like a misguided spurned lover or a little kid.

Anyway, Stan, I wish you the best [and hope for the best] in your journey to reinvigorate, study and LIVE Christianity from the grassroots.

…I also hope another book will emerge from your new perspectives. Oh, you just don’t know much I hope! ^_^

The more often you go to church, the more you approve of torture. This is a troubling finding of a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Shouldn’t it be the opposite? After all, who would Jesus torture? Since Jesus wouldn’t even let Peter use a sword and defend him from arrest, it would seem that those who follow Jesus would strenuously oppose the violence of torture. But, not so in America today.

Instead, more than half of people who attend worship at least once a week, or 54%, said that using torture on suspected terrorists was “often” or “sometimes” justified. White evangelical Protestants were the church-going group most likely to approve of torture. By contrast, those who are unaffiliated with a religious organization and didn’t attend worship were most opposed to torture – only 42% of those people approved of using torture.

The author suggests (this is a very shallow short piece) that torture/suffering is seen as redemptive in some interpretations of the NT, and hence NT-dogmatic Christians may be less horrified by torture than others, seeing it as a potential path to redemption or salvation.

I read the whole scenario very differently, seeing the WASP conservative churches as the official state religion of the US, and membership in those churches as political rather than spiritual… here I guess we should pause and take note of the highly dangerous and counterproductive presence of aggressive nationalist-evangelism among troops in Iraq, which in combination with youth, arrogance and testosterone leads to stupidities like the Jesus Kill Mohammed stunt linked to earlier (thanks for the link to KtB, btw, a very lively site).

In other words, some of the WASP conservative churches in the US are more State and national institutions than religious ones, or more accurately are Constantinian in structure and purpose: a “faith” whose true object is to canonise state power and armed might, to subordinate the idea of God to the idea of Nation. We can find nearly identical structures in imperial British history — the “Muscular Christianity” movement which brought together masculinism, the fetishisation of strength and force, militaristic metaphors from Constantinian theology, and loyalty to the White-Mans-Burden narrative of empire. Note that today’s Promise Keepers are seen by some as descendants of the MC movement — dedicated to male supremacy and the cult of biceps, as one might say.

The various contortions by which patriarchal/state structures manage to warp gender-subversive, humble and pacifistic Christian doctrine into a cover for exactly the reverse (masculinism, arrogance and violence) are extraordinary and extraordinarily persistent…