Paul vs. Missiology #1

Quite a while back, I gave some quotes from Eckhard J. Schnabel’s Early Christian Mission.  This massive, 1900+ page two volume work has been quite the ordeal to work through.  It’s required reading for a course I’ll be taking in July.  Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have come across it, or picked it up if I did.  A lot of the reading has been drudgery, as I skimmed long sections giving detailed background information on every city or travel route, Jesus, the Twelve, or Paul did or might have traveled through. 

Having waded through all of that, here in the last 300 or so pages, I’m getting to the good part.  What is coming out is that, at least in Schnabel’s view, the apostle Paul’s missiology didn’t always confirm to the ideals taught.

Here’s an example:

The gospel is ‘God’s power for salvation to everyone who believes’ (Rom. 1:16; cf. 1 Cor. 1:18, 24).  As a result, the decision that people make—their reaction to the gospel message—has eschatological and apocalyptic consequences.*  The encounter between the gospel and people reveals that people have their distinctive presuppositions about God (1 Cor. 1:22-25).  These presuppositions differentiate humankind as Jews and pagans. … Despite such cultural and religious differences between Jews and Gentiles, Paul reduces all people to a common denominator:  all people miss the reality of the one true God; neither pagans nor Jews can comprehend the reality of God as he has revealed himself in the cross of Jesus Christ.  For Jews the cross is a stumbling block, while for pagans it is folly.  But it is at the cross that God has revealed himself . . . .  And it is exactly this fact that neither Jews nor pagans can understand. . . . The cross of Jesus Christ, the center of Paul’s theology, cannot be integrated into the presuppositions of human reasoning or reflection, whether Jewish, Greek, or Roman.  People come to know God only when they abandon their preconceived notions about God, when they relinquish their criteria and their standards for divine behavior and action, when they let God be God. (pp. 1337-1338)

Here Schnabel shows how Paul contradicts two cherished missiological principles:
(1)  He lumps all people together, despite their cultural differences.  On one level at least – the level of our fallen humanity -- all people are the same.
(2)  The gospel cannot be understood in terms of pre-existing cultural assumptions. The cross, properly understood, is a scandal in every culture.

I don’t think that Schnabel is saying that it is a waste of time to try to understand culture.  Paul did understand the people he worked among, whether Jew or Gentile.  But most often we relate the gospel to a culture by contrast rather than by comparison.  The minute we start finding too many similarities with prevailing culture – whether its African tradition or a scientific worldview or post-modernism – we’ve probably stumbled over the stumbling block of the cross.

I’ve labeled this #1 with the intention of sharing some other examples.  We’ll see how it goes.

*Here Schnabel cites Eichholz [Die Theologie des Paulus im Umriss, 7th ed., 1991] 1972, 58-60.  For a critique of Rudolf Bultmann’s anthropological hermeneutic see ibid., 44-48.