Being Real: The Apostle Paul's Hardship Narratives and the Stories We Tell Today (Philip Plyming) - A Review
BEING REAL: The Apostle Paul’s Hardship Narratives and the Stories We Tell Today. London, UK: SCM Press, 2023. ix + 149 pages.
People
either love or hate Paul or so it seems. There are many people, usually not
scholars, who believe Paul messed up the religion of Jesus. They believe this
is true even though Paul's letters predate the Gospels, perhaps by decades
(depending on how you date things). While Paul tells us little about the life
of Jesus, these letters were written as close to the life of Jesus as any
source we have. While I recognize there are problems with some of what Paul
espouses—though sometimes we can duck the question by attributing certain letters
to someone else (as with the Pastorals)—there is much to learn from Paul. That
is because his letters are often very personal. That is because they are
letters, not essays, sermons, or biographies. In recent years there has been
quite a bit of rethinking concerning Paul and his message, including the overemphasis
placed on the role that justification by faith plays in his theology.
On a personal note, the Pauline
letters I have found to be the most helpful and intriguing are the Corinthian
letters. There are some oddities in these letters, but they reflect a pastor’s attempt
to address real concerns that afflicted this diverse congregation. I've often
suggested that if you want to restore the New Testament church to its golden
age, beware of the lesson of the Corinthian church. The truth is, there is much
about these two letters that speak to our current situation.
In Being Real: The Apostle
Paul's Hardship Narratives and the Stories We Tell Today, Philip Plyming,
Dean of Durham Cathedral and former Warden of Cranmer Hall, Durham University,
connects Paul's life experience and the letters he writes to the Corinthians to
the ways we tell stories today, especially through social media. He divides the
book into two parts. Part One explores the situation at Corinth and its impact
on the development of the congregation. If you know little about Corinth, this
is an excellent introduction. He also tells us about how Paul used his own
story of hardship, something he doesn't do elsewhere, to counteract a certain
perspective present in the congregation, a perspective that reflects the
social-cultural context of the Corinthian congregation. Plyming writes that as
he read the two Corinthian letters over the years, he has "really
appreciated Paul's honesty and openness." He points out how Paul was
willing to acknowledge the challenges he faced in living the Christian life. He
offers Paul’s willingness to be open about these challenges in contrast to his
observation of a contemporary "pressure to emphasize the positive aspects
of our Christian experience" (p. 3). I know the feeling; we do feel
pressured to give a positive vibe. What Paul's letters do is show us a way of
telling hard stories. The question is why does Paul devote so much attention to
hardship in these particular letters?
Plyming begins his exploration of
Paul’s attempt to be real in Chapter 1, which is titled "The Story of
Corinth: A City of Success." In this chapter, Plyming shares how this
ancient city had been destroyed and then rebuilt by the Romans, such that it
was a cosmopolitan economic powerhouse. He compares it to modern Shanghai. When
Paul started the congregation in Corinth, the city was at its zenith. It was
home to upwardly mobile people who prized success. Therefore, showing any signs
of weakness was not acceptable. It was a city of social fluidity, where a
person (mostly males) could rise from slavery to power. As you might imagine, it
was also a place of great "status anxiety." The higher you might rise
on the social ladder the more conscious you would be of your status and the
possibility of falling from your new perch. This ability to climb the social
ladder was accompanied by a culture of "self-promotion." We can still
see signs of self-promotion in the streets of ancient Corinth. What we see from
the archaeological finds is that if you rose to the heights, you wanted to
display your achievements. Thus, what we see here is a valuation of strength. To
quote Vince Lombardi, winning is everything. One of the paths to glory is
through rhetoric, such that the residents of this city valued not only what was
said, but how it was said. Style was as important as content in public speaking,
and venues were present that allowed residents and visitors to display their
prowess at speaking. What Paul encountered as he visited Corinth was a city
that valued success over everything else. The question then has to do with how
that affected the life of the Corinthian church.
Chapter 2 is titled "Walking
in a Worldly Way." After laying out the cultural context in which the
Corinthian church existed, in this chapter Plyming shares how these cultural
values bled into congregational life. To understand the dynamics of this
congregation’s existence, we need to understand that the situation in Corinth involved
a radical social experiment unique to the era. That experiment involved taking
down barriers of separation between male and female, Jew and Gentile, rich and
poor, slave and free. This occurred because Paul preached a message of radical
welcome. This led to the creation of a rather diverse Christian community. It
is clear that Paul wasn't a proponent of the homogeneous principle that the
church growth people offered up in the last several decades. Nowhere else in
that city did such a diverse community gather. Since this was something unique,
problems quickly emerged leading to division, power plays, and more. Standing
at the center of all of this was the larger community's valuation of success.
It appears that Paul didn't measure up. In the estimation of many, Paul
appeared to be rather weak in his speaking and body. Because he didn’t measure
up to their expectations, they opened themselves to super-apostles, people who
demonstrated power and success. Again, Plyming warns us against looking down on
this congregation because many of the same realities present there are present in
our society and churches today.
So how does Paul respond? In
Chapter 3, Plyming shows how Paul uses his own stories of suffering as a way of
countering the narrative of success. Paul tells the Corinthians that while he
suffered, God was present amid that suffering. He could have focused on his
successes, but that would have only fed the Corinthian mode of storytelling. We
find throughout these letters that Paul contrasts his hardship stories with the
Corinthian embrace of success and power. He speaks of physical, emotional, and
social suffering. Despite the suffering, Paul offered a word of hope because he
found God’s grace to be sufficient. Again, the question is why Paul tells these
stories, after all, they are not told to gain applause because the Corinthians
don't value weakness. Plyming ultimately answers the question in Chapter 4,
which speaks of "God's Cross-Shaped Work." Whereas the Corinthians
took pride in their power, Paul pointed to the cross and found God at work in
the cross. Paul sees the power of God on display in the cross, such that he
identifies himself with the cross. He suggests that God's presence was on
display in unusual places, such as among the slaves and others on the margins.
Thus, "For Paul the cross of Christ is not just an event concerning Jesus
that he tells people about. For Paul the cross is also something he models in
his own speaking." (p. 63).
In Chapter 5, Plyming pivots from
Corinth to the present. He addresses the way we tell stories, recognizing that
"stories tell us where we have come from, and what we value today"
(p. 75). Much of what we read in the rest of the book deals with the way we
present ourselves on social media. Plyming confesses he's not an expert in the
area of social media, so he draws on others who have more expertise. What makes
this part of the book so intriguing is the way he connects Paul's words to the
Corinthians with our context. We tell lots of different stories on social media,
most of which are not focused on significant things. Thus, "social media
enables us to share our everyday stories (however apparently trivial) with a
wide audience" (p. 77). It is important to note that this is not an
anti-social media book. Rather, Plyming invites us to look at the way we tell
stories and the pressures we face to tell positive stories about ourselves. The
thing about it is that though we are largely in control of how our stories are
told we face pressures to focus on the positive. There is a lot of connective
tissue with the Corinthian situation. So, we use social media to ingratiate
ourselves with our readers or we might present ourselves in ways to make others
like us. We also might try to intimidate others. Our stories might not cause
fear, but they can be used to induce awe. Look at me and my family, are we not
better than you? Of course, we can’t forget about self-promotion, which was a
prominent issue in Corinth (as an author I feel the pressure to self-promote
because if I don't promote myself, who will?). We might use social media for
what Plyming calls "exemplification." That is, we might use social
media to invite others to follow our example. Put negatively, that would
involve "virtue-signaling." Preachers know this from experience—it's
Saturday, a problematic event has taken place, and the “virtue-signaling”
preacher proclaims that if we don’t throw out our sermon and focus on this
latest crisis, the people in the church should walk out on us. Finally, there
is supplication or asking for help. Of these, the most common are ingratiation
and self-promotion. I can understand how this might be true, for I have been
implicated in several categories. Ultimately, often we feel the pressure to
look happy and feel great! What happens when we do this is we create a
differentiation between the real me and the online me. That's because we live
in a culture that values the positive. But how might we tell our stories as
Christians if we live as most of us do in the world of social media? To what
degree does our cultural context influence the way we tell the Christian story?
Might we exhibit a certain vulnerability (be careful in revealing information
about your family members)?
Having laid out the current context
of storytelling in Chapter 5, when we turn to Chapter 6 we find Plyming inviting
us to view our stories through the lens of the cross of Christ, much as Paul
did. Now the point is not to ask what Paul would do in a situation, but rather
to heed his call to look at things through the cross. Here we're invited to
embrace weakness and to use that when appropriate. The point here is really to
look at life in such a way that weakness is not seen as contrary to Christian
life. In other words, here is an invitation to let go of a need for
self-sufficiency and reputation and instead offer encouragement without telling
stories about our successes in life. As Chapter 7 declares: "Being Real:
Our Shared Story of the Cross." Social media can assist in this effort through
shared stories. We can be co-storytellers. In Paul's case, Plyming writes that
"as Paul narrates his hardship, he is co-telling the story of the cross of
Christ. He uses images and language of weakness that connect the attentive
listener to the original crucifixion of Jesus" (p. 113). The invitation to
us is also to be attentive to unlikely places where God is at work. That leads
to being honest about our experience of the Christian life. It's not always a
"bed of roses." Not everything is fine. Christians do suffer. Of
course, we need wisdom and discernment in how we tell our stories. Plyming
reminds us that Paul tells these kinds of stories in the Corinthian letters but
not elsewhere, suggesting that there is a time and place for everything. In
suggesting that we should think about being co-storytellers with the cross as
our partner, he suggests that we might see weakness, reputation, and
encouragement differently from the larger culture.
In his conclusion, Plyming
acknowledges his own privilege, such that he writes about weakness and hardship
from the privileged status of being an educated white male with a level of
economic security. He also addresses the possibility of assuming that all
suffering should be embraced and endured. That is not the point here. Suffering
is not good and Paul himself spoke of liberation from oppression. This is not
meant to assume that God will always be at work in suffering, but rather to
reflect on ways God is present in weakness. Thus, how we tell our stories says
something about our view of God's presence.
Comments