"You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close."
Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption is in many ways a meditation on proximity. In it, Stevenson, a defense lawyer for people on death row and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, AL, describes what he has learned about the U.S. criminal justice system by getting close to the people he has served, by getting to know their names, stories, and families. In explaining his decision to get close, he speaks about his grandmother, born in the 1880s and the daughter of slaves in Caroline County, VA. He recalls her telling him to stay close. “‘You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,’ she told me all the time.” Recalling how lost he initially felt at law school, he realized “Proximity to the condemned, to people unfairly judged; that was what guided me back to something that felt like home.”[1]
This sense of proximity to the lives of people who are on the underside of history is helpful when looking at the life of Paul. In this post, I will look at one of the ways that Paul appears to have used his compensation as a means of “getting close” to the people he was organizing into early Christian assemblies. In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul first names and then reverses Jesus’ teaching that those who proclaim the Gospel should get their living by the Gospel; in contrast, Paul insists that although it is his right to be paid, he offers the Gospel free of charge so as not to be a burden on the communities he is founding. To survive, Paul has taken up manual labor, a decision that appears to have been a significant step down from his prior socioeconomic status.
Free of Charge
As is often the case with Paul’s letters, the apostle’s description of how he gets close to the people and communities he is serving occurs within the broader context of a conflict, in this case one created by Corinthians’ interpretation of their entitlements and freedoms as followers of Christ.
In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul describes how some within the Corinthian community had been boasting that their newfound faith and wisdom in Christ allowed them to transcend all the prior constraints of the law, including its dietary restrictions. Paul concedes that while they may be entitled to eat whatever they want with whomever they want, he argues that they should waive their entitlement to do so out of respect for the members of the group who were still following dietary restrictions.[2] “Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.”
From this particular conflict, Paul elaborates a view of liberty as something that must be expressed or constrained depending on context. Freedom and entitlements must be balanced against love of neighbor; members of Christian communities must occasionally constrain one’s liberties when acting on them will impinge on one’s neighbor’s well being.[3]
Paul’s next illustration of this principle involves his personal compensation as an apostle. This is the point at which my ears perk up as suddenly Paul is describing how the early church thought about money, particularly with respect to the livelihood of the apostles.
Paul brings up how he supports himself a surprising number of times throughout his letters, and in 1 Corinthians 9 we hear him discussing it with respect to the Corinthians’ discomfort with his choice to not seek compensation.[4] He sees his choice as a continuation of the principle he laid out in 1 Corinthians 8, a non-use of an apostolic freedom and entitlement.
1st Corinthians 9 begins with the questions ‘Am I not free? Am I not an apostle?’ and picks up the contextualized understanding of liberty from the prior chapter. Paul argues that although he has many rights as an apostle, he has foregone these out of respect for the status and needs of the wider community. “Nevertheless, we have not made use of this right, but we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ.”
Paul then presents a series of illustrations and analogies that give us a glimpse into some of the apostolic rights that Paul was familiar with, and some of the ways the early church was thinking about compensation generally. “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?”[5] “Who at any time pays the expenses for doing military service?” Answer: the people from imposed taxes. Citing agricultural practices, Paul asks who plants a vineyard without getting to eat some of the fruit, and who tends flocks without getting a share of the milk. Finally, Paul cites the law of Moses, quoting ‘you shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain’ to argue that the apostles, the like said ox or workers who are ploughing and threshing, may reasonably do this work in the hopes of sharing in the crop. “If we have sown spiritual good among you, is it too much if we reap your material benefits?”[6] And yet, all of this argumentation is set up before his main point: namely, that while he clearly has the right to ask for compensation, he has chosen a different path by giving the Gospel away free of charge.
In one of the most important illustrations on the apostolic right to compensation, Paul cites the example of priests employed in temple service receiving a share in the altar. This example may have had particular importance as the Jerusalem assembly appears to have begun patterning itself increasingly on the Temple. This is immediately followed by one of the few instances in which Paul cites Jesus’ teaching. “In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.” [7]
Jesus’ Compensation Plan
On the whole, Paul references Jesus' earthly teachings and ministry only rarely; he appears to have been so transformed by his experience of the risen Christ that he rarely invokes Jesus’ earthly ministry, parables, or specific teachings. 1 Corinthians 9:13-14 stands out, therefore, as one of the few instances in which Paul is clearly aware of Jesus’ teaching that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by such, lines that later appear in both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.[8] Yet as was the case with all the prior illustrations, he brings up Jesus’ teaching in order to pointedly reverse it.
In A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmaid McCullough notes: “Characteristically, [Paul] takes a contrary line to the Lord. Jesus had said that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel’: that is, they deserve support from others. Paul emphasizes that he has not done this: he tells us that he has supported himself, although in what seems to be in an attempt to face down criticism, he proclaims his contradiction of Jesus’ practice as a privilege renounced rather than an obligation spurned.”[9]
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| Sometimes it's just fun to make fun of Joel Osteen. |
Jesus’ statement that “laborers deserve to be paid” occurs in Matthew 10:10-11 and Luke 10:7-8 as part of his sending followers out to proclaim the Gospel carrying nothing with them. “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff…” and “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road.”[10] Jesus is prescribing itinerancy and radical dependence on the hospitality of others for the disciples he is sending out, and it is within this context that he says they deserve some form of occasional payment and food.
Clearly, though, the expectation was the disciples would carry out their itinerant work in an extremely vulnerable situation. The exposure of two hitchhikers walking along the side of a road comes to mind. Indeed, Jesus’ requirement of both dependence and poverty for these itinerant disciples was such that even his teaching that “laborers deserve to be paid” was itself a reference to the Deuteronomic laws regulating payment of the poor and oppressed found in Deuteronomy 24:10-22.
This powerful section of Deuteronomy connects treatment of the poor and the oppressed with the Jewish people’s past as slaves in Egypt. “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this...” It is with the experience of slavery in the background, therefore, that Deuteronomy frames laws around payment for poor and needy workers. “You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy labourers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them; otherwise they might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt.”[11] The fact that Jesus cites Deuteronomic Law regarding payment for the poor and the oppressed when describing his rationale for the disciples’ payment tells us a great deal about the disciples’ dependence, vulnerability, and exposure.
As is oftentimes the case, Jesus’ earthly ministry is significantly more radical than Paul’s. He sent disciples out with nothing to engage in itinerant preaching of the Good News. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus connects payment to the Deuteronomic laws regulating compensation for poor and needy laborers, and elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew takes advantage of the gleaning rights of the poor described in this same chapter (Deuteronomy 24: 19-22) to feed the disciples.[12] This suggests that when Paul cited and then rejected Jesus’ specific teaching that laborers deserve to be paid, he was possibly rejecting a framework of even greater dependence than he could bear, something that I jokingly describe as Jesus’ “try not to be anxious” health insurance and “you can always forage” compensation plan.
Paul, therefore, both cites Jesus’ teaching but then rejects it, and he does so alongside a list of various other illustrations that may describe how the early church was thinking about compensation for the apostles. Paul has decided to go a different route by choosing to engage in manual labor to support himself as he spreads the Gospel.
Paul, Manual Labor, and Proximity to the Poor
Paul consistently speaks about manual labor as a kind of self humiliation, a fact which has led biblical scholars like Bruce Longnecker to conclude that Paul began his life in very different socioeconomic circumstances. Longnecker argues that “Paul’s attitude toward manual labor betrays a man who imagines it to be beneath his normal station in life.”[13] Abraham Malherbe notes, “Paul’s attitude toward his labor is reflected by the fact that he lists it in a series of hardships (1 Cor. 4:12) and that he regards it as service (1 Cor. 9.19) and an act of abasement (2 Cor. 11.7).”[14] Placing Paul’s descriptions of the hardship of manual labor, his having “grown weary from the work of our own hands”, alongside his rhetorical skills and the likelihood that he was a Roman citizen, has led Longnecker and other scholars to believe that Paul’s life prior to conversion was of a “middling economic profile.” This means he would have occupied the category of people in ancient Rome who enjoyed moderate surplus including “some merchants, some traders, some freedpersons, some artisans (especially those who employed others), and military veterans.”[15]
Post-conversion, however, Paul’s socioeconomic profile dropped significantly, even to the point of experiencing considerable hardship. Paul’s comments cited above in 1 Corinthians 4:11-12 and then the catalogue of difficulties described in 2 Corinthians 11:23-27 -- “in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked…” -- suggest Paul’s lowered socioeconomic status occasionally resulted in life-threatening periods of hardship, including periods of sustained hunger. Longnecker locates post-conversion Paul on new depths of the ancient Roman economic scale in which he was much closer to being just at, if not oftentimes below, the minimum subsistence level needed to sustain life.[16]
In other words, he had become poor. And not in the richly robed, pastoral version of poverty that we see portrayed in stained glass windows. Fascinatingly, a very real consequence of Paul’s conversion was the lowering of his socioeconomic status to that of Jesus and his disciples (Matt 8:20), the Jerusalem Church (Romans 15:26; Gal 2:10), and the people who made up the communities he founded (1 Cor: 26-27; 2 Cor 8:1), all of whom belonged to the “lower socioeconomic stratum and ‘the poor’ to varying degrees.[17]
Paul’s descent in socioeconomic status and his insistence on self-sufficiency through manual labor would later be echoed by monastics such as John Cassian and Benedict of Nursia in the fifth and sixth centuries, primarily in their discussions of the abjectio of the entering monks and the ideal of monastic autarky. This slight detour is important (to my mind, anyway) in that it shows how the Church sought to extract principles from Paul’s letters and apply them to institutional life.
Paul’s themes of descent and humbling would find particular resonance during the rise of Western monasticism amidst the tumult of the fourth century as the Roman Empire decayed all around. Late Antiquity scholar Peter Brown describes the attraction that monasticism may have held amidst the upheaval of the decline of the Roman Empire: “In [a monastery], free men became slaves and the wealthy became paupers. Everything that a Gallic farmer had good reason to dread in time of war and famine; everything that a nobleman made destitute by barbarian violence and civil war might experience: all the social ruin of Gaul was turned, as if by a magical inversion, into the basis of a perfect society…”[18] John Cassian, in particular, described a new monk’s stepping across the threshold of the monastery as abjectio, a lowering of status akin to God’s descent to humanity in the person of Jesus.
Inasmuch as manual labor was relegated to the realm of slaves and the poor in the Roman empire, it proved a key element of this lowering of status in monastic communities, both in the service of humility and the monastery’s economic self-sufficiency. Benedict’s 48th chapter of the Rule prescribes daily manual labor. Echoing Paul’s abhorrence for idleness in saying “idleness is the enemy of the soul”, Benedict states that monks “should be occupied at certain times in manual labor, and again at fixed hours in sacred reading” and later says this should go so far as doing the work of gathering the harvest themselves if and when necessary. Benedict references Paul when he states “For they are truly monks when they live by the labor of their hands, as did our Fathers and the Apostles.”
John Cassian, Benedict’s spiky predecessor, had gone further and viewed monastic communities’ commitment to self sufficiency through manual labor as a foil to wider society. Peter Brown notes, “In Cassian’s opinion, the monk was the exact opposite of the leisured rentier. He was the only productive member of society. He depended on himself to feed himself. Everyone else was like a beggar, living on the agape - the handouts - of others. Landowners collecting rents; emperors collecting taxes: compared with monks, they were all parasites, expecting to be fed by others.”[19]
Paul’s choice to engage in manual labor, his detestation of idleness, and his descent into poverty were echoed in the writings of monastics like Cassian and Benedict as they sought to build communities that more closely adhered to Jesus and Paul’s examples in the fifth and sixth centuries. Nevertheless, while John Cassian and Benedict’s Rule may echo Paul’s emphasis on manual labor as a means of both humbling one’s self and in the service of self sufficiency, the institutional framework they established envisioned these things as taking place within the walls of an established monastery. As I’ve discussed here, beyond symbolic acts of charity on particular feast days, Benedictine communities were remarkably cut off from the lives of the poor beyond the walls of the monastery. Many monastic communities retained a soft dualism in their overall outlook on the world, seeing life within the monastery as modeling heaven on earth and as a contrast to the chaotic, dangerous, and demonic life beyond. In stark contrast, Paul appears to have chosen manual labor as a means of proximity.
In the instances in which Paul describes why he chose to engage in manual labor, he occasionally describes his rationale in terms of proximity to the lives of the people in the Christian assemblies. “You remember our labour and toil, brothers and sisters; we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God.”[20] In a passage that is so significant that I will quote it in its entirety, Bruce Longnecker connects Paul’s lowering of socioeconomic status to the founding of communities of the poor. He states:
“It should not be overlooked that, since Paul saw care for the needy as an integral component of the gospel he proclaimed, his self-imposed economic demotion was motivated, partially but nonetheless surely, by a concern to help alleviate the needs of the poor in the Greco-Roman world through the establishment of communities of Jesus-followers across the Mediterranean basin. Those communities that Paul ‘lowered himself’ to serve were expected to ‘proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes,’ a proclamation that included caring for the economically vulnerable as a central feature. In order to work toward the realization of that vision, Paul willingly compromised his own economic well-being. Making himself economically more vulnerable seems to have resulted from conviction that Israel’s sovereign deity was at work in Jesus-groups, where the needs of economically vulnerable people were expected to be met as divine grace flowed through the lives of Jesus followers.”[20A]
So What?
This blog post began when I came across Diarmaid McCullough’s note on the way that Paul first cites and subsequently reverses Jesus’ teaching that “those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.” [21] As someone who is interested in how the Church has understood wealth, poverty, and issues pertaining to money generally, I was immediately struck that this occurred within the broader context of Paul’s defense about how he had chosen to support himself in 1 Corinthians 9. I am interested in both the biblical text themselves and then how these texts have been reinterpreted institutionally -- for instance, by founders of Western monasticism like John Cassian and Benedict of Nursia in the fifth and sixth centuries. Those monastic works are inspiring in their willingness to draw out general principles from scripture for the reordering of individual and community life.
And, as always, I'm struck by just how removed the institutional church is from the economic teachings of Jesus of the Gospels. Jesus demanded radical non-ownership and near complete dependence on the hospitality and welfare of others for his disciples, right down to foraging in fields if it came down to it. The fact that his teaching on payment is rooted in Deuteronomy 24 shows that Jesus imagined the disciples' itinerant preaching as leaving them poor and incredibly exposed. This is just one of the many instances when it becomes apparent that Jesus was probably not talking about establishing an institution like the church, and that we should be careful when drawing out congregational development lessons from statements Jesus made along his journey to crucifixion.
Thankfully, it appears that the early church’s thinking around compensation had shifted considerably from Jesus’ fairly terrifying approach even by the time that Paul was writing 1st Corinthians in 53-54 C.E. Paul’s use of multiple illustrations reveals something about the way the early church was coming to terms with how to compensate apostles and community leaders for their work. Paul argues that compensation was analogous to the temple tax, or to the tax imposed for the services of mercenary soldiers, or to the agricultural practice of allowing those who plant a vineyard to have a share of the fruit, images that align more closely with current congregational practices of salaries being drawn from the offerings of the whole congregation. And yet, Paul rejects these practices because he sees them as overly burdensome to the communities of Jesus followers that he has founded.
While Paul concedes that compensation is an apostolic right, he also insists on supporting himself through manual labor so as to give the Gospel free of charge. As the work of Bruce Longnecker highlights, this was a consequential decision, one by which Paul lost his relative economic stability and dropped on the economic scale. Multiple references throughout his letters suggest a sense of shock at the hardship of manual labor and the periods of hunger which were now his lot, though it’s also likely that these experiences were shared by most of the members of the early church. And this was part of the point. Paul’s decision appears to have been part of a broader strategy to live and proclaim the Gospel in greater proximity to those with whom he was serving.
Proximity carries profound costs, however, and that is the case both then and now. Once again, Bryan Stevenson’s description of the costs of proximity help me to put all of Paul’s complaints about the hardship he has endured into broader perspective.
Toward the end of Just Mercy, Stevenson recalls having met Rosa Parks along with several other Civil Rights leaders early on in his career, at a time when he had little except big visions for the future. “Ms. Parks leaned back, smiling. ‘Ooooh, honey, all that’s going to make you tired, tired, tired.’ We all laughed. I looked down, a little embarrassed. Then Ms. Carr leaned forward and put her finger in my face and talked to me just like my grandmother used to talk to me. She said, ‘That’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave.’”[22] Having spent the last week wrestling with Paul’s decision in 1 Corinthians 9, it is this bravery that remains with me, and I am left wondering what it was about his conversion to Christianity that led Paul down such a unique path.
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[1] Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Page 18.
[2] Malina, Social Science Commentary: Letters of Paul. See comments on 1 Corinthians 8.
[3] Would that these so-called Christians who refuse to wear masks read Paul!
[4] McCullough, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Page 113
[5] 1 Corinthians 9:5
[6] 1 Corinthians 9:8-11
[7] 1 Corinthians 9:13-14
[8] Matthew 10.10-11, Luke 10.7-8
[9] McCullough, Diarmaid. Three Thousand Years of Christianity. Page 113
[10] Matthew 10:9-10 and Luke 10:4 respectively
[11] Deuteronomy 24:14-15
[12] Matthew 12:1-8
[13] Longnecker, Bruce. Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World. Page 305
[14] Mahlberg, Abraham. From Paul and the thessalonians: The philosophic Tradition of Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), p. 56 n.83
[15] Longnecker, Bruce. Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World. Page 45
[16] Longnecker, Bruce. Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World. Pages 307-308. Specifically places him at ES5 and ES6 levels. See page 45 for chart of economic scale.
[17] Rhee, Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation. 35
[18] Brown, Peter. Eye of the Needle. Page 416.
[19] Brown, Peter. Eye of the Needle. Page 417
[20] 1 Thessalonians 2:8-9
[20A] Longnecker, Bruce. Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World. Page 309
[21] 1 Corinthians 9:13-14
[22] Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Page 293.
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