A More Technical Description of My 2020-21 Carl F.H. Henry Residential Fellowship Project

An interview/profile of my project can be found at the Henry Center website (here)

Great news! I'm elated to share that I am a recipient of the 2020-21 Carl F.H. Henry Residential Fellowship for science and theology. As part of the grant funded by the John Templeton Foundation for the center's Creation Project, the plan is that I will spend the next academic year on the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School campus with three other fellows (Josh Jipp, Kevin Kinghorn, and Alexander Stewart) in a collaborate environment as each of us work on our individual projects. 
     My project is titled: Natural Desire as a Moral Index of What Is Good: What Paul and the Epicureans Have to Say about the Orders of Pleasure. Click the title of the project for a nice article and interview by Matthew Wiley and why I think a theory and theology of pleasure matters for the church today. 
     Here, I'm happy to give more technical details about my work for the coming year. The goal is to write a book under the more user-friendly and general audience title: Pleasure: Enjoying God and His Good Gifts in an Epicurean World (currently looking for a university press publisher). The book examines the issues of food consumption (1 Cor. 8:1–13; 10:23–30), sexual pleasure (6:12–20), and entertainment (15:12–58) in the ancient dialogue and debate between the Apostle Paul and the group which New Testament scholarship has called “the Corinthian strong” or “the Corinthian wise.” I make the case that the Corinthian slogans: “I am free to do anything” (6:12; 10:23), “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food” (6:13), “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die” (15:32), and other maxims find their origin in Epicurean hedonism. 
      Contrary to modern popular caricatures, the Epicureans were not gross hedonists. They practiced a type of moral naturalism where satisfying natural desires for food, sex, wine, and other bodily pleasures were seen as goods as long as they did not cause pain. Their brand of hedonism was self-controlled, pragmatic, and culturally influential. The Epicureans and Paul each provided moral instruction on how best to consume pleasurable goods in a way that led to eudaimonia, or human flourishing. In my analysis of Epicurean moral naturalism and Paul’s interaction with its major tenets, I examine not just key Pauline texts but also the treatises of Epicurus, Philodemus of Gadara, Lucretius of Rome, Diogenes of Oinoanda and other ancient ethical theorists. 
      Both Paul and the Epicureans affirm that the body matters, but Paul uniquely understood that bodily experience can be transformed by a believer’s participation in God (15:20–50). The believer’s union with Christ changes the temporal and futile condition of embodied existence, infuses it with meaning, and allows for eating, drinking, human intimacy, and other created goods to be expressions of faith and divine-human correspondence. Sharing in the triune life of God is an important theoretical and theological category for Paul because of its transformative effect on the participant. While Paul does believe that natural desire and aversion can function as an epistemological index for assessing what is good and can act as a means of moral valuation, he is also aware of how dangerously overpowering and idolatrous desire can become.
      This project is interdisciplinary. It brings a biblical theology and theory of pleasure in conversation with neurobiology, philosophy (ancient and modern), cognitive science, and experiential psychology to explore both the potential and limits of natural desires to gauge what is beneficial or harmful. Medical studies on trauma, for example, demonstrate that while the mind of victims might not recall the violence done to them, the body does remember. There is an epistemology of experience measured by the human body’s interactions with its environment which Christian theology cannot ignore and must take into account.
       However, embodied human experience can neither be the sole arbitrator of what is true and moral. Sin taints human existence and places limits on the extent of an experiential epistemology. I'm hoping to define those limits more precisely in my work.

       My work would be incomplete if it does not offer new biblical, theological, and spiritual insights which inform the practices of the Christian church. We live in a culture of consumption, and so did the churches of Paul. My suspicion is that most Christians consume pleasures much more like modern Epicureans than as believers who participate in the triune life of God. If the virtue of pleasure is no more than its moderate consumption and enjoyment, Christians today may not be wanton hedonists but our practices are no different from ancient Epicureans or contemporary ones. Pleasure by itself is incomplete. It sends the person on a search for something transcendent and eternal. That search ends when we discover our ultimate delight in the person and presence of Christ. I plan to offer some examples of healthy Christian practices that make pleasure a gift which leads us into the grace of God and helps us avoid harmful, idolatrous patterns of living. MJL. 

** Postscript: My home institutions North Park Theological Seminary and North Park University featured the news of the fellowship on the university website here. I'm indeed very grateful for their support and making it possible for me to take the next academic year as a sabbatical research leave. 

Now available at Mohr Siebeck: Moral Transformation in Greco-Roman Philosophy of Mind

I have to say that I'm super excited to see that my book Moral Transformation in Greco-Roman Philosophy of Mind was just made available for purchase on the Mohr Siebeck website (here). Now I'll just have to wait until the author copies arrive on my doorstep through international mail. Looking forward to hold a print copy in person! PTL! 

A Taxonomy of 6 Interactions Types as a Means of Detecting Greco-Roman Allusions in the New Testament (Part 2)

CLICK TO ENLARGE
Screen capture of p. 494 which summarizes the
6 types of interactions between rival sects in
Greco-Roman antiquity as a template for how
Paul might interact with the moral traditions of his day

This is blog post #2 following up on the first one which announced the forthcoming publication of Moral Transformation of Greco-Roman Philosophy of Mind: Mapping the Moral Milieu of Apostle Paul and His Diasporal Jewish Contemporaries (some time this month of April 2020). 
     I'm tackling the contributions in reverse order, from its secondary purpose to its main ones, because it is probably the 2ndary purpose of mapping the types of interactions between rival philosophical and religious sects in Greco-Roman antiquity which has the most direct relevance to New Testament interpretation. The encyclopedic knowledge of Roman Stoicism and Middle Platonism and their respective developments from the old Stoa and Plato stand alone as a valuable contribution to classical and NT studies, but their relevance is not as overt. I'll expand on this for another post.
    Here I want to focus on what Troel Engberg-Pedersen has called the "Transitional Period" of the 1st century B.C. to 2nd century A.D. as a time when there is shift of intellectual and cultural influence from Stoicism to Platonism. During this period, there was considerable interaction between the two philosophical schools where the adherents of each school engaged, rejected, redefined, and appropriated select concepts from their rivals without necessarily compromising their own sectarian identity or school allegiance. 
    In the last chapter of my book (see the screen capture above), I do something different than simply summarize the findings of my study. I re-examine select philosophical texts as examples of certain interaction types between Stoicism, Platonism, and sometimes Epicureanism. My goal is to map out a taxonomy of interaction types between rival sects/schools, and I posit that these six basic types of interactions can provide the basis for detecting Paul's own interactions with concepts and tenets of "rival" philosophical and religious traditions. While Paul (or more literate, more educated New Testament authors as the author of Hebrews or Acts) may not have employed all six types, the taxonomy provides a checklist of possibilities for how Paul or another New Testament author may have interacted with moral discourse of a specific sect/group, or more widely with a common ancient ethical tradition shared between several groups.
      Rather than rehearse the definitions of the six interactions types listed in the screen capture above (i.e., eclecticism, refutation, competitive appropriation, irenic appropriation, concession, and common ethical usage; click on the pic above for a basic definition of each), I am going to propose quickly possible places in the Pauline letter corpus where I believe some of the above interactions occurs: 

1. Refutation - Where there are indications of diatribe being used by Paul (e.g., Romans 3:1-9), Paul takes the proposition/argument of his interlocutor and point-by-point presents a counter-argument to the position which the interlocutor represents.
2. Competitive appropriation - Though this is still a controversial topic of debate in New Testament scholarship where some have strongly resisted reading Paul's gospel as a critique against empire (e.g., Seyoon Kim, John Barclay; cf. my review article ), nevertheless it remains an argued thesis by many (e.g., N.T. Wright, Richard Horsley, Warren Carter, John Dominic Crossan, Richard Cassidy, Scot McKnight, and others; here is a nice article summarizing the issues) that Paul's anti-imperial gospel appropriates key terms of the Empire - such as κύριος or εὐαγγέλιον -- and redefines them in distinctly Christian terms. 
3. Irenic appropriation - Though this is a thesis to be argued in a journal article that I would like to write up in the near future, and is partially discussed in my dissertation, one example of irenic appropriation I suggest in Paul's letters is his use of Stoic arguments in 1 Cor 6:12b ("But I will not be overpowered by anything") to counter an Epicurean ethic of pleasure ("Food for the belly, and the belly for food"). Paul is not a Stoic but he nevertheless agrees with Stoicism that what we eat and don't eat is not adiaphora but can become erroneous behavior if the activity is enslaving or addictive. It is a Stoic (counter-)argument that the elitist Corinthian wisdom group would have understood even if they themselves favored Epicurean practices.
4. Common ethical usage - I discuss this category more thoroughly in my monograph (ch. 12) and in a separate essay "Ancient Mentors and Moral Progress in Galen and Paul" for FS Klyne Snodgrass, but to summarize quickly here, Paul's imitation language is part of a more broadly shared tradition which Abraham Malherbe calls psychagogy and cuts across the sectarian divide. Paul, as I argue in my essay, offers his distinctly Christian understanding of spiritual mentorship and exemplum but nevertheless his language of imitation is part of a set of practices and traditions in moral instruction characteristic of his Greco-Roman cultural environment. 

These are just four of the six basic interactions which I believe Paul employs in his letters. There are likely more examples of the four, and there may be more types than the six, and Paul may not utilize all the types which I catalogue in my monograph (e.g., I doubt that Paul exercises any form of concession to Greco-Roman moral traditions). But having a basic taxonomy gives the biblical interpreter a starting point for critically identifying Greco-Roman allusions in the New Testament. These are meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive, and foundational but not exhaustive. MJL

Happy New Year! 2020 is the Year of Fresh Visions and Coming Announcements

Happy New Year! 2020 is the year of the rat, a year of creativity, clever thinking, energy, and optimism. I could use all of these coming months but not in a superstitious way ;)
    I have not done much with the blog because of an overwhelming amount of work: overload in teaching, heavy admin duties as chair of the biblical field at North Park, and some major research projects in the queue. I do plan on revising/relaunching the blog in the near future, along with relocating it, probably on wordpress.com. I also have some big announcements on writing projects that I hope to make soon within the month.
    Stay tuned! Until then, may the Lord give you a fresh vision and fresh fire for Him and His work this new year! MJL