Living the Story: Implicit Epistemology in Paul's Letters

Abstract

<p>Although Paul is sometimes depicted as anti-rational, he actually assumes in his letters that human reason, with the aid of the Spirit, can achieve genuine religious knowledge. The specific kind of reason which Paul assumes will be fruitful has a distinctly narrative shape. Paul's theological knowledge is structured as a story within which he and his converts interpret their own lives. Ethical reasoning is a matter of "emplotting" oneself within this theological narrative and asking what fate lies ahead in the story for one who acts in certain ways. When we look more closely at the letter to the Galatians we find that Paul is primarily arguing there for a re-configuration of Israel's theological narrative. The Apostle understands new events as further episodes in the one over-arching story. This means that, just as later chapters in a book can surprise readers and force them to reconsider what they read early on, so new experiences can open up interpretive "gaps" in Israel's theological story and force its adherents to construe the traditional narrative in new ways. Paul argues that both the cross of Christ and the Galatians' experience of the Spirit force just this kind of re-interpretation of the story, and his central argument in Galatians is an attempt to show that his own construal of the narrative is more coherent than those of his competitors. This kind of narrative, hermeneutical logic in Paul's argument not only explains some of the Apostle's notoriously difficult exegesis of Israel's scriptures, but it may also offer a useful epistemological model for contemporary Christian theology.</p>