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  • From: Eric Potts <eric AT revpotts.freeserve.co.uk>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Values Argumentation
  • Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 22:36:47 +0100


Jim Hester wrote:
Last week I wrote:

> It would be interesting to approach the question through the interpretive
> matrix of Perelman's Universal Audience and value sharing.

In his reply to this Stephen Finlan wrote:

> Can you summarize that in a bite-size?

The quick-and-dirty answer to Stephen's question is, "No!" But I can take a
shot at some generalizations that might throw light on what I mean.

Thank you for the useful summary of Perelman. The basic point makes sense to me.

Now, what does that concept have to do with the slave metaphor in Romans?
Paul did not know the Romans well and probably did not have current
knowledge of their situation. In that sense the exigence of Romans is not
primarily something going on in Rome but rather something Paul had learned
from the Corinthian situation that he hoped to avoid in visiting Rome.

Is this really so? True, Paul had no personal experience of the Roman situation,
but recent studies (Sanders et al) do suggest that Paul had a certain amount of
information about the churches there, perhaps acquired from Aquila and Priscilla
and other Roman Christians whom he knew. And this information seems to have
brought him straight into his lifelong struggle over the relationships between
Gentile and Jewish Christians. (Though it may well be that Paul latched on to
this issue and missed other matters which were of concern to Roman
Christians.)

Thus, despite all the arguments to the contrary, I still like Jewett's
"ambassadorial letter" thesis. Paul is an ambassador for Christ, whose
commission sends him to the Gentiles. Thus in constructing the universal
audience for the Roman letter, he almost certainly had the Gentiles in mind
and would appeal to "values" he shared with them. The value of freedom from
slavery would be socio-political and not theological in origin.

And yet so much of the argument in Romans appears to be directed to Jewish
Christians. For example, just how meaningful would the excursion into the
Abraham story have been to Gentiles?

Eric Potts




Eric Potts: Lowestoft, England.
Superintendent Minister, Lowestoft and East Suffolk Circuit of the Methodist Church in Great Britain.
http://www.bigfoot.com/~ericpotts





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