Library of New Testament Studies 544. New York: T&T Clark, 2015.
I typically try to review more recent books, particularly within the last two years of publication or, ideally, right around publication. But unfortunately, really awesome studies tend to fall between the cracks because they didn’t get the publicity or attention they deserved at the right time. A lot of the times this has nothing to do with the publisher, the author, or anything else except the very topic of the work. If it isn’t within some type of trend at the moment, it will likely fade away. I’m not saying this is the case with the present work being reviewed, but I have found Turley’s work cited infrequently, whereas I think he has made very valuable contributions to the topic of ritual theory and NT studies, so I decided to put up a review of it, especially as I would like to review another NT ritual theory study, and they should be put in close proximity.
In The Ritualized Revelation of the Messianic Age, Steven Richard Turley delivers an interesting approach to rituals in Pauline literature by way of ritual study and theory, providing a new way of looking at the socio-functional approaches made towards the apostle. The title is a revised version of Turley’s (hereafter T) 2013 Durham University PhD dissertation under John Barclay, Stephen Barton, and Charlotte Hardman. For T this focus is applied to ritual washings (baptism) and ritual meals (Eucharist and table fellowship), applied to various issues with respect to the reception of the Spirit, baptism, the significance of early Christian meals, the forming of identity in Christ and, ultimately, how these practices—these rituals—serve to ritualize or actualize the realization of the eschatological reality in Christ. T’s study is therefore quite interesting as this approach allows the nuances and unspoken vocabulary of ritual to color in the lines of the early community of Christ-believers attributing to their practices (rituals) real truth. Being almost a decade old, T’s study is outdated in some regards—mostly due to recent bibliographic additions and sources he may have interacted with since that time—but his work remains relevant and important—unique in its own regard, even—given the way he applies this exegetical approach all throughout the book. This review will not be able to illuminate these things, but T’s study is one which makes numerous unexpected and insightful stops along the way to its intended goal, if this makes sense. For this reviewer, at least, T leaves a trail of profound and fascinating points on almost every page, and therefore stands as a worthy study for more than just its central thesis.
T’s structure initially feels odd. In Part I, containing chapter one, T tackles ritual studies and its employment in Pauline scholarship, providing for us a succinct but informative overview of ritual theory and study. In Part II, one finds chapter two, on ritual washing in Galatians; chapter three, on baptism, ethics, and “the eschatological body” in 1 Corinthians 6; chapter four, on baptism and the Holy Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12; and chapter five, as a brief conclusion. In Part III, chapter six covers the Antiochene Meals of Galatians 2—perhaps my favorite chapter where my comments on his study above are best demonstrated—and chapter seven covers Christ, the ‘Logos of the Lord’s Supper’ in 1 Corinthians 8-10. In chapters eight and nine we have the conclusions of Paul and ritual meals and ultimate conclusions, respectively. So the use of chapters five and eight may throw the reader off, as it simply does not conform to traditional formatting, but it’s not that big of a deal. Otherwise, it is a well-structured, well-written, and well-studied work which is very valuable for any Greek NT and Pauline student or scholar. The purpose of his study, amongst other things, is that, as T sees it, “Socio-functional approaches to Pauline rituals are…particularly susceptible to imprecise and anachronistic redescriptions” (p. 11), and, in a way, his study resituates us in another view towards Pauline rituals.
In chapter one T provides a quick overview of both ritual theory and the application of the study to Pauline literature as well as other socio-cultural approaches. Following Edmund Leach, T adds that interpreting ritual is “in effect, trying to discover the rules of grammar and syntax of an unknown language” (p. 4), sees the ekklesia (“church”) and shared space in which the early church assemblies would be gathered as taking on the form of sacred and sanctuary space, following Okland (p. 11). T emphasizes bodily focus, as well as participationist notions in Paul, so that humanity participates in Adam, sharing bodies having the same “matter” or “stuff” than him, and now those who are in Christ participate in him for the same reason, being the pneuma that they share with him in faith (p. 18). T’s bringing together of participationist soteriology and its overtures with ecclesiology and identity formation are important to his study, and the reader will see how he fleshes this out throughout the study.
Moving to chapter two T investigates the idea of baptism within the contexts of space and time. Investigating various approaches to Paul’s uses and meanings of baptism, T comments that “It would…be difficult to hear Paul’s reference to all those who were baptized εἰς Χριστὸν [in(to) Christ] as anything less than an echo of that ritual pronouncement” (p. 35), here referring to Galatians 3:26 and how the statement by Pauline would refer the audience back to when they were baptized, when they knew of and had spoken over their ritual Christ’s Lordship, and how important this would be—placing emphasis on the importance of ritual. He notes both Jewish and Greek conceptions of time primarily structured around significant events (p. 43) as well as how the Greek πίστις (“faith”) in Gal. 3:25-26 is interpreted not only as a metonymy of the gospel but also as a specific point in time, as well as a soteriological reality, “a temporal reality, a sphere, as it were, that is not reducible to the private psychological processes of the individual” but, rather, as “an objective reality in which one participates or communes in a manner that frees one from the imprisonment of the ‘present evil age’” (p. 45). T argues that we have here a clear distinction between this “present evil age” and the “new creation” in Christ, thus leading us to see baptism “presented by Paul as an apocalyptic ritual that generates performatively a spatio-temporal dualism of ‘this world’ and ‘the world to come’/‘the new creation’ located in the space of the baptized body” (p. 47), looking towards the “dawning of the messianic age” (p. 48).
In chapter three T echoes these same ideas for Corinthians (p. 60), adds the welcomed comment that the indicative and imperative in Paul are intertwined rather than separate or unrelated (p. 63), and notes that “Th perform ritual is necessarily to embody and thus participate in the meaning communicated by its symbols” (p. 64). This helps to situate the approach he uses in this chapter as he sees the baptism ritual in Corinth as providing a state of existence acquired “in Christ” (p. 68) and that where they have been delivered, like Galatians, from this unrighteous age and into the realm for the coming kingdom of God; “The status of the Corinthians in relation to Christ and the kingdom of God, namely, their ‘sanctification’ and ‘justification,’ was established ritually through the act of acceptance inherent in their participation in the ritual washing” (p. 69), a point he sharpens, and the implications of it, with discussing the presence of the Spirit in the midst of the ekklesia (p. 70), the believers sharing this same Spirit like Christ’s resurrected body (p. 72), and how the ideas of washing, sacrifice, etc. all work together in Paul’s epistle (p. 73). In this chapter, therefore, T continues the same methodology applied to Galatians yet expanded more into the areas of the believer’s body, the Body of Christ, and the baptism ritual.
Chapter four neatly continues the ideas T has been laying down, speaking of the significance of baptism and pneuma together along with medical backgrounds of the use of the word and concept (pp. 77-79), the idea of metaphors and Paul’s use here (pp. 79-83), and how impactful this is with various metaphors of ritual washings and how this overlaps with baptism in Paul (pp. 84-96). The cultic connotations applied to the metaphor, for T, are profound and operate to, when mixed with other metaphorical uses, envision Paul’s idea of the baptism rite “one in where the body of the initiate is revealed as a microcosmic replication, a representation, of the eschatological drama that defined the identity of the drama of the community” and that it was “in fact the reconstitution of space and time around the fulfillment of the Ezekiel 36 promise,” while simultaneously demarcating these two ages (p. 96). In chapter five T pulls together his thoughts. He concludes, on baptism, that “Because of the inherent periodicity of ritualized activity, baptism was able to communicate through the bodies of the baptized a highly visible unambiguous temporal demarcation” between these ages, being able to appeal to their baptism in the past to argue for their current status as sons of Gods (p. 99).
In chapter six T moves into Part III where he focuses on meals, and meals as mirroring baptism in its ritual fluency potential but focused more on the ekklesia and identity formation, mostly on a corporate level. This chapter is T’s densest, I believe, and thus simultaneously the most detracting from his primary views, but still related. Throughout the chapter T interacts with Gal. 2 and the situation regarding the Antioch Incident, and that, for him, he “understand[s] Paul’s concern in 2.11-14 in distinctly eschatological terms”, viewing the gospel for Paul as “a radical reorientation of the world around the Christ-event” (p. 111). This establishes his approach to the situation, which is highly persuasive, in that the meal displayed the “truth of the Gospel” and that, therefore, limiting, severing, or disturbing fellowship between Jew and Gentile is attacking the very truth of the gospel as “the shared meal is integral to the truthfulness of the gospel for its participants, in that it provides the very heuristic and obligatory mechanisms by which the gospel is set apart as absolute and unquestionable as over against all other truth claims…To violate the meal is to violate the sanctity of the gospel. Hence Peter stood condemned” (p. 114). What is at stake in the meal, therefore, is who belongs to the gospel.
What follows is a sustained discussion of both Gal. 2:14-16 (pp. 117-122) as well as the importance of communities sharing meals and for establishing identity as a community (p. 123), demonstrating how severe Peter’s hypocrisy really was (p. 124), which, to this reviewer, justifies the severe rebuke of Peter by Paul, rather than being a matter of mere dietary commandments, a matter T seems to see as part of the issue, and is certainly the majority scholarly consensus. The emphasis on the Mosaic Law is ambiguously laid out by T here, and it seems his main contention is that the Mosaic Law, and associated rituals or lifestyle(s), would orient the Jew towards the Law whereas the believer is oriented towards Christ, but he emphasizes the importance of bodies and fellowship ritualistically to embody evidence of belonging to Christ (p. 126). The chapter closes out with an interesting discussion over connecting Gal. 2:17 to Jeremiah LXX (starting at p. 127), which is interesting.
In chapter seven T begins to allow the ideas thus far to coalesce over his argument and the light which ritual shines upon Paul’s letters. On a larger scale, “the performance of rituals impose an order upon the world such that cosmic orders are made in correspondence to the complex representations of liturgical orders in their entireties” (p. 138) and that ritualized actions, ideas, etc. “become as natural as the natural world around us, and thus the culture that flows out of ritualized processes is taken for granted as natural and normal” (p. 139), an important point when thinking of the identification effect of ritual upon believers. In Corinth, just as in Antioch, “through their acts of eating and drinking, the Corinthians manifest in space and time the eschatological fulfillment of the Jeremiah-promised new covenant” (p. 151) in their baptized, Spirit-filled, Christ-focused, and ritualized ekklesia gatherings. This spatiotemporal setting, ritualized into acknowledging this space as the “space” of the Messianic age, has many interesting implications, such as, as T points out, Paul’s identification of the food and drink in the ekklesia being like that of the Israelites’ (p. 152). The chapter, therefore, applies the same methodology applied to Galatians in the previous chapter, having the book emerge as an ABAB pattern: analyzing baptism in Gal (A) and Cor (B), and then analyzing meals in Gal (A) and Cor (B). When viewed in this light, T’s study is immensely important for these two books, and I would expect his work to be used in commentaries and monologues for its very important views and contributions to the varied discussions therein.
T concludes his work that “Christian rituals were…both generative of as well as communicative of early Christian beliefs, ideas, and values” (p. 173) and that “baptism was for Paul an apocalyptic ritual that revealed the dawning of the messianic age through the bodies of the baptized” (p. 174). With respect to participationist ideas, T contends that his study is important for his insights in this way, though he does so with marked humility. I find T’s work to be a very good and insightful study that deserves a place on each and every reference library’s shelf and certainly within studies of both Christian baptism and meals. I find T’s work to have thus far gone largely unaddressed or unappreciated, which I find to be a bit surprising, considering how many contributions it can make to other divisive or unresolved areas of scholarship, especially a more appropriate background of the Antioch Incident as well as the significance of baptism in the early Church and what it would connote to the participant and how these ritualized realities would play into Paul’s larger arguments. I strongly recommend his work and confidently believe that layperson and scholar alike would be hardpressed to walk away from reading it not only without a better understanding of Paul’s ritual ideas but also without numerous insights and fresh views towards several Pauline puzzles.