I’m continuing my reading about empire and came across this great quote about Paul. I’m always trying to capture the original context of the Scriptures and the community value over against the hyper-individualized reading of modern Americans so I was attracted to this quote.
…Paul’s letters were written in language that would have borne powerful political connotations to its first hearers. The Greek word dikaiosyne, for example, might aptly have been rendered in the sixteenth century by the English word righteousness, but today the word nearer in meaning is justice. When Jewish writings, from the Psalms to the apocalypses of the Roman period, spoke of the “justice of God,” they were not primarily concerned with spiritual questions of an individual’s right standing before God, but with the end of an unjust social order and the hoped-for vindication of the innocent against their enemies.
If nothing else, this is certainly interesting and again pushes us to understand the Scriptures within their cultural context and their voice to the community and not simply the individual.
