Who do you think is has had the more lasting influence on the shape and development of Christian faith and practice – Jesus or Paul? It’s kind of an interesting question. Of course, I would want to put Luke up there as well – as it’s his historical structuring of the story of the transmission from Jesus to the Church that gives us the shape of the liturgical year from Christmas through Easter.

Who you think has had the more lasting influence on the content and shape of Christian faith also depends on whether you are a member of an apostolic or evangelical Christian tradition. For instance, you hear very little reading of, and preaching on, the gospels in evangelical churches compared with a heavy preponderance of long expositions on brief and selective soundbites from the epistles.

Evangelical thinking prefers rules-based black and whites – do this but don’t do that – this is good, that is bad kind of thing. While Jesus’ name is loudly and ritualistically proclaimed in evangelical communities there is little teaching on his kingdom message because his teaching does not easily lend itself to a follow-the-rules approach to Christian living . Whereas the epistles of Paul and even more so, the pastoral epistles – those which are clearly dated later than Paul’s own lifetime although often claiming his or one of the other the Apostles authorship – are crammed full of dos and don’ts. They lend themselves to attempts to apply 1^st and 2^nd century cultural norms concerning the patriarchy’s hot button issues – slavery, women, and sexuality to 21^st century life – while ignoring the clear challenges that early Christian communities posed to the existing imperial orders of the time. If you ignore the early Christian challenge to 1st century imperial world order, then you can go on excusing modern-day authoritarianism.

The nub of the matter is that Jesus’ teaching is too counterculture for conservative leaning evangelicals. Jesus confronted the conventional practice of Jewish religion of his time with a provocative radical religious challenge. He challenged the way religious practice inevitably submits to the pressures of culture. The hallmarks of religious submission to cultural norms can be seen in a reducing of the Christian message to one of individual sexual morality – ignoring Jesus social teaching – and conveniently exonerating the political, economic, and cultural norms of the status quo – the business as usual society.

When Christian faith is reduced to a message about cultural conformity, being different makes you vulnerable. If your view of salvation depends on following a culturally submissive, rules-based approach to faith – then you’ll harden your heart towards those whose vulnerability threatens that order.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung once remarked that he was glad to be Jung and not a Jungian – referring to the tensions that had already emerged in his lifetime between his visionary yet idiosyncratic thinking and his followers need for systematic consistency. This struggle to preserve the teaching of the founding visionary by restricting its application in the interests of consistency and cultural conformity is particularly prevalent in the history of religious movements. To ensure survival – the movement restricts the vision of the founder sacrificing the flexibility and creativity of the leader’s vision to preserve and protect for posterity, the leaders teaching.

And so, it was for the writers of the NT epistles. Their job was to preserve and transmit the memory of Jesus into a system that served living communities faced with the challenges of a continually changing and challenging world. If you embrace an early Christian patriarchal worldview but ignore their challenge to the violence of power, then contemporary, white American evangelicalism is what you end up with.

Given my earlier comments about the epistles being the go-to texts for conservative evangelicals, it’s important that we in the apostolic Christian tradition reclaim them.

With the Easter season now behind us we enter into the period of the calendar known as Ordinary Time which opens with several weeks of readings from Paul’s letter to the Romans. Here, Paul lays out the contours of what it means to live the new life of the resurrection. In Romans, Paul is at pains to distinguish between obedience to the Law of Moses and the life of faith in Jesus Christ.

From our vantage point, Paul is often difficult to read because he loves to get down in the weeds of the meaty issues of the time.  He’s at pains to contrast faith with works, with baptism not circumcision as the mark of belonging. Paul’s letters are written in a cultural and religious context different from ours. I find the trick with Paul is not to be distracted by his words so as to miss the radical quality of his vision for the Christian life –  a vision in which it is baptism not circumcision that matters.

On the 5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time we read Romans 4 in the light of Genesis 12 which details the call of Abraham. In Romans 4, Paul is reminding his fellow Jews that it is Abraham not Moses who is the father of the nation. That the first covenant with Israel is the one God makes with Abraham – a covenant not of circumcision or at least not at first, but a covenant of faith. Paul’s direct argument in Romans 4 is that Abraham was reckoned righteousness through his faith in God – and not simply for his own sake but for ours because like Abraham, our relationship to God is a matter of faith i.e., baptism and not circumcision.

In the readings for Pentecost 2 or the 5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time we see a continuous connecting thread. We have examples of the way both Paul and Jesus approach the Law of Moses. The difference is telling and demonstrates my earlier comments about why the epistles are the go-to texts for evangelical Christians.

Whereas Paul is the lawyerly lawyer – Jesus is the social renegade. Jesus challenges the aridity of a legalistic following of the Law not with complex legal argument like Paul does but by confronting the way the Law has submitted to cultural and social norms. He breaks these norms. He risks ritual impurity by eating with the unacceptable people. In response to Pharisee criticism, he notes God’s concern is with the sick not with those who define themselves as the healthy. God comes not to call the righteous but those who acknowledge their sinfulness. Jesus does not resort to complex invective but simply reminds the followers of the Law to soften their hearts – reminding them that God requires mercy not sacrifice.

We are living through a time in which the authoritarian politics of hate and exclusion are drawing energy from the submission of evangelical religion to the norms of white patriarchal culture with its values of racial superiority, hatred of women, and persecution of lesbian, gay and transgendered persons.

When religion submits to the values of a political culture of tribal exclusion – whether the Reich Church of Nazi Germany and its wholehearted endorsement of the anti-Jewish laws, or the Russkiy-mir of Putin’s tamed Russian Orthodox worldview promoting the virtues of a medieval conquest mindset, or the Southern Baptist bully pulpit culture now feeding into a cycle of Republican sponsored discriminatory legislation amounting to a very unconservative governmental intrusion into the personal lives of Americans  – the result is always the same. When religion submits to the values of tribal political culture then sacrifice replaces mercy and hearts are hardened against those who pose a challenge simply by virtue of becoming vulnerable.