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GASQUES: Your work over the years might he described as a love affair with the writings of the Apostle Paul, in that you have written commentaries on every one of his epistles as well as on the Acts of the Apostles, which sets them in their historical setting. What do you think are Paul’s major legacies to the church?
BRUCE: That’s a big question. [Long pause.] My hesitation to answer quickly lies in my unwillingness to say anything that might seem to do Paul less than justice. But, of course, anything I say about him would do him less than justice! I believe his main legacy is his law-free gospel, his affirmation that the grace of God, which he declares is available on equal terms and manifested in an equal degree among human beings of every kind. When he says that ‘in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person, neither male nor female’ [Galatians 3:28],he is saying that distinctions of those kinds are simply irrelevant where the gospel is concerned, and where Christian witness, life and fellowship are concerned.
Your major work on Paul was published as “Paul: the Apostle of the Free Spirit” in England. In America it was entitled “Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free”. How did these too different titles come about?
The first was my own choice. I had in mind the words of Psalm 51[:12] where the psalmist prays. ‘Uphold me with thy free spirit!’ When my American publisher undertook to market it in the USA, it was thought that the expression ‘free spirit’ had associations which might obscure the main thrust of the book from the intended reading public. ‘Free spirit’ was said to be either a particular brand of gas for automobiles or a class of hippy. I thought at the time that Paul may have been regarded as a sort of hippy in his day! When the book was reviewed very graciously sometime later by Professor Paul Minear of Yale, he pointed out that ‘heart’ in the title was used in a non-Pauline sense. I could not agree more, but I comforted myself with the contemplation that this expression was not my own choice.
How have you been able to resolve the apparent conflict between Paul’s theology of freedom and the social manifestations of people who adhere to Paul but who obviously are not free in either their personal lives or in their manner of relating to people in the world?
If they are obviously not free, they don’t adhere to Paul! They may think they do, but they haven’t begun to learn what Paul means by ‘the liberty with which Christ has set his people free’ [Galatians 5:1].
Why do you suppose there is this fearfulness among Christians who profess to follow
Paul?
Many people, including many Christians, are afraid of liberty. They are afraid of having too much liberty themselves: and they’re certainly afraid of letting other people, especially younger people, have too much liberty. Think of the dangers that liberty might lead them into! It seems much better to move in predestinate grooves.
What is your source of confidence? Does it come directly from your theology?
Yes. Certainly. From Christ as mediated through Paul, who had an exceptional insight into the mind of Christ and realized that in Christ and nowhere else is true freedom to be found. Among all the followers of Christ. I suppose there has never been a more emancipated soul than the soul of Paul.
What has been Paul’s influence on Western thought?
Paul’s influence on western thought has been very profound, indeed. Perhaps it has been chiefly as mediated through Augustine. For Augustine has probably had greater influence on western thought over the centuries than any other single thinker.
Has Paul’s thought been mediated accurately by Augustine?
Not altogether. Augustine did not have quite the same appreciation of Christian liberty that Paul had. Even though Augustine was one of the greatest interpreters of Paul – as [the theologian Adolf] Harnack said of Marcion [whom he considered the greatest interpreter of Paul] – even he misunderstood him’!
Who do you think have been the most accurate interpreters of Paul?
Certainly the great reformers, Luther, for example. Or John and Charles Wesley in the eighteenth century. Paul played such a dominant part in their conversion experience that they could not help assimilating the very heart of Pauline teaching and communicating it to others.
Do you think the current theologies of liberation – for example, Latin American and feminist Theologies – are correct in applying Paul’s theology of freedom to social and political issues?
Basically, yes. The liberation that is at the very heart of the Pauline gospel can’t be restricted in any way. It must have its social implications and applications. I do not know too much about liberation theology, but it does sometimes seem to he linked to a Marxist interpretation of history, and of human life, which is quite different from the Pauline approach.
You seem to interpret Paul as a liberator, if not a revolutionary. But many others see him as a conservative – one who wanted to keep people in their places, who tells slaves to he satisfied with their position in society and women to be silent and forbids them from having positions of leadership in the church. Their interpretation of Paul is of one who is anything but a liberator of people!
Paul’s attitude to slavery must be seen in the context of the social condition of the time. There was no point in telling slaves to rebel against their condition of bondage. They were in no position to do anything about it. What he did was to show, as the Stoics of his day also did, in a way, that a slave can be a free person, just as truly, as a sociologically free person is very often a slave. Slavery and freedom are matters of the inner life, primarily, and a person’s economic or societal position is not of the first importance.
How would you apply this to the role of women?
Paul’s teaching is that so far as religious status and function are concerned, there is no difference between men and women.
What about in practice? Does he not limit women’s role in leadership and in teaching in the church, and in leadership in society?
No. If we have regard to the place that women have in Paul’s circle, he seems to make no distinction at all between men and women among his fellow workers. Men receive praise, and women receive praise for their collaboration with him in the gospel ministry, without any suggestion that there is a subtle distinction between the one and the other in respect of status or function. Anything in Paul’s writings that might seem to run contrary to this must be viewed in the light of the main thrust of his teaching and should be looked at with quite critical scrutiny.
Your church tradition does not have formal ordination for men or women. However, if you were in a church that did make a distinction between clergy and laity, would you support the idea that women, as well as men, should he ordained as pastors, even bishops?
The point is that I could not countenance a position which makes a distinction of principle in church service between men and women. My own understanding of Christian priesthood is quite different from the understanding that dominates so much of the current discussion of the subject. If, as evangelical Christians generally believe, Christian priesthood is a privilege in which all believers share, there can he no reason that a Christian woman should not exercise her priesthood on the same terms as a Christian man.
How do you interpret 1 Timothy 2:9-15, which suggests that women are not to teach?
I’m not quite sure about whether 1 Timothy 2 was written by Paul. But even if it is taken as a statement by Paul himself, it is merely a statement of practice at a particular time.
So you would not regard it as a canon law for the Christian church for all time.
No. I think when you look at Christian history, you observe a tendency to pick and choose the church regulations from the Pastoral Epistles between those precepts which have been taken over as permanent canon law and those which have been set aside as being only for that particular age.
How do you answer people who say that you are doing the same thing, picking and choosing among the various doctrines of the New Testament, using one strand of Paul’s teaching to set aside another strand of the Pauline tradition?
If there is any substance in that criticism, then the strand that I am choosing is the strand that contains the foundation principles of Paul’s teaching in the light of which those other passages must be understood.
What about 1 Corinthians where Paul suggests that women should he quiet in church?
In the same chapter, he indicates certain occasions when men should be quiet or silent in church also! My own view about 1 Corinthians 14 is very similar to the view expressed by Gordon Fee in his recent commentary [in the New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1987)], namely, that the textual evidence throws doubt on the authenticity of the word ‘let your women keep silence in the churches.’ But even if they are part of the original text of Paul’s letter, they have relevance only to the uttering of prophecies in church, where women are advised not to question publicly and vocally the interpretation of prophetic utterances. In most of our churches today, we don’t have prophetic utterances of the kind envisaged in 1 Corinthians 14. Therefore, the application of that negative injunction does not apply. In general, where there are divided opinions about the interpretation of a Pauline passage, that interpretation which runs along the line of liberty is much more likely to be true to Paul’s intention than one which smacks of bondage or legalism.
What about Paul’s use of the term kephale (head) in 1 Corinthians 11:3, where man is said to he the head of the woman, and in Ephesians 5:23, where the husband is described as the head of his wife? Does not this imply women’s subordination to men?
No. It implies that the head is the source of the being of the other party in question. Paul is referring to the Genesis story of Eve’s being formed out of Adam’s side. In that sense, the husband was the source of the wife’s being. This suggests priority in terms of existence but not otherwise.
You have described yourself as a ‘layman.’ And yet you are looked to as one of the leading biblical scholars of our day. Is there not an inherent contradiction in this?
I do not think so. One uses the term layman in two senses. When I apply the term to myself. I use the term in an ecclesiastical sense: I am not an ordained minister. This is a negative status that I rather insist on! One talks of laymen in another sense, as between doctors or other professionals on the one hand and non-specialists on the other hand. This is a different matter. However, as a lay interpreter of scripture. I am in quite a respectable tradition. Even our Lord was a layman, as the writer to the Hebrews emphasizes.
Does your status as a layman give your work a special slant as a biblical scholar?
Sometimes it gives me a special privilege in that it cannot be said that I hold the things I hold or say the things I say because my church directs me to do so.
What books have influenced you most in your life, other than the Bible?
Some of the great Christian biographies have influenced my life, especially among them the memoir of Anthony Norris Groves, the early Brethren missionary: the life of William Robertson Smith, J. S. Chrystal; and John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
Have you changed your mind in any fundamental way in regard to our basic understanding of the Christian faith over the years?
As far as the main outlines of my position are concerned, there have been no appreciable changes. But there have been lots of changes in appreciable matters. For example, in matters of biblical criticism: I may have a vague idea about the purpose, date, authorship, and structure of a particular book of the Bible but if I have to teach a course on that book, or write a commentary on it, and get down to the detailed work necessary, I may find myself changing my views on a number of points related to its study. But that is because I was relatively uninformed previously, whereas closer study has shown me that this rather than that is the way to understand a matter. A rather technical example would be this: for many years I was disposed to believe that the last four chapters of 2 Corinthians belonged to the letter that Paul wrote between 1 and 2 Corinthians, sometimes called the ‘tearful letter’ [2 Cor 2:3-11]. But when I got down to studying 2 Corinthians with a view to writing a commentary on it. I found myself compelled to change my mind and regard the last four chapters of 2 Corinthians as part of a later letter by Paul written subsequently to that contained in the first nine chapters.
What do you think are some of the greatest problems facing Christians today?
The problem is what it has always been. I think: conformity to the world, to the current climate of opinion. The climate of opinion of today may be very different from what it was fifty years ago, but that is the essence of what the New Testament calls “worldliness”. Getting one’s mind into the mind-set of the age, and thinking in those terms instead of in distinctively Christian terms.
How do we avoid worldliness?
We are all influenced by the current climate of opinion, inevitably so. We can’t watch television, or listen to radio, or that sort of thing, without being influenced in this way. But so long as we are aware of the fact that we are being influenced, we may be on our guard against it, instead of simply imbibing it without thinking about it.
What do you think is the greatest opportunity for a Christian young person living today?
There is one great opportunity in the fact that Christian presuppositions, even in a diluted sense, are becoming less and less the presuppositions of our contemporaries. So a Christian who bears witness to the principles of Christian faith and life is not so liable nowadays to hear the response. ‘Yes that is what I’ve always believed!’
Do you have a strategy to suggest to the church today?
No.
Do you think we are living in the last days?
I have no idea.
How can we convince people today of the necessity for sacrificial love?
The best way to convince people is not to talk about it but to practice it. There is no sense in telling people about sacrificial love if one does not show something of it!
What do you think Christians can do to further the cause of peace in the world!
They could start by living peaceably one with another, showing themselves to be, in reality, as they are in the divine purpose, a fellowship of reconciliation, a community of those who, having experienced the reconciling power of God in their own lives, proclaim his message of reconciliation to others, in the widest conceivable sense.
Do you think Christians should he actively involved in opposing nuclear weapons?
I do not see a difference in principle between nuclear weapons and other weapons. We have seen quite a lot of indiscriminate destruction wrought by non-nuclear weapons of a kind that Christians could not contemplate with anything like approval. And the use of nuclear weapons simply multiplies this to the nth power.
Do you think that the Christian perspective demands a pacifist stance!
I should find this a difficult position to maintain. I realize that the pacifist probably has the better of the logical argument, but there are other considerations that may lead to a different conclusion. For example, many people in Britain who were pacifists on principle in World War I were not pacifists in principle when World War II broke out, because they believed that the evil to be opposed in World War was a really positive evil that could not be opposed in any other way. Of course, if it had not been allowed to get to the point to which it had reached in 1939. This evil could have been checked at an earlier stage. From our point of view, however, the moral conclusions that persuaded people in 1939 have been replaced by a quite different series of issues in our day.
I have only observed you to be nervous on only one occasion in all the years I have known you. My impression is that you have a great sense of confidence and certainly an independence of spirit. Is this a valid observation! And, if so, why do you think this is so?
Independence of spirit may largely be the result of my having always been in a position where my personal comfort, income, and the like were not affected by what I affirmed. A person who always has to be looking over his shoulder lest someone who is in a position to harm him may be breathing down his neck has to mind his step in the way such as a university teacher, which I’ve always been, is quite a stranger to.
I’ve known a lot of insecure and nervous university teachers!
That may be so, but that is probably largely a matter of personal temperament.
Has your father’s influence on your life been an influence in this?
In teaching me to think for myself, not to believe a thing just because some preacher says it is so, unless I see it clearly for myself – that was excellent advice. There are some people who will swallow what the most eloquent preacher says.
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