White Privilege and the Apostle Paul
I am white, middle-class, male, and American, which puts me in a rarified group of people with privilege and power. I am not writing this to apologize, nor to wallow in guilt. I can’t change any of this. I will always be white. I will always be male. I will always be American. And, should I give away everything I have, I would still be middle-class, for class itself is as much a cultural identity and mentality as it is a salary figure. It is simply how I inhabit the world.
My goal instead is to think about privilege and power in light of Christianity. In my mind the best biblical text to illumine us on this issue is Ephesians 2:11-22. In Paul’s day the culture was severely stratified. In the case of Roman culture, the biggest and deepest division was between rich, elite Romans, which comprised less than 5% of the population, and everyone else, though that “everyone else” was further divided into the artisan class, freemen, foreigners, women, slaves, and more. Jewish culture was stratified, too. The biggest and deepest division was between Jews and Gentiles, though the Jewish world was further divided into various sub-groups, too, with the party of the Pharisees sitting atop it all.
Paul himself lived in this world and was a product of it. As a radical Pharisee Paul considered himself “blameless” under the Jewish law. In his mind Judaism was the superior religion, and the Pharisaical practice of it the purest expression. Paul’s religious accomplishments were proof enough. “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:4-6).
Then Paul had an encounter with Jesus Christ on the Damascus Road, which set in motion a series of events that changed him and the entire Christian movement. Surprising everyone, Paul became a radical Christian and the primary apostle to the Gentiles, the very group of people he had once despised.
Paul described this dramatic change in one of his letters. As a Pharisaic Jew Paul divided the world into two groups, observant Jews and everyone else. Such was the “human point of view” that informed his perspective on the world. He viewed Christ from that same perspective, believing him to be a Messianic pretender and Jewish rebel. He despised Christ’s disciples, too, then known as “Christians,” because they posed a threat to his Jewish beliefs and way of life. Christians claimed that Christ had come to “fulfill” ancient Judaism. But Paul believed that he was really threatening to destroy it.
His encounter with Jesus changed his entire perspective—and life. Paul discovered that Jesus Christ, the one crucified, had been raised from the dead. This Jesus, he came to believe, was truly Messiah and Son of God.
Paul’s conversion transformed how he understood himself, and everyone else. In Christ people become completely new. “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (II Corinthians 5:16-17).
Paul was quick to acknowledge, however, that much of the “old” remained, which his letters addressed time and again. He exhorted believers to grow into their new identity and to live in a manner worthy of the gospel—in short, to become who they already were in Christ.
His conversion transformed how he viewed the human community, too. Christ, Paul asserted, broke down the “dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile, exposing and condemning any and all claims that made one group feel superior to the other. Christ died for all because they were sinners; Christ rose for all to redeem them. No group had an advantage over another group; no group could assert superiority over another. Christ had made one new person out of two, or ten, and a million (Ephesians 2:11-22). Christ’s death and resurrection introduced a new way of understanding how being an individual and belonging to a community are no more mutually exclusive than being an athlete and belonging to a team. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
Of course that was not entirely true either, as the church in Corinth sadly illustrated, divided, as it was, into various factions. It was obvious that the “old” persisted there, too. Paul reasoned, however, that the primary identity of Christians—adopted children of God through Christ—transformed all secondary identities, subjecting them to the rule of Christ. Occupying the same position in the social order as before, true disciples learned to be a different kind of person in the social order—a different kind of Jew or Greek, ruler or citizen, elite or barbarian, master or servant, male or female, husband or wife, parent or child (I Corinthians 7; Ephesians 5:21-6:9).
The book of Acts tells the story of how identity in Christ—the “new creation”—began to shape and change social identity, however slowly and incompletely. The church became a community that welcomed outsiders—Gentiles, women, slaves—because Christ came to make all people new. The church was not only for Jews, God’s chosen people; it was also for Gentiles. The very group that had at one time been “far off” had been brought “near” through Christ. The story of Cornelius’ conversion epitomizes this dramatic shift. Peter, of all people, was the one who welcomed him into the Christian fold. As Peter discovered in a dream, God declared all foods clean; likewise, God welcomed all peoples, regardless of background and ethnicity, into the church.
Paul’s view of Jesus shaped his view of the social order of his day. In the old order people in power ruled over a society to keep themselves in power. That applied as much to Roman elites as it did to Jewish Pharisees. But Paul discovered that Jesus Christ came to “break down” those old walls of hostility, which meant that people in power were no longer the “superior” group. If anything, their assumed superiority was the one thing that kept them from knowing, trusting, and following Jesus. At the same time, Jesus Christ came to include the members of “inferior” groups. He welcomed the outsider and the powerless. As “new creatures,” they held a status just as high in the kingdom as previous insiders did. In the kingdom there was—and still is—no male or female, Jew or gentile, slave or free, as well as no Republican or Democratic, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, American or refugee, white or black. Christ breaks down all dividing walls.
As we know, of course, the older order still exists, at least for now. The work of Christ, however, promises to transform the old order of hierarchy and its uneven distribution of power. In the end there is no inferior and superior, at least not in the kingdom.
Back to my place in the social order. That I enjoy white privilege goes without saying. That might not be true for all white males, but it is certainly true of me. I could post the academic equivalent of Paul’s Jewish resume to prove my point. It is what we are supposed to do in higher education to establish our value. But Paul learned how insignificant his resume was; he learned, in fact, how dangerous it was.
How so? First, Paul learned that in the kingdom distinctions representing the old order simply don’t matter because they don’t exist. Christ destroyed them all. Second, Paul learned that the ethic of the kingdom transforms the old order, subjecting it to the rule of Christ. Jesus calls me to submit my privilege to him, steward it for his kingdom work, and surrender it for the good of the people who, at least in the old order, bear the burden of belonging to an “inferior” group.
In the next blog I want to use an example from early Christianity (of course) to illustrate what I mean.