This story has not received prominent focus; in fact, it has hardly been noticed at all. The slave girl is constructed as the other at several levels:
narratively, theologically and in the history of interpretation due to intersections of gender, class and ethnic/cultural background. Volumes entitled “Women in the Bible” mostly focus on the prominent Lydia, described some verses before, and pay little attention to this girl. As a slave, her talent in fortune-telling is owned by others; the grammatical form is plural, so she might be shared property between several owners or households. She could be inherited property between brothers. Later in the chapter, her owners become very angry with Paul and his men and send them to prison because Paul has healed her and thereby taken away their income. Such a girl, lacking her fortune-telling talent, would need another job; to sell a female slave’s body into prostitution could be an option.
Ethnically and culturally, in common with several other slaves, she has lost the ties of origin, nationality and family. Slaves are cut off from what normally gives people identity and position.20 The spirit she is said to be possessed by—a spirit of divination—makes her appear as a strange and foreign character on whom Paul’s spiritual power is demonstrated. He talks to the spirit and not to her.
In problematic ways, the text builds on rhetorical techniques where gender and class are used in intersecting ways. At one level, the text tells a bad story about the readers who sympathize with Paul. As discussed above, narratives invite readers or listeners to be involved and engaged and they can offer models for how to deal with life. Such narratives cannot be read only to search for right or wrong; they require more from us. It requires ethical and self-critical reflection.21
The story recounts how Paul operates in the field, how the spirit of God wins the battle over other spirits and how minor characters’ bodies and lives become artifacts and are used as rhetorical devices. How do we deal with the fact that early Christian missionaries were annoyed and mistreated, marginal characters and left them behind with no means of survival, simply because the hero wanted to show that our God is the strongest?
The spirit-possessed slave girl is the other, the religious other. The young female refugee, fleeing due to war or the environmental crisis, shivering in an open boat on her way to Europe. The Roma woman begging at the
20 Catherine Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); John Byron, Recent Research on Paul and Slavery (Sheffield: Phoenix Press, 2008).
21 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship,” in Journal of Biblical Literature 107, no. 1 (1988), 3–17.
Metro station. We have all seen her. She is annoying; she does not give up, she keeps on crying, day after day.
Truth in unexpected places
While this narrative has a destabilizing potential, further investigation may reveal that there is more to it than simply stating that “she should be numbered among the disadvantaged of the sort who are the particular objects of Jesus’ salvation.”22 Interpreters have paid attention to what the slave girl is reported to have said: her words correspond to what is seen as the truth in Acts.23 She cries out that Paul and his men are slaves of God, a common description of early Christian individuals and groups; she also declares that they proclaim a way of salvation.24 Some would even say she sounds like a prophet, like one of the female slaves in the Joel quotation in Peter’s speech, on whom the Lord will pour out the spirit and allow to prophesy (Acts 2:18). A character at the margins carries the truth, however annoying or unpopular.
The story can encourage people from all traditions, contexts and backgrounds to look for the truth in unexpected places. It opens up for self- reflection. It invites us to follow the model of the marginalized other. The story about the slave girl presents a model for how to behave, regardless of whether we are in the center or on the periphery, whether rich or poor, whether strong or weak: speak out loud. Be annoying. Tell the truth.
Stories like this demonstrate that genre-variety, marginality, risk and surprise help us to find new models. Although the text and Paul is involved in othering, readers of sacred scripture can find creative models for hermeneutical engagements. It may look like a text of terror at the first glance, but it has some transformative potential. It can work as a narrative to inspire action in the world, to inspire those suffering from scriptural illiteracy. Speak out loud. Be annoying. Tell the truth.
22 Robert F. O’Toole, “Slave Girl at Philippi,” in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York, London: Doubleday, 1992), 58; discussed in Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, Destabilizing the Margins: An Intersectional Approach to Early Christian Memory (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2012), 131.
23 Turid Karlsen Seim, The Double Message: Patterns of Gender in Luke-Acts, Studies of the New Testament and Its World (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994).
24 John Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity: A Traditio-Historical and Exegetical Examination, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament, Reihe 2, vol. 162 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).
“Choose Life so that you and your Descendants may Live”: Climate Change as a Case Study for a Contextual Hermeneutics
Martin Kopp
Introduction
For a few hours in early 2016, the Northern hemisphere appears to have breached the 2°C limit under which the average global temperature is supposed to be kept by the end of this century.1 Although in part political,2 this 2°C limit is recognized by all parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as the threshold leading us to reach the tipping points, the irreversible climatic trends and possibly runaway climate change and, in any case, catastrophic consequences for human societies. That this limit was briefly reached only two months after the diplomatic success of COP21 in Paris, France, and its unexpected ambition to pursue efforts to keep the mean warming below 1.5°C3 resounds as a
1 Eric Holthaus, “Our Hemisphere’s Temperature Just Reached A Terrifying Milestone,”
in Slate, 1 March 2016, at http://slate.me/1WTPMNi
2 See a brief historical account of the definition of this temperature limit. Stefan C. Aykut and Amy Dahan, “Le choc de Copenhague. La régression du climat,” in Stefan C. Aykut and Amy Dahan (eds), Gouverner le climat ? 20 ans de négociations internationales (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2015), 325–98.
3 Article 2 of the Paris Agreement.
stark warning: the peaking and then slashing of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is of utmost urgency and must not suffer further delay.
Since the UN climate conference COP19 in Warsaw, Poland, in 2013, thousands of people have fasted for the climate all around the globe on the first day of the month to express their solidarity with vulnerable people and to call for action.4 The people who fast come from all walks of life. Many of them are Christians from all denominations, especially Lutherans. From the beginning, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) has been very committed to this initiative. This should not come as a surprise. For decades now, especially at the Protestant–Orthodox international ecumenical level of the World Council of Churches,5 Christians have been theologically engaged with the issue of climate change and, more broadly, the environmental crisis. Catholic theologians and popes have also discussed the matter, but it is only recently that it has entered the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church through the encyclical Laudato Si.
Nevertheless, at the local level, for churches and individual believers—
whatever the Christian confession—the commitment to climate change is often not a “natural” move. The link between climate change and the Christian faith is not obvious and churches need to use both a solid contextual theology and good ecclesial pedagogy to put it on the agenda and integrate it into the various aspects of the life of the Christian community.
Climate change thus provides an interesting case study on the subject of
“transformative readings of sacred scriptures” and biblical hermeneutics—
the latter being understood here as “a systematic and disciplined form of second-order reflection on the praxis of interpretation,”6 i.e., a distanced reflection on the act of interpretation of the biblical scriptures. What is the interpretative landscape of climate change? What are the peculiarities of this contemporary subject? How does Christian theology interpret the scriptures in light of this new question? What are the opportunities but also the risks of such an endeavor? What can we learn from it at the hermeneutical level? These will be our guiding questions as we first explore the interpretative landscape of climate change and then its meeting with the biblical scriptures.
4 https://www.lutheranworld.org/fastfortheclimate
5 Guillermo Kerber, “International Advocacy for Climate Justice,” in Robin G. Veldman, Andrew Szasz, and Randolph Haluza-Delay (eds), How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 278–94.
6 Ernst Conradie, “What on Earth is an Ecological Hermeneutics,” in David G.
Horrel et al. (eds), Ecological Hermeneutics. Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 298.