In full accord: Paul’s social gospel
On June 2, 1953, the day England's Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, my parents gave to my sister and me a Bible each. It was a small but fat King James Version; that's the only Bible we knew in our church at that time. My sister, a year older than me, could read reasonably well; I had just learned to do so. I remember the two of us sitting on the floor, leafing through this great fat book and being rather appalled at the size of it. (It was quite a step up from Thomas the Tank Engine.) We had a feeling we should read something from it but didn't really know what. So, having searched through the apparently endless books of Kings and Chronicles as well as the Gospels and Acts, we came to one much shorter book, and we decided we'd read that. It was the first time I'd ever read anything in the Bible, let alone a whole book right through. And the book we chose was the letter to Philemon.
Philemon is a great place to start. Few works in Pauline theology, I think, start with Philemon. But perhaps we should. The little letter to Philemon gives us a bird's-eye view of what's going on throughout Paul.
Consider the situation. Here we have a slave and a master, who in anybody else's worldview in the first century would be pulled apart by the social and cultural forces which insisted that they remain in separate compartments. And Paul brokers a new kind of deal, the vulnerable deal by which the relationship between Onesimus and Philemon is to be restored. Onesimus has to go back to Philemon, not unlike the prodigal son going back to face his father. Paul is sending him back to where the trouble had happened. But Onesimus will not go back jauntily, with his head held high and a smirk on his face, saying "Paul says you've got to set me free—ha, ha, ha!" No, this is a deeply serious and vulnerable moment, and Paul wants Philemon to know just how serious this is for both of them.
