Luminaries / Michael J. Gorman / Abide in Me and You Will Bear Much Fruit

The esteemed biblical scholar and theologian, Michael J. Gorman, recently sat down for an interview with us at Wipf and Stock. Gorman is a professor of biblical studies and theology at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore and the author of scores of books, including Reading Paul (Cascade, 2008), Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation (Cascade, 2010), Elements of Biblical Exegesis: A Basic Guide for Students and Ministers (2020), and forthcoming Cascade volume, The Self, the Lord, and the Other according to Paul and Epictetus: The Theological Significance of Reflexive Language. Here Gorman talks with Wipf and Stock’s Zech Mickel about theological interpretation of Scripture, mission and theosis, (mis)readings of the book of Revelation, his earlier work on the topic of abortion, and a great deal more.

This interview is also available in audio form on Wipf and Stock’s new podcast, The Theology Mill. You can access this episode below and other episodes at the major podcast platforms.

ZM: Let’s start with a couple fun questions unrelated to work, the first being: What are your favorite songs or bands from your teenage years that you still enjoy listening to?

MJG: Well, if anybody has Sirius Radio (S-I-R-I-U-S, not S-E-R-I-O-U-S), if you put the channel, “The Bridge,” on, that’s my station. That’s folk rock from the seventies. So, Simon and Garfunkel and James Taylor and Carole King and others related to them, or sometimes not related. I still, although less than my wife, like to listen to the Beatles. I went to the Paul McCartney concert in Washington outdoors about ten years ago. And I still like to listen to the Beach Boys.

ZM: Very nice. Let’s move to another fun question: If you could spend a month in any country in the world, which country would you choose, and why?

MJG: That’s a really hard question. I’ve spent the better part of a month in several different countries, but I was a French major. My wife was a French major and French teacher, so we’ve spent a lot of time in France. So France would probably be my first choice, but Turkey would be a second choice, a very close runner-up. I’ve led about ten study tours to Turkey and Greece. I do love Greece, but I absolutely love Turkey. The people are so hospitable, so many interesting places and beautiful scenery, as well as historic sites for the study of the Bible.

ZM: Sure, sure. Let’s go ahead and dive into some of your work. You’re known for theological interpretation and reading Scripture in service of the church. For our readers who are maybe unaware, how would you define theological interpretation? What is it, but also what is it not? Also, what are some of the dangers inherent in that approach and what are some of the promises?

MJG: Well, one of the best ways to learn about theological interpretation would be to read books by people who claim they’re doing it, and not just theoretical books but actual interpretations of the text. In my case, Abide and Go, or Reading Revelation Responsibly, or any of my books on Paul, are attempts to do theological interpretation, not just to talk about it. But if I were to talk about it, I would probably echo Karl Barth’s understanding of theological interpretation as reading for the subject. And he says the subject is God. My friend, Richard Hays, often began his classes at Duke—at least according to his students and according to him—with the statement, “Don’t forget that this is primarily a course about God”; whether it’s New Testament survey or whatever, the text is about God. Beverly Gaventa says the same thing, who’s an interpreter of a theological bent, reading for the subject. Richard Hays himself talks about in some articles reading with the eyes of faith. (I would echo all of these; I’m just quoting some of the big names.) Joel Green speaks about reading the Bible as Scripture. Some people interchange the words “Bible” and “Scripture,” but “Bible” in itself doesn’t necessarily imply reading the book as something that has an authoritative and inspired/inspirational status.

One thing I think it’s important to say is that theological interpretation is not a particular method per se. I like to tell my students that we still read with historical and literary eyes, but those become means to an end, rather than an end in themselves. And since I’m in Baltimore, I often say to students, “You can go down the street to Johns Hopkins University and take classes in the Ancient Near Eastern Studies department, and what they do is very good historical and literary work, but it’s not theological. When you study with us, you can raise the same questions you would raise at Hopkins and make the same observations, but you can raise different questions and more existential, if you will, issues.” And not only can you, you must, you should.

Pitfalls to avoid, or problems: I suppose like any form of interpretation, people can get sloppy and not do really careful work and still call it theological because it allegedly has a spiritual focus or a theological intent or whatever. But reading Scripture theologically is really hard work, because there are so many different aspects of the text now that have to be considered. We can’t just say we’re going to do a rhetorical criticism or social-scientific or historical or whatever, but we need to think about how this text has been received over the centuries, how it has been interpreted both within and without the church, what it has to say in particular cultural situations. I like to tell students again, when we do theological readings and missional readings of Scripture, we’re expanding the context.

ZM: Thank you. That’s very illuminating. We’ve talked a good bit now about theological interpretation, but another couple terms you use quite a bit are “missional hermeneutics” and “missional theosis.” In your book on the Gospel of John, for example, Abide and Go, you use these terms a lot and they’re core to your thesis. How would you define those terms and how do you use them in that book?

MJG: Well, I think those terms are related, but also very distinct. Missional hermeneutics is fundamentally an approach to reading the Bible as Scripture in order to discern and participate in the mission of God, what is usually called the missio Dei. I often tell my students to ask three basic questions. How does this text bear witness to the human predicament? How does this text bear witness to what God is up to to repair and renew that human condition? And thirdly, how does this text bear witness to the responsibility of God’s people to be involved in that reparation of the human condition? That gives people pegs to hang on when they’re looking at a text, instead of just thinking big, lofty words and thoughts.

The term “missional theosis”: Theosis is an older—by older, I mean longstanding—term in the Christian tradition that’s not well known in the West, but it’s increasingly more well known. It basically means the process of transformation into the image of God from beginning to eschatological conclusion. And oftentimes in Christian history that has been understood as being facilitated by contemplation, by prayer, by gazing on Christ. And I don’t want to discount any of those, but the idea of missional theosis is that we become transformed into the image of God by participating in the divine mission. It’s that we become more like God when we have the opportunity to participate in what God is up to in the world either individually or corporately, according to the testimony of Scripture.

How that plays out in the book is that the term “abide and go” is meant to capture this dynamic found especially in John 15, where Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” Abide in me. If you don’t, you can’t bear fruit. And then in the same breath, in the same chapter, he says, “Go and bear fruit.” So, there’s this deep spirituality, if you will, of abiding in Christ, a mutual indwelling, and of going in the name of Christ with the purpose of continuing, by the power of the Spirit, the mission of God, through Christ, in the world. That’s a missionally hermeneutical reading of the text, because you can see some of that and not take it as divine address for me or for us. And it’s also relevant to the idea of missional theosis, because at that point, we’re saying that the deepest participation in the life of Christ—by extension, in the life of God—is going out and washing feet, going out and bearing fruit by doing Christlike things, and bringing people into the divine life. That dynamic of “abide and go” is really a missional reading of the text, and it also embodies the idea of missional theosis.

ZM: Yeah, I think that’s a really nice rebuttal to the false dichotomy between contemplation and action, where it seems like in your work, you’re basically saying you can’t have one without the other.

Let’s talk about your book Reading Paul, which is in our Cascade Companions series. What would you say is the apostle Paul’s core message throughout his corpus, and why does it matter for Christians, but also for the world at large?

MJG: Well, in the early pages of Reading Paul, I have a one-sentence, full-page summary of Paul’s core message, which I won’t repeat here, but you could make a reference to it. I don’t have the book open, so I can’t give the page number, but the long and the short of that very long sentence—which sounds like it should be written in German—is that in Christ God has intervened in human history to create a new humanity that’s characterized by faith—or faithfulness—hope, and love, and that we all are invited to participate in the spreading of that new humanity. That new humanity is a kind of alter culture—in the sense of alternative culture—to the reigning cultures of our day, of Paul’s day, or whatever. There’s a lot to unpack in that, but that’s the short abridgment of that very long one sentence.

ZM: Let’s move to your book Reading Revelation Responsibly. Obviously, Revelation has a pretty interesting and complicated history of interpretation, especially in America. What would you say are the biggest errors that readers make in interpreting the book of Revelation? And then on the other side, what are the key themes in your own interpretation of it?

MJG: I think one of the people who blurbed Reading Revelation Responsibly, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove—a friend of mine at the Rutba House in Durham, North Carolina—said people tend to either completely avoid or completely fixate on the book of Revelation. That’s certainly the starting point of the problem, but once you overcome the avoidance issue and start to fixate on it, I would say the problem is what people refer to wrongly as a “literal interpretation” of the book. And I say “wrongly” because I don’t believe anybody interprets Revelation literally, even those who claim to do so. Case in point: Hal Lindsey, back in the sixties, referred to the references to giant flying locusts as helicopters. Well, that’s an interpretation that is not at all literal. Otherwise, you would be talking about giant flying locusts if you wanted to be literal in the literal sense of literal. The fundamental error there is trying to find correspondences—create, even—correspondences between images in the book of Revelation and contemporary—that is, contemporary to today—realities, whether it’s oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, or wars in the Middle East, or whatever. Related to that is what a friend of mine in graduate school used to describe as people thinking of the Bible—Revelation, Daniel, Matthew 24, texts like that—as a puzzle with all these different pieces in it, that your job then is to take them out and create them into a timeline of a variety of events that are supposed to take place before the end of the world and then the afterlife or the afterworld. I think those kinds of influences and approaches—and they’re prominent in people like Tim Lahaye and the Left Behind series—dominate the interpretation of Revelation across the theological-political spectrum in this country. As one person said, that approach began in England, came to the United States, and then was exported around the world.

In my approach, I tend to emphasize, first of all, how important it is to look at the actual literary genre or genres of revelation as prophecy, apocalyptic, and epistle or letter. I think we need to take the apocalyptic way of doing theology into account, which is by looking both up and ahead, if you will, to realities that we can’t see because they’re either hidden or they haven’t appeared yet, but to do that by way of images, by way of a kind of string of political cartoons. That’s not original to me, but a lot of people have said that. I think it’s a great image of what’s going on in the book of Revelation. But in terms of my own particular emphasis, I like to read—and I like to encourage other people to read—Revelation as really focused on Christ the Lamb who was slaughtered and raised. That’s the central image of the book. The book therefore has a lot to do with “lamb power” as one person has called it. It has to do with the worship of the Lamb, as well as of God the Father. It has to do with the struggle between the misguided marriage of religion and political power. The book of Revelation stands over against that, in my term, “civil religion.” Today, we might call it Christian nationalism or religious nationalism. Revelation’s trying to undermine that and show its demonic—literally demonic—and dangerous quality and to offer an alternative way of being not only human but of being Christian, anticipating this new creation that we see in Revelation 21 and 22.

I think I’m on the same page as a lot of recent interpreters of the book of Revelation in scholarly circles who like to also write for clergy and lay audiences. But probably stronger than most, I think, is my concern about the nature of Revelation’s critique of civil religion, of religious nationalism.

ZM: Let’s talk now about your earlier work on abortion. You wrote a good bit on Christianity and abortion. Obviously, this is still a hot-button issue with the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade. What posture do you think the church needs to develop on this issue in particular?

MJG: You can never speak about abortion without getting in trouble. So, I’m hesitant to be too, shall we say, dogmatic about this, but at the same time I think there are two main things the church should be saying and doing about abortion. The first is to convince ourselves and others as much as possible that abortion has been understood by Christians from its earliest days as an attack on one’s neighbor. And that there exists a covenantal relationship between God and the unborn child and between humanity and the unborn child, to whom we owe a debt of love.

That doesn’t mean there are no exceptions to the general position of that, that there may on occasion be legitimate reasons for abortion. But as a fundamental posture, it seems to me that needs to be the church’s position. And on the other hand—and people like Stanley Hauerwas and I said this a lot back in the nineties—it only makes sense to hold that view if you are offering, as a community, a hospitable place for women who are struggling to survive—whether emotionally, or physically, or whatever—a hospitable place where they can bring their children to term, where they can be cared for. And in all honesty, that kind of location is unfortunately not as widespread as it ought to be. So, in light of the recent decision, I think the church has a lot of catching up to do. If the church became that vision of hospitality, our credibility about a moral stance would be amazingly enhanced.

ZM: Yeah. I recently listened to a podcast where they were saying much the same thing: basically, the danger of the pro-life movement—especially among the church’s ranks—is that now, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, it’s seen as this big victory, but the danger is if pro-life activists are not now stepping in to care for these mothers who are at risk, but instead are jumping to other hot-button, culture-wars issues. I think there’s a real danger there. In our recent interview with Bill Cavanaugh, he said much the same about this attitude of “your baby, your problem” among a lot of the pro-life movement.

Let’s move to nonviolence now. You’ve talked a good bit about Stanley Hauerwas, and obviously your views on Christian nationalism are very Hauerwasian, and I know he’s been a big influence on you, including this theme of nonviolence, which is very present in a lot of your work. What is your view of how the Bible is used in discussing contemporary issues around violence, such as, for instance, gun violence, or the criminal justice system, or the like?

MJG: I want to connect this question to what we were just talking about, the abortion issue. The late Ron Sider—who was also a friend of mine, and we collaborated on a couple of projects together—the starting point for him and for me for Christian ethics is that the gospel reveals to us a God who is wanting to promote and provide life for humanity individually and corporately from womb to tomb. And this became a kind of mantra of what has been called the “consistent pro-life” view that began really in the Catholic Church back in the seventies and eighties. And then some of us picked up that kind of language.

It seems to me nonviolence is not a superficial supplement to the gospel or an add-on, but rather it’s at the very core of what God’s up to in the world and what the gospel calls us to. In that sense, as a fundamental starting point, that’s, to me, basic to the biblical message, basic to the gospel. We start there, that God’s goal is shalom, and that includes nonviolence and peace in a very wide-ranging sense. For instance, one of the first published pieces I wrote was called “Shalom and the Unborn.” It was a 1986 publication, at the behest of Ron Sider actually, who was the editor of the Transformation Journal at the time. So, the starting point is significant. Then the conversation can begin. If this goal of shalom, of life, of human flourishing, of peace, of nonviolence, is part of God’s mission—a significant part of God’s mission in the world—how does Scripture bear witness to the human predicament, to God’s dream—if you will—or God’s mission and God’s will, God’s vision, and how we might participate in that.

I think it takes a lot of conversation, in a very particular context or very particular culture, to ask the right questions. When I teach my students those three questions I mentioned about missional hermeneutics, then I have three parallel questions, one of which is: What is Scripture saying about this human condition where we are? What’s going on in Baltimore is very different from what’s going on in, say, rural Oklahoma. They may be related on issues of gun violence, but when I put the eleven o’clock news on every night, I know what the first seven minutes are going to be every single night of the week. The first seven minutes are going to be about three or four murders in Baltimore that took place that day.

I think pastors and others need to get together and think theologically with, as Karl Barth used to say, Scripture in one hand and the newspaper in the other, and think through what can we do as a community to make an impact in such a way that gun violence is reduced, or to go to the criminal justice system so that the death penalty is not the most common thing that happens in a state between now and the end of the fall, or whatever. I don’t think there are any easy answers to these kinds of questions. Chris Hays, Richard’s son out at Fuller, has a new book out with a different publisher on guns and violence, an edited collection which I haven’t had time to read yet. But it’s that kind of thinking at the theological and pastoral and lay level that needs to take place in specific contexts.

ZM: Absolutely. I appreciate the nuance, because I think it’s greatly lacking in a lot of the conversation.

Let’s move to your forthcoming book with Cascade, The Self, the Lord, and the Other according to Paul and Epictetus, which is an actually an update of your dissertation from years ago. I’m curious what made you think to publish it now, and as you were looking back at the text, what surprised you? Did you feel like there were flaws to the text that needed significant updating? Or just more generally, what was your view of your dissertation as you were looking back on it?

MJG: This is an interesting question because this was not my idea. Actually, Chris Spinks, one of the main editors at Wipf and Stock/Cascade, came to me more than ten years ago and said, “Was your dissertation ever published?” And I said “no.” So, Chris said, “Well, let’s get it published.” And so, we actually began to work on a plan for that. And at the time we couldn’t get the software to convert my old WordPerfect 4.2 five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks to actually work with the text. So, I gave up, and then about two years ago, Michael Thomson came to me—now with Wipf and Stock/Cascade—and asked, “Would you like to publish your dissertation with us?” I probably would’ve died without publishing it had it not been for Chris and Michael pushing the idea. So, that’s why I thought of publishing it. And at first I thought it would be very easy to do, just to find someone who could competently transform the files, which I finally did, and then hand them in. But it became pretty obvious that that wouldn’t suffice, that it made a lot more sense to update the dissertation. What we decided was to leave the dissertation intact but to supplement it with additional footnotes and expanded footnotes that reflected recent scholarship.

ZM: That’s so funny. I didn’t know that story with Chris and Michael.

So, in that book, you’re examining Paul’s work in light of Epictetus. Examination of ancient literature has long been a part of biblical scholarship, but why would you say it’s important for biblical scholars—especially in the New Testament—to explore non-biblical literature, much like you’re doing in your dissertation? And more specifically, how can Epictetus help New Testament scholars better read Paul? And, further, is there anything about this kind of exploration that would benefit a layperson or non-scholar’s reading of Paul as well?

MJG: I think some people will be surprised—because of my being known for theological interpretation—that I started my career and actually want to toward the end of my career focus on a comparative study between Paul and an ancient writer. A lot of things can happen in this kind of work. One is you get to see both the similarities and the differences between Paul and somebody else who lived and breathed in the same intellectual and cultural environment, or at least a similar one. It helps us to situate Paul and see where does he sound a little bit like a Stoic writer (Epictetus was a Stoic). Maybe even where does he get some ideas either from the Stoic philosophy or at least from the air in which Stoic philosophy was filtering, if you will?

On the other hand, by comparing Paul with a figure like Epictetus or other figures, we begin to see some of the distinctives of Paul over against his contemporaries. What makes him and his approach to the flourishing of humanity, his approach to spirituality, to religion, to the common life, the common good, what makes it distinctive? What makes it different? You see both similarities and differences. It’s sort of like today saying it might be valuable to find a major theologian, let’s say Rowan Williams, and how he resonates or doesn’t resonate with postmodern thought or how he doesn’t or does resonate with contemporary scientific views of the universe, since he talks a lot about Christ and about creation. At the end of the day, it’s very helpful to see similarities and differences.

But the caution that I would give to my fellow scholars is let’s not pin too much hope on understanding similarities and differences, because to some degree we have to let Paul or John or Jesus or whomever stand on their own and not think that ancient literature can give us the perfect hermeneutical interpretive key to this person that we’re reading, or hearing, or exploring, or whatever. Samuel Sandmel called that “parallelomania.” I want to be cautious not to simply say, “Well, this is that, and this derived from that and so forth and so on.”

As for lay people, at the very least, I think it can be helpful to realize that Paul or John or Jesus is in a sense a product of his environment, or if we had a biblical writer who was a woman, her environment. That’s where they’re living. That’s the kind of people they’re dealing with, interacting with. I think that’s helpful to know, even if we can’t pin down a specific influence or specific organic relationship.

ZM: Sure. A lot of your work on Paul, as well as your work on Revelation and other areas of New Testament studies, has had an eye on the church, as we’ve talked about already. How much of that is an intentional decision you’ve made, and how much of it is more of a natural outcome of the ecclesial and institutional context in which you’re doing your research and writing?

MJG: I think that it is certainly a both/and situation. I went into biblical and theological studies as a practicing, believing Christian intending to make my work relevant to myself, my friends, my family, my colleagues, my churches. I wouldn’t have gone into the field for any other reason. I do know people who went into the field for that reason, but didn’t stay in the field for that reason, good friends at Princeton Theological Seminary who literally left the faith. I never wanted to teach, say, in a secular university, not that I have anything against secular universities. But I knew that that kind of situation would not encourage or reward the kind of work I was interested in doing. But being at a Catholic seminary as a non-Catholic—but with an ecumenical division for which I served as dean for eighteen years—that has certainly given me lots of opportunities, encouragement, support to do the kinds of things that I do.

I know I’m much more ecumenically minded than I would’ve been had I gotten a position at, say, Eastern University, which is a Christian university, or at Duke Divinity School, where I was privileged to teach as a visiting professor about ten or fifteen years ago. We have a lot of African-American students. We have a wide variety of denominations and of course lots of Catholic students—I teach in the Catholic seminary half the day. All those kinds of things have encouraged me, supported me, and allowed me to do what I wanted to do, but encouraged me to do it in a different way than maybe I would’ve done it, say, at Eastern University or Duke Divinity School.

ZM: Absolutely. Okay, last question: Has your mind changed in significant ways over the years? And if so, how?

MJG: I’m sure my mind has changed in significant ways over the years. I like to think of most of the changes as organic, that is to say building on previous experiences rather than some kind of radical change. But probably the most important change for me was through writing the book on abortion and the early church. I wrote two books on abortion, both of which are now published by Wipf and Stock. The first book, Abortion and the Early Church—in the process of writing that I became a pacifist. My nonviolent approach to Scripture and theology and life generally really began with the writing of that book. That’s been the most significant change theologically and otherwise for me in my entire life. And that’s certainly a major change.

I would say another change for me has been not so much in changing my mind as in changing my approach to people with whom I differ. I used to be a bit more—curmudgeonly or polemical are too strong of words—but certainly less willing to hear other perspectives sympathetically. I think I’ve become a more charitable listener and reader over the years, even if my own positions have strengthened and deepened. Another major change, I would say—and this is probably more organic than the pretty radical change to nonviolence—has been when I became a Christian believer as a teenager, I gravitated to the language of “being in Christ” and that has become for me the governing image of the Christian life, of Pauline and Johannine theology, of Christian life as a theological discipline. So, participation in Christ, again organic from many, many years ago, but that organic change has been the hallmark of what I’ve been becoming over these last many years of theological study.

ZM: Thank you for that. We can go ahead and wrap up there, but this has been a really rich conversation. I just want to say a big thank you for taking the time for doing this. I know many of our readers will be really excited to read this. So, thank you so much.

MJG: Well, I feel more than privileged to work with Cascade/Wipf and Stock editors and owners and publishers and fellow authors all these years. I have always enjoyed and benefited from publishing a good number of my books here at this place.

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Gorman’s forthcoming book, The Self, the Lord, and the Other according to Paul and Epictetus

Other resources mentioned above