Salvation in Koinonia : Faith and Works as Metonymy in Paul and James

Soteriology and the Johannine Paradigm

At various places in the Johannine literature, an idea of koinonia may be found either stated or implied. It will be shown here that using Johannine koinonia as a tool for interpreting the ideas of faith and works in the Letters of Paul and James fills a substantial interpretative lacuna and quietens some of the well-known controversies which, since the Reformation, have surrounded the soteriology in these Letters, particularly the controversy over whether they teach justification by faith and works or by faith alone.

The experience of koinonia or, as it is also called, communion, may be identified from an early stage in the history of Christianity. The earliest Christian communities were preoccupied with their conviction that Christ’s Second Coming would take place soon. They anticipated being taken up into glory, not by a gradual process of individual deaths, but through one, single final event or parousia, in which they would all be saved together at once, by the returning Christ. ‘[T]here is a striking consistency in imminence of expectation throughout the undisputed letters of Paul.’ ¹ The salvation expected was one of separate persons, but persons bound together in communion, paradoxically distinct from one another yet unified in one another. The idea of communion entails that ‘A’ and ‘B’ (whatever ‘A’ and ‘B’ may be) are to be thought of as simultaneously distinct and unified, that is, related by means of a combination of ‘with’ each other and ‘in’ each other. In the case of the early Christians, the future glory of being finally saved all together in communion was perceived as bringing to perfection a communion which they already considered they experienced on earth in the society of the Church. Such earthly communion of Christians through the Church is widely presupposed in the New Testament by themes like the Body of Christ, unity, covenant and sharing, whether or not the Greek word for communion, koinonia, is actually used. ²

In what follows, the idea of communion or koinonia will form a central theme and the words communion and koinonia will be used interchangeably, as being two words for the same idea. ³ The very earliest Christians’ sense of being in koinonia was mainly intuitive rather than articulated. The articulation of the idea would come in due course especially in the Letters of Paul, specifically his theology of the Body of Christ, and in the Gospel of John, where koinonia is clearly implied in Christ’s words, such as ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15.5). ⁴ Koinonia is also implied in the prayer of Jesus ‘that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me’ (John 17.21). Here Christ prays that the whole Church on earth may be united in koinonia, and taken up into the koinonia relationship of Christ and the Father. ⁵ Koinonia is central to John’s soteriology.

Johannine theology as a whole was held in special esteem by the Fathers. Clement of Alexandria compared John’s Gospel favorably with the other three Gospels and wrote that John ‘inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel’. ⁶ ‘Origen described the Gospels as the first-fruits of all Scripture, and the Gospel of St John as the first-fruits of all the Gospels’. ⁷ The unknown author of the Preface to Augustine of Hippo’s Tractates on the Gospel of John states that ‘among the writers of the Gospels, John stands out for his profundity in regard to the divine mysteries . . . For he, who reclined upon the breast of the Lord at the Supper, more perfectly than the others drank the draught of heavenly wisdom from the very fount of the Lord’s bosom.’ ⁸ Hans Urs von Balthasar has written of how ‘a whole Johannine atmosphere penetrates the Rule of Benedict.’ ⁹ He adds that the Rule’s dependence on Augustine and Basil causes it to reflect the spirit of John. ¹⁰ In short, ‘the patristic period was the great period of creative interpretation of the Fourth Gospel. It was both congenial to the contemporary thought-forms and full of material useful in current controversies and theological problems. Indeed, it is interesting to speculate how emerging orthodoxy could have found an appropriate biblical foundation without it.’ ¹¹

‘[I]t is vital (within any Christian theology; and, indeed, within good hermeneutical practice on any corpus of texts) to allow one writing to illuminate another.’ ¹² In this spirit, the early Church and the Fathers often read the rest of Scripture in the light of John. As Yves Congar pointed out, by the time of the first Fathers, the ‘canon within the canon’ on the theology of salvation had already emerged precisely as Johannine, a fact witnessed by the Muratorian Canon ¹³ and Irenaeus. ¹⁴ Together with the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of John particularly shaped early Christian teaching. ‘Of the around thirty papyri of Gospels dating before Constantine, eleven are of Matthew and fifteen of John; some go right back to the second century.’ ¹⁵ ‘Later, ‘[t]he “high Christology” of the Gospel that stressed Jesus’ divinity and its personal portrayal of the Spirit as the Paraclete won for John prominence in the debates over the Trinity’. ¹⁶

The interpretative practice of the Fathers, in giving priority to John, is permanently significant. This is because, as Congar also pointed out, the theology of the Fathers is ‘second only to Holy Scripture’ ¹⁷ as an authoritative point of reference for Christian theology. This eminent importance of the Fathers directly after Scripture is attributable to at least two considerations. First, the Church at the time of the Fathers enjoyed greater social and intellectual cohesion than it would possess following the massive cultural and ecclesiastical division between East and West in the High Middle Ages. This cohesion created an environment for a relative freedom of intellectual exchange among theologians of East and West, enhancing the quality of debate. Secondly, from a more mystical perspective, the unbroken eucharistic communion across the whole Church, East and West, at this period created a spiritual unity which gave rise to a balanced ecology of theological wisdom. This is because the Church’s theological understanding attains fullness of finesse only when the Church is united around one eucharist. It is, in de Lubac’s famous claim, the eucharist which makes the Church. ¹⁸ Yves Congar observed of the patristic period: ‘When we speak of the undivided church, we are well aware that it had its diversities and tensions, not to mention differences, but we recognize this organic, sacramental or mystical unity of the body of Christ.’ ¹⁹ We have noted that belief in the prior significance of John was characteristic of the Fathers. If the Fathers’ theological positions are binding on us, as ‘second only to Holy Scripture’, then the priority the Fathers conferred on John is binding on us too, implying in turn that the Johannine koinonia-based perspective on salvation is foundational for our soteriology. It comes to us with the authority of the Church undivided (sometimes referred to as the ‘great tradition’). ²⁰

A Johannine paradigm for understanding salvation remained in force throughout the patristic period. It was only during the High Middle Ages, that a new faith-and-works perspective on soteriology, grounded in the Letters of Paul and James, became dominant. The medieval Western scholastic thought-world was rooted in the rediscovery of Aristotle. It was ‘drawn more towards soteriological questions’ ²¹ than the Fathers had been, and thus brought a more sharply focused approach to those questions. Specifically, it made use of the new Aristotelian analytical and argumentative approaches to theology. Accordingly, when discussing salvation, this Aristotelian scholasticism was drawn to the complex faith-and-works analyses in Paul and James. This scholastic faith-and-works approach to discussing salvation was a new emphasis in theology and an impoverishment of the richer, older and more implicit approach based on Johannine koinonia. The latter largely faded from sight in the West as the new scholastic use of Paul and James took hold. John’s Gospel with its message of koinonia is mainly holistic and poetic in spirit, far removed in tone from the argumentative Letters of Paul and James, and so it did not appeal so readily to the dialectical, scholastic spirit of the High Middle Ages. From then onward, the very idea of soteriology began to be closely associated in the West with theories drawn from the faith-and-works thought-world of Paul and James. This created an imbalance in theology which can be addressed only when soteriology once again draws fully on John and interprets the Letters of Paul and James through John. Thus read through John, in a way which is free of scholastic methodology, the faith-and-works discussion in the Letters does not obscure but supports the Johannine idea of salvation as koinonia.

It will be proposed that the ideas of faith and works in Paul and James should be read not at the surface and literal level of the text, in the way the scholastics read them, but symbolically. Read symbolically, they together constitute a germinal and indirect statement of koinonia, for they emerge as symbolic substitutes for koinonia itself. When read in this more fruitful and symbolic way, faith represents the Godward pole of Christian life, that is to say, koinonia understood vertically in terms of our relationship with God, while works represent the horizontal dimension of life in fellowship with other Christians. The Letters of Paul and James, when read in this way, suggest embryonically the Johannine teaching on salvation as koinonia which would come later, and they point forward to John, rather than embarking on their own separate trajectory of salvation theory based on faith and works.

Patristic Soteriology and Wisdom Epistemology

The way in which the Fathers pursued soteriology differed in many respects from the approach of theologians of the modern period. In matters of salvation, the Fathers ‘were more concerned to conserve and transmit the message than to reflect on its implications . . .The relation of man to God is frequently described in the language of homilies, catechetical manuals, letters, and advice about living the Christian life.’ ²² The Fathers were generally not abstract theorists of soteriology, and their koinonia-based understanding of salvation rooted in John was more fluid ²³ than discussions of salvation became after the Aristotelian scholastic revolution of the High Middle Ages with its new emphasis on faith and works. Analytical rigour on salvation would develop only in the High Middle Ages and still more at the Reformation, when the discussions of faith and works, producing competing theologies, fuelled debates on salvation between Catholics and Protestants.

The impulse to rigorous analysis of the ideas of faith and works in Paul and James was unknown in patristic culture since the idea of salvation was then grasped more implicitly and in a more intuitive, pre-intellectualized mode. The Fathers’ sense of the nature of salvation flowed not from abstract theoretical analysis but from their daily experience of faith, the presence of the Spirit, and Christian living. The I-Thou context of loving and praying was the place at which their understanding of saving contact with God arose and it generally did not occur to them to encapsulate their sense of salvation in abstract formulations. Salvation was something present as a reality, not something to be analysed in theories, for to theorize is to set at a remove. ²⁴ By contrast, their sense of salvation was born more of involvement. This approach was supported by their liturgical and doxological emphasis, creating a practical daily wisdom focused through ritual practices. Christians of the first millennium thus laid hold upon their salvation not as an abstract theory but as something that ‘just is’, not least because of the centrality of their involvement in the liturgy, which is par excellence the expression of Christian koinonia.

They retained the koinonia-based intuitive soteriology of the earliest Christians oriented to the parousia, as described at the opening of this discussion. Of this patristic outlook John Zizioulas has said that ‘we must think of the eschata as the beginning of the Church’s life . . . that which brings forth the Church, gives her identity, sustains and inspires her in her existence. The Church exists not because Christ died on the cross but because he has risen from the dead, which means, because the kingdom has come.’ ²⁵ Zizioulas refers to the Church’s eschatological identity, and to the eucharistic koinonia as ‘an echo of the future state of things’. ²⁶ Indeed, the life of the Church has its primary source in the end-time: ‘[The Church] is the great mysterium fidei, precisely by being in this world but not of this world, by drawing, that is, her identity from what she will be.’ ²⁷ Zizioulas describes the Church as a tree which grows from the end of time, ‘the memory of the future’. ²⁸ In a similar vein, Leonide Ouspensky writes that:

Christian life is based on two essential realities. One is the redeeming sacrifice of Christ, the need to participate in this sacrifice, to partake of communion in it in order to be saved. The other essential truth is the goal and the result of this sacrifice: the transfiguration of man, and with him, of the whole visible world, resulting in peace between God and the world. This second truth is the main subject of Church symbolism: the forthcoming universal Kingdom of God. It is precisely this orientation towards the future, this building up of the future, which distinguished Christian worship from all others. ²⁹

The liturgical practice of the Fathers was suffused with a sense of future and of parousia.

The Fathers lived out of an understanding of salvation lodged at a higher level of consciousness than any theory or analysis. Their understanding of salvation was based on what may be called a wisdom epistemology. The idea of wisdom epistemology may be illustrated for us by contrast with the Cartesian ‘turn to the subject’ which has influenced modern Western thinking. Descartes felt committed to include in his judgements nothing more than whatever presented itself clearly and distinctly to his mind. ³⁰ This view of truth as something by its very nature clearly grasped, something which ‘I know that I know’, has become the modern ideal. However, according to the wisdom epistemology of the Fathers, those people who truly understand salvation do not have a ‘Cartesian’ clear and distinct conception of it, they do not aspire to such a conception, and they may well have an implicitly apophatic approach to salvation. As Saint Benedict said, ‘A man is recognized as wise when his words are few.’ ³¹ The Fathers’ ideal for understanding salvation is not clear analysis. For them, the right way of understanding salvation is to live it wisely at a largely pre-conceptual level. ³² This patristic approach to salvation was soteriology pursued in a truly primordial manner from the heart of the human situation. Humans, before they ever seek to define or reflect upon themselves, experience themselves simply as existing beings. It is in just this spirit that understanding of salvation is approached by the Fathers. Experience of salvation comes first. Reflection is secondary. ‘[R]eflection is inevitably shaped by and in some ways dependent on our more primordial participation in a world of meaning.’ ³³ Salvation is understood by the Fathers in terms of just such a primordial participation in the holistic world of Christian living and koinonia. Salvation is not approached through disembodied theory.

The Limits of Scholastic Method

From the time of the High Middle Ages and under the impact of scholasticism there arose a new academicization and professionalization of the intellectual context and of the way salvation was discussed. As already noted, the Letters of Paul and James were now approached in a newly analytical way, anchored in an Aristotelian rigour, unlike any approach to Scripture found in the Fathers. The Fathers had preferred to see the meaning of Scripture as lying beneath the surface of the text. This was because, as predominantly Platonic in their thinking, ³⁴ they instinctively believed that reality was found not in outward appearances, but beyond them, in a world of forms, a world more real than the world shown to us by our senses. For Scriptural interpretation, this implied the necessity to pass beyond the surface to the real. It was presumed that the Bible had several levels of meaning and that its underlying spiritual senses were the privileged site of the Bible’s meaning rather than the literal surface sense of the text. By contrast, the scholastics, under Aristotelian influence, believed that substance could be known only through its sensible manifestations, and this implied that the meaning of Scripture must be something not concealed behind, nor in addition to the surface sense of the text, but something present on the surface of the text. That is why they read the faith-and-works discussions in the Letters of Paul and James with a new analytical closeness. For these scholastics, ‘Scripture began to seem less like a mirror of universal truths and more like a collection of works whose authors had intended to teach particular truths; so exegesis was bound to resolve itself into a scientific study of these authors.’ ³⁵

The Western church now began to frame its discussion of salvation almost entirely in terms of the categories of faith and works as debated in Paul and James, because the methodology of argumentation in these Letters corresponded well to the scholastic ideal of intellectuality. By contrast, the Gospel of John, where the deeper, mystical and ruminative wisdom of salvation was to be found, contained no such intellectual cut-and-thrust. John’s proper pre-eminence as a locus for understanding salvation receded. Despite its cultural ascendancy since the Middle Ages, however, the intellectual cast of the scholastic, Aristotelian, Western approach to salvation has many deficiencies. It tends to obscure the fact that our understanding of the nature of salvation properly terminates, not in rational conclusions about the nature of salvation, but in communion with God himself, and quite possibly God as apprehended apophatically through mysticism. Paul bears witness to this mysticism through a participation in Christ by communion, and confesses that ‘it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me’ (Gal 2:20). ³⁶ A sterile analytical and scholastic debate about faith and works in Paul cannot do justice to the richness of Paul’s approach to salvation. The modern West’s intellectual approach to reading Paul, arising from the Middle Ages, is superficial. It entails a procedure which draws people into debates, rather than into an experience of God.

Continuing to interpret soteriology from within the horizon of scholastic assumptions can take us only as far as the essentially flawed methodology of a superficial, surface reading and debate permit. The fact that there is no conclusion, even now, to the debate between Catholics and Protestants about what Paul’s and James’s theologies are really saying about salvation supports the claim that a surface analysis of faith and works in Paul and James cannot yield up any single final theory or synthesis of salvation. To expect such a synthesis from the Letters is to place a weight on them they were never meant to bear, and to imprison them within limits to which they should never have been subjected. In reality, the authority of the Pauline Letters lies in something other than any crystal clarity of explanation, and savouring more of a ‘power . . . made perfect in weakness’(2 Cor 12:9).

Soteriology as Metonymy in Paul and James

Central to our theme so far has been the proposal that the scholastic way of reading the faith-and-works discussion of salvation in the Letters of Paul and James merits unfavourable comparison with the Johannine presentation of salvation as koinonia which is the patristic and therefore normative and traditional presentation of the experience of Christian salvation. However, interpretation of the faith-and-works discussion in Paul and James is not bound to the scholastic approach, and can be pursued differently from the scholastic approach, rendering the texts of Paul and James more fruitful, and neutralizing any sense of conflict with the Johannine tradition. Such a different and more fruitful way of reading Paul and James, it will be argued, consists in understanding the faith-and-works discussion in Paul and James as symbolizing the two complementary poles which define koinonia. These two poles are the Godward pole and the humanward pole. In reading Paul and James in this symbolic way, faith can be taken to represent the first pole, that is, koinonia understood vertically in terms of our relationship with God, while works can be taken to represent the second pole, koinonia conceived in terms of our relationship with other Christians. The Letters of Paul and James present koinonia rather in the manner of a graph, with the vertical axis of the graph, faith, symbolizing communion-encounter with God, and the horizontal axis of the graph, works, expressing the world of earthly Christian communion and Christian activity. To arrive at this interpretation of faith and works in Paul and James, clearly we must read their Letters with a sense for what lies below the surface, where we find this meaning present as an undercurrent.

Because achieving agreement between Catholics and Protestants on the surface sense of these Letters has long proven problematic, the prospect of finding a coherent agreed understanding of Paul and James based on a meaning lying below the textual surface becomes all the more attractive. The writings of Paul and James on faith and works have been variously claimed in the post-Reformation centuries as supportive of both the Catholic and the Protestant interpretations of salvation. Yet Catholic interpretations of the Letters were never found convincing by Protestants, and vice versa. ³⁷ The attempts at finding a single coherent surface interpretation of Paul and James have assumed that the literal sense of the Letters is primary. However, if, on this assumption of the primacy of the literal, Paul and James cannot give rise to agreed interpretation, it may be that we have been trying to do the impossible, by interpreting them with the wrong assumptions. It may be that we should reconsider what kind of hermeneutic these texts require, especially since a great deal has happened in the field of textual theory in the last century. James Dunn writes of the idea of seeking meaning below the surface in Paul:

[The letters of Paul] indicate the need to go behind the letters themselves, and they do so in such a way that we will never be able to explicate them as fully as we can without taking that fuller theology into account. The letters are somewhat like the sections of an iceberg above water: we can deduce from what is visible a good deal of what is invisible. Alternatively, Paul’s letters are like the embossed marks on paper made by an irregular shape behind the paper; these marks are sufficiently clear to enable us to gain a coherent picture of the underlying irregular shape. ³⁸

The argument will be broached here that the faith-and-works binarism in Paul and James should be regarded as a symbol of koinonia, manifesting the idea of koinonia, which latter lies as a hidden intention below the textual surface. In this symbol of koinonia, the two main characteristics of koinonia serve as substitutions for the idea of koinonia itself. These substitutions are metonymic. A metonymy is a symbol in which attributes or components of something are symbolically substituted for the thing itself, as when a king is referred to as ‘the crown’ or horse racing as ‘the turf’. It is suggested that faith and works substitute or stand in for the idea of koinonia in just this metonymic fashion, because they describe koinonia in terms of the two ways in which koinonia exists concretely. Koinonia exists concretely through religious experience on one hand, symbolized metonymically by ‘faith’, and through graced human action on the other hand, symbolized metonymically by ‘works’. ³⁹ At the opening of this study we saw how the earliest Christians were preoccupied and energized by the prospect of being saved as one-and-many, in koinonia, at the imminent return of Christ. It is now suggested that the faith-and-works binarism in the Letters of Paul and James is an attempt by the unconscious minds of those writers to find a way of expressing this primitive Christian intuition of salvation in koinonia. For Paul and James, therefore, expressing this intuitive sense of koinonia is the unconscious intention of their Letters, creating a hidden meaning below the surface of the text, a dynamic of which even the authors were unaware. In deciphering this unconscious sense, or better, this surplus of meaning in the faith-and-works binarism, we uncover an implicit and fundamental textual meaning beneath the surface sense.

This priority attaching to the hidden and non-literal sense of the Letters reflects the reality of the experience of salvation itself. No relationship in real life can be fully articulated and this holds equally for our experience of being in a new relationship with God. Therefore, our new relationship with God is not capable of being captured woodenly in pseudo-arguments like the teachings of Paul and James as they appear when read according to the methodology of the scholastic faith-and-works discussion. Yet, in the recent centuries of Western theology, it is precisely as such pseudo-arguments that Paul and James have been read. Reconciliation with God is not apprehended like this, but through an intuitive event in understanding: ‘For now we see in a mirror, dimly . . .’ (1 Cor 13:12). What we really see in the faith-and-works discussions of Paul and James, once we set aside the scholastic way of reading them, is not a comprehensive analysis of salvation, but the inchoate beginning of a revelation of salvation as koinonia which would come to full fruition some years later in the Gospel of John.

The historical context of Paul is that he is numbered among the primitive Christians awaiting the imminent Second Coming and final salvation of the Christian community in koinonia. The overwhelming sense of koinonia in this primitive community is pre-conceptual and inarticulate but it has an inner drive which pushes for verbalization, and, in Paul, it starts to come to language through the idea of the Body of Christ, but also unconsciously in his faith-and-works metonymy. Paul unconsciously wishes to write about the community’s sense of salvation in koinonia. He is not able to conceptualize fully this sense of salvation in koinonia which he and his co-believers feel. He can only dimly and inchoately apprehend it. His mind feels a way forward in images, in order to give shape to this intuition of koinonia. He reaches out towards the idea of koinonia by arriving at accessible and immediate substitute terms for it. These terms transpose his intuition of koinonia into a concrete idiom by describing the main aspects which define koinonia in practice. These terms are metonymic because they refer to koinonia by referring to its parts. Paul accordingly arrives at a twofold metonymy (or two inter-related metonymies): these are ‘faith’, which is koinonia experienced concretely in its verticality towards God, and ‘works’, which is koinonia experienced concretely in its horizontality towards other believers. Paul’s imagination is led on unconsciously to use faith and works as a textual binarism which acts as a structuring force through his Letters. On the surface level of the Letters, this binarism takes the form of a confrontational theology of faith and works, Gospel and Law. However, the latter confrontational theology, which Paul aims at on a conscious level, is really shaped by his unconscious thought processes. More specifically, his surface confrontational theology of faith and works is a precipitate, a by-product, of koinonia struggling to bring itself to language through the metonymy of faith and works. The fact that the surface level is a precipitate does not render it unimportant. The wisdom of God is able to inspire a text on two levels. ⁴⁰

This precipitate, namely the surface discussion of faith and works, would enjoy a substantial theological career in the West, where Catholics and Protestants would compete to interpret its supposedly literal account of salvation. Both sides failed to detect that the ultimate aim of the Letters is not at the literal level, but is a symbolic modelling process speaking to our subliminal awareness of the two axes of koinonia, and entailing a seminal exploration of koinonia through the medium of textual structure and metonymic symbolism. God is moving the unconscious minds of Paul and James in the direction of an early theology of koinonia. Thus, their Letters broach embryonically and symbolically what the theology of John, coming some years later, would say with more clarity. ‘There is room, already in the apostolic age, for theology, for development, for an advance from what is possessed in a spiritual but unreflective way to a more precise formulation of it.’ ⁴¹ The transition, from these proleptic early presentations of koinonia, ‘spiritual but unreflective’, in the unconscious stratum of the Letters of Paul and James, to the rich theology of koinonia in the Gospel of John, is just such a process of advancement. ⁴²

It greatly helps the interpretation of these Letters if we read with a special kind of consciousness, namely a kind of Christian ‘end-time’ consciousness. The vivid and expectant end-time consciousness of the earliest Christians is something we should share, and it is an important component to correctly interpreting these Letters below their surface. Awaiting the parousia, those people who first received the Letters were believers with a strong eschatological disposition, and the authors of the Letters had the same disposition. The deep meaning of the Letters can be discerned best by those who likewise experience the fire of belief in the Second Coming and its promised eschatological koinonia. Such people will better discern the presence of the deeper metonymic level in the Letters, speaking of koinonia through a faith-and-works binarism, because they can instinctively recognize the shape, the lineaments of koinonia (Dunn’s ‘irregular shape behind the paper’) coming through the shape of the faith-and-works binarism. Such people are the privileged receivers of the Letters’ meaning. One strange feature of the Western scholastic interpretation of faith and works is a false objectivity which seems to imply that salvation is capable of being fully understood in its ramifications simply by reading these Letters according to their literal sense, even if the reader does not believe in Christianity. The presumption of this false objectivity is that, via a faith-and-works analysis drawn from the surface of the texts, a full understanding of Christian salvation is possible even for people with no Christian faith or spiritual discernment. Yet, in reality, this apparent objectivity could only be a misguided process of seeming ‘explanation’ without understanding. ‘Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are discerned spiritually’ (1 Cor 1:14.). These Letters were written from within a particular type of end-time consciousness and directed to recipients with the same consciousness. The Letters continue to presuppose a similar consciousness as the ready way to understanding them at the metonymic level. Their sense is ‘discerned spiritually’ in the power of the Spirit.

The true interpretation of these Letters is therefore not played out solely at the place where the consciously understandable aspects of the texts meet one tiny part of the human mind, conscious reason. The texts of these Letters are more than a consciously understandable surface discussion of faith and works, and my understanding is more than my conscious reason. The interpretative task in relation to these Letters includes moving beyond the conscious intentions of the authors, to take account of the rest of the textual meaning (its unconscious level) and also includes moving beyond my conscious thought processes to take account of the rest of me (my imaginative and instinctive sense fuelled by my religious experiences). When the whole field of my awareness, not just my conscious reason, is brought to bear on these Letters, many subliminal ideas in the Letters, which fail to register with my mind whenever my explicit rationality remains dominant, are brought before my mind in a more implicit fashion. It is in this way that my end-time consciousness, not my objective rationality, elicits the true depth of these Letters.

Paul and James need to be read below the surface for that is where their message of salvation is to be found, not at the literal level where conflicts of interpretation have always arisen. Paul and James are delivering a message of salvation in koinonia, anticipating John, and the patristic consensus. The error of the modern West has been to try to read out of Paul and James a watertight literal account of the relation between faith and works. On this subject they do not speak with a single, coherent voice, and totalizing interpretations can only be forced on to these Letters. Understood correctly, the Letters constitute germinal, symbolic investigations of what the Johannine school would later express more effectively.