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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Scott Hafemann
Hello. My name is Scott Hafemann, and I am the retired reader in New Testament from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
David Capes
Dr. Scott Hafemann, good to see you. Welcome to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”
Scott Hafemann
It’s great to be seen.
David Capes
You’re right in our fair city, and you’re at the Lanier Theological Library. You’re here to teach a course for us. But for those who don’t know you, who are you?
Scott Hafemann
Well, I guess you start at the beginning. And when I think about how I got interested in Paul the apostle, whom we’ll be talking about in a few minutes, I can think back to when I became a Christian. Back at the end of the Jesus movement, through a coffee house ministry, Jesus People USA, in Chicago, Illinois. And one of the first things the coffee house folks did after you gave your life to Christ was hand you a Bible and ask you to start reading it. And I can remember reading the Apostle Paul. I didn’t know anything about who Paul was or anything about the New Testament. But I can remember asking myself, who is this guy? Where did he come from, and what happened to him? And that’s the beginning. I was 18 years old.
David Capes
Billy Graham, in those days, would give out the Gospel of John, but you ended up starting with Paul.
Scott Hafemann
Yes, because the folks who led me to Christ were of a particular dispensational persuasion, and they believed that the epistles were the ones that were most relevant for the church.
David Capes
Oh, I see. So, you didn’t start with the Gospels. You started with the epistles, starting with Paul. You’ve taught at St. Andrews, and you’ve taught at Wheaton College. Where’d you do your education?
Scott Hafemann
I went to three colleges, universities, but I graduated from a small Baptist school in Minnesota called Bethel College, now Bethel University. From there, I ended up graduating from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. Though I did a third of my seminary work also at Bethel Seminary and Luther Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities. And then I did some further work at the University of Minnesota. I had to learn Latin in order to get into my PhD program. So, I did that, and then eventually went off to the University of Tuebingen in Germany, where I did my PhD.
David Capes
Tuebingen has had such a great history of turning out some wonderful scholars over the years. We’re just so grateful that you’re here to talk about Paul and his letters with our students. So, you’re teaching a course for our Lanier Certificate in Theology and Ministry. It’s a new program for us. We’ve got 40 students ready to go. They’re all mostly lay people, and we are just so excited to be able to share a little bit and give a preview of what a course like this might look like for our students. You’ve got four sessions that you’re going to be doing. How are you going to start tonight?
Scott Hafemann
When I was thinking about the class, as you know there’s a couple of ways you can introduce Paul to people. You can do the survey of his epistles. Look at his 13 letters and ask the questions of who, what, when, where and why. To be honest, I find that really boring. And if students are interested in the history of Paul, or tracing out his three missionary journeys, or looking at the structural analysis of the 13 letters, there are so many good resources out there that they can turn to. So instead, I decided that I would focus in on who Paul is as he understood himself, and what were the essential salient points of his theology. So, in the four sessions, I’m going to treat not a survey of his letters in general but look very specifically at his self-understanding and at the two pivotal points of his theology.
David Capes
To be fair, you’ve spent a lot of time reading Paul, writing about Paul, researching Paul. I have too. I’ve written on Christology. You can spend years doing this work, so you’ve got to try to boil it down in just a few hours to some salient, relevant things for people in their lives today. I know you’re going to talk a little bit about covenant. Let’s go a bit into that.
Scott Hafemann
Okay, to get there, I’m going to start in the first session to ask the question, how did Paul understand himself and what is a Pauline epistle as a reflection of Paul’s own ministry? And in order to answer those questions, I’m going to look at two things that he said about himself. Namely, his apostolic authority as it was unpacked, in terms of his self-understanding as a servant of the New Covenant, a slave of Christ and an apostle of the Lord. And hence we’ll look at his authority as a follower of Christ and as an apostle and see how that impacts his understanding about the role of his letters. And then the second thing we’re going to look at is the way in which Paul understood the character of his life as a
servant of the new covenant.
And so, we’ll look at the contours of his gospel on the one hand, and the contours of His ministry, His servanthood of the new covenant on the other hand. Then ask, what’s the relationship between the gospel of God from Isaiah, and Paul’s own understanding of the gospel of Christ and his understanding of what’s new in the new covenant in relationship to the old Covenant and the history of Israel. Finally, we’re going to be climaxing in the way in which all of these aspects of Paul’s life, his authority as servant, slave and apostle, his understanding of the gospel of the New Covenant, find their apex in surprisingly, his call to suffer. And ask, then, why did Paul suffer so much as the embodiment of his message?
David Capes
That is not a message that people talk about a lot with Paul. I mean, they do, but we want to hear happy things about Jesus and being happy in Jesus. “All things working together for good”. We want to hear that. We always want to be on that positive side. But Paul, it seems, sought out ways in which to suffer.
Scott Hafemann
Yes, and I think even more shocking to us is he felt that he was called to suffer. And that God orchestrated the circumstance of his life to bring him into situations of suffering and to do so as an example to his people. I think Paul understood that he was called to suffer in order to embody the message that he preached. So that whenever his people did suffer circumstantially, they would be able to see what the power of the gospel looked like, embodied in his own perseverance in the midst of adversity.
So that the gospel he preached is embodied in the life he lived as a suffering servant of Christ, just as Christ himself was the suffering servant of the Lord. So rather than calling his gospel into question, Paul’s suffering actually was the very enfleshment or embodiment of the gospel itself. And I’m going to try to show students how he unpacks that in his writings.
David Capes
One of the things that we find in the teaching of Jesus is an expectation that his followers will suffer, and often that is in the realm of persecution, social estrangement and in some cases, ostracism in the community. In Paul’s case, the traveling that he did was not easy. It was difficult. He ended up being shipwrecked, he ended up being beaten, and he ended up in prison in a number of cases. And he details those things. I don’t want to say he boasts in them but maybe he does, doesn’t he? He boasts in his suffering.
