Hi, everybody. I'm a busy fella, and I'm not a great multi-tasker. Anyway, I'm applying for a scholarship, and for the application I'm required to write a short essay on one of four topics. I chose the one in which I'm supposed to explain how 2 Cor. 4:5 informs my personal philosophy of ministry. Below is my first attempt at an answer, and I'm posting it here to get your feedback. I look forward to it.


I always hesitate trying to stake out anything quite so definitive as a “philosophy of ministry,” especially a philosophy of ministry informed by the words of the Apostle Paul, whom I have come to see as one of the great deconstructors of such philosophies. II Corinthians 4, in fact, is a great example of the kind of philosophical deconstruction I’m talking about.

Now, if one were to take verse 5 on its own it might look as though staking out a definitive philosophy of ministry is precisely what Paul is up to. “For what we preach,” Paul writes, “is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” I mean, that sounds like a winning philosophy to me. You’ve got all the right ingredients: a proper humility, a thoroughgoing focus on Christ, a good dose of servant-leadership, and—in light of some recent trends—perhaps even a pinch of egalitarianism. Smells like a recipe for a very fruitful ministry!

The trouble is not the verse itself, but what surrounds it. Well, let me qualify that. Verse 2 certainly poses no problems. In fact, it fits the criteria for a “philosophy of ministry” quite nicely. Paul writes about the renunciation of “secret and shameful ways.” In Paul’s philosophy of ministry, the word of God is not distorted for convenience or for personal advantage. “On the contrary,” Paul stresses, “by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” How quaint. Paul’s sophistry of ministry: preach the truth, and watch it work.

The problem, of course, is in verse 4, which—contrary to verse 5—smells more like a recipe for disaster. While Paul would leave the truth to do its work on the human conscience, “the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” Already verse 5 isn’t sounding quite as promising as at first. Now the renunciation of self-proclamation is infused with a peculiar sort of significance, as is the determination to preach Jesus Christ alone. The very strategy that would win Paul a hearing among his audience is the very strategy Paul has renounced. The very message Paul’s audience seems to be incapable of comprehending is the very message Paul has determined to preach.

Now I was under the impression that philosophies of ministry were supposed to be helpful. I thought they were meant to result in more conversions, in bigger buildings, in greater ministerial resources. Philosophies of ministry are supposed to keep us on track. They are supposed to protect us, to anchor us. They are supposed to become best-selling books once they’ve directed us to megachurch status. They are not supposed to result in political oppression, confusion, persecution, violence, and death (vv. 8-10). Philosophies of ministry are happy things. They promote healthy attitudes and balanced lifestyles. They do not promote poverty, imprisonment, or the kind of reckless prophetic critique that results in political assassinations.

So when Paul writes that he and his ministerial militia always embody the assassination of the Kyrios Yeshua, so that the victory of Yeshua over the pretending kyrios might be publicly paraded in the formation of a corps (v. 10), he may be staking out a great many things, but he most certainly is not staking out anything so useful as a philosophy of ministry. Rather, what Paul is doing is deconstructing the dominant philosophies of ministry of his day and ours. He is subverting the patron/client relationship in a society underwritten by the intelligibility of the distinction. He is defusing the threat of shame in a shame/honor politics. He is hijacking the language of defeat and turning it into victory. He is mistranslating sickness as shalom, insanity as balance, poverty as prosperity, rejection as validation.

While in other venues Paul may speak glowingly of the power of the gospel to save, here, in this treatise on the ministry, Paul speaks rationally of the power of the gospel to incite violence. We now can acknowledge an utter lack of sophistry in Paul’s determination to preach the truth and watch it work. While Paul is hopeful about the prospects of a symbiotic relationship between truth and the human conscience, he is equally realistic about the explosive enmity that exists between them. For Paul, ministry is not about success. It is not even about survival. For Paul, ministry is cruciformity.

Let’s not be deceived, however, into thinking that we’ve come a step closer to capturing Paul’s “philosophy of ministry.” The problem with cruciformity, of course, is that it defies formulae. Every attempt in ecclesiastical history to reduce the cross down to some sort of essence, every attempt to reduce it to some sort of inward attitude, has had the effect of making cruciformity an abstraction, which has always been coterminous with a Christianity itself abstracted from concrete social problems. Cruciformity cannot be made over into a principle without erasing the distinction between the church and the world. It must be grounded tangibly in the same sort of mundane struggle for justice that has resulted in the assassinations of Paul, his Kyrios, and so many others in their tradition. Precisely because the Pauline modus operandi is the Kingdom of God—the just society over which YHWH justly rules—the Pauline mode of ministry must always be dialectical. In other words, the proper approach to ministry cannot be determined rightly apart from concrete considerations of what we’re up against.

By way of illustration, the cross is only a central image in Christianity because it was first a favorite tool of injustice inflicted upon failed revolutionaries and runaway slaves by the Roman domination system. In the same way, the central metaphors that would comprise what we might call our “philosophy of ministry” must necessarily—if they are to be relevant and effective—be derived from the peculiar injustices we meet as we engage the world we’ve been given. For that reason, “philosophies of ministry” often tend to obfuscate the reality “on the ground.” The controlling metaphors of our philosophies too often are derived from contexts (e.g. the world of corporate capitalism) that are foreign or adversarial to the struggle for justice, and thus they can blind us to the kind and quality of work to which God is calling us.

For instance, in most megachurches in North America today, pastors are made over in language very similar to that of C.E.O.’s of large multinational corporations, whereas Paul would be more likely to appropriate the vernacular by introducing himself as a debtor, or as a migrant worker. Of course, this is so much more than mere name-calling. The effect of such simple, though extraordinarily difficult, measures is the constitution of alternative sub-cultures capable of undermining and destabilizing the unjust structures that support our world’s societies, calling into question the legitimacy of their existence apart from divine justice while simultaneously calling them to imitate the just example set by these, what we might call, Pauline pockets of resistance.

Thus, if there is a “philosophy of ministry” to be derived from 2 Corinthians 4, it must encourage Christian leaders to face their societies with all the political consciousness of Paul—a highly educated Roman citizen who nevertheless chose to brand himself a slave—and to identify those injustices that serve as structures supporting their society, as well as the victims of those injustices, and to stand in solidarity with the victims over against the structures, come what may. But of course, this task defies formulation, as is evidenced by the lack of facility in which it was just defined, precisely because the task itself cannot be discovered outside of active engagement with actual, concrete injustices. The task of Christian leadership, by standing in solidarity with the marginalized, is to empower the marginalized, those who marginalize them, and those who benefit consciously or unconsciously from their marginalization, to come together to create new alternatives to systemic injustice. These new alternatives must be new, since injustice, though ancient, is as diverse as the persons and institutions that give it occasion. Nevertheless, these new alternatives have classically been called “church,” an appellation which itself was once a subversion of a certain political vernacular. The task of the so-called minister, more than any other thing, is to facilitate the formation of these alternatives, which themselves, as wholes, are the ministers—signs to a world that forgot why it’s here.

Of course, none of this sounds so lofty on the ground. It is one thing for a well educated Roman citizen to call himself a slave, another thing altogether to inhabit a space, somewhere in—say—West Texas, in which “illegal” Mexican immigrants share breakfast at a round table with otherwise right-winged, conservative, white, Texan landowners. Yet if an otherwise right-winged, conservative, white, Texan landowner got up in church one Sunday morning and said to all the other right-winged, conservative, white, Texan landowners, “I was reading the Good Book s’morning and turns out I’m an illegal immigrant myself, and so are all y’all,” it might help. Of course, if we take 2 Corinthians 4:8-10 seriously, it might just smart a little too.