Canter Bridge

It is common for modern-day Christians to suppose that ease and wellbeing are signals of God’s favor. Even indications that one is ‘doing the right thing’ are often assumed, primarily, to depend upon one’s ‘peace’ or at least upon unopposed forward progress.

The apostle Paul would not have recognized this convenient correlation.

Indeed, he might be assumed to take hardship and opposition as signs that he has found the sweet spot of his audacious evangelistic strategy. Although this understanding does not depend upon such proof-texting, Paul’s outlook is at least exemplified by the kind of offhand comment we find in the sixteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians:

But I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost, for a wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries.

The rather literal translation that I have quoted reflects what scholars of Greek call ‘apposition’. That is to say, the ‘and’ of ‘and there are many adversaries’ stands nakedly and unexplained alongside the opening affirmation that ‘a wide door of effective work has opened to me’. Context becomes the sotto voce that alone helps the reader understand the logical relationship between the two statements. Syntax—the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence—will help us very little or not at all.

Reduced as we are to our own devices, we can at least conclude that opportunity and adversaries are not for Paul contradictory phenomena. The wide door that has been opened to him, to employ the metaphor of a man standing outside a house and wanting to enter, is in Paul’s expectation not only expansive but also effective. It is likely to result in solid progress and substantial results.

Yet it is characterized by adversaries. The word, in important passages of the Hebrew Bible’s early translation into Greek, tends to cluster around opposition and opposers whom we might characterize as spiritual. Paul likely refers to what he elsewhere calls flesh and blood, though with nuanced recognition that mere humans often represent or become the pawns of powers greater than they imagine.

This is the bellicose environment into which Paul appears eager to stride.

Curious little man. Curious us.