 Welcome to the launch of the Center for the Social Scientific Study of the Bible here at St. Mary's University College. The Center was the brainchild of Professor Philip Essler, and those involved in social scientific criticism of the Bible will have no problem figuring out why, as he is and has been for quite some time a world leader in that area. As the founding director, I want to express my unabashed excitement about St. Mary's investment in critical research into the Bible and the worlds in which it circulated. Although the Center serves in some ways as an outward face of the institution, it also serves with an inward turning face. As a Catholic institution of higher education, the critical study of Christian Scripture is a highly important endeavor for us as a community. And there is no reason that St. Mary should not have a leading voice in this international discussion. The Center is a strategic means of stepping closer to that end goal. This past year, I've served as the Center's midwife, seeing it through the proposal phase, and this phase ends officially with the launch tonight in Professor Barclay's lecture. We did earlier this week, or last week, have a soft opening on the school's website. So if you get time, I encourage you to go to www.smuc.ac.uk. We're filming this to put it up. And to look under the Centers at the page for the Center for the Social Scientific Study of the Bible, is that address will show you that I've already recruited an impressive international team of internal and external affiliates associated with the Center. These affiliates serve an official role as a pool of resources for me as the Director, and also as a pool of resources for postgraduate research students. Those present tonight include Dr. Perry Brogue of St. Mary's, Mr. Tarsisius Mukuka of St. Mary's, and also Dr. Catherine Southwood of St. Mary's slash Oxford. I express my thanks to each of you for the time that you have offered to invest in our students and in this Center. Our plan is to host a conference at least once a year, every year and a half, and the website will keep you updated on the progress and the news for that. And I'm also happy to report that in our first year we already have underway a collaborative research project with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh and at Humboldt University at Super Lynn. And that this is part of a successful grant application for a British Academy lever-hume grant. The future's bright. In terms of broader research agenda, social scientific criticism of the Bible can span from narrow topics like applications of cultural anthropology to specific biblical texts to broad topics like the economy in the Mediterranean Basin. I intend for the Center to embrace them all. And on that note, I'd like to introduce our main speaker, who has shown a capacity to move seamlessly in various applications of social scientific criticism to the New Testament in its world. Professor John Barclay is currently Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University, a position he's held since 2003. Prior to taking up this post, he also served as lecturer and senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Professor Barclay also serves as the editor of the prestigious New Testament studies journal and as editor of the Early Christianity and Context Monograph series. He's published extensively in the social history of early Christianity, Judaism in the Mediterranean world, and especially Pauline theology. In 2007, he also contributed a new translation and commentary of Josephus' interesting apologetic tract contraepian for Brill Academic Press. Professor Barclay's publications in these areas are, in fact, so extensive that while reviewing them for this introduction, I crawled into a corner, pondered my own inadequacy, and drank cheap beer. Our lecture tonight comes from his most recent work on the Apostle Paul and Gift Theory, which is part of a two-volume work forthcoming from Erdman's Press. He claims that this work goes, quote, beyond Sanders and the New Perspective without returning to Luther or traditional Protestant understandings of grace, end quote. As a non-mainline Protestant working quite happily at a Catholic institution, I say, great, I think. I need to add one more impressive note of introduction. Professor Barclay has supervised at least 32 PhD students to completion. That is extremely impressive. Even more impressive is the way they speak of him. I know several, and I know that they would, to this day, run through a wall for Professor Barclay. The relationship between a PhD supervisor and his or her students is a complex one, and I think that the loyalty of your Dr. Kinder says volumes about you as a scholar in person, Professor Barclay. Professor John Barclay exhibits some of the precise qualities of research and professionalism that the Center for the Social Scientific Study of the Bible hopes to foster, and so I am quite happy to welcome him to launch our center with a lecture on Paul and the Gift, Gift Theory, Grace, and Critical Issues in the Interpretation of Paul. Well, thank you so much, Chris, for your very warm welcome, and it is a great honor and a great pleasure for me to be here tonight. I'm quite old-fashioned in my teaching methods like I have a handout, and I think this sort of fits this context. Don't you think it would be strange otherwise? So I have a handout for you, and I think I've got enough here. If not, I've got more here. Let me just distribute a few of this time as well. Let's give you a sense of where we are in the lecture and a sense of the progress that we're making. But it is a great honor for me to be here at the launch of this center, the Center for the Social Scientific Study of the Bible. This center, I think, with enormous potential to give leadership to the study of the Bible, not only in the UK, but on a far wider scale. I guess since the Second World War, the social sciences have spread in influence across the whole of the Western intellectual landscape, and it's a sign of their significance that sociological and anthropological concepts are regularly deployed in all sorts of historical and literary disciplines. Their benefit for the study of religion has been evident since the days of Weber and Durkheim, although those in the traditional heartlands of theology have not always welcomed their contributions. I think myself the fear of the social sciences as a reductionist or even anti-theological discipline has now largely subsided. Even among those who would insist that theology remains for those within the Christian tradition a kind of master dialogue, a master discourse, sociology and anthropology have proven their capacity to enrich the study of religious traditions at least as a complement to other methods of analysis. Within biblical studies, the first experimental uses of sociological or anthropological theory in the 1970s were sometimes perhaps too wooden or too dogmatic in their use of social scientific resources, but it's clear to most that those resources can be successfully applied to biblical texts as literature and as history, at least on three conditions. That is, so long as there is sufficient data to analyze, so long as the theories or models deployed have cross-cultural applicability, and so long as one allows the biblical and ancient evidence to modify tools deployed not to determine results, but to raise questions and to challenge assumptions. Is that ability of the social sciences to open up fresh angles of vision on long familiar texts? In a mode and an idiom that also resonates with our contemporary context that makes this form of inquiry so fascinating and so fruitful. For me as one who has benefited from the sociological and anthropological literature in a kind of eclectic but always grateful fashion and who is delighted to have anthropologists of religion among my colleagues in Durham, I'm convinced that the sort of interdisciplinary freshness that this produces is precisely what will make this centre so valuable for biblical studies and for theology as a whole. What I want to present for you today are some samples of the sorts of benefits I have found from immersing myself recently into one famous field of anthropology, the anthropology of gift, and the questions it has opened up for me in the study of the apostle Paul. The fact that my title uses the word gift, not the traditional Christian term grace, is itself significant. In fact Paul's term that we have come to translate by grace, the term carous, is the normal Greek word for gift or favour or benefaction. Used by all Greek speakers in antiquity, pagan and Jewish in relation to both human and divine gifts. And those perhaps some benefit in avoiding to begin with at least the term grace since it comes loaded with so many connotations from later Christian controversies. Paul and the gift, my title gestures as some of you may recognize to the famous founding essay in the anthropology of gift by Marcel Maus called Simply Le Don. In another vein it signals the fact that Paul understands the gift as the gift of Christ as we shall see. In this lecture I want to attempt three tasks. First to survey some features of the anthropology of gift and some features of gift giving in the Greco-Roman world in which I include ancient Judaism to set a historical context for understanding Pauline as well as other early Christian discourse about gift. Secondly to outline ways in which gift giving can be what I call perfected that is extended in an absolute or extreme form for the sake of definition or for the sake of rhetorical advantage. And third to sketch in their outline some of the ways in which these angles of perception on gift open up I believe Paul's understanding of gift giving with human and divine. So let's start with the anthropology of gift. Let me make clear at once that by gifts I am including favors and benefactions, material as well as social, everything by which people benefit one another on a non-legal voluntary basis as part of an enduring personal relationship. Thus broadly defined we are speaking of a sphere of personal relations in ancient societies crucial to security as well as to social success. A sphere still important but more limited in scope in modern urban western culture. Marcel Mauss's famous Essay sur le Don from 1925 is right to leave regarded as the seven old treatment of our topic and it has spawned a vast array of anthropological research in subsequent decades. I should say I'm going to pronounce his name Mauss although I know since he was French one should really say Mauss but when I say Mauss it makes me think of the Inspector Mauss and since his name is spelt in the German fashion I'm going to pronounce him as Mauss apologies if any of you purists here are offended by that. In this Essay uneven but immensely suggestive Mauss took care to use detailed and historically specific ethnographic evidence but he constructed from it a synthetic hypothesis about a core characteristic of archaic societies which he called the system of gift exchange. Mauss identified three key elements in the system the obligation to give the obligation to receive and the obligation to return. Each of these three interdependent moves carries the force of social necessity since they constitute the most important bonds of human society and of course of relations between humans and gods. Families and groups he argued are tied together internally and externally by the offering and receiving of gifts and unwillingness to receive gifts and our willingness to receive a gift would be of course a sign of hostility or mistrust. Since things are never completely detached from those carrying out the exchange the mutual ties and alliance that they established are, he says, comparatively insoluble. Now Mauss set out specifically to explain the obligation to return a gift. Whence comes the pressure, he asks real even if not legally enforceable whence comes the pressure for the gift to be reciprocated to an equal if not greater value. Why is it that a gift is received as he says with a burden attached? His answer is that the thing or service given is not detachable from the person who gives it and that that tie with the donor can be acknowledged only by a counter gift. Mauss thus observed that his analysis requires a kind of scrambling of the categories and values which have come to be associated with gifts or their opposites in modern western culture. As he puts it, the concepts of law and economics that it pleases us to contrast liberty on the one hand obligation on the other liberality, generosity and luxury on the one hand or savings, interest and utility on the other these he says it would be good to put into the melting pot once more. Thus he insists that gifts can be both voluntary and obliged both disinterested and interested both free and compulsory and if we find this confusing or even nonsensical the problem he insists lies with the categories that we have invented. The boldness of Mauss's essay includes the suggestion that the economy of gift exchange that he identified in archaic societies also lies at the root of Indo-European society and can be traced at least in Shadowy outline in the early texts and customs of Indian, German and Roman culture. He thus suggests not an absolute contrast between different cultures of gift but a kind of trajectory by which western culture has evolved out of a common what he called total system of gift into what we now have are more differentiated domains and practices in which gift is only one segment. Now it will be a mistake to use Mauss's analysis of archaic societies as a kind of model applicable to every relation of gift. As we've seen he's acutely aware of cultural developments that have changed the role and even the understanding of gifts over time. But his work continues to generate fruitful questions for the analysis of gift relations, their functions within society, their relation to other domains and the values and power dynamics with which they are loaded. Mauss also draws attention to the cultural relativity of modern assumptions about gifts which are liable to distort our perspective on the past. The history of the anthropology of gift since Mauss is extremely rich and varied and I can't rehearse it here. Despite disagreements about Mauss's precise explanation of the obligations caused by gifts everyone has agreed that recipients of gifts are under a strong though non-legal obligation to make some return for a gift even if only a return of gratitude. Is this return in order to preserve one's honour? Or is it out of self-interested desire for some further gift? Does it represent the power of the donor which lays on the recipient the requirement to return? It seems impossible to decide between these forms of explanation. It's best to conclude more generally that the return of the gift represents the desire to what is called reproduce social relations. Each party to the gift relation is in some sense produced by the exchange between them and social relations can only be maintained or reproduced in the continual motion of exchange. In this sense a counter gift is rarely the end of a relationship. It's liable to constitute rather a form of giving again adding to the gift relationship a continuing forward momentum. What we need to be aware of is a peculiarly modern construction of the gift which idealizes the gift that has no return. The unilateral gift which exerts no force of obligation and has as we say attached for an interlocking set of social, economic and political reasons which have banished gift from the normal economy and from the political realm linked with ideological attempts to purify the gift from what we call self-interest from which Luther and then Kant had a formative influence we have come to idealize what we call the pure gift as a gift without return without any hint of reciprocity or any quid pro quo. Derrida for instance famously reflected on what he called the impossibility of the gift which is always circulating but always also attempting to break with the circle that it creates absolutely refusing the gift. According to Derrida as you may know a gift is only a true gift if I get no thanks for it if I do not congratulate myself for giving it no one knows I gave it if there's no possibility that some advantage might leak back to me. Thus the only pure gift in Derrida's terms is anonymous, unrecognized useless and preferably given in and with my death. Now that's a striking example of the modern transformation of the gift which Mauss had already noted as a peculiar mutation not an inherent or natural concomitant of gift. In other words the advantage of engaging with the anthropological discussions precisely that it brings into questions into question such perceptions and ideals that are taken for granted in modern discussions of gift or indeed grace. Now of course if we're trying to study Paul or other early Christians and the assumptions of the biblical texts we still have to determine their social contours which were not the same as the traditional societies which take up most of Mauss's discussion. Now I can only here sketch the outlines of obviously a large and complex picture but I thought I'd give you a little text to get us going which I put on the handout it's all the more interesting since it's not a philosophical or analytical treatment of gift but reflects the common sense of the Greek farmer this is from easier to work and date. Invite your friend but not your enemy to dine especially be cordial to your neighbour for if trouble comes at home a neighbour's there at hand. Measure carefully when you must borrow from your neighbour then pay back the same or more if possible and you'll have a friend in time of need. Shun evil profit for dishonest gain is just the same as failure. Love your friends visit those who visit you and give to him who gives but not if he does not. We give to a generous person but no one gives to someone who is stingy. The man who gives ungrudgingly is glad at heart rejoicing in his gift but if a man forgets his shame and takes something however small his heart grows stiff and cold. Now in its common sense ordinariness this advice shows acute awareness of the vulnerability of everyday existence taking care in reciprocal relations not only makes life pleasant it makes it more secure it's important to be generous and glad heartedly so but also discriminating and cautious to give to the stingy to those who cannot or will not give back will be as useless as as is put elsewhere sowing seeds in the seam. A reputation for grasping is dangerous when you are the recipient of the gift it's crucial to give a well measured return if possible with sufficient increment to place your friend under obligation when you need his aid. Such ordinary reciprocal favour excludes exact calculation but it requires a rough awareness of who's under obligation to whom. Nevertheless these are gifts the exchange of services they're not a trade in goods and it's crucial that they are suffused with the warm sentiments of friendship. Throughout the Greek world we find the same broad dynamics of gift giving and gift reciprocity at the ordinary level of support among friends and neighbours as the Greek saying goes one hand washes the other it's the Greek equivalent of you scratch my back I'll scratch yours one hand washes the other we find the same in the asymmetrical relations between civic benefactors and their city communities where benefaction is reciprocated by public honour which the elite value above everything else. The same in the sponsorship of associations by wealthy families eager to gain public prestige the same in the Roman relations between senatorial patrons and their clients the same of course in the privileges granted by emperors to Caesar loving cities whose grateful return took many forms of honour including veneration or worship. The gods were of course part of this network of reciprocal exchange as in the normal cycle of human reciprocity it's not always clear or necessary to be clear where the cycle began sacrifices to the gods can be figured as return gifts for benefits already given or as gifts of inducement for benefits to be given in the future or as both at once. The common representation of Greek and Roman religion as do or today's I give that you should give is right to recognise the reciprocity ethos of ancient religious practice but it's wrong in putting one sided stress on the human giver as the initiator of the gift cycle and in suggesting perhaps accrued commercialism in the transaction. Just as friends are engaged in continuous cycles of benefit exchange without calculating who started the process or totting up precisely what each benefit is worth so Greek and Roman and Jewish worshippers gave honour, gratitude and gifts to God or the gods to recognise and continue the bonds of benevolence between them always with the potential that the relationship may go sour. Among other things such gifts made clear who were fitting recipients of the favours that the gods would distribute to worthy that is to pious and grateful partners in such an exchange. Gifts are designed to create bonds they are in Seneca's view what holds society together they're not unilateral they are very rarely anonymous and they always expect though they cannot demand a return the weight of this obligation to return is clear from for instance letters of gratitude which frequently use the language of debt it's also evident in the suspicion that public figures who receive gifts may take on resulting obligations that clash with the public interest, the problem of the bribe in fact there's no special term for bribe in antiquity it's just a normal word gift for the issue. Because gifts produce ties they also normally, carefully distributed as we saw from that little quote from Hesiod, a giver should be generous but not indiscriminate since no one wants their gifts to appear random or unjust and you don't want to give to those who won't return nor to tie yourself to people who will diminish your social capital so all our ancient sources literary and non-literary speak of the gift to the worthy Digny in Latin or Axi or in Greek that's not a diminishment of the gift it's precisely what makes it a good gift of course not all social relations are built on gift there's plenty of trade in the Greco-Roman world plenty of contract, loan payment of wages and other commercial forms of exchange that differ from these not because they're unilateral but in ethos for gifts it matters greatly who you receive them from why they are given and in what spirit they are given with a spirit of goodwill gifts like trade or pay involve reciprocity in all these spheres there is a common structure of quid pro quo what distinguishes the sphere of the gift is that it expresses a social bond a mutual recognition of the value of the person it's filled with sentiment because it invites a personal enduring and reciprocal relationship and ethos often signalled by the use of the term carrots let's pass on now to my next section on the perfections of gift or grace as a complex about central form of social interaction gifts have been the subject of reflection and of experimentation in many different ways on a number of occasions we find people thinking the gift to an extreme drawing one or the motif associated with the gift to a point of radical expression or perfection perfection is a term used by Kenneth Burke to refer to the tendency in cultural traditions to draw out a concept to its end point or extreme whether for definitional clarity or for rhetorical or ideological advantage we speak of a perfect storm where all that makes a storm stormy is combined in an extreme form or of students perhaps as a perfect nuisance where the obstacle is the most tenacious and aggravating of nuisances I'm sure students speak of staff in the same terms but even without the adjective perfect we are sometimes inclined to draw out a concept to its logical conclusion or ultimate production concepts are generally balanced by other accompanying or limiting concepts which inhibit their extreme expression but any definitional project is likely to use reductions generalisations or polarities in order to express some true sense to ask what something is by definition invites its expression in an absolute or pure form this tendency is all the more pronounced when rhetoric requires some extreme or antithetical construction scholars like to think of themselves as usefully engaged in the world but a hostile observer might dismiss our academic contributions as purely academic drawing the adjective academic to one end of the line extreme with a sense having no relation to ordinary reality rhetoric here as elsewhere creates extremes absolutes and disjunctions employing polarity or paradox to set otherwise compatible notions into conceptual opposition in some Christian quarters those who truly live by faith live without predictable material support such as salaried employment interpreting the common motif of faith thus and drawing it to an extreme forges a polarity which other Christians would neither recognise nor welcome perfections can thus serve a kind of ideological function one way to legitimate oneself as the bearer of a tradition and to disqualify others for oneself the true or proper meaning of a traditional concept such that others are not simply limited in understanding but fundamentally in error what they mean by X is non-X once it has been defined in a particular perfect form this perfecting tendency is always possible but not everywhere actualised where perfections occur they generally serve the purposes of definitional clarity but not in a symmetric they are especially likely to arise in relation to God since God ends perfectism concepts used with reference to God are likely to appear in their most complete, extreme or absolute form in connection with gift God's gift or favour will be imagined as the ultimate gift the complete expression or very definition of the concept for this reason we are likely to see God's gift or grace a variety of linguistic signs marking the perfection of this concept God operates we say in pure grace or by sheer grace God's gifts are utterly free or totally gratuitous or by grace alone since perfections thrive on polarities they are often marked by negations divine grace we say is unmerited, unalloyed indiscriminate unstinting or unconditional of course such claims about God are rarely theological niceties they serve you might say the interests of those who deploy them that's to say nothing either positive or negative about the truth of such claims but it alerts us to the possibility that in perfecting divine grace in one form or another a struggle for power may be at work now because gift giving is a multi-faceted phenomenon there's more than one way in which gift or grace can be perfected the attitude or character of the giver is one facet the form of the gift another the relationship between the giver and the recipient another again to speak of the perfect gift may be to speak about the sheer benevolence and disinterest of the giver or about the quantity of the gift or about the manner in which the gift is given and its effects because of this complexity there's no single form in which gift or grace is perfected and no necessity that a perfection of one facet will entail a perfection of others in fact I think one may distinguish at least six common perfections of the gift and I've listed them on your sheet I would like to find seven wouldn't that have seven perfections so if you can help me find a seventh I'll be very grateful but I found six the first possible perfection superabundance concerns the size significance or permanence of the gift we're concerned here not with the content of the gift but with its scale the larger and more all encompassing the gift the more perfect it may appear anthropologists were early fascinated by the extravagance of gift giving in traditional societies with big men proving their superior status by the overwhelming scale of their giving the same phenomenon can be traced elsewhere not least in the extravagant largesse of rulers in the Greek and Roman era it was natural that the gods or gods should be considered supreme in this respect giving all things always from the complete abundance of divine self-sufficiency thus Seneca speaks of the lavish and unceasing prevalence of the gods and lists the enormous benefits they pour out day by day in the gifts of nature the language of excess abundance and superabundance is also ubiquitous in the Jewish philosopher Philo's depictions of divine gifts more emphatic in fact in Philo than even in Paul secondly singularity in this form of perfection attention shifts from the scale of the gift to the spirit is given by singularity I refer to the notion that the givers soul and exclusive mode of operation is benevolence giving is here perfected in identifying goodness as the soul and fundamental attitude of the giver in antiquity scrutiny of the givers spirit was a favorite topic for philosophers such as Seneca who were also likely to stress the character of the gods or god as singularly or purely benevolent reacting against the ambiguous morality of Greek mythology Plato insisted that the divine being the highest form of being was also morally the most perfect and being purely good god does only what is good and beautiful in this tradition Seneca speaks of the god's benevolence as derived from their nature the necessity of their being their gifts are perfectly good they can do nothing else one can trace the impress of this assumption on Jews who were trained in the Greek philosophical tradition thus Philo is careful to insist that god is the cause only of what is good while god could of course do anything what he wills is what is morally excellent indeed Philo's philosophy is governed by the rule that the fountains of god's eternal gifts should be kept free from not only what is but also what is thought to be evil very careful to say god never causes evil at least not directly thirdly priority here the focus lies on the timing of the gift which is perfect in taking place always anterior to the initiative of the recipients this chronological fact has many connotations as the initiating move the prior gift is not a reaction to a demand or request and is thus spontaneous in its generosity it's not obliged by a previous gift it's thus absolutely free it signals the superiority of the giver who is not in the subordinate position of returning a gift parents were often figured in this way as the benefactors of their children their absolute priority made it doubtful in fact whether children could ever get even in return by extension god as the source of life was considered the first giver and this priority was perfected as a supreme expression of gift phylo is once again a good representative of this particular perfection it's fundamental to his religious philosophy that god is the source, the beginning and the cause of every good thing god is the soul, the primal and the most original cause of the world this is for phylo an essential counterweight to human pride with its insidious tendency to take credit to itself the core of piety for phylo is the recognition of divine causation expressed in gratitude and thanksgiving to god the whole of life should be characterised by recognition of divine priority and grace fourthly incongruity as we've seen because gifts form social bonds it's normally emphasised in antiquity that the gifts should be given generously but selectively with care taken that the gift is given to suitable worthy or good recipients it was always possible to argue however that such a limitation of the gift was less than fully generous a perfect gift might be figured as given to all without condition given without regard to the worth of the recipient thus a hyper-generous benefactor might advertise the fact as we find on ancient inscriptions that he distributed food and wine to all the citizens and to the resident foreigners and to all who held property in the country since quote he wanted there to be no one who did not share in this philanthropy Seneca emphasises that a benefactor should not be overly choosy regarding the recipients of his gift but should take a risk on the unworthy and he cites in support the significant giving of the gods even here however Seneca introduces some qualifications lesser gifts like the corn doll might be given to everyone but more significant gifts should be more carefully placed and although the gods give benefits even to the ungrateful they intend them only for the good there's a long discussion about why God makes the sun shine like on a day like today even for bad people I believe there are some in Strawberry Hill and he says well if he could God would make the sun shine only on you good people but unfortunately he can't do that so it has to be the sun shines for everybody but if he could he would be more selective it's easy to see how it's possible to perfect the incongruity of a gift the gift given even to the unworthy as supremely excellent to take account of prior conditions of worth fifth efficacy turning to the effect of the gift perfect gift may also be figured as that which fully achieves what it was designed to do once again this perfection is common in relation to God since divine agency can be taken to ground encompass and even cause the activity of the human recipient of grace thus Seneca discourages any boasting regarding human inventions since he says it is God who draws forth from the secret depths of our being our various talents Philo is anxious to trace virtue to the agency of God the soul's capacity to conceive of God is in breath by God in creation and human virtue human virtues are sown by divine gift in this connection Philo is normally content to speak also of the vigorous activity of the human agent but in one fragmentary text he extends the efficacy of gift or grace to the point of human passivity attributing all to the sovereignty of God sickly non-circularity is a gift defined as gift by the fact that it escapes reciprocity that it escapes the system of exchange that characterizes sale or reward or loan such as the modern theory as I've explained of the pure gift I've argued that this was not the common conception of gifts even good gifts in antiquity gifts were certainly distinguishable from loans or purchase by the fact that no return could be demanded or enforced but they were not detached from every notion of return indeed they could fulfill their function as gifts only if they were not unilateral Philo might argue that one should not have expectation of a return or for the sake of a return and they could represent the most important return as non-material the recording of honour or the display of gratitude but it was rare to find the gift perfected in antiquity as a one way unilateral donation it's not to say this form of gift was completely unimaginable in antiquity because the gift could never guarantee a return a gift might always, of course remain unreciprocated or fruitless the use of the adverb, the Greek adverb dorian in the sense of in vain or to nil effect his testimony to that possibility dorian meaning gift once again this form of perfection was most likely to apply to the god since they need no return and could therefore give without its expectation Seneca can portray the gods as benefactors living without pay and without any advantage to themselves a benefit he says should carry no price tag we have the gods for free even here for however for free means for no material benefit rather than without any form of return since Seneca is elsewhere clear that the gods both deserve and desire the gratitude offered by humans now as our classification has shown the six different forms of perfection there's more than one way in which gift or grace can be perfected and each of the six types of perfection outlined can stand on its own to perfect one facet of gift does not imply the perfection of any or all of the others so one could speak of divine gift or grace as super abundant or absolutely prior without implying that it's also incongruous with the worth of the recipient alternatively God's grace may be figured as holy and completely incongruous without at the same time being pure in the sense of seeking no return it's not uncommon for certain perfections to cluster together but these six perfections do not constitute a package to adopt one is not to adopt the rest so two authors may each perfect the motif of grace but may differ widely because they draw different facets of this concept to its end of the line extreme common perfecting terms can mask deep differences in meaning to speak of pure grace may mean its singularity God is nothing but benevolent or it may mean its non-circularity God's grace seeks no return or indeed some other of its six perfections to describe God's grace as free could mean many things that it is unconstrained by previous circumstances in our terms prior or that it's given irrespective of the recipient's worth in our terms incongruous or that it's free of subsequent expectations in our terms non-circular so indeed it might be some combination of these three even the epithet unconditional can be ambiguous it could mean without prior conditions thus incongruous or it can mean without resulting obligations thus non-circular so I'm encouraging you every time you see people use the word free grace or pure grace or unconditional gift you need to say what exactly do you mean by that because they often mean very different things under apparently similar terms right let me finish by suggesting in the briefest outline how all this might relate to Paul Paul's antithetical modes of expression and his polarizing structure of thought have led interpreters of Paul down through the ages to find more and more perfections of the theme of gift in Paul's theology or to perfect his perfections to greater and greater extremes Marcian the second century radical Paulanist forged a synthesis between Paul's emphasis on the benevolence of God and the philosophical concern to clear God of causing harm or wrong so he perfected Paul infiology in terms of the singularity of grace God for Marcian is good and perfectly that is only good can't be imagined as judging anybody or causing any harm Augustine would have none of that God judges justly and condemns justly he does not perfect the singularity of grace but Augustine was captivated by Paul's theology of gratia as the Latin translates it and his successive re-readings of Romans let him to emphasize above all the incongruity of grace God's gift without regard to the worth of the recipient now his great enemy Pelagius also believed in God's grace in the sense of the priority of grace that God gives us all we need for the moral life in advance of our efforts but Augustine insisted on the incongruity between the human sinner and divine grace and also insisted more and more to the grace in effecting and preserving the believer's response so here you have a classic case which not the case that Augustine believes in grace and Pelagius doesn't they both absolutely believe in grace but they believe they perfect it in different ways and Augustine's perfections of grace in terms of incongruity worried Pelagius sick and a vice versa Pelagius's definition of grace worried Augustine Luther to skip down a few centuries Augustinian in many respects sought to break totally with the notion of a repeated circularity of grace and return nervous of Augustine's language of merit Luther insisted on the non-circularity or unilateral character of divine gift God gives, needing and wanting and nothing we do thereafter effects or elicits a further gift from God indeed for Luther human giving is to follow suit in a kind of non-circularity this is clear of all self-interest and is I think Luther's theology one of the roots of the modern western notion of the pure unilateral gift today developing this varied heritage Pauline scholars compete with one another for radical and complete theology of divine grace for some Paul didn't speak or didn't really mean to speak of God as a judge who might condemn in a neo-Marsianite perfection of grace God is all benevolence and if Paul seems to say other things that must be, because he's quoting other people for others emphasis must be placed on the efficacy of the call of God in Christ better for them to read the ambiguous phrase Pistis Christu as the faithfulness of Christ rather than as the more traditionally faith in Christ lest it seem that faith is a human step independent of God's prior grace for others again it's dangerous or unfortunate to speak of the believers obligations to God God's grace needs and demands and whatever believers do in response to God's grace is done surely freely and from the heart without a hint of obligation or debt see the influence of different perfections of grace still having their impress on Pauline interpretations of Paul if we disaggregate these various possible perfections of grace and except they do not have to be a package deal it may be possible to see which are really characteristic of Paul and which have been loaded on to him by later interpretation for myself I think the central and characteristic feature of divine gift in Paul which he identifies above all with the gift of Christ is its incongruity as we've seen it was not necessary or even always attractive to construe divine giving as a gift to the unfitting or the unworthy but this was what Paul emphasized in multiple ways and correlated both with his own experience and with the practice of the Gentile mission in this mission the people who on ethnic moral and social grounds would be considered unlikely recipients of God's benefits turned out to be those who had in fact received God's spirit in this light we can place Paul better I think within his Jewish context as Ed Sanders and others have rightly emphasized everyone in ancient Judaism believed in grace in the sense that they believed that God was benevolent and likely to be the first and effusive giver in a structure that Sanders called covenantal nomism but that's not the same as saying that God gives without regard to worth in fact I think there were differences of opinion even dispute among second temple Jews about the validity of figuring God's grace and incongruous gift to the unworthy Paul is rare they're not quite alone in making this the centerpiece of his theology and as we've noted this fitted exactly the conduct and experience of his Gentile mission Paul then is not to be contrasted with a works righteous great grace less Judaism but his distinctive emphasis on the incongruity of the Christ gift means that we cannot say that there is no difference at all between Paul and his fellow Jews on the subject of grace what about human gift giving I think that Paul has no problem thinking about Christian obedience as indebted to divine grace as he puts it we are under grace although in his view believers are transformed and newly empowered by the experience of the Christ gift so that what they do is in a sense only passing on the divine gift when he thinks about human relations of gift and return he is not encumbered by modern pure gift anxieties about for instance anonymity or about blocking or deflecting the return the Gentiles he says Gentile Christians are under obligation to return material gifts for the spiritual blessings they have received and when the Corinthians contribute to the collection for Jerusalem they can expect to have some return for the churches both immediately and in the future Paul is not embarrassed by this as if this return would in some sense pollute or diminish the gift with an element of self interest as far as he is concerned reciprocity and mutuality in love is the core of all Christian social relations so that what's of benefit for the other will also be in some form or another of benefit for oneself in the same vein Paul can insist that the gifts he wants from the Corinthians are to be voluntary and cheerfully given while he exercises forms of persuasion and inducement that look to us to border on coercion we are reminded of mouse's instinct what we modern westerners tend to regard as polar opposites disinterest and self-interest or freedom and obligation are typically in gift relations conjoined and mixed and if we find this confusing or self-contradictory the problem may lie more with us than with ancient gift givers and gift theorists such as Paul in fact I believe it may be precisely only by getting away from certain modern notions of altruism and disinterest that we can build again healthy and mutually beneficial forms of social interaction in our contemporary individualized West well I have ventured far and wide in the attempt to illustrate how one particular strand in anthropology the anthropology of gift could help illumine and clarify the poor line language of gift or grace there's no single model here more a set of sensitivities and questions which have been used by historians in all sorts of contexts ancient and modern and which I find helpful when applied to Paul in a carefully contextualized form anthropology has here been mixed with history and theology and a bit of literary theory Kenneth Burke in a kind of eclectic mix but I hope it's shown a tiny fragment of the sort of potential in the center being launched today I am delighted to make this contribution to its beginning and now in the spirit of the gift I look forward very much to your observations, criticisms and questions by way of return thanks very much