Philemon as Allegory: Theology, History and Reconciliation

Part 1: PAUL AND HIS WORLD
Chapter One RETURN OF THE RUNAWAY?
3. Philemon as Allegory: Theology, History and Reconciliation

What follows now is a jeu d’esprit, a bit of Pauline foolishness for which the reader’s indulgence and pardon is requested. It bears no weight of argument, serving more to mull over and flesh out the deeply serious questions we have been dealing with. It is more a matter of intuition than of reasoned scholarship to suppose that the massive antinomies of theology and history, frowning at each other across the table of biblical scholarship, might actually be yet another pair which seem within the modern western worldview to be irreconcilable, like heaven and earth themselves, and yet which might be open to some kind of rapprochement. Since the letter to Philemon is all about the reconciliation of people whose culture was trying to pull them apart, and since, as I have suggested, reconciliation and the resultant unity of God’s people is pretty much central to Paul’s whole project, it might make sense to ask whether the study of Paul might do, for this pair of glowering adversaries, what Paul himself was trying to do for his two friends. The fact that this poses our late-modern question to a text which was innocent of the problem is part of the foolishness...