Preface

This is the fourth and final volume of The Pauline Captivity Letters, a confessional Lutheran study of the four New Testament epistles that Paul wrote, or is traditionally held to have written, while in chains. We have moved through Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians. We arrive now at Philemon. The letter is the shortest in the Pauline corpus, twenty-five verses in all, and the most personal piece of writing we possess from the apostle. It is also, in some ways, the strangest book in the New Testament: a private letter from one Christian man to another about a third Christian man, addressed to a household, signed under chains, and preserved by the Church for two thousand years as Holy Scripture.

That last fact should give us pause before we have read a word of it. The Holy Spirit, who could have left us with twenty-seven books of grand theological architecture in the manner of Romans or Hebrews, instead preserved for the Church a one-page letter about a runaway slave and a Christian master and the apostle who wrote between them. Whatever else we say about Philemon, we will want to say at the outset that the Spirit who inspired it meant for us to have it. Its smallness is not a defect. The brevity is the point.

You will notice that this volume is much shorter than the three that precede it. Six sessions, not ten or eleven or eight. A letter of twenty-five verses cannot honestly support more. We have chosen instead to take Philemon slowly, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes verse by verse, because a small letter that contains the gospel in miniature deserves to be read with attention, not stretched out for the sake of length. My hope is that what we lose in size we gain in depth. The Lutheran tradition has resources for this letter that most Protestant studies miss, and those resources do not show themselves to a reader in a hurry.

Philemon was carried to its destination alongside Colossians. The two letters traveled together in the same satchel, in the hands of the same couriers: Tychicus, the faithful minister, and Onesimus, the runaway slave who is the chief subject of the shorter letter. Anyone who has worked through our third volume will recognize the names. We there gave Colossians ten chapters of attention, and in two of them, the chapter on the Christian household and the chapter on the final greetings, we set the stage for what follows here. We will not repeat that material. We will build on it.

The chains are everywhere in this letter. Paul mentions them in the first verse, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, he calls himself, before he names himself an apostle. He mentions them again in the appeal proper, when he could have ordered Philemon and chose instead to ask. He mentions them when he speaks of Onesimus as a son begotten, literally, in my chains. He mentions them when he says he wanted to keep Onesimus to serve him during my imprisonment for the sake of the gospel. And he mentions them in the closing greetings, when Epaphras is named as his fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus. Five mentions in twenty-five verses. The chains are not background. They are the lever Paul uses to move the whole letter. We will let them do their work as we go.

The pastorally and politically delicate matter of this letter cannot be avoided. Onesimus was a slave. Philemon was his master. Paul does not, in this letter, call for the abolition of slavery as a social institution; neither does he endorse it as a divine ordinance. What he does is more subtle and, in the long run, more revolutionary: he addresses Philemon as a brother, addresses Onesimus as a brother, and asks Philemon to receive Onesimus as he would receive Paul himself, that is, as a brother. The word does the work. Brother in this letter is not sentimental and not metaphorical. It is the gospel naming a relation that the social structures of the ancient world could not name and that no merely political program could create.

I want to be plain about one thing before we begin. This study will not be a manifesto for political revolution, nor will it be an apology for the institutions of the ancient world. Both readings have been pressed on Philemon, and both fail it. The Lutheran tradition has the resources to read this letter as Paul wrote it: through the doctrine of Christian liberty, through the two kingdoms, through the priesthood of all believers, through Luther’s own meditation in On the Freedom of a Christian, and we will lean on those resources without forcing them. Luther’s small treatise from 1520 is the closest historical companion Philemon has in the Lutheran corpus. The two writings illuminate each other when read side by side.

The title of this volume is Brother in Christ. It is, like the titles of the three volumes preceding it, a phrase that contains the word Christ, for that is what binds the four letters of this series together. In Christ (Ephesians) was the Pauline phrase by which we are named into God. To Live Is Christ (Philippians) was the Pauline phrase by which we are oriented toward God. Christ in You (Colossians) was the Pauline phrase by which Christ dwells with His people. And Brother in Christ is the Pauline reality by which Philemon and Onesimus are made one (the slave-owner and the runaway and the apostle who writes between them, three men whom no first-century social register would have placed at one table), made brothers under one Lord. The phrase as such does not appear verbatim in the letter, but the reality saturates it. Verse seventeen, accept him as you would me, is the verse in which the title finds its anchor.

The six sessions of this study divide the letter as follows. Session 1 takes verses 1 through 3: the greeting, in which Paul names himself a prisoner of Christ Jesus and addresses the letter to Philemon, Apphia, Archippus, and the church that meets in their house. Session 2 takes verses 4 through 7: Paul’s thanksgiving for Philemon’s faith and love, and the curious detail that Philemon has refreshed the hearts of the saints. Session 3 takes verses 8 through 14: the appeal proper, in which Paul refuses to command and asks instead, and in which Onesimus is named for the first time. Session 4 takes verses 15 through 17: the heart of the letter, where Onesimus is named no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, as a dear brother. Session 5 takes verses 18 through 22: Paul’s pledge to pay any debt Onesimus has incurred, the verses in which the logic of imputed righteousness is pictured in miniature. And Session 6 takes verses 23 through 25: the closing greetings, in which the wider apostolic company comes into view and the letter ends with grace.

The conventions of the prior volumes carry forward, with one change in this online edition. The print edition quotes the English Standard Version; this free online edition quotes the NET Bible, as all the free studies on this site do. Where Paul’s Greek matters to the argument, I give my own literal rendering and mark it as such, so that you can see what the translations are deciding. Each session opens with an epigraph from the NET, followed by an instruction to read the relevant passage from your Bible before proceeding. The Greek and Latin terms we examine are italicized on first introduction. Gathering the Threads at the end of each session draws the strands of the study together. For Discussion offers six questions for use in a group setting or for personal reflection. Looking Ahead points to the next session. The Closing Prayer is meant to be prayed.

A word on setting. Paul does not tell us where he is held. This study follows the traditional and most likely view that he writes from Rome, in the custody under guard that Acts 28 describes, in the early 60s. Some interpreters place the letter instead during an otherwise unrecorded imprisonment at Ephesus, which would put Paul much nearer to Colossae. Nothing essential in our reading depends on settling the question.

A word on group use. If you are reading this volume with others, six sessions fit naturally into a six-week study, or a three-week study with two sessions per week, or a long weekend retreat for those who like their reading concentrated. The letter is short enough that a participant who has fallen behind can catch up in an evening. That is one of the small gifts of working through a small letter together.

A word on solitary use. If you are reading alone, the For Discussion sections still serve. Read them slowly. Sit with the questions before reaching for an answer. They are not pretexts for the answer the author already has in mind; they are doors into the text. Walk through them at your own pace.

This volume completes a four-volume series, and it completes it where Paul’s prison correspondence itself seems to want to end: not with cosmic Christology or apostolic farewell, but with one ordinary household receiving back one ordinary man, and the gospel doing its quiet work in the structures of an ordinary life. The Spirit who preserved this letter for two thousand years did not preserve it for nothing. Let us read it as the gift it is.

Larry Herzog Jr.