Readings
- Leviticus 19:26–37
- 2 Thessalonians 1:1–12
- Matthew 6:25–34
- Psalms: [70], 71; 74
2 Thessalonians 1:1–12
Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy,
To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring.
This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God and is intended to make you worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering. For it is indeed just of God to repay with affliction those who afflict you and to give relief to the afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in a fiery flame, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, separated from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes to be glorified by his saints and to be marveled at on that day among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.
To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Notes
A new letter, and one that comes with a complication. 2 Thessalonians is one of the disputed letters of Paul, meaning that scholars have not reached consensus on whether Paul actually wrote it. James D. G. Dunn calls the debate "roughly evenly split." A 2011 survey of 111 scholars at the British New Testament Conference found 63 in favor of Pauline authorship, 13 against, and 35 uncertain. Ernest Best summed up the issue better than anyone: "If we only possessed Second Thessalonians, few scholars would doubt that Paul wrote it; but when Second Thessalonians is put alongside First Thessalonians, doubts appear." The differences are not just in vocabulary; they extend to the whole structure of thought.
For our purposes, the question of authorship matters less than the question of how to read what's in front of us. Whoever wrote it—Paul, or someone writing in his name and tradition—the letter is in our canon. The work is to read it with care, especially in places where the theology gets hard.
Verses 3–4. "Your faith is growing abundantly and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing… we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring."
In 1 Thessalonians 1:3 the famous triad shows up — faith, love, hope. Here in 1:3 we get faith and love. Hope is missing. This was the pastoral concern Timothy reported back in 1 Thess 3:6, and apparently the issue hasn't fully resolved. By 2:2 we will find out why: some in the community are now teaching that the day of the Lord has already come.
Verses 5–9: the hard part.
Let me say plainly: I do not love this passage. The picture of God paying back affliction with affliction sits awkwardly next to don't repay anyone evil for evil (1 Thess 5:15) and love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you (Matt 5:44). If Christians are commanded to forgive their persecutors, it is hard to see how God's primary mode toward those same persecutors could be retaliation. Something has to give.
A few things help me read this passage through the lens of love and liberation without flattening its difficulty.
First: divine aikido. The theologian Greg Boyd uses the analogy of the martial art aikido, where a practitioner turns an attacker's force back on the attacker, to describe how God's "wrath" actually works in much of Scripture. God does not need to act in a special punitive way to bring evil to ruin; God has so structured the world that evil rebounds on itself. The violence of empire devours empire. The cruelty of an oppressor consumes the oppressor's own soul. Read this way, "it is just of God to repay with affliction" can mean something closer to: God has set up the moral architecture of the universe such that the harm inflicted on others will, in the end, return to its source. That is not God being vindictive. That is justice as the structure of the world.
Second: the language is softer than the English suggests. The verb behind "inflicting" in verse 8 is didōmi — to give. The noun is ekdikēsis — the giving of justice. "Inflicting vengeance" is one possible English rendering; giving justice is another, and truer to the Greek. Verse 7's "give relief to the afflicted" uses the same conceptual frame. The God of this passage is not primarily a punisher. The God of this passage is the one who gives justice, relief to the wronged, accounting to those who wronged them.
Third, aiōnios does not mean "infinite duration." The English phrase eternal destruction in verse 9 carries 1500 years of theological freight. But the underlying Greek adjective aiōnios is from aiōn, which means age, a long but bounded period of time, or a quality of time (the time of the coming age). Aiōnios destruction is more accurately rendered the destruction belonging to the age, the destruction that comes when God sets the world right. It is real and serious. It is not infinite torment forever. This translational point is contested, but it has serious advocates from Origen onward, and David Bentley Hart's recent translation of the New Testament makes the move explicitly. The CEB renders verse 9 as they will pay the penalty, which is a marked improvement over they will suffer.
The word for destruction in verse 9 is olethros, and worth flagging that this is the same word Paul (or whoever) uses in 1 Corinthians 5:5: hand this man over to Satan for the destruction (olethros) of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord. In Pauline vocabulary, olethros can be destruction in service of salvation. The destruction is not the end of the story. It is the part of the story that comes before redemption.
Fourth: the reparations frame. Universalism is sometimes critiqued for being morally cheap. Are we really supposed to say that the murdered Jews of the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler are all going to hug it out in heaven? That is a serious objection. The answer is no, not without something else happening first.
If Colossians 1 is right that God's project is the ministry of reconciliation, then reconciliation involves real repair. Origen argued that those who have committed real evil may spend ages being purged of their sins and doing the work of repair before being reconciled to God and to those they harmed. The promise is that reconciliation will, eventually, happen. The path to it runs through restorative justice, not amnesia. Verse 6 — it is just of God to repay with affliction those who afflict you — can be read as that promise. Those who have done real harm will, finally, do the real work to repair it.
That is not the picture of God most American Christians have been handed. But it is, I think, closer to the New Testament's God than the picture of eternal conscious torment of the unsaved that has been so often substituted for it.
Verses 10–12. The passage closes more gently. Jesus will be glorified by his saints and marveled at among all who have believed. The frame returns to worship. And then a prayer: that God will make the Thessalonians worthy of the call, fulfill every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in them and they in him.
The end of this passage sits in tension with its middle. Verses 6–9 describe a justice that is hard to take. Verses 10–12 describe a community being made worthy by grace. Both are in the text. The interpreter's job is to hold them together — to take the difficulty seriously, but not to let it eclipse the larger pastoral arc, which is that the God of this letter is finally the same God of peace (1 Thess 5:23), whose deepest character is reconciliation, not retribution.
Questions for reflection
Where in your imagination of God has retribution been doing the work that justice should be doing — and what would change in how you pray, hope, or grieve if those two were not the same?
Origen believed real evil requires real repair before reconciliation can happen. Where in your own life or relationships have you been hoping that forgiveness would let you skip the repair work?
