The Down Payment of Righteousness

This chapter studies a letter or set of letters written some fifty to seventy-five years after Paul, partially preserved in Greek, Latin, and Syriac: Polycarp's Letter to the Philippians (Pol. Phil.). The letter's seemingly disjointed themes — from its emphasis on the Philippian community as recipients of Pauline correspondence to its focus on quoting the Pastoral Epistles in condemning philarguria (love of money) to its intense interest in right belief and practice to its stark imagery of divine judgment — make sense when taken in a broader theo-economic context. The chapter focuses especially on Pol. Phil. 8.1–2, in which Polycarp introduces the idea that Christ is the “down payment for our righteousness.” Polycarp understands both the use of money and following proper teaching within a juridical theo-economic context in which Christ has spent blood in suffering as a down payment for humanity's future judgment and that both right belief and right action are required in order to avoid being held liable for that down payment. This text expands the economy of suffering that one finds in Paul's letter, where Christ and suffering are commodified.