Paul's Letter to the Philippians: Unity, Thanksgiving, and Humility - Essay Sample

Introduction

The main contextual questions in the letter of Saint Paul to the Philippians revolves around unity, thanksgiving, humility, and exhortation of Christ Jesus. This canonical letter expresses the joy and encouragement in God through Christ Jesus as attested to by Paul while imprisoned by the Roman authorities. Paul thanks God for using him as a vessel to pass the Gospel to nations like Philippi and purposes to send Timothy and Epaphroditus to continue in the missionary work. The disunity among the believers in Philippi must be mediated through God's grace.

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"3 things to look for."

Paul starts the letter by thanking and praying for the Christians in Philippi. He then expresses his joy while praying for the Christian Community. Joy and encouragement appear to be common themes throughout the letter. Also, Paul shows his determination to defend and confirm the Gospel, whether in chains or as a free man. Finally, he implores the Christian community to live in love and righteousness through Christ Jesus. The Christians must thereby discern and prepare themselves for Christ's day.

Author's big idea for Phil 1:1-11.

In the letter to the Philippians, Paul is imploring and encouraging the Christian community to continue living in obedience, joy, and love of Christ Jesus. The big ideas are, thereby, encouragement and hope.

Phil 1:1-11 in outline

Greetings to the Philippians opens the letter

Thanksgiving to the Philippians for their commitment to the Gospel.

Calls for continued mission work, whether in chains or as a free man.

Prayer for love, joy, and righteousness among the Christians

Adaptation products – Pilgrims Progress

Iconoclasm

Iconoclasm is one of the critical adaptions of the Pilgrim's Progress allegory. In the graphic novels of Pilgrim's Progress, Protestantism has continued to stay overly sensitive to the relationship between words and images. Protestants thereby traced the relationship between current graphical novels and Bunyan's PP. According to the Protestants, the reformation journey aimed at stopping the worship of idols and imagery over hearing the biblical word. In the fight against worshiping images, the reformers crusaded for the reliance on words of the Holy Bible and the shift from images and icons.

It is essential that the authors question the Protestant foundations of Bunyan and how such foundations would have made him an iconophobe himself. Though this presumption only remains hearsay at the moment, it is difficult to ignore the underlying fear that underlies Protestantism on the use of visual representations in today's graphic works (Bunyan, 1880). Enlightenment Protestant's strict value of words over images is currently under threat by comics, which are trying to fuse images and words in complex blends, which, however, still give precedence to the images. This adaptation of Bunyan's allegory stops short in linking itself to the allegorical representation of the text itself.

The Graphical Novel Adaptations of the Vanity Fair Episode

In the Vanity Fair episode in PP, one between Christian and Faithful is supposed to pay for their declaration of Christ with their life. Faithful is then condemned to die while Christian escapes Vanity and meets hope. This episode has been adopted by various comics and graphic models of today, key among them being marvel comics. Marvels adapted the Vanity Fair episode in a carnivalesque fairground with the characters immediately portrayed as devilish in clown attire. The adaptation ends with an emergence Hopeful and Christian as an exact modern-day type of heroes (Land of Books and Honey, 2018).

The adaptation of this episode on marvel's cover takes away from the depth of the episode and its symbolic value. It further portrays Christian and Hopeful as almost equally as violent as the demons.

How do quality and authority judgments come differently into play with the Bible or Christian classics compared to other books made into movies?

Quality and authority in the Bible appear differently in adaptation compared to other secular books. Bible-as-literature paradigm is often used to display the authority of the Bible in power settings. Biblical canon and its literary value always endowed with an authority that lasts through several generations. The biblical authority is often held against any modern standard of measurement of the current era. The Bible must, however, be translated into literary language and modern culture if they are to retain the perceived authority and spiritual quality (Tongue, 2014).

In modern movies, Christian classics and the Bible are always adopted in a manner that attempts to capture the religious connotations to the most accurate detail. These films always express the will of the supernatural and the value of Christian spirituality. During the presentation, the Bible retains not only the artistic and aesthetic but also literary qualities. Such literary imaginations are referred to as esemplastic powers (Tongue, 2014). For the bible representation in artistic works, such esemplastic powers involve the molding of biblical elements into a unified whole. The reenactment of bible stories in movies must, furthermore, create as effective a presentation of the perceived religious and spiritual contexts of the time as practicable.

Bibliography

Bunyan, J. (1880). Pilgrims progress. Worthington.

Land of Books and Honey. (2018, January 4). Book Review: The Pilgrim's Progress. https://medium.com/@landofbooksandhoney/book-review-the-pilgrims-progress-b06edb142a5e.

Tongue, S. (2014). Between biblical criticism and poetic rewriting: interpretative struggles over Genesis 32:22-32. Brill.