Related Reading: For further discussion of ethos, the interested reader might want to read William M. A. Grimaldi's "The Auditors' Role in Aristotelian Rhetoric" in ORAL AND WRITTEN COMMUNICATION: HISTORICAL APPROACHES, edited by Richard Leo Enos (Sage Publications, 1990, pages 65-81).
(2) I would say that Paul was inviting people to use what C. G. Jung refers to as active imagination to imagine the personification that Paul refers to as "Christ Jesus." In the Christian tradition of prayer, a form of prayer based on passages of scripture was developed that involves the use of the imagination in meditation and contemplation. Arguably the most famous compilation of exercises designed to help a person engage in the use of imagination in meditation and contemplation is known as the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES of Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556). By using our imaginations in meditation and contemplation about certain passages in scripture, we today can replicate for ourselves in our experience the kind of imaginative experience that Paul was urging his listeners to undertake with respect to the personification of "Christ Jesus." When we undertake this kind of imaginative work with reference to the personification of "Christ Jesus," we may be able to experience in our psyches what Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette refer to as the archetypes of masculine maturity at the archetypal level of the human psyche. For example, when Paul imagines the Parousia (the Second Coming), he imagines "Christ Jesus" coming as the warrior-king, which has given rise to the Christian tradition of referring to "Christ the King." In the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES of Ignatius of Loyola, the second week is devoted to contemplating the kingdom of God and Christ the King. All the king imagery can be connected with the archetype of the king within the archetypal level of the human psyche. See Moore and Gillette's THE KING WITHIN: ACCESSING THE KING [ARCHETYPE] IN THE MALE PSYCHE (1992; revised and expanded edition, Exploration Press, 2007). By accessing the energies of the archetypal level of the human psyche, Paul and people who listened to him and people today can learn how to move from experiencing their ordinary psyches to experiencing the enhanced energies that can flow into us from the archetypal level of the human psyche. In the terminology used by Engberg-Pedersen, we can move from being people with ordinary psyches to becoming people whose psyches are enhanced by pneuma (spirit), one of the key terms that Engberg-Pedersen investigates.
Let's review. On the one hand, Paul was preaching that the end of the world as we know it was about to occur, which would probably strike terror into the hearts of the people who bought his line of thought. In Aristotle's POETICS, he tells us that people watching a tragedy performed in Athens would experience pity and terror (or fear). From his discussion of watching a tragedy performed, we can conclude that people in the ancient world who listened to Paul and bought his line of argument about the impending end of the world as we know it probably did experience terror (or fear) about that prospect occurring in the near future, as Paul himself said it would. On the other hand, Paul invited them to save themselves from being on the wrong side when this apocalyptic event occurred by getting themselves on the right side by believing in "Christ Jesus." Moreover, when they believed in "Christ Jesus," they would experience a new form of life in their psyches. So what are we to make of Paul's various statements about this new form of life that people who believed in "Christ Jesus" would experience in their psyches?
This brings us back to what Engberg-Pedersen has undertaken to study in detail in his new book: pneuma (spirit) in Paul's writings. Engberg-Pedersen painstakingly shows that we can understand the term pneuma in Paul's writings as referring to the material spirit, as he puts it. In Engberg-Pedersen's terminology, the energies of the archetypal level of the human psyche that Moore and Gillette write about can also be understood as the material spirit in our psyches, as distinct from the immaterial spirit of the transcendent divine ground of being (a.k.a. God) invoked in immaterialist philosophy such as Plato's and in traditional Christian theology. Engberg-Pedersen works out his elaborate case for considering the pneuma in Paul's writings as the material spirit by drawing extensively on stoic philosophy. Stoic philosophy was materialist, as distinct from Plato's immaterialist philosophy.
In plain English, this means that even people who hold a materialist philosophy and deny the existence of the transcendent divine ground of being (a.k.a. God) can have a spiritual life and can become people of the pneuma as described by Paul without assenting to Paul's thought-world about "Christ Jesus."
However, because Engberg-Pedersen draws so extensively on stoic thought, I have to wonder if atheistic materialists today have to become something like the ancient stoics in order to cultivate the material spirit today. In this regard, I should mention that Albert Ellis has long acknowledged the influence of ancient stoic thought, including Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, on his development of rational-emotive-behavior therapy, which is widely used by clinical psychologists. No doubt the approach known as rational-emotive-behavior therapy can help us learn how to stop emoting about many experiences in our lives and learn how to become more rational in our thinking about our lives, as the ancient stoic philosophers themselves became more rational about their lives. But people today may need to undertake a course of personal development more ambitious than rational-emotive-behavior therapy in order to learn how to access the archetypes of maturity at the archetypal level of the human psyche.
I do not mean to sound flippant in what I am about to say. But Engberg-Pedersen belabors the point that the pneuma that Paul writes about includes a cognitive dimension, which is to say that the pneuma impacts and influences thought and how we think about the world. As a result of the cognitive impact and influence of the pneuma, it strikes me that in a way of speaking the activation of the cognitive dimension of the pneuma in our psyches can bring about the end of the world as we have known it and can thereby transform our way of understanding the world.
However, in extrapolating this implication from Engberg-Pedersen's discussion of the cognitive dimension of the pneuma, I do not mean to claim any great originality on my part. In his landmark book INSIGHT: A STUDY OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING (1957; 5th ed. University of Toronto Press, 1992), the Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, S.J. (1904-1984) discusses how different cognitive developments result in certain kinds of conversions in our understanding, which he styles intellectual conversion, moral conversion, and religious conversion. These three conversions probably involve respectively the Magician archetype, the Warrior archetype, and the King or Queen archetype discussed by Moore and Gillette. For Lonergan himself, his intellectual conversion involved working with a non-materialist (or immaterialist) philosophy. But Engberg-Pedersen's painstaking analysis of pneuma in Paul's writings opens the way to allowing that intellectual conversion can involve working with a materialist philosophy, as can moral conversion and even religious conversion if we understand religious conversion as involving our sense of ultimate meaning and reality, which can be a materialist sense of ultimate meaning and reality, not just a non-materialist (or immaterialist) sense of ultimate reality and meaning.
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