“That Most Reluctant of Critical Theorists”
A review of
Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision.
Douglas Harink, editor.
Reviewed by Matthew Kaul.
Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision.
Douglas Harink, editor.
Paperback: Cascade Books, 2010.
Buy now: [ Wipf and Stock ]
As with the last volume I reviewed on this subject, Saint Paul among the Philosophers, this volume is a compilation of essays originally given as talks at a conference. As with any compilation of conference papers, the challenge the editor of this volume faces lies in covering the greatest possible breadth of material from the conference while at the same time maintaining some sort of coherent, logical organization, some sense of the book as a coherent whole rather than a series of only tangentially related chapters.
Unfortunately, too frequently the price of coherence is repetition: essays cover the same ground in setting up and making their arguments, seemingly unaware that other chapters have already done their work for them. This volume does not entirely escape that difficulty; at the end of the book, the reader will have read enough paraphrases of Agamben and Badiou to make her feel right at home in an English department grad student lounge or an emerging church pub-and-theology night. Nevertheless, the volume is in many ways a great success, particular in opening up suggestive new insights into how theology and philosophy might more fruitfully interact regarding that most reluctant of critical theorists, the apostle Paul.
Douglas Harink’s introduction sets up the arguments to follow and introduces the reader to the “Paul of the philosophers.” Harink’s brief paragraph summaries serve as useful guides to those readers not already initiated into the discourses of apocalyptic theology and continental philosophy (trust me, you’re not alone). Harink also clarifies precisely what is at stake in these debates: Paul’s philosophical readers seek to rescue him from the theological paradigms supposedly holding him captive, setting Paul free to serve as the exemplary political thinker he was; the theologians, then, respond by making the case that those transcendent aspects of Paul’s thought jettisoned by the philosophers are not mere metaphysical baggage but rather the central kernel of his writings.
II.
The theologians represented in this volume make their defense through the category of the apocalyptic, drawing chiefly on the work of J. Louis Martyn, accompanied by a disparate host of other theologians, philosophers, and biblical scholars, to do so. There’s no space to engage with even a majority of the essays, but I want to point out several exemplary instances of insightful theological engagement, through the apocalyptic, with the philosophers’ Paul.
Martyn himself opens the volume with a rich essay (marred by a maddening over-reliance upon italics and section headings) that deploys the apocalypse as a conceptual hinge between philosophy and theology. Fascinating in its own right for its consideration of the relationship between apocalypse and what Nicholas Wolterstorff has called the “noetic effects of sin,” Martyn’s chapter avoids contemporary philosophers in favor of considering Paul’s own complex relationship to philosophy. For Martyn, the apocalypse—God’s entrance into the human order through Jesus Christ—is the fundamental category for understanding Paul’s ethics. By emphasizing the utterly transformative fact of this apocalyptic breakthrough, Paul moves away from both Jewish and Greek conceptions of ethics toward an emphasis upon the need to situate ethics within community—the community of people drawn together by this transformative apocalypse.
Martyn’s chapter, somewhat idiosyncratic in this volume in its scant reference to contemporary philosophers, nevertheless sets the tone for what follows, both in its close attention to Paul’s texts and in its emphasis upon the category of apocalypse as a necessary and often overlooked aspect of Paul’s thought. Travis Kroeker’s essay follows upon Martyn’s by leaping forward to consider 19th- and early-20th-century philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and Walter Benjamin, finding in the latter pair resources for a “weak messianic” consideration of redemption that responds justly to Nietzsche’s stirring critique of Christianity as grounded in ressentiment. For Nietzsche, ressentiment—the glorification of suffering for its own sake, the rejection of all true goodness in the world in favor of a perverse spiritual yearning for death and the afterlife—lies at the core of Christianity. For Kroeker, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, and Dostoevsky suggest that true messianic awareness is not an abandoning of this world, but rather a way of being more faithful to the present moment. For, as Benjamin writes, each moment presents “the small gateway through which the Messiah might enter” (53). Kroeker thoughtfully and with style covers a vast amount of philosophical and literary territory; his concluding reflections on the parable, via Karl Barth and Franz Kafka, is quite evocative, but merits and demands an essay- or book-length discussion of its own.
Justin D. Klassen continues where Kroeker left off, in the early 20th century. Klassen uses the early lectures of Heidegger on Thessalonians as a means of correcting and critiquing the contemporary theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy. Klassen’s reading of Heidegger’s notion of Christian hope is especially rich given Klassen’s exemplary and just readings of Radical Orthodox theologians John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. While critical of Milbank and Pickstock’s reckless dismissals of Heidegger, Klassen nevertheless reads both theologians with admirable care and sympathy, rendering his criticisms of their claims about Heidegger all the more convincing.
Paul Griffiths’s chapter, “The Cross as the Fulcrum of Politics: Expropriating Agamben on Paul,” is the best in the book. It begins with the most lucid brief exposition of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy that I have read, clearly articulating the basic concepts of Agamben’s philosophy and the connections between the various volumes of Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” series in a manner that would give even a reader unacquainted with Agamben a clear demonstration of the contours of his thought. Moreover, Griffiths’s exposition sets the stage for the chapter’s second half, in which Griffiths distances himself from Agamben’s secular appropriation of Paul by turning to the cross. Griffiths argues that the Messiah’s death and resurrection make profound demands upon Christians as we live as citizens, political agents seeking the common good in the secular state. Griffiths’s claim is that Christians must not renounce political action altogether in favor of a retreat into the church, but rather must practice “quietist political action” (190)—political action that constantly acts upon what is right, regardless of the ultimate results of such action.
Griffiths’s ideas here are deeply counterintuitive for us, and he acknowledges that: “[P]rospective judgment as to the effects of writing some political proposal into law is for us ordinarily intimate with advocating or opposing that proposal . . . so ascetical effort is needed to refuse such judgments . . . ” (192). His concept of quietist political action might be usefully contrasted with utilitarian political action, in which achieving a particular end (the greatest good for the greatest number) nearly always justifies the means taken to achieve it. Griffiths believes the quietist of political action possesses several advantages over the more standard, interested political agents. Most importantly, the quietist advocate does not presume knowledge where no true knowledge is to be had. Griffiths is surely correct that, with respect to systems as complex as the global economy, any particular action of the Federal Reserve, or the Treasury, or a local businessperson has hosts of consequences never even imagined by those who advocated for that action; to pretend that a particular course has a limited set of predictable results is to be either ignorant or deceptive. The quietist of political action, therefore, can embrace an honesty and transparency that is utterly lacking throughout all levels of contemporary politics; Christ’s death and resurrection, coupled with the hope in his eventual return, perhaps uniquely permits such graceful candor. Griffiths’s proposal is fascinating and deserves a much fuller explication that this brief chapter permits. Nevertheless, even this cursory explication of such a provocative new (or rather, renewed: Griffiths claims without clarifying that he is following Blaise Pascal here) notion of Christian political action is itself worth the price of the book.
Douglas Harink’s concluding chapter offers a masterful conclusion to the volume. Harink’s chapter offers readings of four commentaries on the book of Romans: works by Robert Jewett, N. T. Wright, Karl Barth, and Giorgio Agamben. Harink is particularly interested in how these scholars engage with Paul’s thinking about time and history, and how this engagement inflects their own understanding of these themes. He criticizes Jewett for, in a sense, failing to be properly moved by Paul: Jewett, Harink claims, “maintains the conceit of objective historical research rather than [the] unapologetic theological and political witness in the present evoked by the letter” (288). In other words, Jewett’s commitment to historical contextualization as the proper means of understanding Paul is not a commitment shared or advocated by Paul. N. T. Wright does not make this mistake; instead of historical contextualization Wright proposes a narrative understanding of Paul. But this category, too, is foreign to the thought of Paul itself, according to Harink, one more way of contextualizing Paul in order to avoid his radical, apocalyptic view of history, a view that intrinsically resists contextualization.
Karl Barth, however, is someone who has been transformed by Paul, and his commentary appropriately reflects this transformation: “Rather than contextualizing Paul’s apocalyptic gospel within secular or salvation-historical time, Barth’s aim in the commentary is to speak of the contextualizing power of the gospel in Romans not only in what he writes about Romans, but in the very manner in which he writes the commentary” (299). In other words, Barth rightly recognizes that Paul’s message has implications for theological writing, and even for the writing of commentaries. Paraphrasing Barth, Harink states, “Historical-critical method can be only a prolegomenon to the real task of biblical commentary, which is to discern and speak the subject matter of the text” (300; emphasis original). For Barth, the subject matter of Romans is apocalypse, and his commentary reflects the fact that he has been caught up in this apocalypse.
Harink’s discussion of Agamben, finally, usefully connects to both his treatment of Barth and Griffith’s earlier synopsis of Agamben. By concentrating on Agamben’s reading of time in the book of Romans, Harink supplements Griffith’s chapter, which is also interested in apocalyptic time but focused more closely on the relationship between time and politics. Harink emphasizes the degree to which Agamben’s treatment of time serves as a corrective to Barth’s notion of apocalypse. For Barth, apocalypse flattens out all time, eternity overwhelming history to such a degree that no meaningful historical difference ever occurs. Agamben, however, recognizes that typology is central to Paul’s thought, and this emphasis on typology suggests that the differences between Paul’s apocalyptic time and the temporal experience of Israel necessarily supplement each other. In other words, Agamben is more attentive than Barth to Paul’s reading of the Old Testament.
Though Harink chastises Agamben for “fall[ing] short of grasping how it is the messianity of Jesus in particular—that is, that Jesus is the Messiah—that is at the heart of Paul’s understanding of time” (312; emphasis original), he places the secular commentary of Agamben in such useful tension with Barth’s theology that the work of both thinkers is usefully enriched. Harink’s chapter as a whole should be read by every theologian and Biblical scholar, for he claims that reading the Biblical texts has implications for our writing about those texts. It’s not good enough to churn out one dry academic tome after another. In other words, scholars need to recognize that they are never merely detached observers, but rather called to account by the texts they read; accordingly, both their lives and their writing styles should reflect this fact.
III.
As I’ve said, books of collected conference proceedings are too often both dry and disjointed, placing before the reader a vast number of summaries and abridged fragments of thinkers who merit much deeper, sustained reflection. While this volume does not avoid such occasionally repetitious summaries (particularly of Badiou), it manages to cohere quite nicely. Its success can be attributed to the thoughtful arrangement, oversight, and introduction of its editor, Douglas Harink, and especially to the provocative individual essays. Most of the chapters in this book, frankly, would be impenetrable to readers without at least some grounding in both philosophy and Paul’s writings. But several of the chapters—particularly those by Martyn, Fowl, Griffiths, and Harink himself—might be read with profit by any interested layperson; fortunately, these chapters are also among the book’s best. For those who have not yet done so, reading the works of Badiou, Zizek, and Agamben themselves will open up new insights into Paul, a thinker whose richness is too frequently disguised and burdened by the assumptions and proof-texting sensibilities we often bring to our reading of his letters. Employing this volume as a companion to one’s reading of both Paul and the philosophers will certainly help us do greater justice to both.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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FYI: This book is available digitally from Logos as part of the Theopolitical Visions Series (15 vols.)
http://www.logos.com/product/29765/theopolitical-visions-series