How they plucked God out of the sky and into our heads, on Kant & Descartes

Below I discuss Rorty and Bramdom's beef and solution to Deacartes's conception of mind and knowledge.

But first here David Bentley Hart explains how Descartes & Kant plucked a transcendent God, and all meaning, out there in the Cosmos, and gingerly placed a transcendental ego within our head, to explain how our mind comes to know things "out there".

The first move was made by Descartes by...

"....moving truth from the world in its appearing to the subject in its perceiving, secured reason's "freedom" perhaps, but also unveiled with extraordinary suddenness that "nihilistic" terminus that Heidegger saw (perhaps fancifully, perhaps not) as having been paradoxically but ineluctably determined in the eidetic science of Platonism.

"Now will I close my eyes," writes Descartes, "I will stop up my ears, I will avert my senses from their objects, I will even erase from my consciousness all images of things corporeal; or, at least ... I will consider them to be empty and false" (Meditations III).

Surely this austerely principled act of abnegation (or self-mutilation) was, if not the founding gesture ture of modernity, the supreme crystallization of its unsentimental logic.

Thereafter the trustworthiness of the world could be secured for reflection only within the citadel of subjective certitude, as an act of will."'

The transcendental turn in philosophy was a turn to instrumental reason as foundation; the truth of the world could no longer be certified by the phainein of what gives itself self to thought, but only by the adjudications of the hidden artificer of rational order: the ego.

Understanding, now indiscerptibly joined to the power of the will to to negate and establish, could not now be understanding of a prior givenness, but only a reduction of the exterior to what is answerable to and so manipulable by reason.

If philosophy begins in wonder, thaumazein, the dazzlement of a gaze lost in the radiance of the given - which provokes vision to ascend into its transcendent splendor, so as to convert wonder into wisdom - it can nonetheless end, it seems, in an anxious retreat from world to self, from wonder to stupefaction, from light to will.

The phenomena had to be made conformable to our gaze, rather than taken as the shining forth of being, provoking our gaze to a rapture beyond itself; wakefulness to transcendence had to be displaced by the "clear-sighted" and disenchanted chanted regime of a controlling scrutiny.

When the wakened gaze was transformed formed into the gaze that establishes, the world could be world only as the factum of my intelligence, and the indifferent region of my investigations. The phenomena, when allowed to return, could exist for me only as mensurable quanta; natural light - which has no power to reduce reality to proposition or calculation, but only the power to offer the world to recognition and illumine it as mystery - had no real probative value, but itself was found in need of transcendental certification.

...in this very discontinuity between empirical knowledge and the concept of the infinite, as he construed them, he gave eloquent expression to the prejudice, by his time quite pervasive, that immanent and transcendent truth are dialectically rather than analogically related, as the former embraces a world of substances that exhaust their meaning in their very finitude while the latter can arrive among these substances only as a self-announcing announcing paradox....

"This is the singular achievement of Kant. The transcendental project, in its inchoate and insufficiently "critical" form, could escape the circularity of knowledge - the ceaseless and aporetic oscillation of epistemic priority between understanding and experience, between subject and thing - only by positing, beyond empirical ego and empirical data alike, a transcendent cause.

But, as Kant certainly saw, this is simply to ground the uncertifiable in the infinitely unascertainable. 

Nor was it possible for him to retreat to the premodern language of illumination, which would resolve the seeming impossibility of correspondence between tween perception and the perceived by ascribing their harmony to the supereminent unity in which the poles of experience - phenomena and gaze - already participate; once the possibility of any real evidentiary gravity had been definitively situated within the knowing subject, such a "metaphysics" became came a critical impossibility, as it could not be established by the agency of reason son in any purely "voluntary" and irreducible sense, but could be seriously entertained as an ultimate answer only by a mind resigned to a condition of active passivity, a kind of humble surrender to the testimony of a transcendence that, by definition, cannot be delivered over to the certitudes of an autonomous ego.

And so Kant had no final choice but to arrive at the absolutely metaphysical decision to ground the circle of knowledge in a transcendental capacity behind or within subjectivity; this "transcendental unity of apperception" accompanying all the representations made available to the empirical ego was, of course, a metaphysical superaddition to the given, but it was one to which, given the limits its of modernity's conjectural range, there was no apparent alternative.

Moreover, it assured the subject a transcendence over and mastery of the theoretical, a supersensible freedom that is, as we have seen, announced in the rupture of the sublime. 

In a sense, Kant's "Copernican revolution" might better be called "Ptolemaic": if Copernicus overthrew the commonsense geocentrism of ancient cosmology by advancing the heliocentric thesis, displacing the center from "here" to "there," Kant (as an inheritor of the epistemological caesura such a revolution seems to introduce, more forcibly than Platonism, between sensibility and verifiable truth) enacted at the transcendental level an entirely contrary motion, reestablishing the order of knowledge by moving the axis of truth from the "sun of the good" to the solid, imperturbable fundamentum inconcussum of the subjectum (substrate, substance, ground) transcenden tale.

Now the phenomena would revolve around the unyielding earth of apperception; again, we would stand at the center."

The question that has haunted the modern world is, how do we know what the world is really like outside our heads ? A pseudo problem based on a misunderstanding, says Rorty. And here’s how that happened, according to Rorty as summed up by James KA Smith :

Descartes creates the field of epistemology by inventing “the mind.”‘ This “inner space” becomes the cinema for “ideas” and “representations” that play on the screen of consciousness as images of a world that is “outside” the mind(a“veil of ideas”).

The key to certainty is to“ground” or “found” ideas or representations of the outside in the foundation of the mind itself. Hence it is Descartes’s invention of “mind” that also gives rise to the foundationalist project—namely, securing our knowledge of the “outside” in something “inside.”

Locke picks up the Cartesian model and starts fretting about the mechanics of mind—just how these ideas and representations “hook up” with and “correspond” to “reality.” At this
point philosophy just becomes epistemology oriented by a first and basic question:“How is our knowledge possible?”

The mind is a tablet on which impressions are inscribed, or, a mirror that reflects nature. However, Locke’s own answer to this question (empiricism) wasn’t characterized by the security of Cartesian certainty (spawning different responses inHume and Reid).

Enter Kant who “put philosophy ‘on the secure path of science’ by putting outer space inside inner space (the space of the constituting activity of the transcendental ego) and then claiming Cartesian certainty about the inner for the laws of what had previously been thought to be outer”.

 “Only Thought Relates” is Kant’s maxim—“there are no ‘qualified things’—no objects—prior to the ‘constitutive action of the mind’”.An object is always the result or product of synthesis. In other words, since we “constitute” the objects we know, and our ideas are certain, we can be certain about what we constitute.

So we’re all Kantians now, even if we spend our time railing against Kant.

In the process, philosophy takes as “given” what is contingent.

What epistemology takes as “given”—as what we “find” when we investigate our “experience”—is in fact, Rorty says, put there by our training in the epistemology language-game: what we“find”is what we’ve been trained to see.

For Rorty, we don’t“make contact” with reality (that assumes the inside/outside picture that negates the contingency of our social environment); rather, we deal with reality.

We make our way in the world by means of a know-how for which we are indebted to—and dependent upon—a community of meaning making. It is our social dependency as “knowers” (know-howers) that Rorty thinks is ignored by representationalist theories of knowledge.

Charles Taylor, too, suggests that this is primarily a shift in the location of meaning, moving it from “the world” into “the mind.”

Significance no longer inheres in things; rather, meaning andsignificance are a property of minds who perceive meaning internally. The external world might be a catalyst for perceiving meaning, but the meanings are generated within the mind — or, in stronger versions (say, Kant), meanings are imposed upon things by minds. Meaning is now located in agents. 

Only once this shift is in place can the proverbial brain-in-a-vat scenario gain any currency; only once meaning is located in minds can we worry that someone or something could completely dupe us about the meaning of the world by manipulating our brains. It is the modern social imaginary that makes it possible for us to imagine The Matrix.

Wittgenstein argues that meaning is primarily use rather than reference. We make our way in the world on the basis of a know-how that is acquired through practice, absorbed from our immersion in a community of practice that "trains" us how to grapple with the world rather than "mirroring" reality.

Knowledge is more like "coping" with the world, as Rorty puts it. Thus pragmatists reject referentialist or representationalist accounts of meaning and knowledge that posit a kind of magical hook between ideas "inside" my mind and things "outside" my mind. Instead, referential claims are understood as games we've learned to play from a community of practice.

Bramdom has a similar project he calls a “pragmatist direction of explanation,” in contrast to “a platonist strategy.” A platonist strategy is top-down: it thinks innate ideas planted in the mind, which is applied in practice.

For Bramdom it's the opposite, Concepts sort of bubble-up from the “skillful doings”: conceptual and our linguistic givings-and-takings.

Concept using is also one that assumes “the background of various other conceptual meaning—the traffic—is a distinctive kind of use, even wider web of our social practices content issomething “conferred” kinds of skillful unique sort of meaning, assumes a wider web of (nonconceptual) one that social practices.

This is an account of knowing (or believing, or saying) that such and such is the case in terms of knowing how (being able) to do something.

It approaches the contents of conceptually explicit propositions or principles from the direction of what is implicit in practices of using expressions and acquiring and deploying beliefs. ...The sort of pragmatism adopted here seeks to explain what is asserted by appeal to features of assertings, what is claimed in terms of claimings, what is judged by judgings, and what is believed by the role of believings (indeed, what is expressed by expressings of it)—in general, the content by the act, rather than the other way around.

He emphasizes the priority of know-how.

The “content” articulated in concepts and propositions is a way of making explicit what is implicit in our prediscursive know-how.

Bramdom focus on “Material” inferences, in contrast, are rules of inference that are bound up with the specific matter at hand. They are inferences that are bound up with, and dependent upon, the specific content of the concepts at issue.

What counts as a good (material) inference cannot be separated from familiarity with material realities, like where Pittsburgh is, where Princeton is, what lightning is, and how it relates to thunder. The truth of such inferences is not the sort that can be abstractly and formally reduced to P’s and Q’s in some universal syllogism.

Rules of material inference are bottom—up, not top-down. They don’t fall from some logical heaven, nor are they handed down from some Supremely Rational Being as veritable revelations to which our reasoning must conform. Instead, inferences that matter bubble up in two senses :On the one hand, they are material inferences that are constrained by matter, by the material conditions we inhabit—what Rorty called the “obduracy” of the things we bump into. On the other hand, these rules of inference are forged by the community of concept-mongering creatures, bubbling up from the know-how we’ve acquired coping with these material conditions.

It’s because “we” have inhabited material conditions that the concepts of “thunder” and “lightning” emerged, and it’s because of specific, obdurate material conditions that the rules of good inference about lightning and thunder have emerged. And now we hold one another responsible for making good inferences about thunder and lightning.

This should not be thought of representationally as the turning on of a Cartesian light, but as practical mastery of a certain kind of inferentially articulated doing: responding differentially according to the circumstances of proper application of a concept, and distinguishing the proper inferential consequences of such application. ...Thinking clearly is on this inferentialist rendering a matter of knowing what one is committing oneself to by a certain claim, and what would entitle one to that commitment.

WHAT IF postmodernism is true & Christianity false - doomed to nihilistic Fascism ?

David Bentley Hart surveys the various strains of postmodernism, where the unity of being is severed from goodness and beauty, either as brute difference and flux which one can joyously embrace or dismally retreat from, or the world as some deformed ideal as a veil for some more true and real sublime, and this is what he says we can expect if we affirm a postmodern narrative, in Beauty of the Infinite he writes :


"Nietzschean" moralism is a sad absurdity. True, Nietzsche himself would have found the Nazis vulgar, and he denounced fashionable anti-Semitism in his day, but there is no way within the Nietzschean narrative to prevent a renarration of the Reich's mass-murders as merely careless acts of Aryan exuberance, not resentful but affirmative, natural gestures, a bit of playful aquiline depredation; and similarly, while Deleuze and Foucault may resist collective expressions of power, it is difficult to see why they should, as only a Kantian transcendental subject (that is, one that has not been serialized) needs to be saved from flowing into greater expressions of force. The longing for an impossible freedom - the dream of a flight to the exteriority of nomadic migrations or to the interiority of self-creation - remains as a governing pathos, although it is obviously nothing but a metaphysical nostalgia.

.....it is questionable whether a pure affirmation can ever fail to culminate in one or another of the more robust and pitiless nihilisms unless its inner premises are in fact theological: because only the affirmation that actually creates transcendently is capable of setting difference free without burden, without negation, without reaction; only God's "It is very good" can give difference in the pure positivity of its being: because here affirmation and creation are one. 

This permits something like eschatological or metaphysical irony to govern the enthusiasm of affirmation: affirmation made in accord with an infinite transcendence, bound by no necessity to the world's mechanisms, can be made of the entirety of being without ever becoming a justification for whatever is simply ply the case; it is a pure affirmation that nonetheless can judge violence and cruelty not by negation, reaction, or mere moral sensibility, but by the same absolute solute creativity that gives the world freely. From the Christian point of view, infinite perspectives of affirmation open up: not merely perspectives from which catechetically to mimic the divine approbation, but vantages from which different appropriations of it may proceed analogously, through a sharing in God's infinite embrace of creation and through a repetition in thought, word, and deed of the original divine gesture of love.

For only if being is freed from its subordination to the violence of the sacred and the "natural," and received as a gift of the transcendent (and so impossible to contain within any circle of the Same); and only if the other is also received as a gift, seen within the light of being as one who must be, and one with whom I wish to share yet more being; then is morality possible, not only as injunction, but as a desire that wakens me to something more than subjectivity."

Probably the greatest example of someone trying to wrest an ethical stance from postmodernism is Levinas, Hart writes on his "ethical sublime" :

"The ethical sublime, or the discourse of the unrepresentable when a more genuinely Kantian vein has been struck. For Levinas the place of the unrepresentable is occupied not by "being," "chaos," or "differance,"but by the "Other." That which defies presence and representation, that which stands over against what we can grasp within the horizons of our habitual universe of thought and action, that which is sublimely true is the otherness of the other, the alterity that always precedes and escapes the intentionality by which we compose a world according to our own capacities."

However Hart notes,

“….if presence and beauty cannot coincide, if the possibility of joy in the other is not also the possibility of ethics, if hunger for the visible cannot also become a hunger for the good, then blindness and alien sublimity must be the (irrational) context of the ethical. In fine, if ethics is pure disinterest, then the good cannot appear as being or phenomenon, or anywhere where within the realm of the "theoretical"; but this simply means that disinterest is the wrong formula for the ethical. What, after all, is really more disruptive of simple self-possession, persecution or joy? Joy feeds on what it receives, but rarely on what it establishes; it is a true wakefulness to what I do not ever already ready possess, and it requires a continuity between what evokes and what is evoked, an analogy that places itself in me."

Finally Hart concludes,

"Moreover, from the theological vantage, postmodern discourse compounds the issue with its own violences: its tale of being as a cosmic agon, principally, and all the strange ways it recapitulates the evils it denounces: the way in which Deleuze and Guattari, attempting to describe the living of a nonfascist life, reinvent the nihilistic aesthetics of Marinetti or Jiinger, or in which Lyotard and Derrida unreflectively revert to a classical liberal narrative of difference whose only real embodiment must be an imposition of certain Western prejudices regarding the limits of meaningful discourse upon all other narratives, or in which Foucault succumbs to his own narrative of power so thoroughly that the only political hope he can enunciate is the rescue of autonomous arbitrary will from collective arbitrary will (which, by his own account, is really impossible), or in which all of them repeat without fail a narrative of being wherein the ethical occurs as an inexplicable nostalgia, and whereby either fascism, unrestrained capitalism, or Stalinism might be just as plausibly advanced.

Nor does the postmodern escape the tendency to fashion its own analogy of cosmos, city, and soul: the image of being as force makes political arrangements first and foremost a confluence of powers, not really a possible grammar of accords, and the freedom of the self power unleashed; the univocity of being is an image that portrays difference formally, through the inanition of differential content, and so - by refusing to allow any analogical disruptions of the plane of immanence - inevitably arranges being homogenously, as formally uniform instances of punctiliar difference which must be governed as equally inviolable and equally dangerous quanta of force (that is, as conceived as a coincidence of individual forces of will is always one or another kind of homogenizing police state, in ways it would require a Foucaultian acuity to enumerate).

Theology can take nothing from either approach to "ethics": it cannot relinquish its faith in the goodness of being, or embrace the magical thinking that supposes that there is such a thing as a singular event that obliges apart from the thematizations of creeds and traditions; as it cannot accept the division between being and the good.

The desire to limit violence by surrendering being univocally to the testimony of history, without analogical or eschatological tension, is one that has conceded violence an ontological primacy (and the ethical, as a purely voluntarist response to this violence, is contingent on cultural and political forces it would be quixotic to imagine any discourse of reason or restraint could control)."

The nightmare of Post-Being, David Bentley Hart on our postmodern predicament

David Bentley Hart claims postmodernity severs the unity of Being from Goodness and Beauty, and either places Being’s Truth, or origin, or determination, either behind a veil of the Sublime - call it difference, negation, chaos, alterity, or whatever - which cannot be seen or represented, no communion between it and us, the world as some deformed version of some “real” reality hidden behind appearances that we can never really know, only sense in the terrifying rupture of the "sublime" (as opposed to the peace of Beauty)....or Being just as brute fact, the world as chaos and flux, which one either affirms joyously in all its violence or retreats from in horror….

So, from Beauty of the Infinite, here are some quotes from Hart explaining our present postmodern predicament : 

Writes Milbank, “Postmodernism ... articulates itself as, first, an absolute historicism, second as an ontology of difference, and third as ethical nihilism. . . . its historicist or genealogical aspect raises the spectre of a human world inevitably dominated by violence, without being able to make this ghost more solid in historicist terms alone. To supplement this deficiency, it must ground violence in a new transcendental philosophy, or fundamental ontology. This knowledge alone it presents as more than perspectival, more than equivocal, more than mythical. But the question arises: can such a claim be really sustained without lapsing back into the metaphysics supposedly forsworn?"

Milbank's answer is that it cannot, and that the metaphysics to which it must resort is nothing other than a version of an ancient pagan narrative of being as sheer brute event, a chaos of countervailing violences, against which must be deployed the various restraining and prudential violences of the state, reason, law, warfare, retribution, civic order, and the vigilantly sentineled polis…

The event of modernity within philosophy (which arrived, at least visibly, in the age of nominalism) consisted in the dissolution of being: the disintegration of that radiant unity wherein the good, the true, and the beautiful coincided as infinite simplicity and fecundity, communicating themselves to a world whose only reality was its variable participation in their gratuity; and the divorce between this thought of being, as the supereminent fullness of all perfection, and the thought of God (who could then no longer be conceived as being and the wellspring spring of all being, revealing his glory in the depth of splendor in which created things are shaped and sustained).

…the "forgetfulness of being") that being itself could now be conceived only in absolutely opposite terms: as a veil or an absence, thought or unthought, but in either case impenetrable - the veil that veils even itself, the empty name that adds nothing to the essence of beings, sheer uniform existence. And God's transcendence, so long as nostalgia preserved philosophy's attachment to "that hypothesis," could be understood now only as God's absence, his exile beyond or hiddenness within the veil of being, occasionally breaking through perhaps, but only as an alien or an explanatory cause. Being, no longer resplendent with truth, appearing in and elevating all things, could be figured then only as the sublime.

…it is not implausible to say that the entire pathology of the modern and postmodern can be diagnosed as a multifarious narrative of the sublime, according to the paradigm of Kant's critical project: what pure reason extracts from experience and represents to itself is neutral appearance, separated by an untraversable abyss from everything "meaningful"; and what reason sees in appearance can have, obviously, no more eminent significance: beauty does not speak of the good, nor the good of being.

Questions of the good, of being, of value, of the possibility of appearance itself do not so much exceed the world as stand over against it; truth is not, finally, the seen, but the unseen that permits one to see. With the dissolution of an ontology of the transcendent, of that infinite eminence in which what appears participates, every discourse that would attempt to speak not only of the things of the world but also of the event of the world must inevitably resort to the mysticism of the sublime and its dogmatisms: not a mysticism that seeks to penetrate the veil, but a mystical faith in the reality of the veil, an immanent metaphysics. And the only moral effort permitted by such a faith takes the form of paradox and tragedy.

However one phrases the matter, this much is certain: insofar as the "postmodern" is the completion of the deconstruction of metaphysics, it usually depends upon one immense and irreducible metaphysical assumption: that the unrepresentable is; more to the point, that the unrepresentable (call it differance, chaos, being, alterity, the infinite ...) is somehow truer than the representable (which necessarily dissembles it), more original, and qualitatively other: that is, it does not differ from the representable by virtue of a greater fullness and unity of those transcendental moments that constitute the world of appearance, but by virtue of its absolute difference, its dialectical or negative indeterminacy, determinacy, its no-thingness.

Between thought's representations and the unrepresentable "that" of the "event" there is an incommensurability, and sublimity marks the fated tragic partage of their union, the sacrificial economy of their collusion, as the symbol of their simultaneous divorce and marriage. That is why one can approach a definition of "postmodernity" by classifying many of its exemplary discourses under various accounts of the unrepresentable.

Metaphysics, in its drive toward totality, classically conceives of the infinite as chaos or negation (or at best a "total" synthesis), and certainly cannot conceive of an infinity that is offered peacefully - without alienation, negation, or deceit - as form. Within this sealed circle, if a form in which peace and the infinite are presented as coinciding should show itself, and offer itself only in the appeal of this harmony, it could appear only as a contradiction or illusion, and must be dismissed as the emptiest of all apparitions: not the beautiful shape of a possible way of being, but only a "beautiful soul."

Thus our second definition of "postmodernity" (the narrative of the sublime) folds back into our first (an "ontology of violence"): if the world takes shape against the veil of the unrepresentable, is indeed given or confirmed in its finitude by this impenetrable negation, then the discrimination of peace from violence is at most a necessary fiction, and occasionally a critical impossibility; as all equally is, and power alone sustains the game of the world, violence is already present in all "truth," though all truthlessness too - sadly or joyously - is violence. This story, again, makes all rhetoric an aggression, sion, all beauty in some sense a lie (an opiate, tactical diversion, or necessary respite spite from the terror of truth), and every exodus an imperial campaign. The desire for an ethical issue from this story is no doubt quite genuine, but probably also quite absurd.

….absolute antinomian affirmation of the world and infinite ethical flight from it - proves perfectly logical: pagans and gnostics both assume the iron law of fate to operate here below low and violence to be pandemic in the sensible order (the former simply choose to celebrate the terror and bounty of life, while the latter depart for the sheltering pavilions of a distant kingdom). Both these extremes must appear - tragic joy and tragic melancholy - and indeed fortify one another, once the rupture of beauty from the good has followed upon the withdrawal of being behind the veil of the sublime. This is part of the pathology of modernity. For most thinkers who accept the dimensions of such a world, the two extremes constitute a difficult choice or a mad oscillation; between the pagan and gnostic options the scales can dip either way....

In every case, though, a faith in the transcendent unity of being and the good (along with the expectation that philokalia, the love of beauty, is the form desire takes when it rises toward that unity) is unimaginable.

For their parts, classical "metaphysics" and postmodernism belong to the same story; each, implying or repeating the other, conceives being as a plain upon which forces of meaning and meaninglessness converge in endless war; according to either, being is known in its oppositions, and oppositions must be overcome or affirmed, but in either case as violence: amid the strife of images and the flow of simulacra, shining form appears always only as an abeyance of death, fragile before the convulsions of chaos, and engulfed in fate. There is a specular infinity in mutually defining opposites: Parmenides and Heracleitos gaze into one another's eyes, and the story of being springs up between them; just as two mirrors set before one another prolate their depths indefinitely, repeating an opposition that recedes forever along an illusory corridor without end, seeming to span all horizons and contain all things, the dialectic of Apollo and Dionysus oscillates without resolution between endless repetitions of the same emptiness, the same play of reflection and inversion.

But the true infinite lies outside and all about this enclosed universe of strife and shadows; it shows itself as beauty and as light: not totality, nor again chaos, but the music of a triune God."

Thus, it is the beautiful, the invisible made visible analogously, that also makes the difference between modern thought and the “interruption of Christ”: for without a proper notion of the supernatural, thought inevitably establishes “an autonomous stance between God and creation,” rendering the narrative of supereminent Beauty very difficult, if not impossible, precisely because it cannot be seen.

St Gregory of Nazianzus subversion of Euripides & Dionysus told as Christian anti-tragedy

The epic play Christus Patiens, or Christ’s Suffering, is attributed to St Gregory of Nazianzus, though it’s actual authorship is contested.

It takes about one-third of its verse directly from tragedies by Euripides, but subverts them to tell the story of Christ’s Passion, death, and resurrection, telling what one might call a Christian anti-tragedy.

The aim of this transformation is to reveal the true, hidden sense of the famous pagan original.

The ultimate and highly original goal is to contrast the vindictive pagan destroyer Dionysus with the merciful redeemer Jesus Christ in this Christian anti-tragedy with its new and different world-view.

It’s long, 2,600 iambic trimeters.

I offer a link below from a new translation by Alan Fishbone.

For some background, Karla Pollmann writes HERE,

“In terms of its content, Euripides’ tragedy Bacchae in particular represents a challenge for Christians. Its subject is the spread of the cult of Dionysus in Greece in the face of resistance from the family of Cadmus.

However, aspects such as the appearance of a god among humans in human form, his suffering, the failure, or even active resistance by many to recognize his divinity, as well as the eventual revelation of his godhead are reminiscent of the Christian understanding of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

Thus, it is not surprising that a Christian discussion of this material was very appealing: among other things, the Christus patiens provides a specifically Christian interpretation of the Bacchae."

And scholar Michael Benjamin Cover writes HERE,

“Paul's dramatic christology would have been heard in Philippi: Euripidean tragedy. Echoes of Dionysus's opening monologue from Euripides's Bacchae in the carmen Christi suggest that Roman hearers of Paul's letter likely understood Christ's kenotic metamorphosis as a species of Dionysian revelation.

Jesus's Bacchic portraiture supports a theology of Christ's pre-existence, while simultaneously establishing him as a Dionysian antithesis to the imperial Apollonian kyrios Caesar. These Dionysian echoes also elevate the status of slaves and women, and suggest that “the tragic” remains modally present within the otherwise comic fabula of the Christ myth.”

Anyway, click HERE to download,  Enjoy !

Story as Truth, David Bentley Hart's narrative theology

THE INTERRUPTION OF CHRIST – THE LANGUAGE, BEAUTY, AND THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF DAVID BENTLEY HART by Ari Koponen HERE is a superb full blown study of David Bentley Hart.

In it he explains Hart’s position in regard to rhetoric and narration.

He Calls Hart's theory "a Christian creative correspondence theory” :

Christian thought is “made to interrupt”, not to fill ontological or logical gaps that classical or postmodern thought may problematize regarding transcendence, for example. As John Milbank claims, the theological “method” of his rejects “the correspondence between the intellect and extra-mental reality” and its aim “is not to represent [...] externality but to join in its occurrence; not to know, but to intervene, originate.”


And Hart himself notes in the last chapter of Beauty of the Infinite,


“I believe there is indeed the possibility of a consummation of all reason in a vision and a wisdom that cannot be reached without language, but is as much theoria as discourse; as such it is indeed “aesthetic” in the highest sense [...] but is also “rational” in the highest sense, in that it can “see” where and understand how other narratives fail the great theme of being, are too impoverished to speak the truth of reality’s goodness, and simply lack the fullness and coherence that shows itself in the true.”

In that dissertation, ARI KOPONEN also notes the importance of actual practice,

“As a side note, it can be said that narrative coherence also ultimately governs tradition and its development. Hart implies, for example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.”

And he adds,

"For Hart, if there is a non-foundation, it is always grounded in something “given,” ultimately in the differential unity of being of the Trinitarian God.

It may be said that Hart’s theology is not “aesthetic” theology, for it acknowledges that revelation, in creation and in Christ, is also an act, not a mere category of beauty to appear.”

Kopone goes on,

“…for Hart, the truth of Christianity is a narrative, not simply “a narrated truth.” Narration is not simply a formalistic vessel in which truth is explicated or through which it is conveyed. The Christian narrative cannot seek theoretical support for its central concepts outside itself (while being aware that expressions and ideas are historically constructed).

Therefore, Hart views his narrative as being more than a hermeneutic skeleton key; narrative is not an “option” but in a very real sense, it is what it proclaims. It does not “fit” in any other narrative as such (and vice versa), but as praeperatio evangelica, it can act as leaven.The rhetoric of God is continued in the rhetoric of creation, not simply as a dialectical process, but in an infinite way corresponding to the very nature of the Godhead himself. Thus, for Hart, Christian discourse seeks a “totality,” but it is the manner (or ontology; for questions of style and ontology seem to coincide in Hart’s theological writing) of this seeking that makes Christian rhetoric stand apart from its violent counterparts that seek rhetorical dominance.

….the Christian story must not be understood as a watered-down version of Wittgensteinian communally constructed language games, but as a discourse that resonates even in other languages, non-Christian ones and anti- Christian ones, as the truth about Jesus of Nazareth.

….his narrative differs from postliberal accounts in that Hart sees the other narratives as severely lacking the full account of being, although the Christian truth may address, inform, and influence these other accounts. It is not something that is merely open for discussion; it presents itself as superior. This is something that Hart admits at the outset of his major opus.

For Hart, the justification of his narrative lies in the rhetorical effectiveness, or the story’s phenomenological openings, being comprehensive and true to the “great theme of being,"

The truth of narrative is not found in “matching narrative against reality” but in “matching reality-stories against the truth: Jesus Christ.”

A narrative is a method that refers not to the truth, but to the world where this truth manifests itself, and finds its logic; it also presents a hermeneutical task to the reader to enter into this world, thus disseminating meanings that, in a sense, “overflow” its own narrative structure.

Hart’s opinion that it is impossible to do without a narrative in the first place: there is always a “fictional” element to every truth, not least because truth needs to be articulated and articulation, but also because every attempt to “purify” or “deconstruct” a narrative ensues ultimately from yet another narrative. Therefore, choosing a narrative is not an option, but choosing between narratives is what Hart is after. And if choosing is always an act of preferring, it rests on aesthetic, not primarily on fideistic or epistemological grounds (while these moments certainly help to narrow down the possible alternatives).

…the narrative of Christ is something that is able to explain (both depicting and giving meaning) what the truth of being must be.

In the end, the concept of narrative may be too restrictive here, as Hart himself notes:

It would be best simply to say that I assume that theology, even in its most properly evangelical moments, is most properly a practice of inner witness and anamnesis, a submission of language to the form of Christ revealed in the Scripture and in the unfolding tradition, but also one that seeks to find therein the true home of every “natural light”. [This means] dogmatic discourse that is also an opening out to what is beyond obeys a kind of trinitarian logic: just as the eternal “discourse” of God, the circumincession of the Person in the infinite articulation of the divine utterance (Logos), opens “outward” to creation according to its own eternal motion, expressed economically, so this dogmatic diastole and systole around the story of Christ has a power to include what is other within itself, through mediation of the Holy Spirit who makes all words open to the Word that embraces every created difference.

It can be said that if truth is primarily a manifesting, a heavily laden pre-laden experiential event, rather than a correspondence, then narrative is simply a way to find other narratives inadequate, not necessarily untrue completely or false in good faith.”

Koprin offers this diagram and the following explanation,

Figure 1. The form of narrative according to Hart 

“The boldest arrow represents the particular narrative of a particular person, God-man Jesus Christ, developing and living in history. The narrative is outworked as Tradition, as a respiratory act of the Holy Spirit (remembering the Trinitarian taxis in the Christ- event, as the supreme rhetorical act of the Father) and is “gathered” or “thought” communally, in the Father and beyond. From this narrative ensue theological notions (the relation of God and the world, ‘metaphysics’ and ‘creed’—elucidations of the biblical narrative) resulting in the theologically conditioned philosophical concept of particular beings. Their particular forms are also hammered into being against rival narratives. Yet this historical process echoes and replicates the Trinitarian infinite life, in which the “text” of the world is “spoken” and “called” into being by the Father through the Logos with the Holy Spirit. The narrative stretches out, only to be also found in unusual forms and places as “already there.”

The descending arrow is not to be understood in a chronological sense, but more in a diachronic sense, meaning in a traditional sense, in which Christ borrows the form of Trinitarian discourse, and that narrative can not only entail and lighten mundane metaphysics but can also give rational and “natural” sense to faith and its vision. The narrative cannot be “unfolded” or traced back to its ingredients (though it seemingly can be evaluated by is representatives), for the logic of tradition corresponds formally to immanent Trinitarian capability and eternal circumlocution (in the literal sense of the word) of the “other within itself”. The narrative of Hart is about this world, not of it. It has a certain definitive and speculative tendency, just because its main power source is eternal and historical at the same time. This unitary impetus is reflected in creedal and philosophical developments in history (on the right side, below the arrow). These developments are to be checked with the “eternal” (the left side); they are to re-narrated in order to reflect the “grand theme of being” originating from the Triune life. And Hart is keen to show that speculative elements are not in any way indifferent or secondary to the elemental core of the Gospel narrative; more to the point, they are inevitable, because otherwise the narrative would be a dead one, purely a myth, incapable of nourishing or criticizing other discourses. In short, it is always important to remind oneself that rhetoric is not simply a viable hermeneutical way of understanding Christianity; it is the very form of it.”

Finally, Kopenon concludes,

"Hart wants to show that rhetoric concerning the nature of theology is not only an option, but precisely its truest nature. The persuasive character of theology is not about finding supremacy through reason or faith, but disclosing theology itself as a persuasion, a narrative capable of a holistic alternative vision. That being said, the narrative of theology is to be distinguished from other rhetorical approaches in at least three senses.

Firstly, it must give an account of an ontology, and not stay merely on the level of persuasive talk of God. Secondly, it must do so in a manner that upholds an alternative vision of peace amid worldly rhetoric of power and dominance. Thirdly, it accomplishes this by making the Beautiful the primary decisive point of interpretation, yet grounding it in other great transcendentals in the Godhead, meaning that while its vision is aesthetic, it must also be rationally coherent. Because the Beautiful cannot be treated “from below,” its unity with the Good and the True is affirmed.

Moreover, Hart wishes to distinguish his post-modern position precisely through this anti-modern rhetoric: he embraces a holistic vision of narrative, the universal capacity of it, yet he upholds a realistic view of beings as they are rhetorically spoken into existence by God himself.

Hart claims that with only the three aspects withstanding, theological narrative can be competitive instead of combative. 

Accordingly, the language of theology is capable of speaking about God, not governing him.

Just because the analogy of being falls on the difference between the created and the Creator, theology can wrest itself free from closed systems of philosophy, and “re- narrate” itself in order to criticize other narratives, without having first to yield to their primary premises."

How do we KNOW religious truths ? The same way we know scientific ones.

How we come to know the truth of things is a tricky business. People claim religious and scientific knowledge live in two entirely separate domains.

I don’t think the two are so different, both rely on logic, narrative, trust, faith, and a value system, as Michael Polanyi points out.

Science puts its raw data into meaningful metaphors and similes- DNA is *like a blueprint, X is *like a particle and like a wave etc

And science didn't take off until it was institutionalized into a formal tradition with value laden practices, to authenticate authorities.

Sure, “truth” is a slippery concept.

For Nietzsche, while their object of study is actually in mortem, they falsely believe that they are studying the living and complex reality in vivem:

“You ask me what is idiosyncratic about philosophers? . . . There is, for instance their lack of a sense of history, their hatred for the very notion of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are honoring a thing if they de-historicize it, see it sub specie aeterni—if they make a mummy out of it. Everything that philosophers have handled, for thousands of years now, has been a conceptual mummy; nothing real escaped their hands alive. They kill and stuff whatever they worship, these gentlemen who idolize concepts; they endanger the life of whatever they worship."

In critiquing the narrowness of evangelical notions of truth, Hicks says:

Despite this trend to reduce truth to something very narrow indeed, as human beings we do in fact find ourselves operating with a broad concept of truth. Each one of us regularly encounters and copes with many different types of truth: mathematical (“2 + 2 = 4”); logical (“If A then not non-A”); truth about the world around us (“There is a tree in the garden”); historical truth (“There used to be a tree in the garden, but we cut it down last year”); future truth (“This tree won’t last forever”); truth about values (“Every person should be free to exercise his or her human rights”); moral truth (“Destroying the planet through pollution is wrong”); relational truth (“My wife loves me”); religious truth (“The universe was created by God”); and so on.

If our epistemology, then, is going to be adequate for human experience in the real world, it will need to be broad in its interests and application, covering as fully as possible the whole range of the epistemological data.”

Eleanor Stump says, criticizing analytic philosophy,

“Theories of knowledge that ignore or fail to account for whole varieties of knowledge are correspondingly incomplete; . . . it will be incomplete at best in its descriptions of reality; those parts of reality made accessible to us in experience, especially the experience of persons and the knowledge of persons it generates, will be slighted.”

Truthful representation needs to include all forms of appropriate and sustained responses to the environment where intelligence is at work.

“Church doctrine”, Dru Johnson says in his book Biblical knowing, “will only yield fruitful understanding to the extent that ones lives the injunctions of those authorities. Analysis of “Loving your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18) will yield some kind of knowledge about YHWH and his intentions only if someone actually practices the injunction.

As an illustration, one can learn something about the rules, the effort, and the skills required to play tennis, simply by observing a match. However, the mere observer and the tennis professional are seeing two different games when they sit next to each other at Wimbledon.

There is an existential understanding of what-it-is-like-to-play-tennis that is absent in the mere observer’s view.

Because of that absence, we cannot say that both the observer and tennis player saw the same thing when they watched the match, just as a doctor and layperson do not see the same thing when they look at the same X-ray.

Knowing requires participation, and theological knowledge requires enacting the life of a servant of YHWH or disciple of Jesus.

Clinical distance neither improves knowledge through objectivity nor renders knowledge that can be known only in fiduciary relationship (in contractum).

…there is no process that will render the meaning of these texts outside of submitting to them and participating in their injunctions."

Analyses Lesslie Newbigin summarizes his theological epistemology: “We need to learn to know God as he is. There is no way by which we come to know a person except by dwelling in his or her story and, in the measure that may be possible, becoming part of it.”

Johnson concludes, “The trio of trust (i.e., faith), hope, and love fit nicely here in the category of authentication. We are not importing Paul’s discussion into ours, but noticing that without reasons to trust the authority (faith), an expectation that a discernible skill will result (hope), and the commitment of both parties to each other and the act (love), good knowing is staved or truncated."

Of course, we wouldn’t expect as much precision in religion as science, for in life we find our desire exceeds our reason, and so, ultimately, the language adequate (ratio) to transcendent or moral truths are the primary categories of symbolism, imagery, and metaphor; while precise representation being secondary and derivative in the abstract categories of space, time, causality, and number.

Yes, religious knowledge is relational, the goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion.

But very little of science can be mathematically exact, look at biology or sociology.

When learning to ‘read’ an X-ray, we trust our certified, and therefore authorized, instructor, and his accredited institution publicly acknowledged to be authorized to teach him, and we trust the testimony of the scientific community that the experiments this knowledge is based on has been carried out according to the values of the scientific method..

So, with both scientific and religious knowledge, it is by listening to accredited authorities, embodying the instruction, which leads to seeing and therefore knowing.

An X-ray contains no propositional “facts” in the sense that it cannot be true or false. Despite this, if you practice a certain way of looking at X-rays, under apprenticeship, learning to sift out particular things, notice what is significant, from the guidance of an expert radiologist, you will be able to see something in an X-ray film that you would never see apart from embodying the radiologist’s directions.

And within science there there are different schools, paradigms, for interpreting what these facts mean - it’s not just simply learning to see a result.

Knowledge begins in embodied ritual practices and grows to skilled discernment through ritual repetition in a community.

Just so, Christian sacraments have the same purpose: we practice rites to know.

By ritual, I simply mean a practice that is scripted (usually by an authority) and performed by a subject.

Judging Divine revelation, for example, involves 1) recognizing the docents through whom God speaks and listening to them alone, 2) embodying the actions they prescribe, and 3) looking at what they are showing us. When the people of God do all three to the extent required, then it is considered knowing. When we transgress any of these three, it is considered error (or, erroneous knowing).

In order to know what God is showing his people, God must authenticate an authority to them, and they must both acknowledge that authority and participate in the process specified.

The disciples are not called by Jesus in order to believe correct formal propositions; rather they are known by living a particular kind of life. By enacting this life (Mark 8:31–38), the disciples will see what is being shown to them.

Going further, Dru Johnson says real knowledge must be “sacramental” - where embodied actions are mediated through outward visible signs that are united to the thing signified.

For instance, because we have the skill that enables us to know that “2 + 2 = 4,” we can sacramentally exercise that skill by adding two pieces of pie to the two that we already have in order to reach a total of four.

This trite and provisional example becomes less parochial when one considers the possibility that all human activity is embedded in and expressive of our skilled knowing.”


More on Biblical knowing HERE

Ritual Knowing : a direction, not an explanation

How do you prove an X-ray shows cancer ?

By being trained by those with authority to decipher the image in order to see it.

Just so, liturgy trains us to see the Truth of God, it forms us into the type of people who can perceive the signs of transcendence all around us.

Part of the reason we lack faith is because of "untaught bodies," not just "untaught minds.

This is a portion from Biblical Knowing: A Scriptural Epistemology of Error

by Dru Johnson.

In it Knowledge is not portrayed as an object that one attains, but it is akin to a path that a subject can enter (or refuse to enter), it is to be committed to a direction, not an explanation), here :

"Take a long look at this X-ray film.35 In it, the bullet that wounded President Theodore Roosevelt can be seen. Actually, the bullet cannot be seen by just anyone. While anyone can see something, we want to know exactly what we are seeing. If it were not for the physician, Dr. Hochreim, trained to read radiographs who also knew the historical context of the X-ray film (i.e., it was to get a look inside Roosevelt’s chest) and marked the film for us, we would only see the bare outline of what we presume to be someone’s chest. 

Only by the guidance of Dr. Hochreim’s marks and notations can we see it. The real test of our ability to read a radiograph is when we are presented with instances of X-rays that we have never seen and can accurately diagnose according to our ability to discern. But that level of skill to read X-rays requires hours of expert coaching without which we would not be able to see what is before us.

Likewise, Scripture records instances where characters are taught to see in a way that they would not have been able to do without the training. Man’s discovery of woman as his proper mate is one such episode.

Knowing requires a guide, an interpreter, to teach us how to see.

Notably, God does not fashion woman and commend her compatibility to the man. Instead, God leads the man through a process by which the man himself comes to know what is and what is not his appropriate mate…

God can coach the man to see what is already before him, as a physician could coach us to see the crucial particularities of an X-ray, which would otherwise appear to us as a two-dimensional duo-tone flummox. Man cannot discover autonomously, and he needs God to guide him in his discovery.

Thus if we ask, “How does the man know this creature is his suitable mate?” the answer from the story is something other than a proposition, an axiom, or Kantian synthetic a priori. The man’s exclamation appears to derive from an embodied sense of fit, a sight.

This knowledge of the fittedness of woman is both discoverable and revealed without an articulated propositional analysis. It is the man’s own body that knows the reason for the exclamation “At last! Bone of my bone . . .”

                                                

It appears to be divulged through performing some action. Because this act of knowing is a process, it is inherently bound in place and history, not the metaphysical abstractions of space and time, which appear as inextricable features of creaturely knowing. Participation in the act of knowing ends in discrete points of illumination, of revelation.

…man comes to know woman as his proper mate, but that he is also aware that this knowing is a quest and he intentionally participates by embodying that quest.

…“embodying a quest” is just another way of saying that he enacts the process of knowing itself by participation.

Because man appears to know through his body and is aware of the movement from not knowing toward knowing, we say that knowledge is revelatory.

This term simply acknowledges that a situated creature comes to know through a process that unfurls in a particular place and personal history, not the nebulous abstractions of space and time. It makes knowing a fundamentally historical function. 

Sacramental knowledge is where embodied actions are mediated through outward visible signs that are united to the thing signified….that symbolically represents knowledge.

For instance, because we have the skill that enables us to know that “2 + 2 = 4,”77 we can sacramentally exercise that skill by adding two pieces of pie to the two that we already have in order to reach a total of four.

This trite and provisional example becomes less parochial when one considers the possibility that all human activity is embedded in and expressive of our skilled knowing….that knowledge not only requires participation in order to know, but is also symbolically acted out.

Throughout the Scriptures, we will see that the knowledge urged to the reader as normative and proper is the kind upon which one must act. Additionally, as in the garden, sacramental action exhibits either proper participation in the epistemological process or error. Hence, knowing the woman’s suitability is not captured only by the proposition, “She is bone of my bone . . .” The man’s knowing is sacramentally expressed in matrimony and the union of their flesh.

….knowing requires an obliged commitment between the knower and the prophet-like voice in order to know what is being shown to him. Both parties must commit and knowledge is a process, where an authenticated authority leads the knower to the known through a fiducially bound relationship, and both must be committed to the process.

Knowledge can come through the body and our embodiment even shapes and enables our understanding of abstract concepts, such as the way in which the man’s journey to knowing his proper mate includes animals." 

As Graham Ward writes, “the secret spring of faith lies not in demonstration but operation: being able to read the signs that are available correctly and work with them.”

The Three Paths to Salvation of Paul the Jew

In his essay, The Three Paths to Salvation of Paul the Jew, Gabriele Boccaccini unpacks the implications of Paul’s “belonging” simultaneously to Judaism and Christianity to arrive at the surprising and provocative conclusion that there are in fact three means of salvation:

For Jews, adherence to Torah.
For gentiles, good works according to conscience and natural law.
For all sinners, forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ.

This essay was originally published in Paul the Jew: Rereading the Apostle as a Figure of Second Temple Judaism.

The Three Paths to Salvation of Paul the Jew

by Gabriele Boccaccini

For centuries, Paul has been praised by Christians, and blamed by Jews, for separating Christianity from Judaism. Paul appeared to Christians as the convert who unmasked and denounced the “weakness” (if not the wickedness) of Judaism, and to Jews as the traitor who made a mockery of the faith of his ancestors.1 Paul was, at the same time, the advocate of Christian universalism and the major proponent of Christian exclusiveness—everybody is called and welcomed, but there is only one way of salvation in Christ for all humankind.

The New Perspective has tried hard to get rid of the most derogatory aspects of the traditional (Lutheran) reading of Paul (claiming that Judaism also should be regarded as a “respectable” religion based on grace), but has not challenged the view of Paul as the critic of Judaism and the advocate of a new supersessionist model of relations between God and humankind—God’s grace “in Christ” superseded the Jewish covenant for both Jews and gentiles by creating a third separate “race.”

A new paradigm is emerging today with the Radical New Perspective—a paradigm that aims to fully rediscover the Jewishness of Paul. Paradoxically, “Paul was not a Christian,”2 since Christianity, at the time of Paul, was nothing else than a Jewish messianic movement, and therefore, Paul should be regarded as nothing other than a Second Temple Jew. What else should he have been? Paul was born a Jew, of Jewish parents, was circumcised, and nothing in his work supports (or even suggests) the idea that he became (or regarded himself as) an apostate.3 On the contrary, Paul was a member of the early Jesus movement, and with strength and unmistakable clarity, proudly claimed his Jewishness, declaring that God also did not reject God’s covenant with the chosen people: “Has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin” (Rom. 11:1; cf. Phil. 3:5).

The goal of this volume is fully to embrace the paradigm of the Radical New Perspective not as the conclusion, but as the starting point of our conversation about Paul. The following chapters, based on papers first presented at the Third Nangeroni Meeting in Rome, share that perspective.

In my opinion, the potential of such an approach has just begun to be manifested. We have still a long way to go before fully understanding all its monumental implications. In order to properly locate Paul the Jew in the context of the diverse world of Second Temple Judaism, we need, first of all, to establish a better communication between New Testament scholars and Second Temple specialists—two fields of studies that, to date, have remained too distant and deaf to each other. This is what our meeting in Rome was about; this is the future of Pauline studies.

Three Caveats about the Jewishness of Paul

Since my remarks focus on the Jewishness of Paul, it is important to clarify, as a premise, what we should not imply by that, in order to avoid common misunderstandings.

1. In order to reclaim the Jewishness of Paul, we do not have to prove that he was a Jew like everybody else, or that he was not an original thinker. It is important not to apply to Paul a different standard than to any other Jew of his time. To claim that finding any idea in Paul that is unparalleled in other Jewish authors makes Paul “non-Jewish” would lead to the paradox that no original thinker of Second Temple Judaism should be considered “Jewish”—certainly not Philo or Josephus or Hillel or the Teacher of Righteousness, all of whom also formulated “original” answers to the common questions of their age. Why should only Paul be considered “non-Jewish” or “no longer Jewish” simply because he developed some original thinking? The very notion of making a distinction within Paul between his Jewish and “non-Jewish” (or “Christian”) ideas does not make any sense. Paul was Jewish in his “traditional” ideas and remained such even in his “originality.”



Paul was a Jewish thinker and all his ideas (even the most nonconformist) were Jewish.


In order to reclaim the Jewishness of Paul, we do not have to downplay the fact that he was a very controversial figure, not only within Second Temple Judaism, but also within the early Jesus movement. The classical interpretation that the controversial nature of Paul (both within and outside his movement) relied on his attempt to separate Christianity from Judaism does not take into consideration the diversity of Second Temple Jewish thought. There was never a monolithic Judaism versus an equally monolithic Christianity. There were many diverse varieties of Judaism (including the early Jesus movement, which, in turn, was also very diverse in its internal components).


In order to reclaim the Jewishness of Paul, we do not have to prove that he had nothing to say to Jews and that his mission was aimed only at the inclusion of gentiles. As Daniel Boyarin has reminded us in his work on Paul, a Jew is a Jew, and remains a Jew, even when he or she expresses radical self-criticism toward his or her own religious tradition or against other competitive forms of Judaism.4 Limiting the entire Pauline theological discourse to the sole issue of the inclusion of gentiles would once again confine Paul the Jew to the fringes of Judaism and overshadow the many implications of his theology in the broader context of Second Temple Jewish thought.

As in the case of Jesus, the problem of Paul is not whether he was a Jew or not, but what kind of Jew he was, because in the diverse world of Second Temple Judaism, there were many different ways of being a Jew.5 According to his own words, Paul was educated as a Pharisee. The idea that he abandoned Judaism when he “converted” to the Jesus movement is simply anachronistic.

Conversion as an experience of radical abandonment of one’s religious and ethical identity was indeed known in antiquity (as attested in Joseph and Aseneth, and in the works of Philo). But this was not the experience of Paul. Christianity at his time was a Jewish messianic movement, not a separate religion. Paul, who was born and raised a Jew, remained such after his “conversion”; nothing changed in his religious and ethical identity. What changed, however, was his view of Judaism. In describing his experience not as a “prophetic call,” but as a “heavenly revelation,” Paul himself indicated the radicalness of the event. Paul did not abandon Judaism, but “converted” from one variety of Judaism to another. With Alan Segal, I would agree that “Paul was a Pharisaic Jew who converted to a new apocalyptic, Jewish sect.”

In no way should we downplay the relevance of the event. It was a move within Judaism, and yet, a radical move that reoriented Paul’s entire life and worldview. If, today, a Reform Rabbi became an ultraorthodox Jew, or vice versa, we would also describe such an experience in terms of “conversion.” Likewise, Paul’s conversion should be understood not as a chapter in the parting of the ways between Christianity and Judaism, but as an occurrence in the context of the diversity of Second Temple Judaism.

Paul the Jesus Follower

Paul was a Pharisee who joined the early Jesus movement. Before being known as the apostle of the gentiles, Paul became a member of the Jesus movement, and then, characterized his apostolate within the Jesus movement as having a particular emphasis on the mission to gentiles. Before Paul the apostle of the gentiles, there was Paul “the Jesus follower.” Any inquiry about Paul cannot, therefore, avoid the question of what the early Jesus movement was about in the context of Second Temple Judaism.

We all agree that, at its inception, Christianity was a Jewish messianic movement, but what does that mean exactly? It would be simplistic to reduce the early “Christian” message to a generic announcement about the imminent coming of the kingdom of God and about Jesus as the expected Messiah. And it would be simplistic to imagine Paul as simply a Pharisee to whom the name of the future

Messiah was revealed and who believed himself to be living at the end of times.

As a result of his “conversion,” Paul fully embraced the Christian apocalyptic worldview and the claim that Jesus the Messiah had already come (and would return at the end of times). This included the explanation of why the Messiah had come before the end. The early Christians had an answer: Jesus did not come simply to reveal his name and identity. Jesus came as the Son of Man who had “authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mark 2 and parallels).

A Second Temple Jewish Debate

The idea of the Messiah as the forgiver on earth makes perfect sense as a development of the ancient Enochic apocalyptic tradition. The apocalyptic “counternarrative” of 1 Enoch centered on the collapse of the creative order by a cosmic rebellion (the oath and the actions of the fallen angels): “The whole earth has been corrupted by Azazel’s teaching of his [own] actions; and write upon him all sin” (1 En. 10:8). It was this cosmic rebellion that produced the catastrophe of the flood, but also the need for a new creation.

The Enochic view of the origin of evil had profound implications in the development of Second Temple Jewish thought. The idea of the “end of times” is today so much ingrained in the Jewish and Christian traditions to make it difficult even to imagine a time when it was not, and to fully comprehend its revolutionary impact when it first emerged. In the words of Genesis, nothing is more perfect than the perfect world, which God himself saw and praised as “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Nobody would change something that “works,” unless something went terribly wrong. In apocalyptic thought, eschatology is always the product of protology.

The problem of Enochic Judaism with the Mosaic law was also the product of protology. It did not come from a direct criticism of the law, but from the recognition that the angelic rebellion had made it difficult for people to follow any laws (including the Mosaic Torah) in a universe now disrupted by the presence of superhuman evil. The problem was not the Torah itself, but the incapability of human beings to do good deeds, which affects the human relationship with the Mosaic Torah. The shift of focus was not primarily from Moses to Enoch, but from the trust in human responsibility to the drama of human culpability. While at the center of the Mosaic Torah was the human responsibility to follow God’s laws, at the center of Enochic Judaism was now a paradigm of the victimization of all humankind.

This is the reason it would be incorrect to talk of Enochic Judaism as a form of Judaism “against” or “without” the Torah. Enochic Judaism was not “competing wisdom,” but more properly, a “theology of complaint.” There was no alternative Enochic halakah for this world, no Enochic purity code, no Enochic Torah: every hope of redemption was postponed to the end of times. The Enochians were not competing with Moses—they were merely complaining. In the Enochic Book of Dreams, the chosen people of Israel are promised a future redemption in the world to come, but in this world, Israel is affected by the spread of evil with no divine protection, as are all other nations.

The Enochic view had disturbing implications for the self- understanding of the Jewish people as the people of the covenant. It generated a heated debate within Judaism about the origin and nature of evil.7 Many (like the Pharisees and the Sadducees) rejected the very idea of the superhuman origin of evil; some explored other paths in order to save human freedom and God’s omnipotence—paths that led to alternative solutions, from the cor malignum of 4 Ezra to the rabbinic yetzer hara‘. Even within apocalyptic circles, there were competing theologies. In the mid-second century BCE, the book of Jubilees reacted against this demise of the covenantal relation with God by creating an effective synthesis between Enoch and Moses that most scholars see as the foundation of the Essene movement. While maintaining the Enochic frame of corruption and decay, Jubilees reinterpreted the covenant as the “medicine” provided by God to spare the chosen people from the power of evil. The merging of Mosaic and Enochic traditions redefined a space where the people of Israel could now live, protected from the evilness of the world under the boundaries of an alternative halakah as long as they remained faithful to the imposed rules. The covenant was restored as the prerequisite for salvation. In this respect, as Collins says, “Jubilees, which retells the stories of Genesis from a distinctly Mosaic perspective, with explicit halachic interests,” stood “in striking contrast” to Enochic tradition.8 Even more radically, the Community Rule would explore predestination as a way to neutralize God’s loss of control of the created world and restore God’s omnipotence.

Enochic Judaism remained faithful to its own premises (Jews and gentiles are equally affected by evil), but was not insensitive to the criticism of having given too much power to evil, thereby dramatically reducing humanity’s chances of being saved. The later Enochic tradition tried to solve the problem by following a different path. In the Parables of Enoch, we read that at the end of times in the last judgment, as expected, God and his Messiah Son of Man will save the righteous and condemn the unrighteous. The righteous have “honor” (merit, good works) and will be victorious in the name of God, while “the sinners” have no honor (no good works) and will not be saved in the name of God. But quite unexpectedly, in chapter 50, a third group emerges at the moment of the judgment. They are called “the others”: they are sinners who repent and abandon the works of their hands. “They will have no honor in the presence of the Lord of Spirits, yet through His name they will be saved, and the Lord of Spirits will have mercy on them, for great is His mercy.”10

In other words, the text explores the relation between the justice and the mercy of God and the role played by these two attributes of God in the judgment. According to the book of Parables, the righteous are saved according to God’s justice and mercy, the sinners are condemned according to God’s justice and mercy, but those who repent will be saved by God’s mercy even though they should not be saved according to God’s justice. Repentance makes God’s mercy prevail over God’s justice.

The Christian idea of the first coming of the Messiah as forgiver is a radical, yet very logical, variant of the Enochic system. The concept of the existence of a time of repentance immediately before the judgment and the prophecy that, at that point, “the sinners” will be divided between “the repentant” (the others) and “the unrepentant,” is the necessary “premise” of the missions of John and Jesus, as narrated in the Synoptics.

The imminent coming of the last judgment, when the earth will be cleansed with fire, means urgent repentance and “forgiveness of sins” for those who in this world have “no honor.” “Be baptized with water; otherwise, you will be baptized with the fire of judgment by the Son of Man”: this seems to be, in essence, the original message of John the Baptist as understood by the Synoptics, an interpretation that does not contradict the interest of the Christian authors to present it as a prophecy of Christian Baptism (by the Holy Spirit).

Similar ideas find an echo also in the Life of Adam and Eve—a text generally dated to the first century CE—where the sinner Adam does penance for forty days, immersed in the waters of the Jordan (and it is not by accident that John baptized in the living water of the Jordan). The first man (and first sinner) is driven by one steadfast hope: “Maybe God will have mercy on me” (L. A.E. 4:3). His plea to be allowed back in the Garden of Eden will not be accepted, but at the time of his death, his soul will not be handed over to the devil, as his crime deserved, but carried off to heaven; so, God decided in his mercy, despite the complaints of Satan.

In the Christian interpretation, John the Baptist, as the precursor, could only announce the urgency of repentance and express hope in God’s mercy. But with Jesus, it was another matter: he was the Son of Man who had authority on earth to forgive sins, who left to his disciples the power of forgiveness through Baptism “with the Holy Spirit,” and who will return with the angels to perform the judgment with fire. After all, who can have more authority to forgive than the one whom God has delegated as the eschatological judge?

As the forgiver, Jesus was not sent to “the righteous,” but to “sinners,” so that they might repent. There is no evidence in the Synoptics of a universal mission of Jesus to every person: Jesus was sent
 to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:6); the righteous do not need the doctor. Jesus was the doctor sent to heal sinners (Mark 2:17; Matt. 9:13), as Luke makes explicit: “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32).

Reading the Synoptics in light of the book of Parables of Enoch sheds light also on some parables that the Christian tradition attributed to Jesus. The parable of the lost sheep (Matt. 18:10–14; Luke 15:1–7) defines the relationship between God and “the others”; Luke’s parable of the prodigal son (15:11–32) reiterates the theme, but also adds a teaching about the relationship between “the righteous” and “the others”—between those who have honor and are saved because they have never abandoned the house of the Father and those who have no honor, and yet, are saved as well since they have repented and abandoned the works of their hands. The examples could be numerous, but no parable seems more enlightening to me than the one narrated by Matthew on the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1–16). The householder who pays the same salary for different “measures” of work gives the full reward (salvation) to the “righteous” and to the “others,” just as chapter 50 of the Parables claim that God will do in the last judgment. God’s mercy (“Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?”) bests God’s justice, or, as the letter of James will say, “Mercy triumphs over the judgment [κατακαυχᾶται ἔλεος κρίσεως]” (James 2:13).

The contrast with the traditions developed in the rabbinic movement could not be stronger. The rabbis freely discuss the relation between the two middot—God’s measures of justice and mercy—providing flexible answers to the issue. Mishnah Sotah (1:7–9) sticks to the principle “with what measure a man metes it shall be measured to him again,” and affirms that “with the same measure,” God gives justice when punishing evil deeds and mercy when rewarding good deeds. On the contrary, the parallel text in Tosefta Sotah (3:1–4:19) claims that “the measure of Mercy is five hundred times greater than the measure of Justice.” But the two divine attributes are never opposed as in the book of Parables and in the early Christian tradition; on the contrary, their necessarily complementary nature is emphasized. Not accidentally, the “rabbinic” version of the parables will end with different words in which God’s mercy is praised, but God’s justice is not denied: “This one did more work in two hours than the rest of you did working all day long” (y. Ber. 2:8).

Paul the Apocalyptic Thinker

The problems of the origin of evil, the freedom of human will, and the forgiveness of sins are at the center of Paul’s thought. As we have seen, these were not Pauline problems, but Second Temple Jewish problems. The originality of Paul was not in the questions, but in the answers.

In the letter to the Romans, Paul wrote to the Christian community of Rome: a Christian community of people—Jews and gentiles—who were former sinners, but who believed that they had received forgiveness of sins through Jesus’ death. First of all, Paul reminds his readers that according to God’s plan, the moral life of Jews is regulated by the Torah, while the moral life of gentiles is regulated by their own conscience (or the natural law of the universe—an idea that Paul borrowed from Hellenistic Judaism and its emphasis on the creative order as the main means of revelation of God’s will). Then, Paul repeats the undisputed Second Temple belief that on the day of judgment, God “will repay according to each one’s deeds” (Rom. 2:8). In no way did Paul dispute that if Jews and gentiles follow the Torah and their own conscience, respectively, they will obtain salvation. The problem is not the Mosaic law or the natural law; the problem is sin. With all Second Temple Jews, Paul acknowledges the presence of evil, and he quotes a passage of Scripture (Eccles. 7:2) to stress that evil is a universal problem. Every Second Temple Jew would have agreed. The problems are the implications and the remedies to this situation.

Paul sides with the apocalyptic tradition of a superhuman origin of evil. With the Enochic traditions, he shares a similar context of cosmic battle between the Prince of Light and the Prince of Darkness—“What fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement has Christ with Belial?” (2 Cor. 6:15)—as well as the hope for future redemption from the power of the devil: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Rom. 16:20). What we can notice, however, is a certain—more pessimistic—view of the power of evil. In the Pauline system, the sin of Adam takes the place of the sin of the fallen angels: “Sin came into the world through one man [Adam], and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Adam’s sin is counterbalanced by the obedience of the “new Adam,” Jesus. In order to create the conditions that made necessary the sacrifice of the heavenly Savior, Paul exploits the Enochic view of evil by radicalizing its power. While in Enoch, people (Jews and gentiles alike) are struggling against the influence of evil forces, Paul envisions a postwar scenario where “all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin” (Rom. 3:9). Adam and Eve have lost the battle against the devil, and as a result, all their descendants have been “enslaved to sin” (Rom. 6:6).

Slavery was an established social institution in the Roman Empire. When Paul was talking of people defeated and enslaved as a result of war, everybody knew exactly what the implications were for them and their children. Once the fight was over, the slaves were expected to resign themselves to their condition. Josephus voices the common sense of his time when he addresses the inhabitants of besieged Jerusalem and reminds them that:

. . . [F]ighting for liberty is a right thing, but ought to have been done at first . . . To pretend now to shake off the yoke [of the Romans] was the work of such as had a mind to die miserably, not of such as were lovers of liberty . . . It is a strong and fixed law, even among brute beasts, as well as among men, to yield to those that are too strong for them. (J. W. 5.365–67)

The Romans admired and honored those who fought bravely for liberty, but despised rebellious slaves and condemned them to the cross. No one could expect the devil to be weaker than the Romans. Freedom could be regained only through the payment of a ransom.

Does that mean that all “slaves” are evil? Not necessarily. Once again, this was a matter of common experience. Being a slave does not necessarily equate to being “unrighteous.” However, slaves are in a very precarious situation since they are not free, and at any moment, they could be commanded by their master to do evil things. Paul never questions the holiness and effectiveness of the Mosaic Torah or implies its failure. On the contrary, he reiterates the “superiority” of the Mosaic Torah and the Jewish covenant that has given to Jews a “a full awareness of the fall” (Rom. 3:10) and the “prophecies” about the coming of the Messiah. It is sin that must be blamed, not the Torah:

The law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. Did what is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. . . . For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Rom. 7:12–17, 22–24)

It is this situation of total enslavement, not an intrinsic weakness of the “good” Torah, that leads Paul to do what the book of the Parables of Enoch had already done: that is, to seek hope for sinners not only in an heroic attachment to the law (according to God’s justice), but also in an intervention of God’s mercy, a gracious offer of forgiveness of sins “apart from the Law” (and God’s justice). The evilness of human nature under the power of sin determines that “no human being will be justified by deeds prescribed by the law” (Rom. 3:20), but only by a gracious act of “justification by God’s grace as gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood” (Rom. 3:24–25). God had to react to an extreme situation of distress and counterbalance the action of the devil with an extreme act of mercy:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. (Rom. 5:6–9)

The entire debate about “justification” and “salvation” in Paul is still too much affected by the framework of Christian theology. As an apocalyptic Jew and a follower of Jesus, Paul claimed that forgiveness of sins was the major accomplishment of Jesus the Messiah for Jews and gentiles alike in the cosmic battle that Jesus fought against demonic forces. Justification provides to sinners (Jews and gentiles alike) an antidote, or at least, much-needed relief, to the overwhelming power of evil—a second chance given to people without hope. They were “enemies,” and yet, Christ died for them. In the language of the Parables of Enoch, those Jewish and gentile sinners who have received Baptism have put themselves among the “others” who are neither “righteous” nor “unrighteous,” but are now “repented sinners.” They have no merits to claim, according to God’s justice, but have received justification by the mercy of God.

Paul is confident that those who are justified will also be “saved” in the judgment, but justification does not equal salvation.11 Being forgiven of their sins is, for the sinners, an important step on the way to salvation, but it is not a guarantee of future salvation at the judgment where only deeds will be assessed. Hence, Paul continually reminds his readers of the necessity of remaining “blameless” after receiving Baptism. Having equated “justification by faith” (which Paul preached) with “(eternal) salvation by faith” (which Paul never preached) is one of the major distortions of the Christian reinterpretation of Paul.

Paul the Controversial Christian vs. James and Peter

Paul was just one voice in a debate that involved and divided the many components of Second Temple Judaism, and his position reflects the general position of the early Jesus movement. We may understand why Paul was viewed with suspicion by other Jews who did not share the apocalyptic idea of the superhuman origin of evil and rejected the Christian emphasis on the mission of forgiveness accomplished by Jesus the Messiah. So, why was Paul also a controversial figure within the early Jesus movement? The answer cannot be attributed only to a natural suspicion toward a person who was long regarded as an “enemy,” and, by his own admission, persecuted the church.

There is something in the theology of Paul that differentiated him from other Christian leaders (such as Peter and James). While other members of the early Jesus movement seem more interested in a perspective of restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel (see the incipit of the letter of James), in Paul, there is a special emphasis on the inclusion of gentiles. It was not a new problem: long before Paul, Jewish-Hellenistic communities had already developed models of inclusion of gentiles into their communities as “God-fearers.” Paul, instead, did it in an apocalyptic fashion, along the lines of texts such as the Enochic Book of Dreams, where we read that, in the world to come, the “white sheep” (the righteous Jews) will be united with the “birds of the sky” (the righteous gentiles) to form the new people of God. In the Parables of Enoch, also, the Messiah Son of Man is indicated as the “light” of the gentiles.

Paul never claimed to have been the first to baptize gentiles. What is distinctive is the enthusiasm with which Paul devoted his life to preaching to gentiles. But there is something that is far more controversial. Paul seemed to have pushed for an equal status of gentiles within the new community.

The apparent unanimity reached at the so-called Council of Jerusalem did not solve all the problems related to the presence of gentiles in the church. Despite the fact that baptized gentiles were not required to be circumcised or to keep the Law of Moses, the controversy exploded over the relationship between Jews and gentiles within the community, especially during communal meals. Were they to sit at separate tables or might they join the same table—Jew and gentile, male and female, free and slave?

Paul exploited his pessimistic view about the sinfulness of human nature in order to affirm the “equality in sin” of Jews and gentiles within the church. The parting of Christianity from its Jewish
apocalyptic roots would lead later Christian theology to wonder whether justification and forgiveness of sins are the same thing; but in the first-century apocalyptic worldview the two terms are synonymous. The most controversial aspect of Paul’s preaching was rather his statement that justification—that is, the gift of forgiveness of sins by the Christ—comes into effect “by faith only.”While most of the first Jewish followers of Jesus would talk of sin as a temptation (allowing a larger role to the freedom of human will), the metaphor of slavery leaves room only for a personal “yes” (and makes meaningless the idea of any prerequisites or any claim of “superiority” of the Jews over the gentiles, and therefore, any rationale for a distinction between the two groups within the new community). If only a “yes” is asked of the sinners, there is no room for “works” and justification is “by faith only.” If, instead, sin is a temptation and sinners maintain a certain degree of freedom, then they can, and should, be asked to “prove” their faith with some “works.” This is the move the letter of James makes by claiming that “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone,” and that “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:19–26). Justification is the result of a synergy between humans and God:

[God] gives all the more grace; therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you. (James 4:6–10)

Not accidentally, the letter of James does not even mention the death of Jesus; the preaching of Jesus, the “law of liberty” he taught, is the prerequisite for justification. For Paul, instead, the death and sacrifice of Jesus is the only thing that counts as a unilateral and gracious act of mercy: “I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing” (Gal. 2:21).

The theological dispute had profound practical implications in the life of the church. The incident at Antioch shows that Paul and James had opposite views of how Jews and gentiles should coexist in the church. James opposed the sharing of tables among Jews and gentiles, while Paul favored it. Peter was caught in between. At the beginning, Peter conformed to the practice of the church of Antioch, but after “certain people came from James,” he “drew back.” Paul reacted vehemently, confronting Peter and accusing him of “hypocrisy.” For Paul, there is no distinction between Jewish and gentile church members because they were equally sinners and were equally justified by the grace of God through Jesus. Concerning justification, Jews cannot claim any superiority, unless they deny the grace of God: “I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing” (Gal. 2:21).

Does that mean that Paul “abolished” the distinction between Jews and gentiles in this world tout court? This does not seem to be the case. Very interestingly, Paul’s famous saying about the equality between Jews and gentiles comes in a broader context that included “male and female” and “slave and free”: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). In Paul’s view, these categories are somehow altered in this world; there is no longer enmity and opposition in Christ. Yet, none of these categories is abolished. Paul asks Philemon to welcome his fugitive slave Onesimus as a brother in Christ, and yet, does not tell Philemon to free all his slaves, using the argument that in Jesus Christ, there is no longer slave or free. Paul mentions Priscilla before her husband, Aquila, in the ministry of Christ (Rom. 16:3–4), and yet, reiterates that “the head of the woman is the man” (1 Cor. 11:3) when he could have claimed that in Jesus Christ, there is no longer male and female. Paul proclaims the end of any enmity between Jews and gentiles in Christ, and yet . . . Why should he have claimed only in this case that such a distinction is no longer valid? Ironically, traditional Christian theology has stressed the definitive “end” of the distinction between Jews and gentiles as a divine decree and has never taken an equally strong stance about the “abolishment” of any distinction of gender and social status. Either Paul abolished all three categories or he did not abolish any of them.

Summary and Conclusion

Paul was a Second Temple Jew, a former Pharisee who became a member and a leader of the early Jesus movement. Like many Second Temple Jews (also outside the Jesus movement), as a result of his “conversion,” Paul embraced the apocalyptic view of the superhuman origin of evil and looked at the sinners not only as people responsible for their own actions, but also as victims of a supernatural evil. Like others, he wished for, and expected, some help from heaven to counterbalance the power of evil.

With the other members of the Christian group, Paul shared the idea that Jesus the Messiah had come to earth as the Son of Man to bring forgiveness to sinners, and he believed that Jesus would soon return to carry out a judgment. More than other members of the early Jesus movement, Paul strongly believed that this message of forgiveness included gentile sinners as well, and he decided to devote his life to preaching to the gentiles. Contrary to other members of the Jesus movement, he refused to accept that baptized gentiles had a different or inferior status within the church, as he could not see any distinction between a Jewish sinner and a gentile sinner: they had both been forgiven “by faith only.” This does not mean that he advocated the abolishment of the distinction between Jews and gentiles in this world; on the contrary, as in the case of gender and social distinctions, he accepted it as an inevitable (and perhaps, even providential) reality until the end of times, when these distinctions would eventually disappear.

As a Second Temple Jew, Paul never questioned the validity of the Torah; his only concern was the inability of people to obey the Torah. Paul was a Torah-observant Jew who believed that “justification by faith” was a gift offered through Jesus the Messiah to all “sinners” (not only to gentiles). Does that mean that he believed that Jews should abandon the obedience of the Torah and that no Jew could be saved without Baptism? Not at all. While repeating the common Jewish teaching that “all people are sinners,” Paul shared the apocalyptic idea that the judgment will be according to deeds and that humankind is divided between the “righteous” and the “unrighteous.” But now that the time of the end has come, the unrighteous have been offered the possibility to repent and receive justification through forgiveness. Paul preached to gentiles, but his message was neither addressed to gentiles only nor uniquely pertinent to them. Exactly the same gospel was announced to Jews and gentiles—the good news of the gift of forgiveness: “I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised” (Gal. 2:7).

Paul had a much more pessimistic view of the power of evil. He compared the situation of humankind to a population defeated and enslaved by the devil, but he would have shared the principle that only the sick need a doctor. The sick include Jews and gentiles alike, although not all of them. The righteous do not need a doctor.

To say that the Jews have the Torah while the gentiles have Christ does not faithfully represent the position of Paul. In Paul’s view, Christ is God’s gift not to gentiles, but to sinners. The righteous (Jews and gentiles) will be saved if they have done good deeds. But Paul is conscious of the fact that the power of evil makes it incredibly difficult for all humankind to be righteous: for the Jews to follow the Torah and for the gentiles to follow their own conscience. He preaches the good news that, at the end of times, sinners (Jews and Gentiles alike) are offered the extraordinary possibility to repent and be justified in Christ by God’s mercy apart from God’s justice. Paul was not Lutheran: he never taught “salvation by faith only” to humankind, but announced to sinners, “justification (that is, forgiveness of past sins) by faith.” Paul did not preach only two ways of salvation, but rather three: righteous Jews have the Torah, righteous gentiles have their own conscience, and sinners—Jews and gentiles alike, who have fallen without hope under the power of evil—have Christ the forgiver.

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