Archives for July 2014

In an old post here, I wrote about Coheed and Cambria’s retelling of the Joker/Batman mythos. The lead singer of that band is Claudio Sanchez and he’s at it again. He wrote this song:

This time the song is about Freddy Krueger. He wrote the song from Krueger’s perspective. In the Coheed song about Batman, the Joker is still awful, but he has a level of self-reflection that allows him to critique Batman on a psychological level. In this case they rewrite Krueger as a misunderstood guy who has a crush on Nancy (the female protagonist in the first film). His obsession with her leads to poorly conceived flirting tactics that, in a creepily realistic way, lead to violent attempts to garner her attention with Krueger’s ability to confront people’s souls and endanger their bodily health in a realm of dreams.

In one sense, this song is kinda cute, because upon a first hearing, it’s just about a kid who loves a girl and has dreams about their future together. This is pretty standard fare for popular romantic music. On another level its macabre, but in a hilarious way. There’s a guy who savagely destroys several people’s lives in a sort of comedy of errors because he misunderstands how romance works. On a third and more realistically horrifying level, the song portrays the sort of obsession young men develop when they cannot manage their emotions and how they respond to being unable to relate to the opposite sex.

Anyhow, I wonder if Krueger just needed to read his Ovid:

  The title of this book when Cupid spied,
  “Treason! a plot against our state,” he cried.
  Why should you thus your loyal poet wrong,
  Who in your war has serv’d so well and long?
  So savage and ill-bred I ne’er can prove,
  Like Diomede, to wound the queen of love.
  Others by fits have felt your am’rous flame,
  I still have been, and still your martyr am;
  Rules for your vot’ries I did late impart.
  Refining passion, and made love an art.

P. Ovidius Naso, Ovid’s Art of Love (in Three Books), the Remedy of Love, the Art of Beauty, the Court of Love, the History of Love, and Amours (Medford, MA: Calvin Blanchard, 1855).

In 2009, back when I thought I had a future in Biblical Studies, I bought and read Douglas Campbell’s tome of interminable length, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: 2009) I was impressed by his breadth of reading as well as his depth of thinking. He spent a great deal of time explaining various difficulties concerning what he terms justification theory. Those problems alone apparently required over 100 pages of end notes. The problems are enumerated on pages 168-172. He outlines his understanding of the common Christian understanding of Salvation (Justification Theory) and the problems with it on pages 28-29.

I appreciate Campbell’s hard work and his effort to point out problems of logical incoherence in popular and scholarly explications of the gospel message. That effort alone should prove useful. Campbell also deals well with the question of Paul’s coherence as a thinker in a preliminary way on pages 12-14 and in a more meta-way in 461-930. The problem with his treatment in the later chapters is how much he relies upon his brilliant but unexpected and eccentric (in the best sense of the term) rereading of Paul. He is also one of the few writers I know of who has cited David Bentley Hart’s essay on Anselm’s theory of Atonement (which is marvelous). Those nice things aside, there are some serious problems with his proposal.

What is his proposal?
His proposal is that Paul’s gospel, in Romans, is not fully explained until Chapters 5-8 and that the discourse related to judgment upon ungodliness in Romans 1:18-3:20 is actually a form of “speech-in-character” debate/dialog wherein the condemnation of sin in Romans 1:18-32 and the various utilizations of the Old Testament in chapters 2 and 3 are examples, not of Paul’s thought, but of the false teachers whose influence he is inoculating the Roman Christians against. The implications for this, in Campbell’s mind, are vast. In one sense, based on his rereading, people who utilize the concept of moral law to help people see their need of the atonement are actually preaching the message Paul preaches against!

The Problems

1. The picture of Paul in Acts is of somebody who preaches a message very similar to that of the other Apostles. James Dunn, David Wenham, Mike Bird, and Scot McKnight have all argued successfully in my mind, that the early gospel was very similar to the content of the four gospels. If Paul preached that and adaptations of that, it is difficult to discern how his message in Romans 5-8 is his gospel qua gospel rather than an apocalyptic description of what the gospel does for the Christian community and how the gospel redefines the meaning of human history. That does not make Romans 5-8 untrue or not useful for explaining the gospel. It just means that those chapters are part of the gospel or the implications of the gospel (and thus they are gospel) but not the gospel. In other words, it appears that Campbell’s approach leaves us with a gospel message that has very little or perhaps no room for the actual ministry and teachings of Jesus beyond his incarnation (as a concept) and his apocalyptic death/resurrection/ascension/return. 
2. When I read Campbell’s I had just met Chris Tilling (at SBL) and he told me that it was a big, big deal. That’s why I bought it. The book is a big deal, but I had also started reading the rhetorical manuals and was always a fan of the Socratic Dialogs. Thus when I heard Campbell defend his thesis at SBL that year (Mike Gorman is the only person I recall being on the panel), I was very excited to read whether he could make the case for speech-in-character. I wasn’t super impressed. I saw his argument as possible and not remotely probable. And in Chris Tilling’s volume Beyond Old and New Perspectives on Paul: Reflections on the Work of Douglas Campbell, Robin Griffith-Jones seems to put Campbell’s arguments to rest. I could be wrong, I haven’t read Campbell’s response yet, but Jones’ material comports well with my own conclusions based upon the manuals.
3. There remains a fairly serious difficulty in Campbell’s approach when he attempts to reread Romans 9-10 with speech-in-character (in my opinion here and Romans 7 are the most realistic places to see this). He ends up saying that the nation of Israel is culpable for rejecting God’s righteous act in Christ (which I think is Paul’s point there all along). The problem with this is that Campbell appears to be lapsing himself back into a Justification Theory reading of Paul (771-821). He is careful to define Israel’s ‘unbelief’ in a very specific way. “It is that they have repudiated the coming of God…(821).” Even though Campbell then reminds us that belief in the gospel is merely assurance/evidence of salvation, not a sufficient criterion, for Paul’s argument to have any force, he needs to be saying more than, “My people weren’t rejected by God, they rejected God and thus have no evidence that God has delivered them.” Even the evidence at that point would be the gospel that they found compelling and thus would be a piece of information that they received (and Campbell is very concerned to make sure that the gospel not be a piece of data to which people cognitively assent because in Justification Theory that is the crux of the problem.)
4. Campbell’s theory is difficult to find outside of his book in church history. That’s not a reason to reject it. It is simply puts perspective on such a radical redefinition of Paul’s preaching when compared to the past few centuries of Christian theology, interpretation of Romans, and preaching.

There is much to applaud and enjoy in Campbell’s book. I hope he releases a shorter volume that simply proposes the theory and briefly outlines its results with a brief appendix explaining what he sees as the major problems of Justification Theory (rather than the several hundred pages of problems). It might the case that, if his theory is so important for evangelism (he is explicitly critical of many evangelistic organizations in endnotes 11-16 on pages 1005-1006), that he make some pdf files available so that pastors and college ministers can weigh his case against Scripture without having to buy a 1200 page tome that they might not be able to follow. I understand that he might be circumspect about these things because he wants the academics to debate the merits of his case, but I think the gospel on the ground floor of church work is where Campbell’s critique is (if true) most apt, despite its academic analogs.

 

 

This has been a weird summer for me for several reasons. The first is that it is the first Summer since I became a teacher when I am not working several days a week. It is also the Summer during which I take an extremely difficult version of Calculus in order to prepare for an Engineering program I start in the Fall. The point is that I’ve had plenty of time to revisit books I bought while in seminary but never finished. It’s been good to read Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine, and Barth. Reading these guys got me to thinking, though. In seminary strange things can happen.

1. You start to read books and come away with this or that author’s perspective on this or that subject. So you get Anselm’s perspective on the ontological argument, or Aquinas’ view of justification, or Douglas Campbell’s view of Paul’s view of justification. Or you could get Alister McGrath’s view of Aquinas’ view of Paul’s view of justification. In one sense this is good. An author writes about a subject, but what is written isn’t the subject. But nevertheless, if Christianity is true, there is more than this or that perspective on things. There is a truth and it is out there, beyond my perspective, beyond this or that author’s perspective, and that truth takes time to find and humility to hang on to and further understand.
2. Studying Scripture becomes a chore for a grade (this never holds true if I’m reading in Greek, I can still get lost for hours in the Greek New Testament or the LXX).
3. Talking to Christians with a more popular understanding of the gospel can become awkward. I have several friends who never went to seminary but who read deeply and broadly in Biblical studies and church history who have this problem too. You end up trying to find quick ways out of conversations without glazing over or rudely stopping somebody when they say something weird rather than looking for an opportunity for the “body to build itself up in love (Ephesians 4:16).”
4. You can become accustomed to talk about what Scripture says over against what God has done. This one is tricky because it is, in most ways, a good. To speak of the revelatory text, what it says, and what it means is a salve for idolatry. You avoid speaking ill of God because you’re sticking with what God has inspired. Even if you’re wrong, but you point toward love of God and neighbor, the Scripture’s purpose has been met (which is a major point in Augustine’s theory of interpreting Scripture). Nevertheless, the Scripture itself gives warrant to those who wish to speak of God’s work in their lives to do so (see the Psalter), although it does seem to favor speaking about the Apostolic witness (Acts 2:42-48).
5. Seeking after God and his kingdom can begin to seem illusory when your career is tied up with the process. If you’re having career trouble, it can be so much the easier for you to see the church or a parachurch ministry purely in terms of personal economics. This is why it’s important to pursue skills in another field prior to the seminary.
6. You can graduate with such a narrow field of interest or such a small skill set that you’re not much use to others in conversation or actual physical help.
7. Similarly to point 6, you can be so narrowly interested in one particular theological group or camp that you lose the ability to tell when people are saying the same thing with different words. You could also be so narrowly focused on one aspect of things that you actually start believing certain in-group caricatures of people outside that group.

The biggest solution I see to this problem is to make sure that you live outside of the realm of concepts. Feed people, learn to cook, learn to solve physical problems, etc. The other solution is to remember that despite all of the perspectives, despite the extreme importance of exegesis using linguistic and socio-rhetorical tools, at the end of the day it isn’t just about what this or that person thinks. At the end of the day studying Scripture remains a task for who Jesus is, what he said, what he did, and thus what he reveals about God to the church in all ages. I’ll post more on that closing thought in the future.

This summer I’ve been preparing a curriculum on the whole Bible. This is slow going, but it is worth it in many ways. One of which is that I have gotten to read a great deal of books on the history and theology of Paul that I had never gotten around to starting.

Two of them have really stuck out to me:

1. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003
2. Cassirer, H. W. Grace and Law: St. Paul, Kant, and the Hebrew Prophets. Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 1988.

Now, in general I think that the Biblical authors, Paul included, need to be read on their own terms. This means that they need to be read first as ancient Mediterranean Jewish persons. Secondly, in the New Testament, they need to be read as people who purport to be representatives of the gospel of Jesus. In other words, they must be read as preachers or theologians.

This isn’t to say that Paul or the gospel writers shouldn’t be read using recent critical methods, it is just to say that those critical methods aren’t necessarily designed to understand these authors precisely because they do not let the authors speak for themselves. So there is one sense that reading Paul in light of modern philosophy is a dangerously easy way to misunderstand him. There is another sense in which reading Paul on such terms requires the reader to be rather ruthless in attempting to understand Paul on his own terms in order to put his ideas in conversation with philosophical quests and attitudes from far beyond Paul’s own day. Badiou and Cassirer both do this rather admirably. Both of them attempt to grasp Paul’s gospel and the historical particularities of its utterance in order to place that gospel and its corollaries in conversation with modern continental philosophy and Kantian rationalism.

Both authors attempt to show that Paul is not purely a moralist and that Paul is not anti-semitic. This is important simply because arm-chair philosophers who haven’t read their New Testament love to make claims of this sort. They also both see Romans 7 as autobiographical. Which, at the end of the day, it may be. But I really don’t think that it is. If either author could convince me it would be Cassirer. I think both authors needed to study more ancient apocalyptic literature and to pay more attention to typology and fulfillment language in Jewish literature. Both authors pay great attention to the Greek text of the New Testament though, which Larry Hurtado notes in his review of Badiou’s book with the wry observation that New Testament PhD’s don’t do sometimes.

Badiou’s Book

Badiou is an atheist who notes that he has no care “for the Good News that he [Paul] proclaims or the cult dedicated to him (Badiou,1).” Anyhow, Badiou spends his entire first chapter attempting to demonstrate that Paul is our contemporary from an ideological perspective and I think he is spot on. He essentially notes that in Paul’s day, truth was often seen as the view of this or that group of which one was a part rather than an accessible feature of reality. Badiou notes that in Western Civilization (circa 2002-2003) even mathematics is seen as a sort of political power play and not an actual instrument of knowledge (Badiou, 6). In fact, he even notes that any obscurantist view could be considered as valid as a mathematical proof so long as the group who holds said view has been victimized in some way (ibid). The point being that in Paul’s day, as in ours, truth is seen as merely a matter of kinship or patronage (what group am I in and who is my master). With this in mind, Paul is the anti-philosopher of subject or the individual who embraces the event of the resurrection. Paul warns philosophers that the universal truth of humanity and indeed history cannot be purely conceptual, but must be an event. For Paul, the event is the resurrection, which Badiou does see as fictitious. Badiou also sees a radical break between the teachings of Paul and the content of the synoptic gospels. While I used to agree with such a notion, authors like David Wenham, Scot McKnight, and James Dunn have essentially proven that Paul is indebted to the Jesus traditions and that his gospel preaching necessarily would have included elements of Jesus’ deeds and teachings.

As a brief aside, Aristotle himself seems to have seen the quest for truth, not in consideration of concepts, but in sensory data that helps us to form concepts about physical reality and events. I wonder if the distinction between philosopher and anti-philospher is overblown.

While the argument of Badiou is too long to express here, I wish simply to note that in his effort to understand Paul’s place in philosophy, we have a philosopher who (while trying to demythologize Paul’s concepts into atheism) seems to really “get it.” Badiou understands that for Paul, truth is primarily about a certain event (the resurrection) and thus about how certain particulars can reveal universal reality. In this sense, customs and ceremonies are diaphora insofar as they do not cause people to fight or to lapse back into pre-resurrection ways of living by treating group trivialities as though they were the truth of existence (Badiou 98-106). It remains the case that Badiou’s treatment of Paul is not the best possible, but the ontological argument probably does not apply to treatments of Paul or is there a “greatest imaginable treatment” of Paul that must exist. Nevertheless, I suggest that this book be read by New Testament specialists and by philosophy students who have dismissively avoided reading Paul.

Cassirer’s Codex

Cassirer, unlike Badiou, is a theist. He was thoroughly Kantian in outlook, including attempting a non-religious quest for moral perfection. He eventually became a Christian around the age of 50, which he notes in a brief auto-biographical comment, because of the impression Paul the Apostle made upon him (Cassirer, 167-169). Prior to this, Cassirer had followed in his fathers footsteps and had made a name for himself as one of the greatest Immanuel Kant scholars in the world. His book is an attempt to show A) an agreement between Kant, the Old Testament Prophets, and Paul concerning moral evil in the human soul, B) to contrast their view of the solution, and C) to show that in this contrast Paul has something to say to modern philosophers about human nature (Cassirer, xiii-xvi).

While I love reading Kant as much as the next guy, I’m more interesting in Cassirer’s reading of Paul which is refreshing because Cassirer treats Paul as an intellectual rather than as a religious relic at arms length and thus disagrees with him on certain points. The biggest potential mistake Cassirer does make is that he attempts to read Paul in a way that attempts to find his personality. While this is not necessarily bad, books like Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Personality by Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey seem to demonstrate rather conclusively that ancient persons typically did not reveal many of the personality traits that we would be interested in when they wrote or spoke publicly. That caveat aside, Cassirer does show rather convincingly that Paul’s personality is deeply in line with his doctrines and ideas about the Christ event. This is why Paul can be extremely realistic about the moral flaws he sees in society or in specific groups of Christians (see Romans 1:18-3:23 or all of 1-2 Corinthians) and yet be so tender-hearted and optimistic just sentences away (2 Corinthians 1-2) (Cassirer, 131-153). Paul can simultaneously believe that human beings are morally devious, even beyond the capacity of self-repair, and yet believe that human beings by connectedness to Christ can possess moral repair while also avoiding drabness of personality precisely because of his belief in the resurrection of Christ from the dead. In this concrete event, Cassirer notes, Paul sees the solution to the problem of human captivity to evil, the need for moral progress, and finally the freedom to maintain self-hood while being morally perfected (Cassirer, 169). Badiou, it seems, would agree with this assessment of things.

One more thing is that Cassirer, like Badiou, sees Paul as a sort of anti-philosopher or anti-intellectual (Badiou, 28 and Cassirer, 160). There is something that is partially true about this assessment, but another aspect of it simply is not. It is true that Paul is skeptical of a purely rationalist account of curing the human problem. But it is not true that Paul is against carefully reasoned exploration of the natural world nor of the implications of God’s self-revelation in Christ. This is demonstrated, inadvertently by Cassirer and Badiou, as well as intentionally by N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Paul uses a great deal of cognition language in order to show that moral formation as much a matter of reordering the thoughts to match reality (which requires logic and contemplation) as it is of willing oneself to do what is right.

I highly recommend Cassirer’s book. While I don’t find his exegesis of Paul entirely convincing (Paul is dealing with more problems than that of human evil, he’s also dealing with problems of ancient promise fulfillment, covenant renewal, his own apocalyptic worldview, and the cohesion of a series of churches), by and large Cassirer rarely misses the mark. His book really should be read by philosophers and students of the New Testament. Incidentally, he apparently a genius. He taught himself several languages in a brief time, including English and Greek. He then translated the New Testament into English.

Quotables

1. “…Paul writes in Greek, the Greek commonly spoken in the Orient of those days, which is a sort of international language…It is in no way a contrived or esoteric language, but the Greek of traders and writers. We must try to restore to Paul’s words, whose translations have become worn by centuries of obscurantism (all this “faith!” “charity!” “Holy Spirit!” What an extravagant waste of energy!), their contemporary, every day currency; forbid ourselves from seeing them as Church dialect.” Badiou, 28
2. “…Paul, who for crucial reasons reduces Christianity to a single statement: Jesus is resurrected.” Badiou, 4
3. “But all things considered, there is something absurd about bringing him [Paul] to trial before the tribunal of contemporary feminism. The only question worth asking is whether Paul, given the conditions of his time, is a progressive or a reactionary so far as the status of women is concerned.” Badiou, 104
4. “Far from fleeing the century, one must live with it, but without letting oneself be shaped, conformed. It is the subject, rather than the century, who, under the injunction of his faith, must be transformed. And the key to this transformation, this renewal, lies in thought.” Badiou, 110
5. “I am, of course, fully aware that nothing that has been said may serve to establish either that Jesus Christ is the son of God or that he appeared to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Yet, as I have remarked before, I myself have no doubt that Paul was right on both counts. This is largely because the impression I have formed of St. Paul is that he was the very last man to fall victim to self-deception and because, in consequence, I find it impossible to entertain seriously the idea that his spiritual pilgrimage had a hallucinatory experience for its starting point.” Cassirer, 168
6. “One of the most interesting features of St. Paul’s teaching is his belief that the further a man progresses in combating self-will, the more readily he becomes submerged into Christ and trusts himself to Christ’s guidance, the more that same man will become his true self.” Cassirer, 155
7. “I soon became firmly convinced that nowhere, except in the Old Testament, and especially in the prophets, was there an account of the moral life which I could accept as essentially true. In fact everything I read struck me as both important and profound.” Cassirer, 96
8. “That St. Paul’s doctrine is essentially antirationalist and anti-intellectualist is indeed not open to doubt. Yet, at the same time, it is striking to find how many warnings there are against sheer enthusiasm and its evil consequences.” Cassirer, 160
9. “Still, it is essential to insist very strongly indeed that the opinions which St. Paul holds in this matter are in fact radically mistaken. Christianity may well be a doctrine which is sound in every way. Yet at no time was there ever any justification for the hypothesis that those opposing themselves to the Christian religion were necessarily under the influence of sinister and malevolent motives.” Cassirer, 165.