Outlaw Justice

The Messianic Politics of Paul

Theodore W. Jennings

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804785990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Filosofía de la religión

This book offers a close reading of Romans that treats Paul as a radical political thinker by showing the relationship between Paul's perspective and that of secular political theorists. Turning to both ancient political philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero) and contemporary post-Marxists (Agamben, Badiou, Derrida, and Žižek), Jennings presents Romans as a sustained argument for a new sort of political thinking concerned with the possibility and constitution of just socialities.

Reading Romans as an essay on messianic politics in conversation with ancient and postmodern political theory challenges the stereotype of Paul as a reactionary theologian who "invented" Christianity and demonstrates his importance for all, regardless of religious affiliation or academic guild, who dream and work for a society based on respect, rather than domination, division, and death. In the current context of unjust global empires constituted by avarice, arrogance, and violence, Jennings finds in Paul a stunning vision for creating just societies outside the law.

First Phase

THE UNJUST SOCIAL ORDER (1:18–3:20)

Since Paul is concerned with justice, with the claim of divine justice, he turns first to indicate how the quest for a just social order has failed. The most serious indictment of social injustice is directed against the Greco-Roman world (1:18–2:6), whose center is the city of Rome, where his readers constitute a messianic cell or vanguard. But he will also claim that a Judean polity based upon the Mosaic constitution is not the solution, for it, too, produces injustice rather than justice (2:17–3:20). The impartiality of this indictment is based upon the divine impartiality (2:6–16), which seeks and welcomes justice wherever it is found and rejects and opposes injustice wherever it is encountered. This will seem to lead to a sort of dead-end or aporia in the apparent impossibility of the justice that is nevertheless necessary. This aporia will set the stage for a consideration of justice that is not based upon law so is outside the law: outlaw justice.

2. The Critique of Pagan Injustice (1:18–2:5)

Paul has indicated that his concern is with justice, divine justice, and with the way this justice or the coming of this justice is the good news of God, the proclamation that makes glad a world that somehow may be represented as yearning for the actualization or realization of justice. He has also indicated that this incoming of justice is connected with the news concerning the messiah who has been brought back from ignominious death. The character of such a proclamation is that it be performative, that it somehow accomplish or begin to accomplish what it proclaims, as in a proclamation of war, a proclamation of peace, a proclamation of a tax holiday, a proclamation of marriage. Here the proclamation produces, or aims at producing, joy.

That the justice of God is, in important respects, yet to come means that the mechanisms for bringing justice and maintaining it have failed. It is the burden of the next several paragraphs of Paul’s argument to show that justice had not been achieved. In this discussion he will first turn to an indictment of gentile justice, the justice enacted and administered by Roman law. He will then turn to an indictment of Israelite or Judean justice, which prides itself upon a superior polity or law but which nonetheless has not achieved or been capable of achieving justice.

Paul’s basic presupposition throughout is that God requires justice—indeed, the name of God and the name of justice are virtually interchangeable, so much so that to turn away from the divine is to fall into injustice. Moreover, Paul will insist that justice is a political concept in that it applies to whole societies, not simply to individuals. The indictment, I argue, does not apply to individuals but to social realities named as Greek or pagan, on the one hand, and as Judean, on the other. We will see that even if individuals in either of these social realities may be regarded as just when considered as persons, they are viewed as embedded in deeply unjust social orders and to that extent are subsumed under the indictment that will be unfolded.

But why should an indictment of these social realities, these societies or polities, be called for? I believe that this stems from the fact that the messiah of God was rejected by the responsible representatives of Israel and was executed by the responsible representatives of gentile society—the Roman imperial order. At stake will be a collision between polities that extol the law and the divine or, as Derrida says, undeconstructible claim and call of justice. This collision had come to expression in the death of the messiah, a death by law, that exposed an ineradicable opposition to justice that has come to expression through the execution of the law. As Nietzsche had recognized, it is the law that executed the messiah, so it was a choice between the messiah and the law: “Up to that time that ignominious death had seemed to him to be the principal argument against the ‘Messiahship’ proclaimed by the followers of the new doctrine: but what if it were necessary for doing away with the Law . . . henceforth the Law is dead” (Daybreak § 68). Leaving aside Nietzsche’s rather fanciful notions of resentment that make Paul out to be a pure Lutheran, I think the basic sense of a collision here is absolutely correct. In this sense at least I can agree with Derrida’s suggestion about Nietzsche’s “lucidity about Paul” (“Silkworm” 325). Jacob Taubes echoes this appraisal of Nietzsche concerning Paul at greater length (80–85).

This looking ahead at the orientation of the basic argument is necessary if we are not to get lost in the details of Paul’s indictment. We turn then to the initial indictment of Greco-Roman civilization. This indictment has a triple structure that near the beginning of the third century Origen already regarded as being basically parallel, that is, three ways of depicting the same situation.

The general terms of the indictment are as follows:

From heaven divine wrath is disclosed against all human impiety and injustice that unjustly imprisons the truth.

The indictment will aim at demonstrating that those who pretend to judge—those who pretend, that is, to administer justice in the name of the law—are themselves under condemnation. It is the suppression of the truth, the willful imprisonment of or silencing of the truth that is the concrete expression of impiety and injustice. “Impiety” and “injustice” are Roman political terms and overlap considerably. Impiety has to do with both a neglect of the gods and a violation of ancient, universal custom or human decency. In general, it is that which insults the divine. For Paul’s argument to work, he must operate on pagan terrain; his indictment of pagan society must make sense on pagan terms. Thus, pagans are not unjust or impious because they are pagans but because they do not do what pagans know would comport with true piety or true justice. The answer will not be for pagans to leave off their own paganism (or humanism) in order to become Jews, nor will it be for Judeans to leave off being Jews in order to become good pagans, nor even will it be to invent something new to be called Christianity as an alternative religion. This will bear some close attention.

In the meantime, it is important to note that Paul is using terms that are perfectly recognizable in Roman political discourse. For example, Tacitus can speak of the “melancholy and continuous destruction of our citizens who are being slandered when just and driven to suicide: Such was the wrath of heaven against the Roman state” (16.16). That is, the Pauline indictment agrees with that of Tacitus. This extends not only to the content of the indictment (slandering the just and driving them to suicide) but to the way in which social madness is itself the demonstration of the wrath of God, as well as, presumably, its cause.

For what of God can be known is manifest to them, for God has made it manifest to them; for even the most inaccessible of divinity is made evident through the world of things made: God’s everlasting power and divinity.

Although for understandable reasons in the social chaos of the Nazi nightmare, Barth and others made a point of rejecting what was called natural theology, philosophers of the Enlightenment like the great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza are right to see in Paul one who shares their confidence that the most fundamental theological knowledge is available in and through all cultures in their knowledge of the world of things, of existents. Spinoza writes in his Theological-Political Treatise of 1670: “Here [Paul] quite clearly indicates that by the natural light of reason, all can clearly understand the power and divinity of God, from which we can know and infer what they should seek and what they should avoid” (57). What is known precisely is divine power as evident in the existence of a world of existents. That things are at all and that they are in such a way as to present themselves as a “world” give evidence of divinity, of mysterious and efficacious power.

What is at stake here is not some or other metaphysics or ontology but what metaphysics and ontology try to think. Whether there is something rather than nothing, that things somehow just are, or that things are in some sort of relation to one another and to us, the ground zero of experience is an experience of multiple existents somehow there before us in relation to one another and to us. This is the basic ontological wonder that Paul articulates as indicative of divine efficacy. Here Paul is pointing to what reflective persons in the Greco-Roman world would already recognize. Recognizing this divine power at work in the constitution of the world is not dependent upon any particular religion nor restricted to particular cultures.

Moreover, since the basic point will have to do with the claim of justice, it is worth recalling that the most basic formulation of elementary justice seems to be the common property of all cultures: dealing with others as one expects or desires to be dealt with. Paul will come back to this later in his argument.

So they are without excuse, for although knowing divinity, they did not honor the divine as divine or give thanks, but became empty in their speculations and became willful and blinded in their thinking.

Perhaps the most important phrase here is “give thanks,” that is, feeling and expressing gratitude in face of the sheer mystery of being. The importance of this is clear from the contrast: between thankfulness and the self-delusion that begins as willfulness (Paul says having an undiscerning heart; but heart in Greek refers not to sentiment but to will). It is when wonder gives way to willfulness, when gratitude gives way to a greediness that instrumentalizes all things, that the door to chaos opens. For now instead of a desire to understand based in wonder, there comes to be an expropriation of all things that makes them serve self-interest and a blind will to power. Instead of the science that marvels there arises the pseudoscience that manipulates. This is the dream and nightmare of Francis Bacon, who thought of science as an instrument for the human domination of nature. For every true scientist seeking to unravel the mystery of the atom, there is also the servant of power who would weaponize the mysteries of the universe; for every true scientist who seeks to unravel the wonder of the genetic code, there stands the corporation that would profit from a patent on a gene.

Their wisdom becomes idiocy, [their rationality irrational, their intelligence stupid. And] they exchange the glory of incorruptible divinity for imitation images of perishing men or birds or quadrupeds or reptiles.

Here one often speaks of idolatry, but Paul inveighs against things that the intelligent of the empire would also find to be just plain stupid. When Nero was young, Seneca mocked the divinization of Claudius, and before that, all Rome was horrified at the impiety of Caligula, who deified not only himself but also his sister and even his horse. The imperial eagle upon the standard of the legions represented the divinity of empire and of Rome. While some see an attack here upon Egyptian practices (deities represented as birds and hippos and crocodiles, for example), I would suppose that what is at stake is the capturing of the divine in corrupted images far closer to home.

In this, Paul is not dependent upon a specifically Jewish or even prophetic condemnation of idolatry. He is using the more or less common currency of Greco-Roman philosophical repudiation of superstitious practices. The point is that awe and wonder are transferred from the invisible to the all too visible, from what Jean Luc Marion, the Catholic philosopher and former student of Derrida, insightfully characterized as a turn from the icon to the idol (7–24). But here the idol is whatever instantiates or represents imperial power and excess. In our own time we may think of the ways in which the wonder at the intricacies of human interaction gives way to the idolatry of the market and to an astonishing faith (credulity) in virtual “wealth” that disappears in an instant when avarice runs over a cliff of its own making.

For God let them have the madness they had chosen so that they plunged themselves into every kind of filth and dishonoring of one another’s bodies.

It has become difficult not to make of Paul some kind of prude since for us dishonor and “uncleanness” have somehow become focused on sex. But that is not likely the meaning for Paul or his readers. Rather, they refer to a descent into social madness in which human beings become their own worst enemies, arousing revulsion at the excesses of dishonor into which they fall. Instead of honoring one another’s integrity (bodies), we dishonor one another and so also ourselves. This should not be too hard to understand: just as we know that racism or sexism dishonors not only its object (and its object’s body) but also its agent, so too with all the ways in which humans dishonor one another. Moreover, this behavior, especially when exemplified at the top of the social order, tends toward a vicious cycle, a downward spiral of social decay and death.

In Greco-Roman thought of the time, the dishonorable passions would have been not so much “sexual” but social: such as unreasoning rage, anger, delight in cruelty, an insane need to accumulate or display wealth, a lifestyle given over to luxury. These are the “passions” decried by Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics as dishonorable. This is also Paul’s point.

To make this clear, I will go to the third and most detailed of Paul’s tripartite indictment: Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God [note how this flows directly from what Paul has been talking about at the beginning of this indictment], God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done: they were filled with every kind of injustice [this is the point, after all, and it summarizes all that follows—note that there is no punctuation in Greek; it must be supplied by translators], evil, covetousness, malice. [And then he expands on this basic list.] Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness; they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

This is social madness. And it is almost exactly what Roman historians will also say about this period of Roman history, the period from Augustus’s death (perhaps earlier) until the end of the century. It was a time of the rule of paranoid gangsters who sought to destroy any and all rivals: you got ahead by making up lies about your neighbors; informants and slanderers become wealthy and powerful. Anyone with a reputation for virtue had to be destroyed lest the populace seek that person to be dictator rather than the one who was in power or sought power. The first casualty was truth, but the result was social madness, a war of the powerful against one another as well as against the weak.

Tacitus, for example, writing around 120 CE, recalled that “the histories of Tiberius, Caius (Caligula) Claudius and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror” (1.1). He remarks in his description of the reign of Tiberius what is true of the succeeding accounts as well: “I have to present in succession the merciless biddings of a tyrant, incessant prosecutions, faithless friendships, the ruin of innocence, the same causes issuing in the same results, and I am everywhere confronted by a wearisome monotony in my subject matter” (4.33). And as the historians will also say, the example of the rulers was often contagious.

They know the divine decree, that those who do these things deserve to die. Here it is not a question of specific legislation for which one can find capital punishment prescribed; rather, it is a question of a social madness or collective insanity that brings destruction upon itself. If there is a god, a divine power, then this kind of social chaos is itself a death penalty. Societies generally know this and will express it in different ways. In China, for example, one might say that the rulers have lost the mandate of heaven. But what can be discerned is that a social order that is really vicious is on the point of dissolution, of self-destruction. No one needs to look this up in a law book either in Rome or in Israel—or even in the contemporary world.

Yet they not only do these things; they actually praise and honor those who do them. This is one of the things of which the historians of this period, writing only a few decades later, really seem to despair—what everyone recognized to be vicious and outrageous conduct was nevertheless applauded in the Senate and on the street. One illustration: When Nero, after several attempts, finally succeeded in having his mother assassinated, he was welcomed into the city as if he had won a war. Suetonius reports that congratulations “poured in from the Army, the Senate and the people” (Nero § 34). This is the depth of social depravity.

The indictment that Paul has produced is one directed at the (rumored) behavior of the sociopolitical elites of Rome, the very elites responsible for the administration of what is called justice, yet their injustice is evident to any thinking person. This becomes evident in the histories of this period written by pagan Roman historians a few decades after Paul’s writing. They themselves will claim that this sort of truth about the empire could not have been written at the time Paul is writing because of the reign of terror that was common from Tiberius and Caligula through Nero and beyond. Paul is thus treading in very dangerous territory here, for he is writing not during the dawn of a sort of Roman enlightenment a few decades later but in the midst of what Romans themselves claimed was a time of insane injustice.

Given this understanding of what Paul is saying here, we can return to the verses that constitute Paul’s second indictment. Placing them in the context of the overall indictment will help overcome extraordinary misconceptions at how they are to be interpreted. I will attempt a more or less literal translation:

Therefore God handed them over to dishonorable passions; for even their females changed the natural [phusikein] use [chreisin] to that against nature [para phusin]; likewise, also the males leaving the natural [phusikein] use [chreisin] of the females burned in their desire for one another, males among males, wor...