Paul's Summons to Messianic Life

Political Theology and the Coming Awakening

L. L. Welborn

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780231539159
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Taubes, Badiou, Agamben, Žižek, Reinhard, and Santner have found in the Apostle Paul's emphasis on neighbor-love a positive paradigm for politics. By thoroughly reexamining Pauline eschatology, L. L. Welborn suggests that neighbor-love depends upon an orientation toward the messianic event, which Paul describes as the "now time" and which he imagines as "awakening." Welborn compares the Pauline dialectic of awakening to attempts by Hellenistic philosophers to rouse their contemporaries from moral lethargy and to the Marxist idea of class consciousness, emphasizing the apostle's radical spirit and moral relevance.

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NEIGHBOR (A)

IN ROMANS 13, Paul enlarges upon a conviction that he first expressed some years earlier in his epistle to the Galatians (5:14): “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”¹ Leviticus 19:18 (Septuagint), from the heart of the Holiness Code,² is cited as warrant for the one obligation that remains for members of the messianic community: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves the other has fulfilled the law” (Rom. 13:8). Epitomizing the Torah in a demi-Decalogue (Rom. 13:9),³ Paul asserts that “the word” of Leviticus 19:18 “summarizes,” or “recapitulates,” all the commandments: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Thus, Paul is able to conclude that “love is the fulfillment of the law” (Rom. 13:10).

As is well known, such summaries of the whole law are found elsewhere in Jewish tradition. The “Golden Rule” is attributed to Rabbi Hillel as the essence of the Torah.⁴ A generation after Paul, Rabbi Akiba cited Leviticus 19:18 as the principle that sums up and contains the whole of the Torah.⁵ But the frequent citation of Leviticus 19:18 in early Christian literature⁶ makes it likely that Paul took the quotation from the tradition of Jesus’s sayings, as attested by Mark 12:31 and parallels.⁷

The conclusion that Paul is following a tradition established by Jesus gives point to the assertion of Jacob Taubes in his exposition of Paul’s political theology: Paul’s designation of neighbor-love as the fulfillment of the law represents a radical reduction within the primordial core of the Jesus tradition.⁸ As Taubes observes, Paul cannot have failed to know that Jesus taught the dual commandment.⁹ Asked by a lawyer “which commandment in the law is the greatest,” Jesus answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:35–40).¹⁰ Paul’s omission of the command to love God from his summary of the whole law in Romans 13 cannot, Taubes argued, be accidental, given its centrality in the Jesus tradition, but reflects Paul’s conviction that this burden has been lifted from the shoulders of the new people of God, in consequence of the messianic event.¹¹ How this came about Paul explains in Romans 5: through divine kenōsis.¹² This is Paul’s interpretation of the death of the Messiah for the weak, the ungodly, and enemies: “God commends his love toward us in that while we were still sinners the Messiah died for us” (Rom. 5:8; cf. Rom. 5:5–11).¹³ For those who have experienced the messianic klēsis (calling), there is now only one imperative: to love the neighbor as oneself, that is, to love the nearest embodiment of the ones for whom the Messiah died, following the kenotic movement of divine love. Thus, the divine kenōsis has sublated the first commandment.

To his credit, Taubes did not shy away from the psychotheological implications of Paul’s sublation of the commandment to love God. By way of a series of lengthy citations from Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Taubes reprises Freud’s version of the history of religion: “Judaism had been a religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son. The old God the Father fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took his place.”¹⁴ Taubes comments: “This is also a contribution to the problem of the dual commandment and its radicalization in the love command: the focus on the son, on the human being; the father is no longer included.”¹⁵ For Taubes, the assertion that God the Father has been dethroned is not an ontological claim, but a religious way of speaking about a psychological development. Paul’s sublation of the commandment to “love God with all your heart and soul and might” lifted the burden of guilt imposed by paternal law. As Paul’s spiritual “descendent,”¹⁶ “Freud, so to speak, enters into the role of Paul” and tries to realize Paul’s theological vision by a new therapeutic method.¹⁷ “Freud . . . continues Paul’s work by striving to liberate us from the burden imposed by the obscenely cruel paternal agency that we harbor within ourselves.”¹⁸

Now, ironically, the sublation that, according to Taubes, was intended to transport Paul’s readers beyond all superego inculpation, so that they might freely obligate themselves to mutual love, has the consequence of making the command to love the neighbor more difficult to fulfill, because it removes the force of the divine mandate. The importance of the divine mandate is inscribed in the tripartite structure of Leviticus 19:18: first, the prohibition—“You shall not take revenge or bear a grudge against any of your people”; then, the remedy—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”; finally, the rationale—“I am the Lord” (Septuagint).¹⁹ Without the divine mandate, it is scarcely possible to imagine that one could undertake something so unreasonable and difficult as loving the neighbor as oneself.

It is the difficulty of neighbor-love apart from the divine mandate that Kenneth Reinhard, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Žižek contemplate in their three inquiries into political theology as the legacy of Jacob Taubes.²⁰ The insuperable difficulty of the biblical injunction is vividly evoked in the introduction by way of the frighteningly realistic assessment of Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents: “Let us adopt a naïve attitude towards it,” Freud proposes, “as though we were hearing it for the first time. We shall then be unable to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why would we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible?”²¹ The commandment seems more unreasonable when the neighbor is a stranger: “If he is a stranger to me, and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own that he may have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them, if I put a stranger on a par with them.”²² But if the neighbor happens to be an enemy, then the biblical injunction seems positively absurd: “I must confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. . . . If it will do him any good, he has no hesitation in injuring me. . . . Indeed, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me, and showing his superior power.”²³ Freud concludes his reflections on the difficulty of neighbor-love by confronting the persistence in human beings of a fundamental inclination toward aggression, a primal mutual hostility. Freud observes that the neighbor is for us “too often only a potential source of cheap labor, someone to be tricked or exploited, a sexual object, someone who tempts us to satisfy our aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him or her sexually without consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.”²⁴

Reinhard, Santner, and Žižek struggle mightily to discover resources for rethinking the biblical injunction to love the neighbor in a world where the divine throne is vacant. Reinhard takes up Lacan’s proposal of an alternative logic for sexuation, not as a static situation, but as an event, an encounter involving a choice that is retroactively named either “man” or “woman.”²⁵ The passage of the human through an indiscernible zone that Lacan called the “not-all” in the process of sexuation encourages Reinhard to seek for an analogous path beyond the friend/enemy dichotomy of politics. Reinhard finds the opening to this path in the figure of the neighbor, who emerges beyond the boundary of politics in the generic field of Humanity.²⁶ But in order to operationalize the decision to love the neighbor as oneself, Reinhard has recourse to Lacan’s argument that a third love is necessary, the love of God, which is the model of symbolic love, the love of the father that sustains the symbolic order, even for those who are not believers.²⁷ Hence, even “the [Lacanian] subject loves the neighbor only by means of the love of God.”²⁸ In the end, Reinhard escapes from the difficulty of Paul’s sublation of the love of God by reverting to a psychoanalytic version of the dual commandment.

Santner endeavors to remain faithful to the commandment of neighbor-love in an era when historical materialism sets the parameters of discourse.²⁹ Santner combines the Lacanian theory of the constitution of the subject with Franz Rosenzweig’s attempt to recover an experience of the miraculous in everyday life. Rehearsing the account of the primal scene that gives rise to unconscious formations in the infant subject by Jean Laplanche (a student of Lacan), Santner posits that the excess of parental desire which cannot be metabolized by the child through symbolization sinks into the unconscious as “residues.”³⁰ These “residues” of the desire of the other constitute an “internal alien-ness, maintained, held in place, by external alien-ness.”³¹ A “miracle” for Santner would represent “the event of a genuine break in the fateful enchainment of unconscious transmissions,” an opening of the subject toward the inner alien-ness of the other.³² Santner grasps that the biblical commandment to love the neighbor “directs our minds, indeed our entire being, toward that which is most thing-like about the other.”³³ But how can a genuine exodus occur from the deep patterns of enslavement to the needs of the self, so as to love the other? Santner concludes that to conceive of a kind of love that exceeds mere object cathexis “is already a mode of registering the region of being we call God,” and “testifies to the ongoing necessity of theological thinking.”³⁴ Thus, Santner endorses Rosenzweig’s project of monotheism as “a form of therapy that allows for a genuine return to the midst of life with our neighbor.”³⁵ Rosenzweig’s own experience demonstrated that the “miraculous achievement” of neighbor-love “required some form of divine support—ultimately a form of love—kept alive, in turn, by a certain form of life.”³⁶ Like Reinhard, Santner seeks to evade the difficulty of Paul’s radical reduction of the dual commandment by offering a “postsecular” solution to the human predicament: monotheism as therapy.³⁷

Žižek styles his contribution to the political theology of the neighbor not as a response to the problem identified by Taubes, but as “a challenge to the so-called ethical turn in contemporary thought, a turn often linked to the though...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 | Neighbor (A)
• 2 | Kairos (B)
• 3 | Awakening (C)
• 4 | Awakening (C′)
• 5 | Kairos (B′)
• 6 | Neighbor (A′)
• 7 | Coda
• Notes
• Index
• Series List