Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision

Critical Engagements with Agamben, Badiou, Zizek, and Others

Harink

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781621890737
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The apostle Paul was a man of many journeys. We are usually familiar with the geographical ones he made in his own time. This volume traces others--Paul's journeys in our time, as he is co-opted or invited to travel (sometimes as abused slave, sometimes as trusted guide) with modern and recent Continental philosophers and political theorists. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin; Taubes, Badiou, Zizek, and Agamben--Paul journeys here among the philosophers. In these essays you are invited to travel with them into the regions of philosophy, hermeneutics, political theory, and theology. You will certainly hear the philosophers speak. But Paul will not remain silent. Above the sounds of the journey his voice comes through, loud and clear.

part i

From Apocalypse to Philosophy

chapter 1

The Gospel Invades Philosophy

by J. Louis Martyn

Gospel and Philosophy, Initial Sketch

How shall we approach the issues that arise when, before turning to modern philosophical interpreters of Paul such as Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, we ask about the apostle’s own journey into what a number of his Greek-speaking contemporaries—pagan and Jewish—called philosophia? We begin with four observations.

(a) Philosophia. Several Hellenistic witnesses—notably Stoics—tell us that the established philosophical curriculum of the time was made up of three major parts, each a human endeavor: to physikon is our investigation of the cosmos; to ethikon is our engagement with human behavior, actions right and wrong, wise and foolish; to logikon is the cerebral work in which we concern ourselves with logos, understood to include our ways of knowing things, epistemology.1 A man of great mental agility, indeed of considerable sophistication, Paul could surely have written a brief treatise relating a part of his “scripture” to one or another of these three philosophical divisions, producing an essay in some regards similar perhaps to the work of Philo.

In his own ways he does in fact refer numerous times to the cosmos, the subject of to physikon. A person who had achieved wisdom in that philosophical division—one affirming, for example, the Epicurean notion of cosmic conservation—would certainly have found a topic for sharp debate in Paul’s statement that “the form of this world” is passing away (1 Cor 7:31). Indeed, Paul’s apocalyptic uses of the term kosmos would have raised both Greek and Jewish eyebrows.2 And what of Paul and to logikon? We can be sure that lively philosophical discussion was in fact elicited by several of the passages in which Paul ventures into epistemological issues. One thinks, for example, of 1 Cor 2:6–16 and of the link he draws between epistemology and apocalyptic theology in 2 Cor 5:16–17.3

(b) Euangelion. The apostle wrote, however, no philosophical treatise. He was no philosopher. As he made his literal journey from one part of the Aegean to another, he did not carry to his hearers what he called a philosophia. On the contrary, he conveyed to euangelion, a joyous announcement focused not on human endeavors of any kind, but rather on an act of God that had just now occurred, that was still occurring, that would occur climactically in the near future. Specifically, with the term euangelion he referred to and expanded upon what he identified in the first instance as God’s new, militant act in the invasive sending of his Son Jesus Christ.

(c) An Invasive Meeting. This gospel, then, was literally the new invader as Paul traveled from one place to another; and with regard to primary subject matter, it was focused on the new invasion of God in the person of his Son. In city after city, in one market place (agora) and workshop (ergasterion) after another, Paul’s joyous announcement plunged headlong into the established philosophies of the setting, announcing that divine advent. And here we pause over an epistemological issue that arose immediately.

(d) Contextualization: Philosophy and Gospel or Gospel and Philosophy? We take a moment to enter imaginatively into the mind of one of Paul’s hearers, an auditor who can be a paradigm for us as we ourselves seek genuinely to listen to the apostle. Being a typical human being, this hearer will have assumed that Paul’s euangelion could be assessed on the basis of the philosophy that had already won that hearer’s assent, whether Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic, or some homemade and unsophisticated form of popular wisdom. That is always the first human assumption, the scarcely examined one that is evident in one of our modern, commonplace uses of the term “sense.” We assume, that is, that “having sense,” we can use this sense as a yardstick to measure anything new that comes along. Upon hearing a new statement, we often say, “Yes, indeed, that makes sense” or “That cannot be true; it makes no sense at all.”

To speak about the meeting of Paul’s message with philosophy in the Greek agora, we can employ a somewhat more sophisticated locution. We can follow Walter Lowe and Douglas Harink in their illuminating use of the verb “to contextualize.”4 To say that A contextualizes B is to say two things, both implying that A is the senior partner. First, when A contextualizes B, A functions as the master map on which B is located. Furnishing the basic criteria of perception, A is the context in which B is discerned and interpreted.5

Second, when A contextualizes B, A is the point of departure for thinking about the relationship between A and B. A does not get all of the words, but it does get the first word and that first word is basic.

Thinking of Paul in the agora, we can say, then, that his typical auditor would have taken for granted that philosophia contextualizes euangelion. Listening to Paul’s preaching, one assesses the gospel in the context of philosophia, the latter serving as the master map, the senior partner, the basic frame of reference.

Will that have been Paul’s assumption as well? Here we have a question of considerable import for the present essay, for while our formal focus will lie for the most part on the gospel and to ethikon—with a brief glance in the direction of to physikon—the epistemological dimensions of to logikon also come into play. Specifically, in epistemological terms how did Paul understand the gospel’s invasion? Did the established philosophies—especially some of their common assumptions—function as the stable context in which the invasive good-news announcement necessarily found its place? And, finding its place in this philosophical context, was it subject to criteria of perception that were already basic in that context?

With those questions playing their strong roles in the background, we come now to our formal subject, the gospel’s invasive meeting with to ethikon, the latter being represented by an established philosophical drama of morality.

An Orthodox, Philosophical Drama of Morality:
The Two Ways and the Two Steps

The Two Ways in Pagan Moral Literature

Even a modest survey of moral literature composed by polytheistic pagans in the Hellenistic period leads one to sense a coherent ethical portrait of the human being that was so widely presupposed as to warrant our referring to it as one of the era’s orthodox philosophical constructs. In its numerous and various forms from Hesiod to Seneca and beyond, it had as its focal figure the human being who as traveler stands center stage before a road fork at which two ways open out before him, each being a viable option. He is homo viator in bivio.

There was also more to this established philosophical construct than the two ways. With variations and some qualifications, it was made up, in fact, of five major elements:

(1) Frequently so fundamental as to be linked to cosmic, universal pairs of opposites, the two ways are either taken for granted—they simply exist as, for example, life and death, virtue and vice—or they are presented to the human being, often by an older and wiser person, or even—in poetic form—by personifications of virtue and vice.

(2) Accompanying the presentation, there is explicitly or implicitly a strong hortatory element designed to persuade the human agent to take the way that is identified as the better of the two. Explicit or implicit exhortation and the effort to persuade are hallmarks in a massive amount of Hellenistic moral instruction, so much so that even when they stand alone, they very frequently indicate that just below the surface lies intact the whole of the two ways.

(3) Exhortation and the effort to persuade also presuppose a certain anthropological given: moral competence in the precise sense of the ability to choose. Even in emphatically theistic authors such as Epictetus, the two ways is a fundamentally anthropological construct focused on volitional action of which the human agent is capable. He is able to see the two ways—often, to be sure, with instruction—and he is able—often after deliberation—to decide between them. In short, the human being is morally competent to make his own choice.

(4) Faced with the two ways, often identified, as I have said, as a pair of opposites, the human being does in fact choose one or the other; he exercises his moral competence by making an all-determining decision. In the happy scenario he chooses to follow the way that is “choiceworthy” (haireton), achieving moral progress (prokopē) by repeatedly choosing virtue in preference to vice.6

(5) His choice has momentous consequences; it determines his future.

One hardly needs to say that the part of Hellenistic philosophy denominated to ethikon was both large and complex, being so partly because the Stoics focused the good and the bad almost altogether on ethics. Amidst that complexity one is struck, then, by the relative simplicity and the near ubiquity of the two-ways portrait of the human being.

The simplicity is evident, for example, in pagan traditions in which the two-ways pattern is assumed—as noted above—more or less as a natural, cosmic given, no personal presenter being mentioned. The near ubiquity is attested by many passages in which the popular philosophers speak in an ethical, paraenetic manner that presupposes some form of the two ways.7 Notably impressive and pertinent witnesses also include two pieces of widely influential ethical instruction, the Heracles legend of Prodicus and the Tablet of Cebes.8

Sirach Representing the Jewish Sages:
The Two Ways Acquire a Highly Influential Addi...