Friday, December 10, 2004
(11:27 PM) | Brad:
St. Paul Week: Proclamation & Poesis
I am not, by any normative standard at all, a Pauline scholar. The degree to which I am a scholar in anything at all, it would be continental philosophy and Herman Melville. That said, however, I did moonlight for a while, in the earlier, halcyon days of my seminary days, as one who actually spent some time reading and reflecting on the good apostle. When I left the creaking doors of the Church dimly lit, the very same day I was officially ordained as one of its earthly representatives, I was, I proclaimed to friends, 'done with it all.' What I have found interesting, and I'm sure this is worthy of more analysis, though I am especially loath to endure it, is that the further I moved away, i.e., to outright secularism qua philosophical materialism, via deconstruction and thenIdealism, the more I became interested in returning, and not simply with a morbid, ironic fascination, to some of the dustier vestiges of this previous faith. The Weblog is, along with a resurgent interest in politico-philosophical appropriations of Paul, a testimony to the fact that I am not alone. We, of course, did not all share the same faith, or perhaps even faith at all, and neither do we speak or think the same of it now; but, alas, here we are, born again, as it were, if I may take a perverted notion and pervert it still more, in the 'archaic religious practice' (to quote Anthony) of Pauline studies.I say all this not to award us all with gold stars for the tenaciousness of our speculative vigor, that we would dare (or, for some, deign) to rehabilitate Paul. Rather, I say it to highlight a peculiar passage, one that has long bothered me, and was recently explicated by a friend of mine who has spent the better part of his adult life translating and teaching the New Testament. I am talking about Philippians 1.12-18.
Paul begins v. 12 with one of his normative disclosures: Not only has the gospel advanced in spite of his imprisonment, Paul avers that it has advanced because of it. What is significant here, my friend explains, is the measure of Paul's idea of success -- i.e., he was not referring to the winning of converts, but to the dynamic aspect of the gospel's proclamation (or, to speak more contemporarily, its re-citation). That is, by virtue of the Praetorian guard knowing Paul to be imprisoned because of the gospel of Christ, as well as the emboldening effect it has had on others to speak 'the word of God without fear', its message has been spread. Importantly, none of this means that any of the Praetorian guard, for instance, had been converted. The import for Paul is that the gospel itself had been advanced simply by its proclamation.
This, in itself, is interesting enough. Verses 15-18, however, provide the twist that, I think, deserves far more thought than a single blog post can allow. Paul writes:
[15] Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will.What seems to be happening is that some of Paul's opponents are preaching with the 'insincere' motivation of usurping his pedagogic authority in the Philippian church. Paul's response is as rhetorically ingenious as it is philosophically radical. That is, he not only 'decontextualizes the gospel of Christ' (per my friend's deconstructive explanation), i.e., away from the standard notion of one's assent to it (toward the notion of recitation/proclamation, wherein conscious motivations do not seem to play the role they would appear -- be they Paul's or Paul's opponents) , but has effectively highlighted its excessive particularity. The gospel of Christ, as it were, is never that, in the Lacanian sense ... and this is, for Paul, precisely what predicates the conditions of its very success/advancement.
[16] The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel;
[17] the former proclaim Christ out of partisanship, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment.
[18] What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in that I rejoice.
Now, yes, I think there are probably problems with aligning 'the gospel' too closely, too quickly with some version of objet petit a. And no, the material particularity of Paul's gospel ought not be entirely dismissed, any more than it should be embraced without self-conscious reflection. Rather, in close, the direction in which I am currently trying to push my Pauline friend is, instead of the all-too-easy deconstruction still rampant in a large sector biblical studies, is that of an autopoetic (or self-adaptive) gospel, whose particularity is taken seriously enough to include the presuppositions of its own proclamation.
