Thursday, December 09, 2004
(6:23 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
St. Paul Week: A Reflection on the Epistle to the Americans
Having covered Romans 1:17-4:25 in parts 1 and 2 of the Epistle to the Americans, I find myself unable to proceed much further. Part of this is certainly a product of my own preferences: I find chapters 1-3 of Romans to be much more interesting than the rest of the letter, in terms of ideological critique. Part of it, however, is due to the limitation of my approach -- having tied myself to following Paul's language as closely as possible, I am coming up against the fact that Romans was written to a historical sitaution that no longer obtains. The only reason I was able to move on to part 2 (ch. 4) was that I had the sudden inspiration to replace Abraham with Paul himself; I had no such striking insight regarding chapters 5-8.Barth was able to get around this in his commentary. That work is also a rewriting of Romans for the present day, but his format gave him the advantage of overwhelming the original text in those sections where he was not able to work as closely with what was actually going on in the letter. For instance, his commentary on chapters 9-11, which I originally intended to cover tonight with regard to Christianity, is simply not convincing in my view. That's not a failing on Barth's part so much as a testimony to the historical specificity of the text -- as crucial as it was to Paul's mission, it simply is not so crucial to today's situation, even in the context of Jewish/Christian relations. Very few contemporary Jews are going to find Paul's account convincing or to take it as a compliment that Paul sees them as eventually "coming around" to believing in Jesus as Messiah. (Readings of Paul that don't see him as believing that seem to me to be motivated by the political exigencies of Jewish/Christian ecumenical dialogue rather than by a desire to remain faithful to the text -- more an explaining away than a genuine encounter -- and while I think that that kind of reading has its role to play, I don't think it's honest to let it have the final word.)
In addition, part of the problem is that the text has just become so Christian to us. It has so often been deployed in defense of the claims of the Christian church -- claims that are not very convincing to those outside the church and to many inside -- that it is difficult for me to have those words coming out of my mouth. For instance, I felt I had to start my account the verse after Paul says, "I am not ashamed of the gospel." If Paul is to become an active political voice for our time, he is going to have to move beyond the confines of the church. That is, we're going to have to recognize that while a lot of what the contemporary church does is plausibly based on Paul, a lot of it has nothing to do with what he was up to. That's not to say that the church doesn't have its own validity as an institution or as an intellectual tradition -- it's just to say that Paul is not the property of the church. That's part of the reason I'm personally so satisfied with this recent fad of Marxist atheists picking up Paul and finding something really exciting going on there.
The kind of work I see being done on the basis of the "Pauline turn" -- for instance, Zizek's fascinating recent article on the state of Israel -- seems to me to point toward a real political alternative. Particularly important to me is basing the political order in a "diaspora" community, and historical changes since Paul's time mean that such a community might not be found in present-day Jews, who now have a nation-state and autonomous political institutions. James Cone's contention that "Jesus was black" might be one way of pointing toward a new diaspora community that can form the basis of the new political order. The "ingrafting" of the nations into this powerless, decentered community represents a counter-imperial approach. (While Anthony was justified to call James K. A. Smith to task for his lazy equation of the Hardto-Negrian multitude and the Christian ecclesia, I do think that the Pauline project and the hope for the coming multitude are at least comparable.) "The church" as it stands right now does not seem to me to be a parallel diaspora community, even given the reduced power of the church compared to previous epochs.
In short, barring another revelation, I am suspending my project of completely rewriting Romans. Piecemeal rewrites are not, however, out of the question.
