Thursday, January 19, 2006
(6:30 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Paul, the law, anti Judaism pt. 2
[the weblog turns 2000, posts that is, sometime this weekend probably]So to this point, what we have is some good examples of a very unhappy position, a very bad reading of Paul, that makes its way into the broad stream of Catholic thinking, affirmed in some way or another by the very most important of Christian theologians (Augustine, Jerome, Aquinas). However, at this point I think it fair to say that Dave's suggestion with respect to 20th century thinking (positions on the abolition of the law are critically intertwined with theological anthropology, etc.) does not hold for these thinkers. That is, one could readily excise the doctrine of keeping the law as mortal sin from Augustine or Aquinas' broader system of thought without doing major immediate damage to the overall structure. Michael Wyshogrod (Jewish theologian in the tradition of Rosenzweig, married to the more widely read Edith) has suggested how this doctrine could easily be voided in Aquinas' thinking in an essay he wrote in the 80's on Aquinas' Treatise on the Law (Summa Theologiae II.I q. 90-110 or so). Keeping the law for Jewish Christians could be seen as retrospective rememberance rather than as an active denial of the sufficiency of Jesus' sacrifice. On another front, Ratzinger's pre-papal take on Judaism deftly avoids the doctrine in Aquinas and tinkers with a line of thought actually rather amenable to my position.
The situation from the Reformation forward is something of the reverse, especially with respect to Luther. It is not nearly so easy to pin such a noxious doctrine as 'keeping Torah = mortal sin' on Luther. Luther, to his credit, rightly rejects the Catholic tradition on this point and, later in life, develops the concept of a 'third use of the law.' For Luther, keeping the law is audiaphoric, neither here nor there. In Pauline language 'circumcision or uncircumcision is meaningless.' (Calvin, by the way, for all his love of the law, maintains Aquinas' tripartite division of the Torah and the insistence that keeping the ceremonial law is damnable.) The source of Luther's offensiveness, however, is absolutely impossible to purge. One has to reject Lutheranism in toto to reject Luther's anti-judaism.
I can't do Lutheranism justice in a short post, so I'll simply take off from Dave's argument that my polemic is overdetermined by the late Luther's undeniable anti-semitism. The problem is that the late Luther is fully present in utero, as it were, from the Reformation get go. Luther's grumpy old anti-semitism stems from bitter disappointment. Early on, Luther enthusiastically assumed that Jews would come pouring into the Christian camp as a result of the Reformation. Luther, misreading everyone from Paul to Erasmus and 1500 years or so of Judaism to boot, fervently believed that Catholicism had perverted the Gospel of Grace so immediately and so badly that Jews had never really seen an alternative to a religion of works, and, further, that if Jews could only understand 'justification by faith', they'd begin jumping upstream like spawning salmon.
What's more, the whole doctrine of 'justification by faith' that Luther supposedly gets from Paul is highly problematic. I say supposedly because the Lutheran take on 'justification by faith' actually repeats in a new and subversive way the errors of Paul's opponents in places like Romans 1-4. Adam's 'Epistle to Romans pt. 1 and 2' (see St. Paul Week archive) gets much right that has been wrong in Protestant readings for the last 500 years. Luther and the mainline Protestants who have followed have accomplished something truly remarkable. Radical individualism and totalitarian statism. 'Your own personal Jesus' and 'obey the governing authorities' bitch. There has been a major revolution in Pauline studies within the New Testament guild, a revolution that I can't narrate here. Agamben should probably be aware of what's going on as he is the only one of the Pauline philosophy folks who has made an attempt at secondary sources (but it seems to me from a cursory look that he has only dabbled, and ignored stuff that would seriously upset what he is doing with Paul, but ultimately could supercharge his larger project - so it goes, sadly).
To state the problem briefly: the 'justification by faith' or Gospel of Grace models require as their obscene other a religion of works or a Gospel of Law, and Judaism is seen to be the originator of the obscenity which must be flushed out of the system. New readings of Paul in the New Testament guild, however, are recovering another Paul. I should probably do a post or two sometime (no promises) that is something of an annotated bibliography of the field.
My take on Paul actually originated in working through the New Paul in New Testament studies and, only then, trying to figure out what was going on with the New St. Paul in philosophy.
One doesn't have to go all the way down the road with my judaizing political theology to deal with this set of problems in Pauline thought. I hope that my particular misreading of Paul is more faithful than other misreadings to Paul's original misreading of Moses (a brilliant and radical and universalizing misreading). One could say something like this about Paul and the law (and this, I gather, is the contested consensus within the New Testament guild): Paul universalized Judaism precisely by not requiring gentiles to become Torah observant Jews first in order to become Christians. Paul's thinking on the law, however, doesn't abolish it altogether. Former gentiles, now Christians, have to observe a certain minimum of the law (no idolatry or porneia) and might keep other provisions of the law where expedient, but are otherwise free from the demands of Torah. On the other hand, Paul doesn't for a moment attempt to keep Jewish Christians from observing the law ('to the Jews I became as one under the law that I might win a few').
I would only add, that Paul's narrative leaves the door cracked on the future of gentile Christian law keeping, and Paul's letters actually provide moments where, as Jodi commented with respect to Zizek, the law is still kept by all, only from a different perspective.
