RESPONSE NUMBER FIFTEEN To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”

Galatia As Primeval Background in the Christian Theological Imagination (page 33)

Yet more prolegomena, which Kahl justifies in the final sentence of the preceding section:  “It is important first to note just how different that topology is from the conventional imaginary location of ‘Galatia’.”

This is followed by the assertion that “Galatia is terra incognita in the Christian imagination” and that the Galatians addressed in Paul’s letter “seem” more at home in the Wittenberg of Martin Luther and in modern “dogmatic mindscapes” than in the actual environment “where Paul first met them.”

We then are told that the last hundred years of “exhausting” scholarship has “obscured” the true context in which the letter was originally and presumably still is, to be read.

Instead of providing examples, which might support any of these assertions, Professor Kahl goes on to further assert that the letter itself is more “secretive” than others of Paul’s letters “in terms of contextual markers.”

If Kahl’s assertion is correct, that the Galatians letter is lacking in contextual indicators, would this not explain why many later readers of Paul’s letter, looking over the shoulders of the intended recipients, are left to speculate about much of the original setting?

Does the suggestion about deliberate secretiveness on the part of the letter writer not indicate all the more why a consideration of the text of the letter is of first importance?  

Kahl focuses on the secretiveness of the letter, but not as a possible explanation of the letter’s uncertain context. Rather Kahl merely wishes to announce that Paul is being deliberately obscure. Again, without providing anything that could be assessed as evidence, Kahl simply asserts that Paul has not provided a “standard” opening but rather is perhaps engaged in “a conspiratorial concealment” of the location of the letter’s recipients.

The pinball approach to issues – moving rapidly from one assertion to another without supporting with evidence what has just been stated – does not clarify either the import of ‘traditional’ scholarship, of which Kahl is critical, or her own announced plan to establish a needed, re-imagined context in which the letter is to be assessed.

Beyond North and South is the first sub-head under this section. Yet again, Kahl wishes to make something decisive of scholarship, which is inconclusive as to whether Paul’s Galatia is the Roman province of that name or the likely more ethnically uniform region to the north of the province.

Enough already about the inherently inconclusive north-south debate! 

Kahl brings up the debate, yet again, in order to make the point that “self-congratulatory” scholarship, by not finding a conclusive answer to the location question has itself “decontextualized” the letter.

This cannot be the case. The letter itself does not provide enough information for clarity as to where the letter’s recipients resided. Scholars who point this out are not congratulating themselves.

One gets drawn into blind rhetorical allies, when one looks beyond the silence of a text, to fault previous research which has concluded, the text is silent.

It is true, and Kahl points this out forcefully and correctly, that the Romans, present as conquerors and occupiers of Galatia (whether north or south Anatolia), have been “conspicuously absent “in the “imagined geography of religious spaces and counter spaces,” that is, in the efforts to understand the letter.

Kahl is correct also to remind us that the letter’s likely recipients probably (Kahl insists they did) walked Roman roads, paid taxes, were present at events at Roman temples, fought in Roman legions, attended Roman meals and games, fulfilled their civic obligations.

But if the Romans are to be seen as players and not as background to the letter, the letter must be cited for this. But it is not.

Instead, Professor Kahl argues that, the a scholarly focus on the north-south location issue has lead to a “dominant concern,” already present in Luke-Acts, to reconcile Paul’s career with Luke’s travel narrative and a Lucan interest in confining Paul to the role of a model missionary and an orthodox, doctrinal pioneer. 

But Pauline scholarship does not uniformly point in this constrictive direction.  We cannot know where lived the Galatians of the letter, but this does not mean or imply that Luke rightly portrays Paul’s chronology or his mission.

Pauline and Lucan investigations are entirely separate, from a scholarly point of view. Not for Kahl, who has it that “Paul has been turned into an entirely agreeable and politically correct model Roman citizen.”

Before sweeping all modern Pauline scholarship into a murmuring devotional circle, willing to see Paul disengaged from “the social and political realities of conquest,” Professor Kahl might engage Ernst Käsemann, with whom she has much in common as a tenacious and thoughtful Pauline investigator from within the Lutheran tradition.

Käsemann is the most searching Pauline scholar we have. Perhaps his fundamental gift is his thoughtful dissent from the notion that ecclesiology is the determinant for theology.

“Contemporary theology has forgotten,” Käsemann asserted, “that its true opponent is not unbelief , which is in any case probably more or less a fiction . . . unbelief is a manifestation of superstition, whether religious or secularized . . . superstition [may have] contributed more to the continuity of church history, theology and Christian institutions than faith.” (“The Spirit and the Letter,” Perspectives on Paul (Fortress Press, 1971, p. 153, translator: Margaret Kohl)

Käsemann once described Paul as “a possessed man in pursuit of a feverish dream” and also asserted, “Historical research has perhaps its final and deepest value in the fact that it disillusions.”  (Both statements may be found in “Paul and Nascent Catholicism,” Distinctive Protestant and Catholic Themes Reconsidered (Harper Torchbooks, 1967, pp. 19, 17, translated by Wilfred F. Bunge).

A gift from J. Louis Martyn to this shy M. Div. student at Union Seminary in the ‘60’s was Martyn’s drumbeat for Ernst Käsemann. Even if you decide that a Käsemann nugget (rarely an entire sentence) is fool’s gold, you have had to turn it over in your hand three or four times, and it is so pretty!

Through the centuries, many official, i.e., self-declared, orthodox interpretations of Paul, have dutifully domesticated him as the Cosmic Apostle, bravely fighting to preserve space for the development of a magisterium, which would then invoke Paul for its own secular ends, while pretending never to avert its gaze from the heavens.

But this is not the Paul of the letters, when the letters, including Galatians, are read as the ingenious but flawed theological inventions they in fact are.

One best not try to re-imagine Paul as a resistance operative against Roman occupation, who sent a cryptic message to sleeper cells somewhere in Galatia.

This seems to be where Kahl is headed.

But the exercise is not likely to be true to the Paul of Galatians any more than are the long standing efforts to reshape Paul’s statements, in the interests of some other imposed agenda.     

Thus far, to the sub-head Beyond East and West, page 37.

    

  

    

  

RESPONSE NUMBER FOURTEEN To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”

In Search of a Displaced Context (pp 31-33)

In this sub-head the writer announces that “Gauls had become a topic of visual art” ever since Gauls / Galatians had begun to be a “presence in the Mediterranean region in the fourth century B.C.E.”

The discussion at this point is helpfully enlarged by the inclusion of several (presumably) marble figures of falling or defeated Gauls, together with captions, which are either the generally accepted title such as “The Dying Trumpeter / Gaul,” and the “Suicidal Gaul” or which succinctly describe the representation (a warrior trampled under by horses drawing a Roman chariot.)   

Kahl states that this visualization,  typified by the monument(s) Nero saw, returning from Rome after putting down an uprising in Galatia, was invariably the image of “failing, falling, dying and dead” Gauls / Galatians.

The prevalence of such images, Kahl asserts, would have been encountered by anyone “who traveled as much as Paul did . . . .” 

Further, these representations of defeated Gauls / Galatians “might” be taken as “representations of the direct ancestors of Paul’s Galatians,” i.e., the intended recipients of his letter to the Galatians.

I wonder if this conclusion, proposed tentatively (“might”) here, is actually to become a building block for the promised re-imagining.    

Kahl combines these assertions with the complaint that “none of these images has played a role in traditional theological reflections on the context of Galatia or Paul’s letter to the Galatians.”

This omission is regrettable, Kahl argues because the context of such representations and the representations themselves – “virtually omnipresent in Paul’s world” – “are crucial for “re-imagining Paul’s world and for correcting what has all too frequently been a decontextualized reading of the letter.”

The correct visualization, Kahl argues is the Roman perception of Gauls /Galatians as a ‘counternation’ inhabited by ‘universal barbarians,’ who had, after centuries of Roman struggle against them, “at last been forced into compliance with the ‘world-saving’ power of Roman victory, at the threshold of the era of Jesus and Paul.”

Kahl does not identify the source of the information placed in quotation marks: counternation . . .  universal barbarians . . . world saving (the Romans). I suspect these terms  are Kahl’s own confections, intended to assist the reader in the re-imagination effort.    

The balance of this first chapter, then, will be “to establish and visualize Galatia as a focal topos” of both the geographical and the ideological map of the Roman Empire.

My reaction to these continuing preliminary remarks is one of frustration.

Still, we have not arrived at the actual, fleshed out re-imagined context.

We are, still, up to our elbows in prologue.

I sense the writer wants to deploy every likely strand of factual detail before trusting her reader to get it.  

Nero’s journey to/ from Galatia is here mentioned for the second time, at least. 

The representations of defeated Gauls are described as dying and also dead, as failing and also falling. These depictions are beginning to be re-played while the reader is invited, yet again, to wait longer for the coming re-imagination to be revealed.

There is even an additional reference to the fact that scholarship is divided, whether the Galatians of the letter resided in south Galatia (a Roman province) or in north Galatia (likely historical homeland for some Galatian clans).   

Is there going to be an actual, new, never-before-imagined setting, for Paul and his Galatians?  Can such a context be established without detailed reference to what is contained in the one letter we have from Paul to the Galatians?

    

RESPONSE NUMBER THIRTEEN To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

In the previous post, I offered comments to Professor Kahl’s presentations under three sub-headings, Galatians and the Occidental Semiotics of Combat, Pauline Binaries Revisited, The Annihilation of the Antinomies (J. Louis Martyn).

The following sub-head is The Politics of the New Creation, wherein the writer asserts (p. 21), that the image of Paul “primeval Christian warrior defending the purity of the Christian gospel against the onslaught of Jewish law and otherness begins to fade.”

I am suspicious of a polemic which acknowledges the complexity of its own perspective(s) while dismissing a counter position, which has been drawn so simplistically it is merely a caricature. 

This gambit is easily done, but is also easily dismissed in its turn as unpersuasive.

The casual dismissal of the traditional perspective on Paul (Paul is contending against those who would require circumcision of Gentiles, who adhere to a belief in Messiah Jesus) is prologue for Kahl, who moves quickly into an explanation of brand new polarities, created by Paul himself.

Kahl is unwilling to place Paul’s polarities on the same plain as the official Roman binary ideology. Nor is Kahl prepared to see these polarities as rhetorical devices merely.

Kahl sweeps all of Paul’s polarities into a pile in the middle of a paragraph, the better to sweep them aside.

Old age-new age, flesh-spirit, slave-freedom, old creation-new creation are Pauline polarities but – according to Kahl – not really. 


These contrary elements, Kahl acknowledges, function in the context of “performance power” but the real game is not Paul’s attempt to adopt a persuasive and familiar rhetoric.

For Kahl, one must come to see Paul’s “war” as actually an “anti-war” in which Paul calls for the mobilization of life’s “losers, the crippled and limping, the never victorious.” The recruitment of bottom rung dwellers amounts (p. 22) to Pauline  “erasures of the principle of enmity itself.”

Paul is challenging, Kahl asserts, “an evil order” and “not an evil Other.”

This is a pretty good rhetorical flourish in its own right.

It may also be reductionist to define Paul’s Galatians letter in this way.

It certainly is a heavy lift to attempt to persuade that Paul has been fundamentally, and indeed deliberately, misunderstood for two thousand years, by a Christianized empire that intends to reassert the old self-versus-other polarity.

The ironic transcendence of all ideologies associated with the message of Jesus followed by a crucifixion of a Jewish messianic figure certainly gains purchase in the imagery of the Gospels, but not, so far as I can tell thus far, in the letter to the Galatians.

Paul in Galatians simply is too angry and hostile for that. Paul in Galatians is strident and accusatory. He is taking on “the Other” because he must answer criticisms leveled against him.

But Kahl would see the author of the Galatians letter as embracing “the Other” – which in turn amounts to an upending of the entire Roman self-versus-other ideology of empire.

Kahl asserts that the abandonment of the old Greek-Roman polarities “does not create a new Christian binary” but rather “produces a non-binary space” wherein “the old cosmos” and “the old-Self” are “put to death and turned into Nothingness.”

Nietzsche saw this in Paul’s teachings, as Kahl again reminds her readers.

This reader responds: is Nietzsche the best you can do? Is a deliberately outrageous iconoclast, given to insults and exaggeration – the best you can do?

Kahl is bumping up against the literal words of the letter and she knows it. This is why she asserts (p. 22), “the transformation Paul perceives is difficult for us to grasp and to articulate.”  Professor Kahl states (p. 23) that Paul’s argument is “literally senseless” if one tries to understand it by “the old ways of meaning.”

Kahl invites readers to look past the words of the letter and focus on lifestyle changes. Kahl speaks (p. 23) of Paul as more interested in “a permanent discipline of self-Othering.” Earlier (p. 22) she had argued that Paul has in the Galatians letter, initiated “the practice of Selves, who no longer try to vanquish their Others.”

The gist of Kahl’s argument at this point (p. 24): “it is not an antagonism between Judaism and Christianity, however, but an antagonism between a messianic way of life and an imperial order.”

A sweeping critique of Christian ideological pretensions can be and has been made in praxis and by apologists over the centuries – along side other far less challenging critiques.

But is the most sweeping critique of all what Paul’s letter to the Galatians is all about?  I retain my doubts.

RESPONSE NUMBER TWELVE To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Galatians and the Occidental Semiotics of Combat is the title of the next section of Professor Kahl’s introduction.

Kahl argue that the traditional understanding of Paul in Galatians by the Western church, is grounded in the imperial Roman world view.

The official, Roman world view, had in its turn, adopted the Greek perspective, which viewed all of creation as a pattern of opposites. Greek though first identified the fundamental components of creation – air, earth, fire and water – to which other opposites were added – superior, inferior; right left; good, evil, male, female; rest, motion, etc.  

The imperial view, naturally, allied “self” with elements associated with power and orthodoxy and identified its defeated adversaries, as “other” and allied with elements associated with weakness and heresy.  

Kahl states that she will demonstrate her thesis by way of a close examination of the Great Alter of Pergamon, described by Kahl as “the visual focus and anchor of this investigation.”

Kahl intends to demonstrate that the traditional understanding of Paul in Galatians is a continuance of the Greek and then Roman notion of the ordering of the cosmos into oppositional elements. 


This may be why Kahl does not address herself to any other than Protestant and specifically Lutheran prospective readers. 


All the rest, i.e., Roman Catholic interpretations of Galatians, merely perpetuate, in Kahl’s view, a theology of polarities and dominance, and have done so for two thousand years.

Kahl acknowledges that some commentators are in the role of precursors, having already reached the same conclusion regarding Paul’s declaration that the polarities built into the created order have been smashed by the “subversion” of the old, binary order by “a non-binary ‘new creation’. ”

Kahl acknowledges J. Louis Martyn’s Galatians commentary  (Doubleday, Anchor Bible, 1997) at this point, stating that Martyn had made “a groundbreaking insight” (Kahl, p. 20.) into Paul seeing the crucified Messiah in opposition to all negative, cosmic polarities. 

The new insight Kahl expects to establish beyond Martyn, is  a delineation of the actual motives of Paul’s opponents in Galatia.

Kahl intends to show that Paul’s perspective, properly understood and free from distortions engineered by a philosophy of dominance, threatened the security of the occupied populations in Galatia.

Kahl will maintain that the occupied of Galatia, including some among those who would follow the crucified Jewish Messiah, had concluded that Paul’s announcement of the “invasion” of the old order would likely be deemed a form of treason by the Romans.

For Kahl, Paul’s theology necessarily threatened the “compromise” which had been made with the Roman forces of occupation. Kahl (p. 21): “As we shall see, the Paul-opposing circumcision party in Galatia was driven much more by concrete sociopolitical concerns than by purely religious anxieties.”

Establishing the true motives of Paul’s opponents in Galatia, Kahl hopes then to show that Paul and his Messiah-believing adherents and recruits “were still part of Judaism” (p. 20).

This point, which can be established already on first century (CE) historical evidence, appears to be important for Kahl, who is at pains to separate the correctly understood Paul from the anti-Semitism which has pervaded Western Christian theology.

Kahl has already alluded to her personal connections to this dark and unsavory theme by reference to her mother’s reconciliation with a childhood classmate. It is therefore not beside the point to observe, as Kahl has done, that Western anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust, engineered by the government of Kahl’s native Germany and from within the natal ground of her Lutheranism. I suspect this book is, in part, about self-identify, whatever else it might be about. But come to think of it, this can be said about many books, can’t it?   

I expect it will not be difficult to show that features observed at the Great Alter of Pergamon express elements of the traditional Greco-Roman world view of an ordered universe composed of oppositional elements.

However, I retain my doubts that an awareness of oppositional cosmic elements can be seen reflected in the primary dynamics at play between Paul and his addressees in the Galatians letter.  

Surely it ought to be acknowledged that the Roman occupation adopted and co-opted an older philosophy of oppositional elements, with Rome itself in the positive role as embodiment of the positive and powerful elements. But this is background, part of the context of any and all, who lived under Roman occupation. The annual announcement of “the law” by Roman authorities would function in the same way and ought not to be taken as reflected in any particular debate or dispute among or between occupied peoples “on the ground” in some specific region of the Empire.

Can the Galatians letter itself be described as Paul’s answer to concerns about Paul subverting the Roman world view in a way that threatened the existence of his addressees or opponents in Galatia?

I expect only a close exegesis of the letter can answer this question.    

           

RESPONSE NUMBER ELEVEN To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Professor Brigitte Kahl now (p. 11 f.) marks out a major heading, Re-Imagining Justification by Faith, which is made up of several sub-heads. (As mentioned in an earlier post, keeping track of the argument in the Introduction is likely to prove important, when the exposition in the book itself is under consideration.) 

The sub-headings under this major heading are: Constructing the Protestant Other (M. Luther), “Final Solution,” Galatians and the Occidental Semiotics of Combat, Pauline Binaries Revisited, The Annihilation of the Antinomies (J. Louis Martyn), The Politics of the New Creation.

Kahl has stated already that the deliberate misreading of Paul operated as sort of a centuries-long conspiracy.

Introducing this section, Kahl states as given, matters which are subject to considerable uncertainty. Kahl declares that, by way of “a political makeover” the “pro-Roman Paul” is twinned with “the theological Paul’s opposition to Judaism” so that “eventually” Paul (“the apostle to the nations”) was made “admissible among the founding fathers of Western Civilization.” 

This appears to be the thesis of the book. But the chore that lies before Kahl is to establish the historical grounds for the new image of Paul. This is likely to be a taxing explication.

Kahl thesis is this: Paul was willfully misunderstood, so that he might become an important authority for the development of new Western imperialism(s) and the attendant exclusion of any who can be viewed as “the other.” Correctly understood, Paul offers small comfort to imperial power or to anti-Semitism, to homophobia or the millennias-long abuse of women.

In what sense is Paul to be understood, today, as a “founding father” of “Western Civilization.” No details are provided in the introduction. The book awaits.  

Constructing the Protestant Other (M. Luther)

Kahl invokes Luther, as she has invoked Nietzsche, as a kind of forerunner, who awakened Kahl to the new need to re-imagine Paul.

Nietzsche was brought on stage by Kahl, and handed the card that reads, Paul worked among the weak and the poor and we despise him for that. 

Taubes walked on, holding a card that read, In Paul’s time “nomos” meant anything you wanted it to mean. 

Martin Luther, enter stage right, holds a sign that says, Paul’s central doctrine is justification by faith and you must despise any and all who do not hold to this doctrine as we understand it.

Just as with Nietzsche, Luther’s intemperate opinions are presented flatly, for their face value. There is no attempt to qualify or to suggest there might be a more nuanced assessment.

The summary (simplistic?) presentation of the views of Luther and the others is deliberate. Kahl is introducing the reader to those who have influenced her to see Paul in a new, more compelling and more accurate – and therefore, a truer way.

I am struck by the irony of Professor Kahl invoking individuals as representatives of opinions, which may not reflect the complexity of the views held. Isn’t this the kind of distortion, Kahl argues, that has victimized the apostle?

“Final Solution”

In this sub-heading, Kahl relates the effecting story of a 2002 reunion between her aged mother and a Jewish childhood classmate. This story is inserted here, Kahl writes, because it stimulated her “to re-imagine my Lutheran heritage” and to discover, by way of Paul’s “true” story in Galatia, whether there might be a chance for peacemaking and justice seeking with the apostle.           

RESPONSE NUMBER TEN To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Torah Criticism as Affirmation of Roman Nomos

The argument presenting under this sub-head strikes me as more persuasive than the preceding assertions that Nietzsche and Jacob Taubes lead the way.

Here, Kahl asserts that the Roman context was, for Paul, far more relevant than subsequent New Testament and theological developments have seen. Instead, this context has been “eclipsed” because of the centrality of “the doctrine of justification by faith” which is prominent in Galatians. (See Gal 2.16). 

Hopefully, this point will be expanded, since, superficially, the impression is left that Kahl is in a dialogue only with her Lutheran context.

Kahl adds that an important alarm about the traditional misunderstanding of Paul has been sounded by Robert Jewett in his Romans commentary (Fortress, 2007).

I think Kahl needlessly obfuscates the clarity of her argument about the importance of the Roman context, by asserting that Paul’s negative critique of nomos in Galatians required the creation of “an anti-Jewish double.”

Why? To create an explanation for Paul’s law-critical statements. Also, Kahl adds, the actual target of Paul’s critique – the Roman empire – could not be acknowledged in the subsequently developed “Christianized empire.” 

These arguments come very near to the promulgation of a conspiracy theory, which would have had to include centuries of commentators, agreeing together not to understand Paul plainly and correctly.

Kahl finds it ironical that the Rome-critical Paul was replaced in theology, by a “pro-Roman Paul” and his "anti-Jewish double.”

These arguments appear to me to be tendentious. 

Why isn’t it sufficient simply to demonstrate that the larger Roman context has been neglected? Why does this probable truth need to be expanded into an argument about conspiracies and the wholesale, deliberate misreading of Galatians?

Maybe the book itself will draw all these threads together.   

RESPONSE NUMBER NINE To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Law As Imperial Compromise Formula (J. Taubes)

Under this sub-head, Kahl credits (page 9) Jacob Taubes’ 1986 lectures on Paul (The Political Theology of Paul, Stanford: 2004) with providing an insight which has proven to be “one of the decisive impulses behind the assumption of this book that in Galatians Paul does not abandon Jewish law but, on the contrary, wrestles, from a rigorously Jewish perspective, with a practice of Torah that has a least partly been ‘hijacked’ and desecrated by Roman imperial law and religion.” 

What Taubes says in the passages reproduced by Kahl is that nomos is imbued with an elastic essence, which permits “everyone to understand law as they want to” but that Paul rejects this “liberal” accommodation to imperial power, in favor of “the one who was nailed to the cross by nomos.”

I have not read Taubes but the statements of his, which Kahl has quoted, do not appear particularly controversial or groundbreaking.

The Roman occupation certainly enforced a religious consensus. Certainly, too, those who wished to preserve their own practices, had to seek some kind of accommodation, which satisfied both the Roman overload and their own identity and integrity.    

Paul, an adherent of Christ crucified, vigorously dissented from the imposed (and partly negotiated) consensus.

But it’s not clear from Taubes’ comments, how Paul’s Galatians letter is a forum in which it is demonstrated that Paul did not “abandon Jewish law” (Kahl) but rather “wrestles with a practice of Torah” (Kahl) that Roman law has “hijacked and desecrated.”

I can see grounds for describing Jewish practice under Roman occupation as a kind of “desecration” but I don’t – yet – see the target of Paul’s critique in Galatians not Torah but rather Roman law and its enforced practice. (As I have suggested already, my own take on Galatians is that it is a highly personal self-defense by the missionary, who was required to answer the charge that his violent abuse of Jewish adherents of Messiah Jesus destroyed his credibility as a religious guide.) 

Kahl refers the reader to earlier writings of her own and to chapter six, below.

We shall see. 

  

   

RESPONSE NUMBER EIGHT To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Law As Power Construct (Nietzsche)

The material under these brief sub-heads (pp. 8-9. ff.), does not appear to be cumulative so much as different slants on the same fundamental idea, that Paul in Galatians is mounting an attack on Roman Nomos rather than Jewish Torah.

In the paragraphs under this heading, Professor Kahl enlists Nietzsche as a forerunner of her re-imagining of Paul’s Galatians. How is Nietzsche a forerunner to the new re-imagining? It is because Nietzsche asserted that the natural order places the powerful over the weak and Paul, writing under the banner of a crucified (lawfully executed) Messiah, is aligned with the weak.

Brigitte Kahl views Nietzsche as an astute historian (“profoundly knowledgeable about ancient history and the Roman empire”), but Nietzsche’s various statements can be assessed with greater nuance. For one thing, Nietzsche can be seen as sarcastic, ironic, contradictory or provocative.

  

Nietzsche’s assertion, cited by Kahl, that Paul intended to undermine the Roman empire by uniting “all who lay at the bottom . . . into a tremendous power” is unlikely to be taken as an historically precise view of the writer of the letter to the Galatians.

Nietzsche’s take on Paul may find purchase as a description of the Cosmic Saint Paul, of the much later church universal, a figure and a worldly institution never contemplated by the Apostle himself.  

I think Nietzsche gets ink here because he can be presented as a (cynical?) admirer of power and a (bitter?) critic of Paul, apostle to the weak.                

      

     

RESPONSE NUMBER SEVEN To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Jewish Torah or Roman Nomos?

This is the sub-heading Kahl has given her following few paragraphs, leading up to a succeeding several more subheadings, the immediately following being a reflection on the impact of Nietzsche, entitled here, Law As Power Construct (Nietzsche). There follows three paragraphs under the sub- head: Law As Imperial Compromise Formula (J. Taubes) and finally, Torah Criticism as Affirmation of Roman Nomos, all of which precedes the next major heading in this Introduction, which is entitled, in a bold font,   Re-Imagining Justification by Faith.

We pay attention to these sub-headings, since the writer wishes her readers to follow a polemic, laid out in a deliberate sequence.

Here we go.

Jewish Torah or Roman Nomos? For Kahl, the answer is: Roman Nomos. The other option is the traditional take on Galatians. This, Kahl describes as an “imagined contextuality” based on “what we had imagined is the context of Galatians” that is, “a dispute between Jews and Christians” . . . “as to whether circumcision was a religious requirement for non-Jews among the Jesus followers.”

Kahl arrives at this either-or by stating, “We all know how much our interpretation of a text depends on how we imagine its context.”

There is a rhetorical leveling going on here, with the apparent objective, to place Kahl’s own re-imagining on the same level of cogency as the traditional understanding of Galatians. This, without placing a commentary about Galatians before the reader.

Note: the ‘imagined contexts’ of Galatians – Kahl’s and the circumcision debate – are taken to be just that – imagined.

This strikes me as a de-valuation of the task of the historian, which is to explicate the actual context, not an imagined one.

There are many parts to the context of a past event, of course. But none of these parts of the context ought, subsequently, to be imagined, should they?

Maybe the problem I am having is the absence of a definition of “imagined.” Maybe this will be cleared up in the text of the book.

Kahl states that the “imagined contextuality” . . . “illuminates one isolated segment of a larger historical picture but leaves the rest in the dark, thus rendering the fuller meaning of the letter practically impossible.”

Once again, I am brought to the thought that what is missing is a set of  comments on the text of the letter. Isn’t this the most direct way to get to the letter’s meaning?  

Kahl believes that Paul and his addressees argued “in the Jewish ‘key’ of circumcision.”

Key? This phrasing is not further explained. Rather, Kahl asserts that “the polarity of law versus lawlessness” was part of “the public discourse” (including representational art) of which Paul partook.

Kahl believes the political, ideological and theological threads “interwoven in Paul’s confrontation with the Galatians and his rejection of ‘law’” will lead to insights otherwise overlooked or neglected.

Kahl presents a diagram in further explication of her point of view. She may be right, insisting that important aspects of the imperial occupation of Galatia have been neglected in the traditional reading of Galatians. 

Her confidence that she is presenting a new, valuable perspective brings her to pose this question: “What if Paul were targeting Greco-Roman imperial nomos much more than Jewish Torah?”

Can we ever know enough about the letter to give a definitive answer to this question? Perhaps working back from the abyss of not knowing is what has caused Kahl to land on the soft target of ‘re-imagining.’ If we don’t know, let’s use our imaginations.

Kahl concludes (p. 7) this sub-section with the assertion, “whatever the subject of contention” between Paul and his addressees in Galatia, “it was Roman law that ultimately defined and enforced what was licit and illicit.”

It strikes me as obvious to state that the Roman occupiers were the ultimate enforcers.

It is not as obvious that this aspect of the context of the Galatians letter clarifies the intentions of Paul in writing, or sheds much light on the concerns of his addressees.        

      

     

RESPONSE NUMBER SIX To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

In my previous post, I mentioned that Brigitte Kahl recommends Mark Nanos’ book, The Irony of Galatians (Augsburg Fortress 2002), especially at pp. 257-71.

Nanos write that the Apostle Paul’s addressees in Galatia were not Jews, although adherents of Messiah Jesus (“Paul’s Gentiles”). As non-Jews, they were compromising the security of the synagogue(s) by claiming the privilege – as Jews – to no longer be required to show honor to the Emperor by way of mandated participation in the imperial cult. Nanos then argues that the Jewish community (communities?) responded to this threat by pressuring Paul’s Messiah Jesus converts to become proselytes and submit to circumcision.

Paul’s Galatians letter is ambiguous as to the identities of both the community (communities) addressed and the opponents Paul is confronting. This ambiguity explains the existence of both Nanos’ book and Kahl’s, to say nothing of most other commentaries: biblical scholars want to have their say and also want to say something fresh, if not novel. (The faddish nature of New Testament scholarship is a subject for another day.)

About the identities of the parties mentioned in the Galatians letter, decisions have to be made by those who write commentaries. Nanos has made his calls, and Kahl’s introductory remarks indicate she has adopted a similar position in her book. (You will recall, I am reviewing her book as I work through it.)

I leave it to the readers of Mark Nanos to decide if he is persuasive that synagogue representatives (Nanos, unfortunately, calls them “control agents”) would demand circumcision of non-Jews, whose adherence was not to Judaism per se, but to a Jewish itinerant preacher, executed under Roman authority in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. 

My own take on these identity questions is that Paul, in Galatians, is having to defend himself from allegations that he is a man of extreme violence and therefore, lacking in credibility as a reliable counselor in religious matters. This bitter criticism of Paul was made, I believe, in Galatia by survivors of his earlier persecution of Diaspora Christian Jews, whom he had run out of Jerusalem and who had returned to their homes in Galatia, there to denounce Paul to their co-communicants, some of whom were Gentile. 

(See my article, “Paul and the Victims of His Persecution: The Opponents in Galatia” 32 Biblical Theology Bulletin No 4 (Winter 2002) pages 182-191.)

Kahl’s first reference to Nanos, appearing here in the Introduction, may yet be qualified in her more detailed explication in the book.          

RESPONSE NUMBER FIVE To Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010) by Brigitte Kahl

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Kahl associates (p. 5) herself with the “empire-critical” research of Richard Horsley and also mentions Dieter Georgi, Robert Jewett, Neil Elliott, Adolf Deissmann and Klaus Wengst as predecessors in the project of drawing attention to “the Roman context and the Rome-critical implications of Paul’s theology and practice.”

These predecessors, Kahl points out, have worked more with the text of Paul’s Romans. Kahl also mentions the work of Bruce Winter (civic obligations) and Mark Nanos (on Galatians) as providing helpful insights. In a footnote, Kahl indicates that Nanos’ comments in his commentary, pp. 257-71, are particularly pertinent.

Kahl introduces the idea that she intends to draw attention to Paul’s “words” and not merely his “world” so as to examine “the doctrine of Justification” in the light of “concrete historical realities” rather than leaving this doctrine, as it “predominantly” understood, as “abstract” and “timeless.”

This Lutheran emphasis strikes me as an unfortunate thematic narrowing of the project that is proposed. The idea, now, is that Paul’s historical Galatians context, stressing the import of Roman rule, is actually to be focused on a principle of Luther and of Lutheran orthodoxy.

Paul’s Galatians certainly does not belong under the category, Justification by Faith. 

Unless I am misreading Kahl, she sees her book (primarily?) as “necessary groundwork for the larger critical task of reinterpreting justification by faith.”

But then, there is introduced a different rationale for the project. Kahl writes that her “task” is “driven as much by contemporary urgency as by historical interest.”

She continues: “We live in a precarious time, when imperial globalization extends its grip ever more rigidly and destructively upon the planet, imposing a de facto martial law on whole populations, often under the aggressive auspices of nominal Christianity.”

Neither in this statement or in those that follow, does Kahl name names. Perhaps in the text, we will get to specifics.

This paragraph concludes with a return to the challenge of orthodox Lutheranism, which so greatly preoccupies this writer. Kahl states that what is required is, “first and foremost a reexamination of the core concept at the center of everything Paul says and does: justification by faith rather than by works of the law.”

Why is the project so narrowly focused on Luther and the traditional (and very questionable) formula, which has been applied to his system?