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.