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?             

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

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

Professor Kahl continues the introduction of her subject by making comments under subheadings. This approach has the advantage of providing a set of first principles that are related thematically. The disadvantage is that the moment of the introductory argument seems lateral and not forward.

The section labeled “Re-Imagining Paul” is a case in point. Here, Kahl re-emphasized the project of re-imagining Paul by identifying “two issues still widely neglected” by other scholars of the Galatians letter.

The first of these issues is “the power of Rome and the representative of this power in images.”  Kahl states that the most important of these images are the ones “developed at Pergamon (Asia Minor).” Kahl adds that the “major burden” of her exploration will be a “visual reconstruction of the Galatian world behind Paul’s letter.”

The second neglected issue, Kahl says, is “to re-imagine the historical context in which Paul and the Galatians met, not as an end in itself but as an element of a comprehensive historical-critical rereading (relectura) of the letter that has been handed down through history as the material imprint of their encounter.”

Kahl adds that she will not undertake “a comprehensive exegesis” of the letter. Why not? – “space does not permit” this.

I am not persuaded that the Apostle Paul can be better understood by a presentation of visual images taken from the ancient world, when this presentation is not anchored in an explication of the only material we have from himself – his letters – because “space” in a four hundred page book does not allow room for exegesis of the short Galatians letter. It may be, however, that past Kahl’s introductory remarks, sufficient reference will be made to Paul’s comments in the book itself, to address this concern.

Not for the first time has Kahl stated that she is presenting material that has been “neglected.” Yet, numbers of commentaries on Galatians have identified the intended recipients of the letter and have gone into greater or less detail about Galatia in history. I am not sure this aspect has been neglected.

More likely to be a new approach by Kahl, is the emphasis on visual representations.

But here, one wonders how this is likely to lead to a better understanding of the Apostle in his relations with the Galatians, when the presentation is not associated with an explication of the letter. Kahl does state that “a re-reading of Galatians drives, informs and molds the contextual inquiry throughout.”

This is helpful to hear.

Helpful also is Kahl’s phrase, “contextual inquiry” which seems to provide a description of what this work is all about.

I will hazard a tentative conclusion that the book will prove to be helpful as adding details about the larger context of the intended recipients, and less helpful as a persuasive new portrait of the Apostle. This may already be conceded, as Kahl is rather insistent that her project is one of “re-imagining” rather than describing Paul.

Kahl speaks of her intention to delineate “a new way to read and hear Paul” and of a “liberating (0f) Paul.” Kahl, admittedly, is not about delineating Paul’s own thoughts and motivations. Rather she is about replacing “the figure of Paul” as it presently exists “in the collective conscious and unconscious heritage of the Christian occident.”

This very sweeping rhetoric strikes me as too much sugar for my nickel. How are we going to assess “a figure” hidden away in a place called the “heritage,” which is not only “collective” and also both “conscious and unconscious?” I must hope that the coming chapters will spell all this out.

And why is the Eastern Church let off the hook? I should have thought that the iconography of Eastern Orthodoxy, might provide an insightful comparison or contrast to Kahl’s promised visualization of what can be seen at Pergamon.

Kahl concludes this section of the Introduction by identifying herself with positive, recent attempts to reconstruct (and therefore rehabilitate) Paul’s image rather than with the more negative “deconstruction” of Paul statements, and of Paul himself, which have prompted him to be taken as a symbol of a “post-Constantinian interpretation” of history.

Kahl, then, would not simply re-imagine Paul, but would “retrieve an image of Paul” which Constantine’s conversion of empire to faith by conformation of faith to empire had buried. This implies that the picture Kahl intends to paint of the Apostle is one that has existed all along, though buried by Constantine’s accommodation.

Kahl will undertake this task of re-imagining Paul, because she is “convinced that scripture is re-imaginable outside the confines of the occidental pattern, that history matters, and most of all, that Paul matters.”

This rhetoric seems to race well ahead of the actual project. This last quote from Kahl begs questions which cannot be ignored and, hopefully, will not be ignored in the book.

What does it mean to assert that scripture is “re-imaginable” except that scripture is imagined, in the first instance?

What exactly and precisely, are the “confines” of what is asserted but not explicitly described as “the occidental pattern?” What precisely are “confines” anyway?

In exactly what ways can the Apostle be said to “matter” more than history?

This flourish is more sermonic than informative. But that’s OK. This is only the introduction.     

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

KAHL’S INTRODUCTION

In the two pages (pp. 2-3) preceding comments (p. 3) under the heading “Re-Imagining Paul” Professor Kahl adds some sweeping comments intended to make the argument that the Gallic peoples of Gaul and Anatolia ought to be seen together “in the Roman imagination” as having retained – even after their separate defeats by Roman legions – “a notoriously indomitable tendency toward lawlessness.”

But first, she states that “Galatians (or Gauls), Jews and Christians as well, had one thing in common: all were suspected of subverting law and order.”

This point is not furthered elaborated upon.

Rather, the reader is invited to see a commonality between the two Gallic peoples which is exhibited in “the Roman imagination” as “archetypical enemies, quintessential barbarian intruders, remaining dangerous even after their defeat.”

Evidence offered is that “Roman authors frequently use the Latin term terror when they discussed Gauls/Galatians.” This means that we ought to understand “the Greco-Roman campaign” as a multistage campaign against “global terrorism.”

Once this picture has been drawn, Kahl puts the question which is to be asked and answered in her book: “what exactly is Paul’s position and role on that stage” – with “stage” a reference to “the highly charged battlefield of imperial representations, ancient and contemporary, alike.”

Kahl concludes this section, with supplementary questions about Paul: “How do we see him, how do we read him on the blood-soaked terrain of Western war-making history?” 

These questions reinforce my tentative conclusion that in Kahl's book, our subject is not the writer of a specific letter, but rather the Cosmic Paul of the Scriptures and perhaps also of the later-appearing, more-or-less triumphant Catholic Church.  

I question whether the introductory foundation has been sufficiently established to invite the questions raised. 

Two weaknesses I see in these introductory comments (which may be fully addressed in the book) are these:

1.                  The “Roman imagination” remains unidentified.

2.                  The commonalities of the Gallic tribes so far identified are not persuasive enough to compel this reader to see Gauls and Galatians – to say nothing of Jews and Christian Jews – as sharing a common identification in the so far quite non-specific “Roman imagination” as lawless terrorists.