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.