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

CHAPTER ONE – “REMAPPING GALATIA”

 “It is harder to interpret Paul to one who half understands him than to one who knows nothing about him.”

Kahl’s heavy lift into a re-imagining of Paul might be associated with this comment, which was made more than a century ago by William Wrede, whose scholarly promise was tragically cut off by his death in 1906. See Paul (Eugene, Oregon: WIPF and Stock Publishers, 2001, originally published by the American Unitarian Assoc. in 1908) p. 85.

Is Kahl engaged with a scholarly guild that only partially understands Paul?

Under the sub-head A Depolitized Geography, Kahl addresses a concern I had just voiced in the previous post – that Kahl’s critique of Pauline scholarship was too general and not grounded in specifics.

But Kahl does engage at least one investigative current in a clarifying and helpful rhetorical tact, by drawing attention to the work of E.P. Sanders and James Dunn, which has come to be knows as the “new perspective” on Paul. In essence, Sanders and Dunn have argued that Paul’s concerns ought not be equated with Luther’s emphasis on the plight of the individual to find acceptance by and before God.

Kahl is impressed with subsequent responses to Sanders and Dunn, which argue that Paul’s missionary focus had to do exclusively with Gentile recruitment. She mentions the work of Gaston and Gager and then goes on to highlight a scholar I am not familiar with, James M. Scott. Kahl is impressed with Scott’s location of the geography of Paul’s missionary program in the Genesis 10 “Table of Nations,” although she faults Scott for assuming that Paul would have simply taken over the geographic perspective of “the dominant class, ” i.e, the Roman overlords of Anatolia.

Kahl is intent upon pushing a debate in the direction of the view that Paul is antagonistic, in his letters, not towards Judaism but towards the Roman occupation.

Interestingly, Kahl begins with a salute to Krister Stendahl’s 1976 book of essays, in which Stendahl argued against equating the concerns of Luther and Paul. The work of Stendahl, which Kahl cites goes back to a 1960 essay, originally in Swedish, which was then delivered in 1961 as a speech to the American Psychological Association and published in English in the Harvard Theological Review (No 56, pp. 199-215) in 1963.

Stendahl observed, then, fifty years ago, that Paul’s “trivial” observation in Romans 7 that everyone “knows that there is a difference between what he [sic] ought to do and what he [sic] does” is part of “a very special argument about the holiness and goodness of the law" (Torah). Stendahl suggests that this special argument and its accompanying trivial observation has been taken as “a penetrating insight into the nature of man and the nature of sin.”


Kahl is right to credit Stendahl for drawing attention to the divide between Paul and his era and Luther and his. It is in Stendahl’s essay that the call for a “new perspective” is found, a call which was answered by Sanders, Dunn and others.

Citing the work of Stendahl, Kahl is locating her own research on foundational work by one influential scholar, who, though not the first to do so, suggested that Paul’s statements, to be understood aright, must not be abstracted from his context.

But this raises another issue. Isn’t it in the nature of Scripture that a venerated text inherently is removed from its original locus and applied anew?