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 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.