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.                

      

     

Everyone has a strong reaction to the Apostle Paul.


My triple great grandfather Joshua Flood (1772-1850) admired him. Grandfather Joshua also admired Andrew Jackson. Josh Flood, who worked slaves and would be counted by anyone as among the truest and simplest backwoods Baptists, believed everything came down to this: each wretch must come to Jesus.

How does Saint Paul fit into Joshua Flood’s view of this world, a world that included the embrace of human slavery, the rejection of indoor cooking, and the categorical refusal to allow mules on his farm in Shelby County, Kentucky in the first five decades of the nineteenth century?

It would not be difficult to conclude, at the present moment, that Joshua Flood simply misread his favorite Apostle. But I doubt if you could get away with that in a conversation with old Joshua, or with his Huguenot wife Mary (Marie) Bondurant (1782-1863). I doubt if you could set the parameters of that conversation in a way that would require old Joshua to see what you see, in Paul.

Context makes a difference, no?

Who is the Apostle Paul?  Well, that depends. Are we talking about yesterday or today? And which yesterday and which today do we have in mind?

Brigitte Kahl, professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary, New York, has published her take on the Apostle, in a book entitled Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Fortress 2010).

What follows here (and in subsequent posts) is going to be my take on Kahl’s take on Paul’s letter, found in the New testament and there entitled, Galatians.

I have not read Kahl’s book. I am reading it. I will post my reactions and comments as I work through her book.

Comments are welcome.