The wisdom and foolishness of the cross: a conference on 1 Cor 1-2

It's a good year for conferences on the theology of St Paul. There was the recent Princeton conference on Romans, and next month is the St Andrews conference on Galatians. Now Christophe Chalamet of the University of Geneva has announced a conference on 1 Corinthians: "The Wisdom and Foolishness of the Cross: Reconsidering 1 Corinthians 1-2." The conference will take place in Geneva on 23-25 May 2013.

So far, speakers include Heinrich Assel, Günter Bader, John Behr, John Caputo, Kathryn Tanner, Marc Vial, and Matthias Wüthrich.

If you're interested in presenting something, you should send a one-page CV with a half-page abstract of your paper to Christophe Chalamet by 1 October. Accepted presenters will have free room and board in Geneva.

Princeton Romans conference: audio and video

Last week's Princeton conference on Romans 5-8 was terrific. The whole conference had an ethos of serious exegetical, theological, and pastoral reflection on Romans, and there was a remarkable degree of resonance between the various papers, thanks to the careful and ingenious (though self-effacing) orchestrations of Beverly Gaventa, whose Christian warmth and love for St Paul were the real animating pneuma of the whole event.

Happily, all the plenary papers are available in audio and video. Though the whole conference was excellent, if I was to pick one highlight it would have to be John Barclay's paper on Paul's theology of 'the Christ-gift'. (My own paper was on the Christ-Adam typology in Augustine's Confessions – when I revise it for publication, I'm thinking of calling it "A Tale of Two Gardens: Augustine's Confessions as a Narrative Commentary on Romans".)

If you don't do anything else, you really ought to watch the opening sermon by Luke Powery – the guy can really preach! When you hear good preaching like that, the gospel dawns on you as though for the first time. Listening to Luke Powery, I was stunned by the realisation that God loves me – as though I'd never heard of such a thing before!

Speaking of preachers, another highlight for me personally was getting to know the American preacher Fleming Rutledge – a grand and good human being. She has a new collection of sermons on the Old Testament, which I'm eager to read: And God Spoke to Abraham: Preaching from the Old Testament (Eerdmans 2011). She also has a lot of sermons online.

Creation, Conflict, and Cosmos: conference on Romans 5-8

In May 2012, Princeton Seminary is hosting "Creation, Conflict, and Cosmos: A Conference on Romans 5-8". I'll be speaking there – in utter fear and trepidation, given the lineup of speakers!

• John M. G. Barclay, Durham University
• Martinus C. de Boer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Susan Grove Eastman, Duke University Divinity School
• Neil Elliott, Fortress Press
• Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Princeton Theological Seminary
• J. Louis Martyn, Union Theological Seminary (emeritus)
• Ben Myers, Charles Sturt University, Sydney
• Stephen Westerholm, McMaster University
• Philip G. Ziegler, King’s College, University of Aberdeen

There's a call for papers out too, and they're obviously keen to hear from both theologians and biblical scholars.

Jacob Taubes, Karl Barth, and St Paul

For this year's Karl Barth blog conference (coming up in July) I'll be doing a piece on Barth and Jacob Taubes – I'm also writing up a full version for publication. Here's the extended abstract:

Karl Barth and Jacob Taubes: apocalyptic theology and political nihilism

The Jewish intellectual Jacob Taubes (1923-87) is surely one of the most eccentric figures of twentieth-century philosophy. A political thinker of the far left, Taubes’ greatest intellectual debt was to the arch-conservative German jurist Carl Schmitt. An ordained rabbi, his work was driven by a penetrating engagement with Christian theology, in an attempt to lay bare the roots of modern political power. With Schmitt, Taubes believed that in today’s world everything is theological (except perhaps the chatter of theologians). He began his career with a doctoral dissertation on the secularisation of Christian apocalyptic – a vigorous response to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s work on the same theme – and ended his career, just weeks before his death, with lectures on the explosive political impact of Paul’s epistle to the Romans.

At the centre of all Taubes’ work is an attempt to rehabilitate radical Paulinism in the interests of a Jewish apocalyptic politics. In this connection, he returns again and again to Karl Barth, and his reading of Barth is as profound as it is idiosyncratic. In Taubes’ view, Barth’s interpretation of Paul is ‘perhaps the most significant contribution to the general consciousness of our age’; like Luther, Kierkegaard and Marcion, Barth is a true interpreter of Paul who unflinchingly pursues the ‘heretical’ implications of Paul’s dialectic of law and grace. In Barth’s interpretation of Paul, Taubes finds a recovery of the ‘nihilistic’ impulse of apocalyptic politics. The illegitimate nomos of the world is passing away. Neither quietism nor revolutionary zeal counts for anything; what the world needs is neither conservation nor reform, but annihilation and recreation.

But although Taubes appropriates much of Barth’s political theology, he argues that Barth’s thought finally remains snared in the tragic aporia of all Christian theology. Dogmatics presupposes the existence of a Christian tradition, and the church’s institutional tradition necessarily erases the footprints of its own apocalyptic origins. There can be no theological resolution (since theology is itself the symptom) of the conflict between apocalyptic event and ‘the brute fact of a continuing history’. Although Taubes’ critique rightly describes the judgment under which all theology is carried out, Barth’s entire theological project can be read as an attempt to destabilise the self-evidence of the church’s existence, and to suspend the Christian community in a precarious apocalyptic moment ‘between the times’.

Taubes’ political appropriation of Barth/Paul should therefore also be modified: what his political nihilism lacks is a good dose of ecclesiological nihilism – or in Barthian terms, the (politically charged, but never secularised) concept of witness. The church’s witness to divine action is always simultaneously a gesture to its own provisional status, an acknowledgment of the abyss of judgment over which it is suspended – and thus also a witness to that strange anarchic grace by which God’s people are gathered into being out of nothingness.

The faith of Jesus Christ: the pistis christou debate

I just received my copy of the new collection of essays on the pistis christou debate. (In a nutshell, the debate centres on whether Paul's language of pistis christou refers to "faith in Christ" or "the faithfulness of Christ".) The book is edited by Michael Bird and Preston Sprinkle: The Faith of Jesus Christ: Exegetical, Biblical, and Theological Studies (Paternoster / Hendrickson, 2009), 350 pp., with a foreword by James D. G. Dunn.

Contributors include Douglas Campbell, Francis Watson, David deSilva, Stanley Porter, Paul Foster, and many others. It also includes my essay on Barth's interpretation of Paul: "From Faithfulness to Faith in the Theology Karl Barth". Here's a summary of my paper, from Mike Bird's introduction:

"Benjamin Myers draws attention to Karl Barth's unique contribution to the debate through his conception of God's faithfulness as revealed in the πίστις of Jesus. He detects a pervasive Paulinism, running from Barth's Römerbrief to the Kirchliche Dogmatik, which places God's operations in the context of cosmic apocalyptic action rather than seeing them as the outcome of salvation-history. Myers shows how Barth regards faith as essentially God's faithfulness revealed in Jesus Christ, and human faith as the obedience that participates in Jesus' own obedience to the Father. Myers also regards the construal of the πίστις χριστοῦ debate as a contest between 'anthropological' and 'christological' readings to be a false dichotomy, since Barth's own model shows that the human subject need not be erased in order to make room for divine action."

Once more with J. Louis Martyn: divine action and the church

OK, since the last post generated so much enthusiasm about Bultmann and my beige jacket, I thought I'd give you another excerpt from my AAR paper, which is now titled "Apocalyptic Gospel: J. Louis Martyn’s Galatians Commentary as a Challenge to Contemporary Theology". (Seriously though, I appreciated the comments on Bultmann, and I revised that section accordingly. But I'm keeping the jacket.) This excerpt is from the paper's conclusion:

Where so much contemporary theology seems hesitant to invoke the category of divine action – or to replace divine action with the church’s own drama of virtue and moral agency – Martyn’s work remains unfashionably committed to the absolute distinction between God’s act in Christ and all other forms of religious or irreligious agency. Here, the fundamental antinomy is not between religion and lack of religion, or between church and world, or even between human works and a human exercise of faith. Instead, it is ‘the cosmic antinomy between religion and apocalypse’. Thus in his essay on Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, Martyn underscores O’Connor’s ‘vision of [the] burning away of virtues and thus a vision of tax collectors and prostitutes preceding you into the Kingdom of the God who rectifies the ungodly’. It is precisely the dissolution of virtue – the dissolution of religion – that the gospel announces, since even virtue itself stands on the wrong side of the apocalyptic antinomy between the way of God and all human ways.

If we take this seriously, the result ought to be a rather humbler, more circumscribed ecclesiology. The church cannot become a new polis, as Nate Kerr has also argued. It cannot become a secure alternative order over against the world. It cannot, Martyn says, ‘stand aloof as a new “us”.’ God’s apocalypse in Christ has already dissolved every distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. God’s power is manifest not in the virtue or cohesiveness of the church, but ‘in the foolishness of a Christ-centred gospel that brings its proclaimers into solidarity with those who are weak and stumbling’.

Apocalyptic gospel: J. Louis Martyn on Galatians

Here's a short excerpt from my aforementioned AAR paper, entitled "Apocalyptic Gospel: J. Louis Martyn's Galatians Commentary as a Critique of Contemporary Theology". The paper focuses on Martyn's commentary on Galatians, and it has three sections: I. The Gospel against Religion; II. Gospel as God's Apocalypse; III. The Truth of the Gospel. This excerpt comes from section II:

Martyn’s Galatians commentary is thus best understood as a sort of speech-act reading of Paul: he emphasises not so much the content of the letter as the performative action of Paul’s address. Paul is doing something to the Galatians; he is proclaiming the gospel, and thus directly situating his Galatian hearers in the unsettling, liberating presence of God. In Paul’s announcement, ‘God himself steps on the scene, addressing the hearers directly’. Paul’s gospel ‘is the active power of God, because in it God himself comes on the scene, speaking his own word-event’. For this reason, Paul underscores the fact that his gospel did not come through any line of tradition; it came to him directly from God, as God’s own self-utterance, ‘the good event that God is causing to happen now’. In the same vein, Martyn suggests that Paul’s use of the word ‘amen!’ – both in the opening and close of the letter – is an attempt ‘to rob the Galatians of the lethal luxury of considering themselves observers.’ They stand before God, and are confronted not merely by Paul’s word, but by the very speech of God.

Martyn’s indebtedness to the Bultmannian tradition is often overlooked. But in this connection the deep Bultmannian undercurrent of his thought becomes evident. For Bultmann, as also for Käsemann (to whom the Galatians commentary is dedicated), Christ is risen into the proclaimed gospel; the risen life of Christ confronts the community only in the word-event. ‘The exalted Christ is present only in Christian proclamation’, as Käsemann says. Here, the content of the proclamation (the ‘what’) is less important than its sheer eventfulness (the ‘that’). The gospel is God’s own liberating act; it is not a subsequent report about the saving event, but it is part of the very fabric of that event. The gospel, we might say, belongs to the divine economy. The proclamation of Christ is part of Christ’s own identity. To put it in Barthian terms, the risen Christ is not only Lord, he is also the living contemporaneous witness to his own lordship.

All this has profound implications for the way Martyn understands the relation between present proclamation and God's apocalypse in Christ. Just as Bultmann refuses any disjunction between Christ’s past historicity (Historie) and present eventfulness (Geschichte), so Martyn insists that Paul has no interest in an ‘objective’ report about a Christ-event of the past. Nor does Paul try to bring out the present ‘relevance’ or ‘significance’ of that past event. The gospel is betrayed if one speaks about it ‘solely in terms of the once-upon-a-time’. Instead, Paul’s theme is ‘the activity of God then and now’; his one question is: ‘What was God doing in Jerusalem that is revealing as to what God is doing now in Galatia?’ Again, the contemporaneity of God’s action is not a mere application of an event that belongs essentially to the past. God is unceasingly active through the apocalypse of the gospel announcement: ‘for Paul, the history of the gospel is what it is because the God who acted in it is the God who is now acting in it’. The saving event happens in the word of the gospel. The proclamation of Christ’s ‘there and then’ is itself the mode of Christ’s redemptive presence ‘here and now’.

As Martyn also puts it in his book on History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, the incarnation of the Word is not an event ‘which transpired only in the past’: the drama of this event unfolds on two levels simultaneously, the level of the unique past and the contemporary level. More than that, Martyn insists that the occurrence of this event on both levels ‘is, to a large extent, the good news itself.’ Thus in his work on both Paul and John, Martyn foregrounds the church’s continuing gospel proclamation as part of the very fabric of the salvation-event, part of Christ’s own identity as the risen one.

NB: Although I won't be at AAR in person, someone sent me this photo from a recent paper I gave in Canberra. So now you've read the text and you've seen me presenting it: my work here is done.

More from the Barth blog conference

In case you haven't been following this year's Barth blog conference, it's the best one yet – several excellent discussions of Barth's exegesis of Paul. Here are links to all the posts:

• Introduction
  
• Day 1: Travis McMaken on Calvin and Barth on Paul (with a response by Jason Ingalls)
• Day 2: Shane Wilkins on Paul and Romans 1 (with a response by Lynn Cohick)
• Day 3: David Congdon with an excellent post on God's No and the No-God (with a response by Halden Doerge)
• Day 4: Shannon Nicole Smyth on Barth's Shorter Commentary on Romans (with a response by Kevin Davis)
• Day 5: Nathan Hitchcock on Barth's resurrection exegesis (with a response by John Drury)
• Conclusion
  

Johnny Cash on scripture and commentaries

Did you know that Johnny Cash wrote a novel about the conversion of the apostle Paul? I hadn’t even heard of it until I was given a copy last week: the title is (of course) Man in White.

I haven’t read the novel yet – but there’s some great stuff in Cash’s introduction. He talks about the excitement of research (when June’s father died, he left his religious-historical library to Johnny); the impossibly difficult process of writing; the long years in which he lugged the manuscript around with him on tour; the way his writing ability was stifled during periods of drug dependence (“time after time I wrote dozens of pages while under the influence, but when I read them afterward with a clear mind, I burned them”); the way Billy Graham gently prodded him to keep writing; and finally, the way a vision of his deceased father (a vision of brilliant light streaming across an unbreachable gulf between them) inspired his description of Paul’s conversion experience.

Anyways, my favourite part of this introduction is Cash’s remark about commentaries on Paul (p. xvi): “I started reading books about Paul…. Then I got into the commentaries on Paul by Lange, Farrar, Barnes, Fleetwood, and others. I started making notes and writing my own thoughts on Paul when I saw so many different opinions in so many areas. Tons of material has been written …, but I discovered that the Bible can shed a lot of light on commentaries.”

This is a humorous observation, but I think it would actually be excellent advice for all those of us who study theology and the Bible: scripture can shed a lot of light on commentaries!

Barth and Bultmann on St Paul

There’s some interesting work being done these days on the relation between Barth and Bultmann (including David’s dissertation, which I think has great promise). The latest issue of the Barth-studies journal, the Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie, includes an article on the dispute between Barth and Bultmann over the correct exegesis of Romans 5 – whether Paul’s theme is “Christ and Adam” (Barth) or “Adam and Christ” (Bultmann): Christof Landmesser, “Christus und Adam oder Adam und Christus: Anmerkungen zur Auseinandersetzung zwischen Karl Barth und Rudolf Bultmann im Anschluss an Röm 5,” ZDTh 23:2 (2007), 153-71.

Incidentally, this entire issue of ZDTh is devoted to Barth’s Römerbrief, so there’s some good stuff here, including articles by Georg Pfleiderer and Christian Link. The latter opens his article with the excellent statement (p. 135): “Evangelical theology is from its first beginnings a theology of the letter to the Romans. From this epistle it grew, and from this epistle it has renewed itself.”

St Paul and philosophy: register now!

If you’re lucky enough to be in Vancouver next month, then time is running out to register for the conference, St Paul’s Journeys into Philosophy, 4-6 June 2008, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

“Join us for a conference which explores the critical appropriations of Saint Paul by modern and contemporary Continental philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and others. An international group of philosophers, theologians, biblical scholars and literary theorists will present papers on a wide range of themes arising from this recent philosophical appropriation of Saint Paul. Plenary speakers include Stephen Fowl, Paul Griffiths, Travis Kroeker and J. Louis Martyn. There will also be presentations by Creston Davis, Neil Elliott, Paul Gooch, Douglas Harink, Chris Huebner, Mark Reasoner, Jeffrey Robbins, Gordon Zerbe, Jens Zimmerman and others.”

To register, visit the website or email Doug Harink.

A rain of frogs (and other horrors)

Thanks again for all the kind help with my lecture on Magnolia – I’ve just gotten back from presenting it. As it turned out, the lecture was actually a two-and-a-half hour session. So I called it “Monstrous Grace: Pauline Apocalyptic and Popular Culture,” and I talked about Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, Tom Waits’ music, and finally Magnolia as guides to the interpretation of Paul. Your suggestions for reading on Magnolia were all extremely helpful!

Anyway, I thought people would need to be eased gently into Tom Waits’ music, so I started with this film clip – “God’s Away on Business”:



                Digging up the dead with a shovel and a pick
                It’s a job, it’s a job
                Bloody moon rising with a plague and a flood
                Join the mob, join the mob...

Magnolia and apocalyptic: a plea for help

In a rash moment, I agreed to give a lecture in a couple of weeks on apocalyptic theology and popular culture. Instead of talking about boring or stupid forms of contemporary apocalypticism, I thought I’d discuss cultural instantiations of Pauline apocalyptic (following J. Louis Martyn’s interpretation of Paul). Initially, I thought I’d talk about the fiction of Flannery O’Connor and the music of Tom Waits. But now I’m wondering whether I might focus instead on Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia.

So does anyone have any good ideas? Or any reading suggestions for a theological engagement with Magnolia? I’ll be preparing this lecture on a wing and a prayer, so I’d be grateful for any help!

O Roma felice! O Roma nobile!

I have only three things to say about this conference: Oh. My. God.

To get you in the mood, here’s a stirring passage from Giorgio Agamben: “The Pauline decomposition of messianic presence is similar to the one in Kafka’s extraordinary theologoumenon, in which the Messiah does not come on the day of his arrival, but only on the day after; not on the last day but on the very last day…. I found a perfect parallel in an Islamic text that reads, ‘My coming and the hour are so close to one another that the hour of my coming risks arriving before me.’ The Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its parousia, not in order to defer it, but, on the contrary, to make it graspable. For this reason, each instant may be, to use [Walter] Benjamin’s words, the ‘small door through which the Messiah enters’.” (Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 71)

And – I can’t help myself – here’s a passage from Jacob Taubes: “I contend that this concept of nihilism, as developed here by Benjamin, is the guiding thread also of the hos me in Corinthians and Romans. The world decays, the morphe of this world has passed. Here, the relationship to the world is, as the young Benjamin understands it, world politics as nihilism. And that is something that Nietzsche understood, that behind all this there is a profound nihilism at work, that it is at work as world politics, toward the destruction of the Roman Empire. This is why you can’t make Lutheran deals with Romans 13, unless you give up the entire frame.” (Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, p. 72.)

St Paul and philosophy in Vancouver

The most exciting and most événementiel theological conference of the year – “Saint Paul’s Journeys into Philosophy,” 4-6 June 2008 – now has its website up and running, and it’s open for registrations (early bird until 15 April). Here’s a note from the organiser, Doug Harink:

Join us for a conference which explores the critical appropriations of Saint Paul by recent and contemporary Continental philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and others. An international group of philosophers, theologians, biblical scholars and literary theorists will present papers on a wide range of themes arising from this recent philosophical appropriation of Saint Paul. Plenary speakers include Stephen Fowl, Paul Griffiths, Travis Kroeker and J. Louis Martyn. There will also be presentations by Creston Davis, Neil Elliott, Paul Gooch, Douglas Harink, Chris Huebner, Mark Reasoner, Jeffrey Robbins, Gordon Zerbe, Jens Zimmerman and others. To register, or to get travel and accommodation information, visit the website or email Doug Harink.

So don’t be an animal, be a subject – be there for the event!

Human agency according to Augustine, Paul, and Lou Martyn

In his extraordinary book on the history of Christian spirituality, The Wound of Knowledge, Rowan Williams describes Augustine’s understanding of human agency:

“Augustine is less concerned than almost any of the Greek Fathers with freedom…. The human subject is indeed a mystery; no one could be more painfully and eloquently aware of this than Augustine. But the mysteriousness and unpredictability have more to do with the forces that act on the subject…. Augustine’s undiminished appeal to a post-Freudian generation has much to do with this aspect of his thought. He confronts and accepts the unpalatable truth that rationality is not the most important factor in human experience, that the human subject is a point in a vast structure of forces whose operation is tantalisingly obscure to the reason. Human reality is acted upon at least as much as acting” (pp. 82-83).

This reminds me of a provocative SBL paper in November by the great Paul scholar, J. Louis Martyn (he was in a session with Douglas Campbell and Susan Eastman, with responses from Darrell Guder and Telford Work). Martyn presented Paul’s understanding of human agency along these lines: the human agent has no subjective autonomy and no moral competence to choose her own path. She is under the sway of inscrutable cosmic powers – and will remain so except for the militant, apocalyptic interruption of a divine agent who vanquishes the enslaving powers and creates a new moral subject.

Further, according to Martyn (much to the displeasure of his respondent, Telford Work!), Paul’s apocalyptic conception of human agency is a deliberate critique of the “classic moral drama” which underlies much of the Old Testament, e.g. in Deuteronomy, where “morally competent” agents are said to stand at a crossroad between two possible choices.

For Paul, there is no crossroad, no moral competence, no “choose this day.” To be sure, there is a real alternative: slavery or freedom! But this alternative doesn’t lie in our power or depend on our agency. This means that God’s action cannot be said to “help” us or “enable” us – the divine action is a unilateral liberation which constitutes us as new agents.

After his paper, Martyn was asked: “Why are you so uncomfortable with the word ‘enable’?” He replied: “I’m not uncomfortable with it. It’s just wrong.”

Conference announcement: Saint Paul's Journeys into Philosophy

The brilliant Canadian theologian Douglas Harink is organising what promises to be a superb conference on “Saint Paul’s Journeys into Philosophy.” The conference will be held at the Vancouver School of Theology on the campus of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 4-6 June 2008. Speakers will include Stephen E. Fowl, Paul J. Griffiths, J. Louis Martyn, P. Travis Kroeker, Douglas Harink, Chris K. Huebner, Mark Reasoner, Gordon Zerbe, Jens Zimmerman, and others.

Proposals are invited for papers that address aspects of the appropriation of the work of the apostle Paul by recent philosophy, in particular by Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes and Slavoj Žižek, as well as their precursors, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Papers may address the subject from the perspectives of biblical studies, philosophy, political theory and theology.

Proposals must be no longer than 300 words, accompanied by the proposer’s name and institutional affiliation. All proposals are due by 15 January 2008, and should be emailed to Doug Harink. You can also contact Doug for details about registration and accommodation in Vancouver.

This definitely looks like it will be one of the best and most important theological conferences of 2008.

Barth and Paul: my SBL paper

On Friday afternoon I’ll be presenting my SBL paper on Barth’s interpretation of Paul: “From Faithfulness to Faith in the Theology of Karl Barth.”

Update: I’ve taken the paper down from the web, but the final revised version will be published in a Paternoster volume in 2008.

Jacob Taubes on Romans 8

The Political Theology of Paul, by the Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes, is an extraordinary work. Taubes was dying from cancer as he delivered these lectures in Heidelberg. He was not able even to stand as he spoke – but the lectures are filled with warm humour, apocalyptic intensity, and striking new insights. Here’s an excerpt:

“You notice that Paul has very peculiar worries about nature. Of course they’re not ecological worries. He’s never seen a tree in his life. He traveled through the world just like Kafka – never described a tree, or mentioned one…. Just find me one place in a Pauline letter where he lets up from this passion, from this obsession, from this one theme that moves him. None at all, it persists through and through. Look through Kafka’s novels some time, whether there is a tree there. Maybe one on which a dog pisses….

“And yet nature is a very important category – an eschatological category. It groans, it sighs under the burden of decay and futility. What does ‘groan’ mean [in Romans 8]? There he explains that we too groan. You must imagine prayer as something other than the singing in the Christian church; instead there is screaming, groaning, and the heavens are stormy when people pray.”

—Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 73.

Pistis christou

J. Louis Martyn’s essay, “The Apocalyptic Gospel in Galatians,” Interpretation 54 (2000), creates a brilliant encounter between Paul’s apocalyptic gospel and Flannery O’Connor’s use of the grotesque. In one of the footnotes (p. 250), Martyn settles the pistis Christou debate with this anecdote about Karl Barth:

“Oral tradition, which I have not been able to find in print, tells of a priest who made an appointment with K. Barth on a personal matter. Coming after a while to the point, he said, ‘The problem, Dr Barth, is that I have lost my faith.’ The response: ‘But what on earth gave you the impression that it was yours to lose?’”