The Exceptional Political Theology of Saint Paul
PHILIP GOODCHILD
The recent reception of Paul’s thought in European philosophy concurs with a contemporary strand of historical-critical scholarship (Elliott 1994; Horsley 1997; Wright 2000): Paul’s gospel is believed to announce a radical politics. At the opening of Romans we read this gospel as a heraldic announcement of Jesus as king or Davidic messiah, demanding the ‘obedience of faith’ (Rom. 1.1-6). Caesar has been superseded by a crucified, Jewish messiah. This announcement is both scandalous and incredible. Indeed, such a political reading has remained scandalous and incredible for the much of the history of theological and critical scholarship. How can Paul’s gospel have a directly political import, when the main focus of his epistles seems to lie elsewhere – on the death of Christ, on communal relations, on the place of Jews and Gentiles, on the practice of circumcision, on the body of Christ, on justification by faith, on life in the Spirit? If Paul’s gospel is political, then Paul must hold an exceptional understanding of ‘politics’. This will indeed be our argument: Paul holds an exceptional, indeed, eschatological understanding of politics. Paul summarises it thus:
Then comes the end when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and every power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. (1 Cor. 15.24-5)
Eschatology involves the displacement of every other principle of authority. The exceptional character of Paul’s political theology is therefore denatured when it is interpreted simply in relation to its context of Jewish piety, Roman politics, or Hellenistic wisdom, for each of these appeals to a subsidiary power or principle. The messianic innovation announced by Paul offers a new principle for the reconstitution of religion, politics and reason alike. Then neither historical-critical scholarship nor philosophical commentary will be able to disclose the full radicality and exceptionality of the political theology of Paul.
Eschatology
Eschatology is not universality. Eschatology must be distinguished from universality in several ways. Any confusion between them is regrettable. Of course, when judged from the perspective of a universal reason, the eschatological will seem to hold a universal significance. Nevertheless, the universal is only established in eschatology as an enemy, in subjection. For the universal establishes a single form or principle to comprehend all things, but Pauline eschatology subjects all forms or principles to Christ. There is little hope of a reconciliation of principles here. For every authority and every ruler and every power that claims universality sets itself up as a supreme power; yet insofar as it falls short of Christ, it does not know Christ, and its universal claim excludes all that is of Christ that it cannot comprehend. In addition to the universal, there is always an eschatological remnant who are too exceptional to be included under the universal. This is the first problem of political theology: who are those ‘in Christ’, the righteous remnant, the community or kingdom founded on Christ himself?
Universality expresses a point of view according to which all things may be comprehended under a single form. In relation to the universal, the particulars do not matter; individuals may be freely substituted for each other. Only the form that comprehends them all in a synchronic moment of understanding is glorified. Universality belongs to the order of law, whether a law of nature or a moral law. Law has a universal application; yet law remains abstract and transcendent until it is applied in an actual act of judgement, in accordance with the truth of the case. Law, truth, and sovereign power exist in reciprocal presupposition in the order of universality. In eschatology, by contrast, the individual is glorified; the individual becomes a ‘judge of angels’ (1 Cor. 6.2-3). No doubt there is also judgement at work here. Yet such a judgement finds in favour of the individual and against the law. In the final judgement, the law and its judgements of death are suspended. All sovereign powers are suspended and subjected to Christ. Eschatology replaces subjection to the sovereign with adoption as an heir. Eschatology remains a judgement, but a judgement in relation to someone unique and singular. It dissolves the order of universality and law in favour of a unique order for every heir.
Universality is synchronic and atemporal. Eschatology is diachronic and suspended. Eschatology proceeds by promise and fulfilment, by announcement and arrival, by downpayment and full inheritance, by calling and justification, by suffering and the revelation of glory. The end approaches. It is eagerly awaited. This is the second problem of political theology: what is the messianic temporality, given that glorification is still awaited, yet the messianic era has already arrived? When will the messianic politics be accomplished?
Universality expresses a sovereign power enacted through judgements. Sovereign power is exercised through the threat or execution of exclusion from the sphere of the universal. Sovereign power is exercised through death. Eschatology, by contrast, expresses the arrival in power of a crucified messiah. Such a messiah expresses the power to die, to be executed by sovereign power. The death of Jesus discloses God’s power and righteousness. This is the third problem of political theology: what is the divine power, where strength is made perfect in weakness? How can the messiah triumph over those who execute him?
Eschatology, then, involves the overthrow of the world, including its present authorities, by the authority of a new creation. It announces a new faith, a new politics, and a new reason. It will no longer be possible to judge the eschatological by the universal; the universe will be judged by the eschatological. In short, eschatology involves a difference in principle or authority – a new people, a new temporality, a new truth, a new power. Formal categories are replaced by personal relations. Transcendental principles are replaced by lived experiences. For eschatology, truth is a faith, hope and love that exceed knowledge. For the world, faith falls short of knowledge, hope falls short of power, and love falls short of governance. Knowledge, power and governance give guarantees that they are suited to their ends – that knowledge will be correct, that power will accomplish the means, and that governance will direct the end. Faith, hope and love may lack the guarantee of the end, lack the sign that announces the end, lack the end as already achieved, but faith, hope and love exceed all guarantees in one respect – they endure in a time before the end. They endure in an experience. It is a time of an ordeal or a proof. It is a time the world wishes to avoid. It is a time that the world wishes to save. It is a time outside of the universal. It is a time of contingency, and perhaps of chaos. It is a time of life, and a time of thought. For living and thinking take time.
What, in the meantime, does Paul teach us of a new religion, politics and ontology?
Universal reason
The merit of recent readings of Paul by Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben is to have brought out the contemporary relevance of Paul’s thought. Paul’s thought holds a significance which exceeds that of his immediate political context of the Roman Empire as well as exceeding his historical influence over the development of Christianity. Paul, while not regarded as a philosopher, makes a unique contribution to understanding philosophical concepts such as law, subjectivity, truth, temporality and community. Paul, regarded by Badiou as the founder of universalism, contributes to concepts that are philosophical because of their universality, whether formal or transcendental. In order to contribute to such a philosophical discussion, Paul’s thought must be abstracted from its specific theological content. One attains to the universal by means of formalism; yet formalism leaves a nostalgia for the concrete, and Paul’s thought is invoked to concretise the universal.
The context for such a surprising rapprochement between Paul and a purely secular philosophy is the contemporary ‘return of the religious’: if the foundation of a modern state has been an attempt to separate politics from theology by deploying a universal reason, the actual effect of a multitude of critiques of pure reason, from Schelling, through Nietzsche and Derrida, to contemporary critical thought, has been to demonstrate that such a universality never completes itself. Universal reason is displaced by an undecidable yet particular element that substitutes for it in order to establish it, as an exception establishes a rule. Exceeding the mastery of reason, one relates to this undecidable element in the way that one relates to a god. The central problem of contemporary political philosophy is the nature of this element. Is it excess or lack, subject or signifier, fiction or real, concealment or disclosure, exception or concrete universal, event or thing, difference or repetition, affirmation or void? Can one substitute whatever particularism one chooses for an empty and dominating universal? The central difficulty in identifying such an element is that one deploys an immanent, universal reason to track down the undecidable exception that substitutes for it, reproducing the very effect of undecidability that one wished to explain. Where one hopes to encounter the fullness of life, one merely finds a symptom of its absence in a concept devoid of determinate content. Žižek explains this logic according to which universality acquires actual existence in a particular element that is unable to achieve its full identity:
the point is, rather, that the singular agent of radical universality is the Remainder itself, that which has no proper place in the “official” universality grounded in exception. Radical universality “covers all its particular content” precisely insofar as it is linked through a kind of umbilical cord to the Remainder – its logic is: “it is those who are excluded, with no proper place within the global order, who directly embody true universality, who represent the Whole in contrast to all others who stand only for their particular interests.” (Žižek 2003: 109)
Paul is invoked by Agamben as a theorist of the remainder; he is invoked by Badiou as the true founder of universalism. In practice, Badiou, Žižek and Agamben utilise Paul as a singularity, exception or remainder who confirms their philosophical systems: he guarantees a passage from abstraction to the truth of singularity. Agamben explains this explicitly: the law is suspended in a state of exception in order to capture all that is outside the law (Agamben 2004: 178). Then the recent turn to religion – or rather, ‘religion without religion’ – in contemporary critical philosophy does not affirm religion as such; instead, it is an attempt to recapture the obstinate and persistent cult for the sake of a resurrected, universal, secular reason. The cult of universal reason is re-established by including its exception; at the same time, religion is de-fused of its cultic potential. The turn to Paul as the founder of universalism is thus an attempt to maintain an immanent piety – a religion of the Son without the Father, of the event without the Resurrection, of the messianic without the messiah, of religion without religion – so as to contain an obstinately inescapable political theology once more within the limits of reason alone, that is, within the sphere of the universal.
Philosophical universalism is necessarily hostile to the essence of Paul’s message: far from monotheism deriving from universality, as Badiou maintains in saying that the ‘One is only insofar as it is for all’ (Badiou 2003a: 76), universality derives from monotheism: the all only is insofar as it is subjected to the One. This is manifest in the stubborn persistence of political theology in the secularised cult of the universal. Or as Paul puts it, ‘yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist’ (1 Cor. 8.6). Moreover, such universality is eschatological: ‘When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all’ (1 Cor. 15.28). Paul has no need of universality because he worships God. Paul has no need to understand all things because he still hopes to be transformed by God who has the power to subject all things to himself (Phil. 3.21). There is no evidence for Agamben’s unargued assertion that eschatology is a ‘dangerous misunderstanding’ of Paul’s messianic announcement (Agamben 2002: 5). Paul never ceases to proclaim a final judgement and coming end.
For a political theology, the nature of divine power explains the nature of messianic temporality and the nature of the messianic community. For the fundamental question of political ontology, or what constitutes a political subject, and the fundamental question of political agency, or how to bring about an event, can only be resolved in political theology by a solution to the fundamental question of piety: what is true worship? Beyond the legal power of the constitution of a people, and beyond the sovereign power of agency, there remains a power that is made perfect in weakness, apart from law and dominion: piety. The messiah brings neither law nor power but piety. The revelation of this impotent power is the true contemporary significance of Paul’s political theology.
Secular piety
Paul’s announcement contradicts the guiding assumption of our secular age that the religious qua religious has been superseded in the political constitution of our world. In secular thought, religion can only return to undermine the pretensions of a purely secular, universal reason in a form stripped of its authority and essence. Yet if the secular universal can never be fully constituted, then neither can the secular world. The political constitution of our world must also still be built on religious foundations – there remains an obstinate and persistent cult at the source of power even in capitalist democracy. Just as it is the temporality of truth that has called modern notions of reason into question, it is also temporal existence as such that demonstrates the persistence of piety. For the singular nature of temporal existence escapes comprehension by the universal. Worship is inevitable for any thinking that takes time – that receives the gift of its time by passing it on – for one shows value, respect, concern or interest by spending time. In practice, we determine ourselves by the ways in which we distribute our attention and order our action. Yet here there is no necessity linking cause to consequence – we do not know precisely what effects our attention will have. Since the pivot linking our attention to its result is invisible, any act of attention is an act of faith – we trust that we will be granted a suitable future. We appeal to an invisible causality. Radical contingency implies transcendence. The persistence of piety may be discerned in our temporal conduct itself.
Such piety is manifest in both theoretical abstraction, the substitution of symbols for actual entities, and economic abstraction, the substitution of symbols of value for use-values. Saving time forms the essence of the Enlightenment project of emancipation: if we are liberated from the constraints of natural necessity that may foreshorten our lifespans, and if we are liberated from the constraints of social obligation that occupy our time, then we have true freedom to become what we wish to be. Economic rationality depends on a symbolization of time, so that a calculation can be performed that minimises our relative expenditure, while maximising our control over nature through technology, and maximising control over social obligation through money. The certainty that attaches to economic rationality derives from its proofs in practice – technological invention and acquisition of wealth. Yet the knowledge, power and wealth acquired are always local and partial – projecting a future when liberation will be complete, economic rationality is faith seeking understanding. In this total future, abstract symbols of time will effectively represent a time that has become open, empty, and undetermined, in a glorious, heavenly future where the passage of time is no longer constrained by natural necessity or social obligation. Only as such will the ‘secular’ sphere be constituted, the sphere of the present age untrammelled by obligation to repeat the past, or anxious expectation of the judgements of the future.
Failing the arrival of this universal, we substitute a particular representation of a universal value: money substitutes for the universal equivalent it does not have time to become. The particular price of things represents what their universal value might be. Yet this substitution of the particular for the universal – a key issue for contemporary philosophy – has significant effects. In the first place, the value of money is transcendent: it is a promise, taken on faith, and only realised to the extent that this faith is acted out in practice in exchange. In the second place, since money is both a means of acquiring value as a particular commodity and a measure of value as a universal equivalent, then it posits itself as the supreme value, the precondition of access to all other values that involve social interchange beyond bonds of reciprocity or communities of shared faith. Whatever our own individual or collective values, we must value money first as the means of access to all other values. In the third place, money is only ‘value in motion’: one cannot achieve profitability without investing that money. Here, again, the value of assets is deterritorialised from their intrinsic worth since it is determined by their expected yield, their anticipated rate of return. The value of assets is determined by speculative projections. In the fourth place, capital is essentially a speculative value – it is a promise of future wealth. It is credit: an offer of value in advance. It cannot be understood according to an eternal ontology as accumulated wealth; it cannot be understood according to a temporal ontology as ‘value in motion’. Both appeal to the promise of a future return. Being transcendent to material and social reality, yet the pivot around which material and social reality is continually reconstructed, financial value is essentially religious. A new political ontology will be required to explain how our contemporary world order is founded upon an idolatrous and unrealistic eschatology.
The essence of contemporary money – created by fiat in the form of credit or loans by being entered by banks onto records of accounts – is debt. Credit offers an ambivalent eschatology: on the one hand, credit may promise a means to realise future wealth; on the other hand, credit incurs a liability to produce future wealth in order to repay the loan. On the one hand, capital offers to the faithful the promise of future prosperity; on the other hand, capital offers to the unsuccessful a future of expanding debt, of endless labour as debt-bondage, or of exclusion from the means of production and subsistence. Credit leads to the ultimate form of judgement by works: one is judged upon economic performance. In contemporary capitalism the saved or elect are those who prosper, can gain access to credit, and so can render their demands effective. Capitalism selects a prosperous remnant. Moreover, for this remnant, final judgement is perpetually deferred: for if the value of all assets is essentially a speculative value then at every stage the value of assets is determined by the next wave of anticipations about the future. Thus this future never comes: it is purely ideal. Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credibility. It holds no reality. It offers no proof. It is a spectral power, invulnerable to law and force alike. It is the power of piety. The critical discourse on such a power is political theology.
Paul’s gospel
Paul’s concern is political theology as such – in the sense explained two centuries earlier by Varro, and later cited by Augustine: deum colere kata ta nomina, the correct and public interaction with the gods (City of God 6.5, cited in Terpstra and de Wit 322). The sphere of the political is not confined to law and right on the one hand, and sovereignty, agency, force and subjectivity on the other. It also consists in piety: the polis constituted itself in public through cult, sacrificial rituals, ceremonies and festivals. At the heart of Paul’s discussions are circumcision, the observation of special days, the eating of meat offered to idols, and ‘works of the law’ – primarily the temple cult as prescribed in the Torah.
Such an assertion may seem all the more paradoxical, given that the Pauline churches practised what must have appeared to the ancient world as a form of atheism. For ancient religion centred around sacrifice, around rites relating to home and family, and around agricultural and commercial productivity, all overlaid by a thin veneer of piety relating to the state. All this, the heart of ancient religion and society (whether Jewish, Greek or Roman), was missing from the Pauline churches (Stowers 2001: 87). Paul’s astonishing assertion that there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female amounts to an abolition of the ancient social order. In contrast, Paul attempted to establish a new order, the ecclesia, based on Christ.
For Paul’s political thought we must turn to his announcement of the gospel at the opening of his epistle to the Romans:
Paul, a slave of king (christos) Jesus, called to be a herald (apostolos), appointed to the task of the proclamation of the kingdom of God (euangelion theou), which God had promised beforehand through his proclaimers in the sacred writings, the proclamation of the God’s Son, the successor to king David, who was revealed as God’s king (huios theou) in power and holiness by resurrection of the dead, king Jesus our master, through whom I have received the commission and power to bring about the loyalty of all the Gentiles to honour him, including yourselves who are called to his service. (Rom. 1:1-6 – my translation).
The lengthy argument of Romans is bracketed by this and a concluding quotation from Isaiah: ‘The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.’ (Rom. 15.12) To write this to Rome is to announce that Caesar has been superseded by the Jewish messiah. Paul’s ‘gospel’ or euangelion recalls the good news of Isaiah that God is returning to Zion to judge and redeem the nations (Is. 40.9, 52.7 – cited in Rom. 10.15); it also echoes the imperial announcement of a great victory or the accession of an emperor (Wright 2000:165). The phrase ‘son of God’ has Davidic messiahship as its primary meaning (as in Ps. 2.7, 2 Sam. 7:14; see Wright 2000: 167); it also parodies the divine pretensions of the Roman imperial dynasty (Elliott 2000: 23). If Jesus has been crucified under Roman authority but vindicated by God – as in Paul’s vision of the risen Christ at the right hand of God – then God is already at work bringing about his kingdom (Elliott 2000: 23). Paul’s eschatological message could hardly be more political: ‘Then comes the end when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.’ (1 Cor. 15. 24-5) Such is Paul’s gospel announcement: not justification by faith, not peaceful coexistence between Jewish and Gentile Christians, but an eschatological victory. It is hardly surprising that Paul was so frequently silenced and persecuted by the authorities; it is hardly surprising that Paul was persecuted by other Jews, since open dissemination of the messianic gospel could put the entire Jewish community at risk (Horsley and Silberman 2002: 143-9). It is hardly surprising that Paul’s scandalous gospel has rarely been heard in the history of interpretation.
We therefore propose that Paul was attempting to found a new social order based on rational worship of the one true God. It will be objected that Paul rarely discusses politics, and even when he does so, he counsels submission to the governing authorities. This objection belies the biographical evidence. In spite of Paul’s boldness, we learn of necessary precautions in his biography, and can infer their existence in the epistles. We may note that the famous passage on submitting to the governing authorities is framed by an exhortation to ‘overcome evil with good’ (Rom. 12.21) implying that submission may be a part of non-violent resistance, and a clear allusion to Jesus’ saying on taxes, ‘paying honour to whom honour is due’ (Rom. 13.7) implying that the authorities need to earn honour. Indeed, to demote the emperor to the status of a temporary servant appointed by God to administer justice leads one to infer how poorly such a role is currently being fulfilled (O’Donovan 1996; Stubbs 2004).
Yet the obedience of faith does not require direct political revolt. Paul’s supreme political and revolutionary gesture was to proclaim a rational worship (logiken latreian):
to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom. 12.1-2)
Paul’s principal aim was the renewal of worship of the one true God in spirit and in truth. In the Christian communities, love was to fulfil the law (Rom. 13.10), superseding the constitution of governing authorities; Christ was to be the new Lord, superseding all principalities and powers (Rom. 8.38-9); and spiritual worship in Christ was to replace sacrificial ritual. If Paul’s political programme now seems invisible, this is simply because it consisted of a renewal of worship, rather than a direct renewal of social structure or sovereign agency. If this is interpreted merely as a Hellenizing call to reason (Boyarin 1994) then such a political theology would appear to have little contemporary relevance; we have despaired of people ever becoming reasonable. Yet divine wisdom, for Paul, remains entirely different from human logic: it is demonstrated ‘not with plausible words of wisdom’ but with Spirit and power (1 Cor. 2.4). At the heart of Paul’s gospel, his call to worship, was a defence of God’s honour by proclaiming his power and justice: he aimed to convert worship from one code of honour to another.
For Paul, the gospel was a public demonstration of the righteousness of God. A different conception of ‘proof’ is offered here. For to proclaim God’s honour among the Jews and Gentiles of Rome was to meet with hostile accusation; God’s honour had not been directly demonstrated, as had the rule of Caesar. For the imperial cult was justified by works, both in terms of victories won and benefits established for the people: the benefits accrued by works were regarded as due reward for righteousness (Rom. 4.4). This is precisely the ideology of empire: that power is evidence of righteousness, and weakness the evidence of failure. Paul’s strategy is not only to cast shame on the achievements of pagan morality under the justice of the Caesars (Rom. 1.18-32), but also to name as sin and idolatry the very principle of judgement and accusation. For it is this principle that formed the basis of pax Romana: the rhetoric of power attributes imperial success to a combination of force, fortune and virtue; it imposes judgement upon all those who question the peace and prosperity achieved by force. Jacob Taubes has suggested that ‘the concept of law . . . is a compromise formula for the Imperium Romanum’ (Taubes 2004: 23). The paradox of passing judgement is that you condemn yourself (Rom. 2.2, echoing the Jesus tradition in Matt. 7.1-5). The very act of moral condemnation exercises a symbolic violence to justify actual violence; the condemnation of imagined enemies is the essence of imperialism. Paul takes issue with both Hellenistic and Jewish notions of nomos expressed in the formula, ‘We know that God’s judgement on those who do such things is in accordance with the truth.’ (Rom. 2.2). This is the imperial pretension: the universalisation of law. Paul discloses how law can become an autonomous power opposed to God. For there must be a temporal separation between law and the divine will: if God acted instantaneously to repay each according to their deeds, then there would be no distinction between moral and natural law, and both sin and grace would be unworkable in practice. Instead, God allows an interval of kindness and forbearance before the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgement will be revealed in order to allow for repentance (Rom. 2.4-5). Indeed, an eschatological suspension of judgement is essential to allow for divine transcendence and freedom, as well as to allow for true human repentance and worship. Temporal delay is essential for piety.
Paul’s gospel is that God will judge the secret thoughts of all through Jesus Christ on a future day (Rom. 2.16). It is the futurity of such judgement that undermines any pretension to embody a divine order within the world. Although such a future judgement may be in accordance with the law for those under the law, and in accordance with deeds for those apart from the law, Paul’s main point is that the law does not make righteous. Indeed, judging by the law leads to sin. Paul therefore explores a temporal lapse in the law that belongs to the law as such. This is not to overthrow the law but to uphold it (Rom. 3:31) – for judgement will come in the end. Although the law is holy and just and good, there is another law at work in the body, the law of sin (Rom. 7:23). It seizes an opportunity in the commandment: Paul’s strange condemnations of Jews for breaking the very laws that they teach – including accusations of stealing, adultery, and robbing temples (Rom. 2.21-2) – make little sense according to the standard interpretation, that prohibition arouses an uncontrollable desire. The famous passage in Romans 7 should not be interpreted anachronistically in subjective or psychoanalytic terms: only the prohibition against coveting could lead to temptation. Instead, it should be understood in public and political terms: law leads to boasting, judging, condemning and death. Law is supplemented by dominion – the dominion of sin, the passion to dominate (Rom. 6.14). Only by submitting oneself as an instrument of righteousness can one escape the dominion of death (Rom. 6.13).
Paul replaces a public judgement on the basis of present evidence according to a universal law with a future judgement on the basis of secret thoughts according to the Spirit. This is not a rejection of judgement nor an indifference towards deeds. Paul could hardly be more explicit that even Christians will be judged by works, ‘so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil’ (2 Cor. 5.10; see also Rom. 14.10; Phil. 1.10, 2.12-13, 3.13-14; 1 Cor. 6.9-10). The Christian innovation (Matt. 6.1-24) that Paul shares is that the basis on which people will be judged will be their secret thoughts, not their public works, for justification by public works leads to boasting – and, by implication, to the condemnation of others. The central point is as follows: ‘Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due’ (Rom. 4.4). To justify oneself by one’s works is to attempt to make a claim upon the divine; it is to exercise impiety. It is an attempt to establish a contractual relation to the divine, to equalise what is unequal. It is an abuse of sacrifice. Moreover, the benefits accrued by works are regarded as due reward for righteousness. This is precisely the ideology of empire: that power is evidence of righteousness, and weakness the evidence of failure. There is no reason to read justification by works as a particularly Jewish phenomenon: the rhetoric of empire justified imperial power by the works performed for the people. Paul will consistently invert such self-justifications in his epistles: if one is to boast in one’s hope of sharing the glory of God, one may also boast in suffering (Rom. 5.3).
In place of the axis combining law, public evidence, and imperial force, one finds an axis combining temporal delay, secret thoughts, and divine righteousness. Paul inhabits the interval between law and final judgement, between the vindication of the messiah and his return in power, between temporal worship and ultimate glory. As such, universality is not yet possible. Truth is conceived rigorously as that which is to come. Nevertheless, in the meantime, Paul neither laments nor celebrates such incompletion, he neither negates nor affirms all things, but ‘forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,’ he presses ‘on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God is Christ Jesus’ (Phil. 3.4). If the interval of eschatological suspension is a test or ordeal, if it is filled for Paul with sufferings, if he is to be judged as having the righteousness of God based on faith, if he is to be found in Christ, then it is only by his spiritual worship, his orientation towards God in Christ, his abiding in faith, hope and love, that he may be saved. It is piety itself that is the missing, undecidable element. Piety is the ‘secret thought’ attaching to the deed. For piety is an endurance in time.
The Righteousness of God
Worship is offering glory and honour to God. In the context of a dominant imperial cult, worship of the true God must be vindicated – it is a vindication of Judaism that Paul is called to proclaim: Christ confirms the promises given to the patriarchs (Rom. 15.8). For true piety to be possible, God’s righteousness must be revealed. God’s faithfulness to his covenants is called into question if the promises of God to the patriarchs are not fulfilled – if his people are not faithful, or if they do not dwell in peace but under Roman law and domination. To vindicate God, the messiah must first renew worship, before returning to renew a political order. If worship by conducting ‘works of the law’ leads to self-justification or boasting, then the messiah must demonstrate how worship can be vindicated even without such evidence of its piety. The work of the messiah is an ordeal or a proof – a public test of the righteousness of piety.
Paul’s gospel also offered its own proof in ‘Spirit and power’ – a proof quite unlike any abstract or empirical proof one might offer today. It is closer to Duns Scotus’ proof of contingency, cited by Arendt and Agamben (Agamben, 2004: 69-70): anyone who denies contingency should be tortured until they admit the possibility that they might not be tortured. Such an ordeal concentrates the mind; it enables the perception of that which matters supremely, but may be concealed under normal conditions of thinking. Apart from the law, prior to circumcision, Abraham’s faith was similarly tested in order that it be reckoned as righteousness (Rom. 4.5). The heart of worship is located in faith in God’s eschatological promise rather than the sacrificial cult prescribed by the law. The ordeal undergone by the messiah was a proof of the glory of God, showing the possibility of righteousness when all dominion, all external evidence or ‘works’, and all public respect is stripped away. Moreover, piety before such righteousness is the true divine power. The paradox of honour is that to be truly honourable one remains loyal to one’s calling in weakness and shame. The true glory of God can only be shown in weakness and by means of weakness:
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Cor. 4.7-12; emphasis added)
Paul reveals the power of Christ by recounting the matters that show his own weakness and shame. Escaping from Damascus in a basket let out of a window epitomises Paul’s encounter with imperial authority (2 Cor. 11.30-2). The heart of Paul’s honour is as follows: ‘We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.’ (2 Cor. 6.8-10)
It is precisely such an ordeal that is undergone by the messiah. The eschatological suspension is not merely of nomos – a cosmic and social law – but also of power, of honour, and, at the limit, a suspension of life itself. What is at stake, here, is the fundamental question of ontology: what is the remainder? The messianic experiment is a ‘purificatory’ approach to the Real, stripping away layers to reveal the kernel within (Žižek 2003: 64 borrows the terminology from Badiou). If Being is nomos, then nothing exists but a set of particular judgements. The identity of the remainder fails to coincide with itself as a thing differs from the judgement or truth about it. According to this conception, the transcendence of the divine is maintained in the gap between accusation and punishment, between a thing and its truth. This ontotheological conception of truth is maintained, in the Western tradition, whenever truth is ‘presented, after Plato, as localizable in the proposition’ (Badiou 2003b: 59). The Nietzschean charge of ressentiment against life may be applied here. If truth is submitted to thought, by contrast, not as a judgement but as a process in the real (Badiou 2003b: 61), then it admits a universal affirmation. For Badiou, Paul preaches not a cult of death as Nietzsche maintained, but the killing of death, the foundation of a universal ‘yes’ (Badiou 2003a: 71): in Christ ‘every one of God’s promises is a “Yes”.’ (2 Cor. 1.20) Badiou contrasts a traditional, transcendent ontology of judgement with a modern, immanent ontology of pure affirmation.
Paul’s own ontology goes beyond law and power: it is neither a transcendent judgement nor an immanent affirmation. It cannot be consistently maintained that Paul has no path of the cross, and attributes no redemptive significance to the apostle’s tribulations (Badiou 2003a: 67): Paul’s ministry of reconciliation, as an ambassador for Christ, makes the life of Christ visible through being given up to death (2 Cor. 4.11, 5.19-20); Paul wishes to know the power of Christ’s resurrection through the sharing of his sufferings (Phil. 3.10). Paul maintains a purely theological ontology:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8.38-9)
For Paul, the Real is neither Event, nor Void, nor displacement of the Void, but the ‘love of God in Christ Jesus’.
Divine affirmation replaces both transcendent judgement and immanent affirmation. There is no necessity for such a love, no argument for its existence. There is only the evidence of testimony – the testimony of the messiah, the apostolic testimony to the resurrection of the messiah, and the testimony of the Spirit. Testimony itself does not constitute proof. The true proof, the true reasoning, is the ordeal. Only through an ordeal do secret thoughts become public.
The Time of Salvation
If Paul’s preaching aims to convert his listeners from one code of honour to another, one cultic practice to another, it is through the renunciation of all spiritual benefits (Phil. 3.7-10). Insofar as one no longer claims a ‘righteousness of one’s own’, an ontological independence, one can be considered to have become like Christ in his death (Phil. 3.10), to have been ‘crucified with Christ’ (Gal. 2.20), to have been ‘united with him in a death like his’ (Rom. 6.5). Paul’s gospel, however, announces that one still has a truth beyond death, beyond all powers and events, a free gift of righteousness, the righteousness from God, consisting of the love of God in Christ Jesus. Then just as one is united in Christ’s death, one may also be united in his resurrection. ‘The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.’ (Rom. 6.10) The modern belief that it is rigorously impossible to believe in the resurrection of the crucified (Badiou 2003a: 5) is irrelevant: Paul affirms that all people are mortal. We are concerned with an eschatological ontology of piety, not a universal ontology of human mortality. We are concerned with the end, the limit of human existence. Is the believer included under a universal law of nature, the law of death, or is there any remainder when the flesh is stripped away? Can temporal existence be delimited as being-towards-death (as in Heidegger)? This is to assume that the person constitutes itself in its temporal orientation. Is the believer constituted by an immanent self-affirmation (as in Nietzsche)? This is again to assume that the person constitutes itself in its temporal orientation. It is to assume that time is constituted by the person as a project, rather than time happening to the person. Both the law of mortality and the affirmation of power are temporal orientations, modes of piety. They offer no universal proof, for time has not yet come to an end; the possibilities for modes of orientation to time are not yet circumscribed. To determine our true ontological constitution it is necessary to put the matter to the test.
Life itself consists in the delay between deed and judgement. It is in the time that remains, between and beyond synchronic universals, that one may be saved. It is a time of pure contingency, beyond reason. Sin, as idolatry, is an attempt to anticipate the end, to enclose all possibilities within a universal limit, whether a limit of judgement or a limit of power. It is an attempt to bring death forward, so that life may be judged from the perspective of its anticipated completion, from the perspective of death. This very life of sin is a life of death; it is a life that leads to death, as well as anticipating death in its every moment. In short, the ‘secret thought’ of sin is a worship of death. By contrast, the ‘secret thought’ of the resurrection is that ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us’ (Rom. 8.18; cf. 2 Cor. 4.17). As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive:
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. (1 Cor. 15.42-4)
The eschatological message is that ‘the perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality’ (1 Cor. 15.53). Alternatively, ‘if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’ (2 Cor. 5.1). At any rate, ‘if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God’ (2 Cor. 5.17-18).
The proof in power of this coming glory is therefore already available to those who are willing to undertake the ordeal of baptism into the death of Christ. It is not a proof based on evidence or plausibility; indeed, the very suggestion is incredible. Yet the work of universal reason, which consists in the substitution of atemporal symbols for temporal experiences, eliminates in advance the possibility of such a proof. Disavowing the temporal thinking that makes it possible, universal reason attempts to save time by aspiring to a knowledge that is potentially universal, based on evidence that is repeatable, public and exchangeable. Such a truth is for anyone or about anything, it does not matter which; it is independent of value – it does not matter. Such a truth projects a time when thinking will be complete, when reason will follow of necessity; it projects the end of time – it is thoughtless. Such a truth assumes the objectivity of objective truth, an objectivity that can never be demonstrated since no truths are demonstrated independently of thinking – it rests on a faith.
Paul, by contrast, bears witness to an ordeal that is against reason. It is an ordeal that matters, a duration that is thought-provoking, a faith oriented around a singular awareness. The notion of a crucified messiah is scandalous to Jew and Gentile alike: what kind of God puts forward his servant as a sacrifice of atonement (Rom. 3.25)? It is difficult to know which reception betrays love the more: on a sceptical reading, God’s sending of his son to die is a betrayal of love; to hold out self-sacrifice as a paradigm of love is destructive, nihilistic and oppressive. Life as a whole is not affirmed and loved. Yet such a law of affirmation allows of no exception; it admits no true demonstration of love. On a pious reading, one enters into a costly exchange of self-sacrifice: if Christ dies for us, then bought by him, we become slaves of righteousness (Rom. 6.18). If Christ dies for all, it is so that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for Christ (2 Cor. 5.15). In short, the pious reading submits us to a costly exchange once more, where an infinite obligation is owed to God. Moreover, God is submitted to a new law of love, whereby those he hoped to redeem become enslaved. This is the reading that Paul appears to adopt, although he does qualify that he is speaking in human terms because ‘of the weakness of your flesh’ (Rom. 6.19). Now in both these readings, what is obscured is the voice of Christ himself. If Christ is merely objectified in a transaction between God and humanity then it is hardly surprising that God and humanity will become objectified too. Paul maintains the rigorous transcendence of divine wisdom over and above any manifestation in law or in gift-exchange (Rom. 11.33-5):
O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways!
“For who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counsellor?” [Is. 40.13-14; cf. Job 15.8]
“Or who has given a gift to him,
to receive a gift in return?” [Job 35.7]
Paul refuses to objectify Christ: at the centre of Paul’s thought is the ‘mind of Christ’ (Phil. 2.5): Christ is vindicated and exalted because ‘he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross’ (Phil. 2.8). Christ is the supreme exemplar of true piety: Christ’s death cannot deal with sin – essentially idolatry (Rom. 1.23) – unless his ‘secret thoughts’, his mind, his righteousness is revealed. If Jesus is to be regarded as ‘Lord’ in anything but name, his own words – echoed at many points in the epistle to the Romans (largely from the ‘Q’ material, a common source for Matthew and Luke) – should be regarded as the key to the interpretation of the whole. As Paul writes, ‘So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the word of Christ’ (Rom. 10.17).
A key allusion qualifies Paul’s rhetoric of ‘slavery’ to God:
For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. (Rom. 8.17; cf. Gal. 4.6)
This echoes Jesus’ desperate prayer of ‘Abba, Father’ in the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14.36). If Paul aims to found a community on a renewed worship based on having the mind and Spirit of Christ, then such worship is explained as the attitude of one who receives adoption as a child of God. One is redeemed from slavery to the elemental spirits of the world by adoption as a child of God (Gal. 4.3-6; Rom. 8.18-39). It is thus Christ’s Gethsemane protest, like Job’s lament, that accomplishes redemption. One only has the opportunity of becoming a joint heir with Christ by suffering with him (Rom. 8.17), by ‘being united with him in a death like his’ (Rom. 6.5), by being ‘crucified with Christ’ (Gal. 2.20), and ‘sharing in his sufferings by becoming like him in his death’ (Phil. 3.10). It is by having the mind of Christ that one works out one’s salvation (Phil. 2.12).
The eschatological condition of the believer in Christ is that of having already died to sin (Rom. 6.2). If death comes through sin (Rom. 5.12), and Christ died to sin, then ‘the life he now lives, he lives to God’ (Rom. 6.10). Instead of relying on a mythological or magical effect of baptism, Paul urges his unknown Roman addressees to die to sin so as to live to God (Rom. 6.11-12). It is here that eschatological suspension gains a new dimension. Instead of referring only to the judgement that is to come, as though one’s true being was not one’s mortal body but the divine judgement on one’s deeds, and instead of referring only to the event of resurrection, as though one’s true being was not one’s mortal body but one’s eternal body in heaven, one’s true being is the Spirit as a guarantee or downpayment (arrabon) of salvation (2 Cor. 5.5). One dies to the flesh by setting one’s mind on God through Christ: instead of setting one’s mind on earthly things, one’s citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3.19-20). Thus the only possible demonstration of the truth of Paul’s scandalous gospel is its proclamation in Spirit and in power (1 Cor. 2.4). For no one understands God’s secret wisdom, or what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2.11). One only understands by having the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2.16). In short, it is only by encountering the glory of God shining in the hearts and minds of Christ’s ambassadors that Paul’s gospel makes its appeal.
Conclusion
Paul’s political theology is truly exceptional. It lacks plausibility; it lacks universality; it lacks a law or sovereign power. It cannot be reasonably recommended; it can only be proclaimed. What, then, are we to make of its contemporary significance? Does it hold any significance beyond the secret thoughts of the believer or the eschatological resolution of time? Paul’s gospel proclaims Christ as the final end of reason, power and worship. In the interval before the end, in default of a final demonstration or parousia of truth, power and glory, can anything be learned of a new ontology, politics, and religion?
For the philosopher, Paul’s thought raises a number of problems. Reasoning itself is a temporal activity, suspended between the significance of the problems it divines and the truth towards which it aspires. The predicament of philosophy is itself eschatological. Between the formal universal of thinking and the concrete universal of being there lies a remnant, a time of thinking. This time of thinking is to be saved or spent, disavowed or given. Yet whether saved or given, the experiential ordeal of the test of time may be concealed or objectified. Eschatology draws attention to the dimension of piety that is present in all thinking. It exposes the illusion of a universal reason capable of judging religion, and replaces it with a typology of determinate modes of thinking. Formal categories are replaced by personal relations. Transcendental principles are replaced by lived experiences. Whatever the truth of Paul’s gospel, it creates a new reason, a new era for philosophy.
For the political thinker, Paul’s thought revives the question of the public cult in politics. Whereas in Paul’s time the public cult revolved around worship of the state or emperor, in our own day the public cult revolves around the worship of money. For the principal political determination is not the legal constitution of a people nor the power of sovereign agents or democratic subjects, but the social ordering of time in work, in leisure, and in worship. Whatever the truth of Paul’s gospel, it creates the possibility of a new kind of political action consisting in the social re-ordering of time.
For the theologian, Paul’s eschatological thought continues to offer a distinctive challenge: instead of explaining divine power in terms of law or subjectivity, divine power itself becomes the principle upon which all else must be explained. The task of theology is to subordinate reason to God rather than God to reason. Far from this limiting the power of reason, it is an enriching of reason with new powers that it would not otherwise possess. If the work of God is manifest in temporal experience, then it will no longer be possible to understand divine power in terms of anthropomorphic analogies drawn from a universal human nature. The righteousness of God may only be revealed in the determinate character of the piety of God’s servants. Whatever the truth of Paul’s gospel of Jesus as the Christ, its very proclamation produces a new creation of philosophy, politics and religion. No doubt, such a new creation has not yet come to fruition. It can, nevertheless, be regarded as nothing less than a downpayment of the Spirit of God.
In each of these respects, the political theology of Paul remains truly exceptional.
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The other key allusions for this reading of Romans are as follows: ‘for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself’ (Rom. 2.1, echoing Matt. 7.2, Luke 6.37, John 8.7) has already been discussed. Paul later repeats this allusion as a fundamental principle for life in the Christian community (Rom. 14.4, 10, 13): it is his reason for tolerating both particular observances and none. Secondly, ‘For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit’ (Rom. 8.5) – it echoes the meaning of the sayings on storing treasure in earth or in heaven and of the eye as the lamp of the body (Matt. 6.19-23). Jesus enjoined his followers not to worry about food, but to ‘strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be given to you as well’ (Matt. 6.33). Conduct will be judged on whether it is undertaken ‘in honour of the Lord’ (Rom. 14.6). It is by having the mind or Spirit of Christ that God will give life to those in Christ; indeed, life comes through such a Spirit (Rom. 8.11). Thirdly, there is a set of allusions concerning the foundation of a messianic community: one should ‘outdo one another in showing honour’ (Rom. 12.10, echoing Mark 10.42-5; Luke 14.7-11); one should ‘bless those who persecute you’ (Rom. 12.14, echoing Luke 6.28); one should not repay evil for evil (Rom. 12.17, echoing Matt. 5.39); one should pay taxes to whom taxes are due, but honour to whom honour is due (Rom. 13.7, echoing Matt. 22.21, Mark 12.17, Luke 20.25); and, most significantly, love is the fulfilling of the law (Rom. 13.10, echoing Matt. 22.40, Luke 10.25-8). If Christ is the fulfilment, goal or end (telos) of the law (Rom. 10.4), then the mind of Christ is the eschatological instantiation of the righteousness aimed at by the law. The righteousness aimed at by the law is based on faith (Rom. 9.32). If Paul sums up such righteousness in terms of ‘love’, it is a love that essentially consists in showing honour rather than judging. Other allusions to the Jesus tradition recorded in the synoptics are also highly significant: the image of missionary work as a harvest (Rom. 1.13), judgement by deeds (Rom. 2.6), the justification of doers rather than hearers (Rom. 2.13), that God will judge secret thoughts (Rom. 2.16), teachers of the law as a guide to the blind (Rom. 2.19) who should teach themselves (Rom. 2.21), that one should await the unexpected arrival of the kingdom in sobriety (Rom. 13.13), that all will stand before the judgement seat of God (Rom. 14.10), that one should be wise (as serpents) in what is good yet innocent (as doves) in what is evil (Rom. 16.19, cf. Matt. 10.16).