Christ Without Adam: Subjectivity and Sexual Difference in the Philosophers’ Paul

113 Pages·2014·0.905 MB·English

by  Benjamin H. Dunning

CHRIST WITHOUT ADAM
Gender, Theory, and Religion
GENDER, THEORY, AND RELIGION
Amy Hollywood, Editor
The Gender, Theory, and Religion series provides a forum for interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of the
study of gender, sexuality, and religion.
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Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity,
Jennifer Wright Knust
Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler,
Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville, eds.
Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World,
Kimberly B. Stratton
Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts,
L. Stephanie Cobb
Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicisim,
Marian Ronan
Between a Man and a Woman? Why Conservatives Oppose Same-Sex Marriage,
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Patricia Dailey
CHRIST WITHOUT ADAM
SUBJECTIVITY AND SEXUAL
DIFFERENCE IN THE PHILOSOPHERS’
PAUL
Benjamin H. Dunning
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53733-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunning, Benjamin H.
Christ without Adam : subjectivity and sexual difference in the philosophers’ Paul / Benjamin H. Dunning
pages cm — (Gender, theory, and religion)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-16764-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16765-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-
53733-9 (e-book)
1. Sex differences—Religious aspects—Christianity 2. Bible. Epistles of Paul—Theology. 3. Breton, Stanislas. 4.
Badiou, Alain. 5. ŽiŽek, Slavoj. 6. Theological anthropology—Christianity. I. Title.
BS2655.S49D86 2014
227'.06—dc23
2013035165
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For my parents
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Reading Anthropology in Breton’s Saint Paul
2. Mysticism, Femininity, and Difference in Badiou’s Theory of Pauline Discourses
3. “Adam Is Christ”: Žižek, Paul, and the Collapse of the Anthropological Interval
4. Pauline Typology, Theological Anthropology, and the Possibilities of Impossible
Difference
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to generous support from the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at
Harvard Divinity School and from Fordham University that allowed me time for
research and writing and thereby greatly facilitated the completion of this manuscript.
Portions of this research were presented at various academic conferences and also
at a symposium on early Christianity and anti-Judaism at Yale University. My thanks
to those conference audiences and to Hindy Najman and Maurice Samuels at Yale for
their kind invitation and hospitality. I am grateful to numerous friends and colleagues
for their feedback and encouragement on this project, but especially Bob Davis,
Samir Haddad, Amy Hollywood, Dale Martin, Charles Stang, and Larry Welborn—as
well as multiple colleagues in the Department of Theology at Fordham. Thanks also to
an extremely perceptive cohort of Fordham graduate students who engaged many of
these ideas in two different doctoral seminars—“History, Theory, and the Study of
Pre-Modern Christianity” and “New Perspectives on Paul”—during academic year
2012–13. At Columbia University Press, Amy Hollywood has been an incisive and
engaged editor and Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, Kathryn Jorge, and Anne
McCoy have all been a delight to work with. Many thanks to Robert Demke for
excellent copyediting and to John David Penniman for help with proofreading the final
stages of the project.
A slightly modified version of chapter 2 was previously published as “Mysticism,
Femininity, and Difference in Badiou’s Theory of Pauline Discourses,” Journal of
Religion 91, no. 4 (2011): 470–95, the University of Chicago. My thanks to the
publisher for permission to reprint this material here.
Finally, thanks to my immediate and extended family (Dunnings and related on
multiple coasts and both sides of the Atlantic, Parks, Davises), but most especially to
my parents, Stephen and Roxy Dunning. This book’s disciplinary foothold in
philosophy of religion means that it draws closer than either of my other two books to
my father’s own area of academic work, while its subject matter—and especially the
final chapter—speaks to some of the theological arenas most important to (and
debated by) my mother and me. I dedicate it to both of them with love.
Introduction
Some strange texts await us. They give us the choice: to dream or to
think.
—STANISLAS BRETON, A RADICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SAINT PAUL1
The Apostle Paul bequeathed to the history of Western thought a set of elaborate
reflections on what it means to be a human being, enmeshed in—but never entirely
determined by—the complexities of identification: social, ethnic, cultural, sexual. Here
there is perhaps no more famous statement than the rallying cry of Galatians 3:28:
“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer
male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (NRSV).2 And yet, as the
convoluted interpretive history of this and other Pauline texts has shown, more often
than not, it is not always entirely clear what precise anthropological point the apostle
is trying to make.3 Nor is it clear how a statement such as Galatians 3:28 should be
taken together with other Pauline statements about the human condition (with respect
to God, Christ, sin, the world, and the exigencies of existence), if indeed it even
should be.
One thing is evident, however: whatever anthropological claims Paul made in his
letters—whether informed by an underlying systematic vision or simply comprising ad
hoc statements responding to specific crises—these claims were deeply aware of
(and thus concerned with) the problems posed by the simple fact that human beings
have bodies. These are bodies that both grow and decay, that endure in continuity
with themselves and yet also undergo radical change, that function as the
simultaneous site of limitation and possibility—and that, most fundamentally, are
different from one another.
Thus Paul paid substantial attention to issues that attend the differences between
bodies—issues ranging from circumcision to gender and desire. While the apostle did
sometimes offer seemingly Platonizing formulations contrasting the “earthly tent” of
the body to higher heavenly realities (e.g., 2 Corinthians 5:1–10), he did not articulate
a stereotypically “Platonic” position on human bodies overall. That is to say, Paul
refused simply to write off the body as an incidental or burdensome accessory to the
true human self.4 Rather, he sought to situate the body as an ambiguous but
nonetheless irreducible aspect of what it means to be human.
In recent years, the Pauline corpus has enjoyed a renewal of interest from an
unlikely source: continental philosophy and critical theory.5 From outside the guilds of
theology and biblical studies, thinkers such as Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio
Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek (to name only the most prominent) have turned to the
apostle as a conceptual resource in order to theorize a variety of issues including
human subjectivity, universalism, political action, and temporality. This renewal has, in
turn, begun to be engaged by scholars in biblical studies, philosophical theology, and
the philosophy of religion.6 My goal in this book is to add to the discussion by turning
to the place of bodily difference—and Paul’s reflections on such difference—in the
philosophical conversation. While this is an issue that requires further elaboration and
analysis at multiple levels (racial, ethnocultural, religious, sexual), in this study I will
focus on one specific aspect of the topic: the relationship between subjectivity and
sexual difference, as it figures in selected philosophical readings of the apostle.7
Put most simply, given that Paul deals extensively in his authentic letters with a
range of embodied issues related to sex, gender, and desire, how are we to
understand the tendency of these recent readings to ignore or downplay this aspect
of the apostle’s thinking? If Paul is to function as a contemporary intellectual resource
for theorizing a “singular universal,” in what ways are the different “theories of the
subject” that emerge from this conversation shaped by—or even dependent on—this
exclusion? And how might contemporary Christian theological anthropology interact
with both the Pauline text and its modern philosophical interpreters in order to offer
alternative accounts of an embodied, gendered, Pauline subject?
THINKING THE HUMAN BETWEEN ADAM AND CHRIST
The Adam-Christ Typology: Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15
My starting point for the exploration of these questions is a specifically Pauline
theological construct: the Adam-Christ typology, as articulated in Romans 5:12–21
and 1 Corinthians 15. As I have argued at length elsewhere, in these passages Paul
lays out a certain kind of anthropological space in which to theorize what the human
being is—with an eye not only to humanity’s present situation, but also backward to
its creation and forward to its eschatological destiny.8 Here the apostle’s reflections
unfold with reference to two paradigmatic figures: the first Adam (i.e., the character
of Adam from the Genesis creation story) and the second Adam, Jesus Christ. In
Romans 5, this relationship is framed primarily in terms of contrast: “For if the many
died through the one human’s trespass [tō tou henos paraptōmati], much more surely
have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one human [en chariti tē
tou henos anthrōpou], Jesus Christ, abounded for the many” (Rom 5:15, NRSV,
translation slightly modified). And yet, the contrast is not so sharp as to relegate the
figure of Adam to theological irrelevance. Rather, “Adam … is a type of the one who
was to come” (Adam … estin typos tou mellontos; Rom 5:14, NRSV). Thus both
figures have a representative function in Paul’s thought with respect to other human
beings. That is to say, Paul envisions people in a relationship of identification with