St Paul in Continental Philosophy
Staffordshire University
28th June 2014
Cadman Conference Room
Abstracts
Ward Blanton, University of Kent
‘Paul the Philosopher, or, the European Quest for a Political Miracle’.
The ancient Paul, self-proclaimed apostle of Jesus, was indeed already a strange kind of
philosopher, becoming in time a striking precursor to our current continental philosophies
which seem now to become ever more Pauline the more they approach something like
thinking after the death of God or politics after the collapse of inherited philosophical
foundations.
In this presentation I want to show some ways in which the polemical locations of ancient
Pauline discourse continue to shape modern and contemporary philosophical encounters with
Paul and politics alike. Like many of Paul’s philosophical contemporaries, he travelled
around as a cosmopolitan sage, peddling promises of the overcoming of disorienting passions
through a radical transformation of one’s mind and through countercultural performances
which inverted common values. Both borrowing from and competing with Stoic, Platonic,
and Cynic traditions of philosophy, Paul promised his hearers a kind of short-cut to virtue
which tried to bypass the implicit economic elitism of most other forms of philosophical
counterculture. It is the ancient competition or “outbidding” of Paulinism and other forms of
countercultural utopianism which resulted in Paulinism’s very strange cultural location
between what Alain Badiou now describes as philosophy and anti-philosophy. More
important than the simple gesture to the inside or outside of “philosophy” or “religion”
however is the genealogy of the “political miracle” which is arguably the most pressing issue
for both ancient and contemporary debates.
Denis McManus, University of Southampton
'St Paul and Heidegger on being-towards-death'.
Heidegger’s discussion of ‘Being-towards-death’ occupies a prominent position in his
reflections on authenticity; but it has attracted fierce criticism, and poses profound
interpretative challenges. This paper will offer an interpretation of that discussion as
contributing to the articulation of a not-implausible account of self-knowledge and selfacknowledgement. The term typically translated as ‘authenticity’—‘Eigentlichkeit’—can be
translated more literally as ‘ownness’ or ‘ownedness’; and my reading understands
Eigentlichkeit to be the ‘owning’ of one’s own judgment, an ‘owning’ that manifests itself in
a distinctive relationship to one’s death.
Crucially, this reading builds on a comparison of Heidegger’s discussion of ‘Being-towardsdeath’ with his examination in 1920-21 of St Paul’s remarks on the Last Judgment. I propose
that Heidegger sees in St Paul's understanding of the challenge of being willing to stand
before God a model for the challenge of standing before oneself. The (confused) desire to
escape God’s judgment is a desire to avoid what one takes to be the facts about oneself and
manifests itself in a distinctive relationship to the Last Judgment. Alienation from one’s own
judgment is the avoidance of the same facts and can be identified, I argue, with Heideggerian
inauthenticity and its distinctive mode of Being-towards-death.
Philip Goodchild, University of Nottingham
‘Paul and Temporality: grace and eschatology’
In Paul’s thought, eschatology 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, and a new power. This
power is that of ‘grace’, where strength is made perfect in weakness.
The eschatological dimension of Paul’s thought raises radical questions over the
appropriateness of historical-critical scholarship: to the extent that Paul announces the rule of
an eschatological messiah, then his thought is ‘in the world, but not of the world’ – its
messianic heart cannot be uncovered by situating it in relation to Jewish piety, Roman
politics, or Hellenistic wisdom. The aim of a messianic exegesis will be to draw out what is
implicit in Paul, but which Paul did not say. This paper will attempt a philosophical
exposition of an aspect of Pauline notions of grace and temporality by situating his teaching
on wealth and poverty between that of Jesus and that of Kierkegaard.
Jordan Dyck, Staffordshire University
‘Alain Badiou and the Event of Pauline Theology'.
Abstract TBA
Matthew Harris, Staffordshire University
‘Vattimo, kenosis and St. Paul’.
Kenosis (self-emptying) as an important term for Paul’s Christology. Gianni Vattimo, a
contemporary Italian postmodern philosopher, uses this idea in a highly irregular way to
ground his nihilistic hermeneutics historically. After giving a brief overview of Vattimo’s
philosophy, in this paper I wish to explore how Vattimo uses kenosis, some criticisms of his
usage, and in relation to Paul’s use of kenosis in Philippians chapter 2 and other resources
within the Pauline corpus how there are some missed opportunities for Vattimo to create a
stronger ground for his philosophical style of ‘weak thought’. In particular I wish to draw a
link between Paul’s distinction between the ‘Spirit’ and the ‘Letter’ on the one hand and
Vattimo’s understanding of secularisation as effecting a gradual ‘spiritualisation’ of
theological ideas in general and how we read Scripture in particular.