You Are Not Your Own

Abstract

Paul’s political theology as been employed negatively as a critique of empire and positively as a means of finding new figures of activism and militancy based around a universalistic claim to equality. I begin by arguing that the return to Paul is nothing new and that the history of Christianity, from Marcion to Luther to Kierkegaard, can be understood as a gesture of reformation where the essentially secular order of the existing or established church is undermined in order to approach the religious core of faith. Paul has always been the figure for a reformation, I argue, motivated by intense political disappointment. The double nature of the address in Paul is fascinating: both how Paul was addressed by the call that transformed him from a persecutor of Jewish Christians into a preacher of Christ’s gospel; and the addressee of Paul’s call, namely the various churches or communities that he established and which are identified as the refuse of the world, the scum of the earth. But the central concern of this Chapter is the idea of faith understood not as the abstraction of a metaphysical belief in God, but rather the lived subjective commitment to an infinite demand. Faith is understood here as a declarative act, as an enactment of the self, as a performative that proclaims itself into existence. Faith is an enactment in relation to a calling that is proclaimed in a situation of crisis where what is called for is a decisive political intervention.

I then turn to Marcion. The radicality of Marcion’s position is that his hyper-Paulinian affirmation of faith comes at the price of a disavowal of the experience of law, in particular as it is expressed in the Hebrew Bible. This leads Marcion to cut the cord that connects ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments, or the orders of creation and redemption, and replace the affirmation of one god with two, where monotheism becomes dualism: the god of creation is not the same being as the god of redemption proclaimed by Paul. Following closely von Harnack’s reading of Marcion, the seductive power of this heresy becomes clear: what is announced in Paul’s Epistles is something absolutely new for which the only proof is the proclamation of faith. This brings us back to the contemporary return to Paul and the disavowal of the figure of law that is at its core. I argue that the Paulinism of Agamben and Badiou is actually a crypto-Marcionism that risks a radical antinomianism in its attempt to break the connection between law and faith. Against this tendency, I give a reading of Romans 7 and 8 that tries to give a different and hopefully more plausible understanding of the relation between faith and law: if law and sin were not within me, then faith would mean nothing. Our wretchedness is our greatness.