Paul without religion: The creation of a category and the search for an apostle beyond the new perspective. by Brent Nongbri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The World Turned Outside In

The 20th century theologian Karl Barth insisted that Christianity was not a public religion in which one ritually participated but a personal faith which grabbed one by the spiritual throat. In this he took a similar line to that of the political philosopher, John Locke, in the early 17th century who made the distinction between personal belief and civil activity. Both men, for political reasons, wanted to make Christianity an essentially private affair, something of the individual spirit. For Locke this was a possible solution to the continuous wars of religion that had plagued Europe since the Protestant Reformation. For Barth it was a way to distinguish his version of Christianity from that civil religion which had promoted not just Protestant liberalism in the 19th century but also the violence of World War I.

Both Locke and Barth succeeded, for a time. Locke inspired the secular state of the Enlightenment. Barth set an agenda which dominated 20th century theology. But neither achievement appears to be sustainable, much less permanent. Each put forward in their distinctive way a form of fideism, the idea that faith is something separate and independent of reason. Reason is a communal category. What is reasonable is what is accepted as reasonable by a community. To exempt faith from reason, political or intellectual reason, leaves it a solipsistic hulk. Eventually this hulk had to drift into the course of the liberal democratic state.

The rise of evangelical politics over the course of the 20th century is an affront to both Locke and Barth. Evangelicals wanted the collision between faith and reason for logical reasons. Faith cannot be contained within the boundaries established in the Enlightenment and it is not content to allow the reason of politics or science to proceed without it. So it has claimed, often rather effectively, the territory of political action (as well as apolitical and anti-political action) as its own. The fact that those lacking faith might find such claims to be unreasonable if of little consequence. Faith, in other words is as inherently a mass movement as it is an individual virtue.

This movement has its own standards of rationality which are largely alien to the general secular culture. These standards are essentially totalitarian in character. They are simply not open to discussion. The communal aspects of religion gives these standards, however unreasonable, a political power in excess of the mere numbers involved. In its most benign form this power is exercised as an electoral bloc. In its most malignant form it manifests as terrorism. In all cases it is immune to pleas of reason from those outside the faith-community. So, for example, while most of the world looks on Evangelicals’ tolerance of Donald Trump’s mendacity and immorality with consternation, his supporters view him as an instrument of a beneficent God.

The world was not always this way, that is conceived as divided between secular and religious concerns or wherein religion per se is a political force. These distinctions have an historical source and their own history. Nongbri sums up the situation neatly when he says, “we already intuitively know what ‘religion’ is before we try to define it: Religion is anything that looks sort of like modern Christianity.” This is not merely because many of those who are interested in the history of religion are Christians. Rather it is because the distinction of what we have come to call religion came into existence with Christianity.

Christianity is the religion of faith. It defines itself as such and it projects the idea of faith onto any other set of cultural practices it chooses, and calls them faiths as well. Christianity is the dominant world religion, not in terms of numbers of adherents or political influence, but because most of the world’s spiritual systems and cultures have accepted the Christian term of faith and therefore the Christian designation of religion.

And it is Christianity which insists that faith involves not just conformance with communal behavioural mores and participation in public ritual. Christianity proclaims that religion, all religion, is also a religion of the heart. It claims a superiority in this respect but this is only to compare itself favourably with other forms of heart-felt faith. Without the core of Christian teaching, the ethical views of other faiths, no matter how compatible with Christian standards, are fatally deficient and should be overcome by the true faith.

This idea of faith as the law written on the heart comes from a specific source. That source is not Jesus who spoke mainly of ethics and the subordination of all religious law to the interests of human beings. It is Paul of Tarsus, someone who had never met Jesus, never heard him speak, and witnessed none of his purported miracles, including his Resurrection, who took this commonplace spiritual metaphor and turned into a religious movement. The principle of this movement was faith, an internal spiritual state which was necessary to motivate external communal organisation and action. According to Paul, doing right is really not possible without believing the right things. Believing the right things was the necessary and sufficient condition for eternal happiness.

Thus the category of religion was created. For the first time spiritual practise and communal ritual were qualified by an entirely personal state of belief. This is an incredible theological innovation. It scandalised Paul’s fellow Jews*, mystified Paul’s fellow Roman citizens, overwhelmed cultures who had never even considered the separate character of spiritual ideas. And it did indeed change the world. But as both Locke and Barth discovered, not necessarily for the better. From the point of view of both politics and spiritual endeavour, Paul’s innovation has caused immense personal confusion and untold human suffering through violence, persecution and oppression of those without the right beliefs.

Paul, of course, did not perceive himself as the inventor of religion. That was the work of subsequent theological commentators, particularly Augustine and Martin Luther. Nongbri’s stated intention is to “re-contextualise” Paul, that is, to eliminate as much as is possible the subsequent interpretations of what Paul wrote. He wants to re-imagine Paul without religion but rather in his “vocational role” as a Jew.

While I understand the academic interest in this approach to the historical intentions of Paul (for example the degree to which he remained a Jew), the wider practical import, if any, of Nongbri escapes me. He seems to have no doubt that it is Paul who provided the originary material of this thing called religion as a faith-based activity. Subsequent theologising of this material clearly was accomplished in political and intellectual contexts which shaped official interpretations. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that Paul is the fulcrum, the watershed, the Big Bang of modern religion.

From experience I can testify that it is in the nature of aspiring academics to tame their enthusiasm in pursuing an interesting thesis. A little controversy shows a willingness to stretch established limits. More than that risks losing credibility in the community one hopes to enter and influence. Paul is a very sensitive subject in theology, as is the Whig fiction that Christianity is not the ‘cradle’ of democratic government but its historical nemesis. My sense is that Nongbri is (quite sensibly) playing it safe in his argument and his conclusions, particularly in his discussion of the Enlightenment. In any case, there is an enormous amount of creative thinking here that is inspiring for those of us who are long past academic ambitions and constraints.

*Dongbri shows that faith was not a category of Judaism. In Judaism, as demonstrated in the story of Abraham which Paul distorts for his own purposes, Yahweh commands and humans either respond or suffer the consequences. Belief doesn’t enter into the matter. Put another way: one doesn’t believe in air; it is simply there and taken for granted. There is no theory, no ‘inner light’ involved in the religious attitudes of Abraham, of the other Fathers of Judaism, or of the Prophets, only an unanalysed sense of obligation. And that obligation is about behaviour not conceptual systems. Yahweh is elemental, unlike the complexity of Paul’s God-come-to-Earth. There is nothing to believe or refuse to believe. Paul needed faith as a means of making this complexity acceptable. Apparently it worked.

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