Apocalyptic Birth Pangs: The Cross,Corporeality,and Epiphanic Manifestation in Apostolic Practice

Setting the Stage

The principal source for Luther’s well-known theologia crucis is the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, which draws heavily from First Corinthians 1–2 (especially 1 Cor. 1:18ff.). For Luther, ‘suffering and the cross’ is a habitus, a way of living in faith that enables us to experience the paradox of God’s creative love even amidst what appears to contradict it. ⁸ By emphasizing the cross, he sought to highlight two things. First, it emphasizes the ways we misuse the best of things, even what we know of the things of God, for distorted purposes. Second, it spotlights the fact that God’s love, unlike human love, is always unconditional, because it creates out of ‘what is not’, without regard for self-interest or what it might receive in return. ⁹ Nonetheless, as Alexandra Brown has pointed out, Luther, and especially his followers in later generations, often articulated these insights in ways that could be misunderstood. For example, an emphasis on God’s unconditional love could lead to neglecting love of one’s neighbor, and an emphasis on the cross and suffering, especially for victims of abuse and oppression, could simply cause more harm. ¹⁰

Brown sought to address these concerns in a study of First Corinthians, drawing on biblical scholarship influenced by Käsemann’s apocalyptic theology. On one side, J. Louis Martyn has brought to the fore the way the revelation of Christ in Paul’s letters provides an ‘apocalyptic epistemology’ that provides a new way of knowing at the turn of the ages ‘according to the cross’ (kata stauron). ¹¹ On the other, J. Christiaan Beker brings out the ethical dimensions of Paul’s depiction of the new creation, highlighting ways ‘Paul’s church’ was involved with ‘creating beachheads in this world of God’s dawning new world and the yearning for the day of God’s visible lordship over his creation, the general resurrection of the dead’. ¹² In her own reading of First Corinthians, Brown integrated these perspectives by demonstrating that while Paul emphasized that the death of Jesus brings about a shift in perception, he did so precisely to show how such a shift might bring about reconciliation among the Corinthians. In what follows, I seek to attend to analogous themes in Second Corinthians, but with a focus on Paul’s apostolic practice.

If in First Corinthians Paul addressed factions and conflicts within the Corinthian community, then in Second Corinthians he attends to challenges to his apostolic authority generated by competing apostles that centered, among other things, on the question of whether his suffering and weak body could indeed be a confirmation of God’s blessing on his ministry. In response, Paul enacts, as he did in his first letter, a critical hermeneutics that seeks to deconstruct false assumptions even as it performatively enacts a new reality for his readers to consider. We find the central premise at the heart of his approach in the blessing that introduces the letter. There he speaks of a dynamism whereby ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God’ (2 Cor. 1:1).

To gain insight into the way Paul enacts this dynamism in Second Corinthians, I turn to Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a way to conceptualize Paul’s missionary practice. ¹³ Serving as an alternative to traditional and modern existential conceptions of the self, the concept of habitus provides a way of understanding how we perceive and respond to the world in ways that are not only social and embodied, but also can be communicated to and generated within others.

Given this understanding of habitus, we can discern a threefold pattern that Paul introduces in his introductory blessing and weaves throughout the letter. First, Paul pictures his (and our) call and union with Christ in terms that are both personal and cosmic, stating that the overflowing ‘sufferings’ and ‘consolation’ of Christ are at the heart of a dynamism whereby we console others precisely as we are being consoled by God (1:5). The phrase ‘sufferings of Christ’ alludes to the Jewish motif of birth pangs, which associated the suffering of the righteous with the ushering in of the messianic age, a theme believers used to interpret the significance of Jesus’ death. Christ’s sufferings overflow for us: not only are they ‘for us’ in the sense that they benefit us, but they also characterize what happens to us as a result of being united with Christ. Yet, in the midst of these sufferings, we also experience the overflowing consolation Christ provides through us for others.

Second, having characterized the apocalyptic and cosmic setting in which we experience Christ’s sufferings and consolation, Paul goes on to render how these are transmitted to others. As the epistemological or revelatory moment, this also involves enabling his addresses, by faith, to distinguish critically between reality and appearance. Just as Jesus’ death ushers in the messianic age, so united with Christ, ‘our affliction’ becomes a source for another’s ‘consolation and salvation’. And since Christ’s consolation is always for all, our consolation becomes effective, or is put into operation (energoumenēs) in the lives of others, as they endure the same sufferings we are also suffering (1:6).

Finally, Paul intends for his audience to share in his bodily state, his habitus of being united with Christ and others. He is secure in his hope for what will take place among the Corinthians because, given his own rooting in the sufferings and consolation of Christ, he knows experientially that as they share in his sufferings, they will also share in his consolation (1:7). This hope reaffirms his teaching about the body of Christ in his previous letter to the Corinthians—that as one member suffers, so all suffer with it, and as one is glorified, so all rejoice (1 Cor. 12:26).

Being Led in a Triumphal Procession

As we have seen, Paul hopes that the Corinthians will share in what constitutes his own bodily habitus—the sufferings and consolation of the Messiah. But how does he actually communicate or transmit that bodily habitus? To address this, we can draw on Margaret Mitchell’s portrayal of an ‘epiphanic logic’ by which, as a ‘one-man multi-media presentation of the gospel of Christ crucified’, Paul serves as an ‘aural-visual icon’ for this gospel and, by implication, for Christ as well. ¹⁴

Paul begins his apology for his ministry (in 2 Cor. 2:14–7:4) by presenting himself as an epiphanic emissary being led by God in a ‘triumphal procession’ (2:14). In Roman triumphal processions, victorious generals led prisoners to their death by parading them through the streets. ¹⁵ As Paul is being paraded in this way, an olfactory epiphany takes place ‘through him’: God ‘manifests (phanerounti) the scent of the knowledge of him [Christ] in every place’ (2:14).

Although he is in fact the ‘sweet smell of Christ’, different people perceive him differently, depending on whether their mode of perception leads to their ‘being saved’ or to their ‘perishing’ (2:15), a distinction that alludes to Paul’s discussion of the wisdom and power of the cross in First Corinthians (1:18-25). In that context, the issue of perception was also a central concern, although there it related to ‘Christ crucified’ himself while here it pertains to Paul’s manifestation of Christ. Both passages, especially when read in relation to each other, are rich with allusions to biblical texts that address the question of perception. These include a reference to God’s thwarting the wise, which is set within the context of a long judgment on corrupt rulers, priests, and prophets (Isa. 28), and allusions to Christ as the Suffering Servant (Isa. 52:13–53:12) and as the Wisdom of God (Sir. 24 and Wis. 7).

As we have seen, what is at issue in Second Corinthians is the question of Paul’s sufficiency or competence (hikanos) as an apostle. The Corinthians question whether he is not simply another huckster peddling God’s word like so many (2:17). Paul, in turn, is concerned that the Corinthians have fallen under the sway of false apostles, whom he calls ‘super-apostles’ or more literally ‘hyper-apostles’; though claiming to be ministers of Christ and of righteousness (11:15), they are in Paul’s view preaching a different Jesus, Spirit, and gospel (11:4). Specifically, they seek to evaluate apostolic competence based on human criteria—that is, classification schemes ultimately defined by worldly wisdom, wealth, and power and not on the Lord’s mercy, righteousness, and justice (Jer. 9:23-24). Given Paul’s portrait of them, they appear to value mastery over the body—from being able to endure extreme hardship to having visions and revelations, which perhaps even include soul travel (2 Cor. 10–13). But what especially piques Paul—what causes him to speak of their modes of interpretation as being not only deceptive, but in fact demonic—is that they are abusing the Corinthians and treating them harshly like slaves, and the Corinthians seem to tolerate this treatment (11:20; cf. 4:5).

Paul seeks to help the Corinthians regain their own spiritual authority in Christ by providing them with the means—through the critical phenomenology entailed in his bodily practice—for testing and examining their own conscience, and in this way cleanse themselves of the idolatrous influence of the false apostles. He enacts this precisely through the epiphanic disclosure of the crucified Christ, which contrary to their expectations, can only take place through his suffering and dying body.

What is at issue here is not simply Paul’s defense of himself, but rather, as Käsemann points out, the resurrection of the dead, which is the basis for our being able to perceive anything about Christ in the first place. ¹⁶ According to Käsemann, for Paul Christ’s resurrection is not about the resuscitation of a dead man; it is about creation out of nothing. As such, it not only ‘points back to the first creation’, but also to the fact that ‘God’s action in history is always brought to bear, from the beginning to the end, on what is in itself nothing’. ¹⁷ Thus, Käsemann perceives as ‘variations on the same idea’ Paul’s discussion of his apostolic competence (2:17 and 3:5ff.) and his portrayals of bearing Jesus’ death and life in his body (4:7ff) and of God’s grace manifest as ‘power in weakness’ (12:9; 13:4). To this he adds Paul’s treatment of how God creates the church by choosing ‘things that are not’ to bring to naught ‘things that are’ (1:26-28). What is at play in all these examples is not simply a radical reversal of values, but ‘a radicalized doctrine of God and creation, acquired in the light of the cross of Christ’. ¹⁸ And this, rather than a human scheme of classification, is what provides us with criteria for distinguishing idols from ‘the Father of Jesus’, who always ‘works with poor, fundamentally perishable material, and always most profoundly for and with the dead’. ¹⁹

The Ministry of the Spirit

This understanding of apostolic competence, I would argue, underlies Paul’s depiction of what it means to be a ‘servant of the new covenant’ (3:6), which in one of the most commented-on phrases in Christian thought he describes as being ‘not of the letter but of the Spirit’ (3:6). What is curious, however, is that most commentators—including Käsemann—interpret this phrase in relation to Paul’s use of it in Romans. For example, given his reading of Romans, Käsemann interprets it as having to do with Judaism’s interpretation of the promise of its distinction as the bearer of revelation to the nations as a ‘demand for good works’ that, in turn, ‘has been perverted into a privilege which is a restriction of the divine grace’. ²⁰

However, given the context of Second Corinthians, Paul is not correcting a faulty demand for works. In fact, the letter makes no mention of the law or circumcision, topics found in Romans. If anything, Paul is correcting a false understanding of the relationship between the Messiah and Moses, which assumes that Moses (or the Torah) is no longer relevant to a messianic age. ²¹ If the hyper-apostles are using Moses’ vision as a criterion for evaluating apostolic competence, then Paul is reminding the Corinthians that hearts that have become stone through idolatry can only perceive the ‘letters on stone’ and not the glory shining on Moses’ face. Moreover, because of the veil over their hearts all they see when they hanker after the glory of Moses’ vision is the veil that protects them from the potentially fatal effects of his shining face.

On the one hand, it appears that Paul is using Moses as a limit against idolatry and injustice. Indeed, Paul’s body displays an epiphany of the crucified Messiah precisely amidst death (3:7), condemnation (3:9), and what is perishable (3:10); this is where the Spirit creates life, righteousness, and what abides. On the other, Paul uses Moses as an exemplar of turning to the Lord (3:16). The word for ‘turn’ used here (eisporeuomai) refers to the verb ‘used to go in’, when Moses would take his veil off and go in to speak to the Lord (Exod. 34:34 LXX); it is also associated with Israel’s ‘turning to the Lord’ in, for example, repentance (Deut. 4:30) or remembrance (Ps. 22:27). ²²

Indeed, as Käsemann himself observes, Paul provided ‘ethical depth’ to the view held in much of primitive Christianity—including among the Corinthians—that pneuma (spirit) was the ‘power of ecstasy and miracle’. ²³ Echoing Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Paul affirms in Second Corinthians that the purpose of the new covenant in the messianic age of the Spirit is for the law to be written on people’s hearts and for hearts of stone to be revivified as hearts of flesh. ²⁴ In fact, the Lord of Sinai is now present among us as the spirit of the messianic age who enables us to speak with the freedom and the parrēsia, the capacity to speak truth openly and responsibly, that comes from the liberation from slavery associated not only with Exodus but also with Sinai. If Moses is the exemplar of our turning to the Lord, then through his death the Messiah ‘uncovers’ what we have chosen to hide, and in so doing ‘sets aside’ the distinctions our idolatrous propensities create between Moses and the people, or the apostle and members of the church. In this way, all of us, with unveiled faces toward each other, both reflect and behold (the word katoptizo used here has a double valence) the glory of the Lord, being transformed into the same icon, Christ, who is God’s Wisdom as embodied Torah (cf. Sir. 24), from one degree of glory to another (3:18; cf. Wis. 7). All this takes place, as Käsemann puts it, through the bodies that ‘serve as our medium of communication’ as we live our lives not under the categories of ‘being’ and ‘having’ but under ‘those of sharing and giving a share, of mutual and common membership’. ²⁵

In this way, Paul gives public witness—in the midst of suffering—to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. If people perceive that his gospel is veiled, it is because the god of this age—the god of wisdom, wealth, and power—keeps them from seeing and reflecting (augazo, a word that like kataprizomai also has a double valence) the Messiah, the icon of God (4:4). The proclamation that Christ is Lord can only be enacted as we are slaves to one another, in sharp contrast to the false apostles who treat the Corinthians as slaves. The very light that shines in our hearts is both the light of the first creation and the light that gives knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ, the crucified Messiah (4:6).

What this means is that if the ‘Spirit, not the letter’ defines the ministry of the new covenant, then that ministry—precisely as it participates at the turn of the ages between death and Spirit, condemnation and righteousness, what is set aside and what abides—can only take place by way of ‘death in me, life for you’ (4:12). The ‘cult image’ that Paul carries in his epiphanic parade is precisely the dying of Jesus, a ‘necrotic epiphany’ being displayed in his body that signals the promise of the resurrection epiphany to come. ²⁶

The vivid imagery Paul uses in this section provides a complex multidimensional portrayal of how this takes place. The treasure of light created in our hearts is found as treasure in clay pots, so that it is evident that this hyperbolic power is God’s and not ours (4:7). We only experience it as those afflicted but not crushed, and so on (4:8-9). Like the Psalmist, we too cry out trusting and speaking in the confidence—the faith—that God will not only raise us individually, but also raise us together with one another (4:14). Thus, Paul says ‘everything is for your sake’, because he trusts that grace will continue to extend and expand throughout the world (4:15). Slight momentary afflictions become the locus for God’s eternal glory to be produced in us (4:17). Given the prohibition of idolatry, we look for God’s glory not in what is seen, which is temporary, but in what is eternal (4:18). And through all this, the Spirit has been given as our pledge (arabbōn), as we ‘groan’ in this time between the ages, yearning to be established together as the temple on God’s holy mountain (5:1-5; cf. Wis. 9). We walk by faith not form (eidos), knowing with confidence that each of us will receive recompense for what we have done in the body, whether good or evil (5:6-10).

Thinking with Käsemann: On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene

So far, we have examined ways Paul depicts his apostolic practice in Second Corinthians as a social and embodied habitus that transmits and generates new life in others by way of a cruciform manifestation of the resurrected Lord’s presence in our life and in the world. Thinking along with themes Käsemann emphasizes, we turn to discuss constructive implications of this reading of Paul for contemporary theological reflection at the interface of biblical studies, philosophy, and ethics.

We begin by noting points of resonance with Käsemann’s biblical theology, which was heavily influenced by his own reading of Second Corinthians. ²⁷ Throughout his work, Käsemann emphasizes our ‘corporeality’, a theme that ties in with our discussion of the social and embodied character of Paul’s habitus and the ways it counters what is idolatrous and demonic. Sharing Krister Stendahl’s critique of the ‘introspective conscience of the west’ extending from Augustine and the Reformation to Bultmann’s existentialism, he eschewed the individualism he identified not only with Bultmann’s emphasis on an authentic self but also with the various forms of Christian theology through the ages that focused on the ‘care of souls’. ²⁸ He felt that theology ‘could have learned as much from Marxism as it did from Kierkegaard’. Perhaps then, it would not have given such a decisive role to the individual and ‘the dogmatic-philosophical postulate’ that humans have a ‘self-same identity’ that endures throughout their lives and in all epochs of history. ²⁹ By contrast, Käsemann emphasized that we are fundamentally ‘corporeal’ beings, with creaturely needs and a capacity for communication. We belong to and participate in worlds governed by conflicting and chaotic forces that impinge upon our everyday lives. Following Paul, Käsemann linked anthropology and cosmology and made clear that the gospel message always addresses not merely individuals, but what Tillich called the ‘demonic-tragic structures’ of our ‘individual and social life’. ³⁰

However, Käsemann always related our corporeality to the ‘critical power’ of the cross of Jesus. The cross provides us with a critical hermeneutic that does not simply demythologize an ancient worldview, but rather de-demonizes our worlds and our addictions to destructive powers and forces. If the crucified One ushers in a new age through his death, then his resurrection is not just the resuscitation of a dead man, but his inauguration as ‘Cosmocrator’. However, this reign is always the reign of the Crucified. Seeking to correct the Corinthian temptation to understand the Christian life as some kind of ‘heavenly existence’ free from temptation and dread, ³¹ Paul made the cross the touchstone for the church’s life—in its proclamation, sacramental life, and apostolic work of reconciliation. We manifest the risen Lord when God’s power and activity is at work in our act of dying, molding us into the likeness of the one who was crucified. ³² The cross is the criterion that judges and liberates not only those beyond the ‘Christian’ sphere, but also those within it and, as Nietzsche noted, the cross always attacks the strong and devout. It enables us to see that only true divinity can create life out of nothingness, a point the apocalyptic image of messianic birth pangs brings to the fore so well. Likewise, it enables us to discern that we become truly human when, as those called to be earthly representatives of the exalted Lord, we bear the marks of his death in our bodies, being offered up in his ‘triumphant altar’. This is how we become—as ‘messengers and servants of the liberating God’ ³³ —freed for mutual service with one another ‘in solidarity with all the threatened, those who suffer, and with sinners’. ³⁴

With these emphases, Käsemann combined Albert Schweitzer’s attention to the eschatological inbreaking of the reign of God given the death of Jesus with Luther’s attention to the cross and the first commandment. The result was a biblical theology that continually sought to follow Paul’s charge to ‘discern the spirits’ and thus make the ‘lordship of the Crucified’ concrete in practice since as human beings we always ‘live in and from spheres of power’; we always have a lord ‘whose power is manifested’ through us. ³⁵ By recasting Käsemann’s theological emphases in relation to the notions of the habitus of Paul’s missionary practice and the epiphanic logic it manifests, I hope to have demonstrated the conceptual power of some of his core assumptions, especially as they are put to the test in a critical exegesis of Paul’s texts. In this regard, I would contend that Käsemann’s emphases bring to the fore two themes in Paul that have particular relevance for contemporary appropriations of Paul’s ‘inner logic of the messianic’, ³⁶ whether that takes an explicitly Christian, theological form, or that of a secular political theology. ³⁷

The first has to do with Paul’s emphasis, especially in Second Corinthians, on ‘power in weakness’, an emphasis that counters any secular or religious attempt to deny our embodied creatureliness and mutual dependence on one another. Given Käsemann’s reading of Paul, we can affirm L. L. Welborn’s criticism of Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul for highlighting the resurrection at the expense of the cross. This move, Welborn argues, places Paul’s concept of Christ in ‘dangerous proximity’ to the pure self-affirmation of a Nietzschean Übermensch. ³⁸ Welborn’s critique, however, could apply to any philosophical or theological appropriation of Paul that affirms triumphalist conceptions of identity, political influence, or leadership. It could apply to any attempt, in Käsemann’s words, that allows the ‘church ultimately to triumph over its Lord’ by way of some set of criteria—whether it be based on an experience, a set of ideas or doctrine, or even as a set of practices.

At the same time, such power in weakness does not negate Paul’s ‘authority for upbuilding’ identity formation at a communal and personal level, especially if the point of such formation is to enable others to stand in their own conscience so that they are not as vulnerable to abusive patterns of relationship, whether on an interpersonal or broader political level. Along these lines, Welborn provides another insightful evaluation, in this case, of Giorgio Agamben’s Marxist and secular appropriation of Paul’s concept of the ecclesia, as the idea of a community whose collective subjectivity transcends class. Although Agamben’s appropriation of Paul has many fruitful aspects, the difficulty with it lies in the way that its conception of a messianic vocation revokes every vocation as ‘devoid of content, that is, of identity: the worldly vocations are never replaced by a new vocation’. ³⁹ But without a new identity, a new vocation, and an explicit identification of the communal patterns that signify that vocation, Agamben’s remnant is not only incapable of political action, but also does not have the resources for forming communities that can foster healthy communal identity in the long-term. Again, as with Welborn’s account of Badiou, we could apply this critique to analogous positions. For example, some Barthian and Lutheran conceptions of the church are so dialectical that they cannot take shape over time. Likewise, theological appropriations of the work of thinkers like Jacques Derrida or even Walter Benjamin can often be so indeterminate that they can only find an institutional locus within an established academic setting that operates on other principles for its ongoing operation.

Thinking against Käsemann: Addressing Criticisms

We have seen that our treatment of Paul’s bodily practice in Second Corinthians not only resonates with Käsemann’s main emphases but also opens up ways his insights are relevant for contemporary interdisciplinary appropriations of Paul. Given this, it is surprising that Käsemann provides such a problematic reading of the topic of letter and spirit in Second Corinthians, one that imposes a notion of justification by faith (based on Luther) that does not fit with Paul’s texts. ⁴⁰

It is true, of course, that even in this essay, Käsemann captures the insight that this passage has to do with the temptation ‘bound up with all piety’ and that is ‘to misuse the gift of God as a means to one’s glory’ and in a related vein to confuse ‘faith’ and ‘superstition’. ⁴¹ This theme runs throughout his work; it is linked with his critical phenomenology, which seeks to de-demonize the ideologies that hold us captive. Nonetheless, in his essay on ‘The Spirit and the Letter’, he specifically maintains, as we noted above, that Paul is polemicizing against the way Israel not only misinterprets this ‘promise’ as ‘a demand for good works’, but also perverts it ‘into a privilege’ that restricts divine grace to a specific group. ⁴² Not only does such a reading target Jews, but it also severs grace from ethics, proclamation from vocation, word from deed, etc., in ways that have been problematic.

Indeed, such a reading betrays a tendency in some of Käsemann’s work to associate the biblical image of apocalyptic birth pangs with a Lutheran (rather than a Pauline) conception of the pangs of the despairing ‘bad’ conscience afflicted by Satan’s temptation. In this view, the self in itself is sinful before any act. Only through the ‘justification’ that comes by faith in God’s self-sacrificial love in Jesus can a ‘transmoral’ conscience be created, that is, a conscience that is as far above the moral realm as the desperate conscience was below it. ⁴³ Such a position not only severs grace and works, but it also presupposes ideas about justification (dikaiosunē) and conscience not found in Paul’s letters. ⁴⁴

Most importantly, the difficulty with this reading is that it reinforces a major assumption about Paul’s theology, one held by both his critics and adherents: that Moses serves only as an antithetical foil for him. As Jon Levenson puts it, because the emerging church adopted the position that Jesus the Messiah had fulfilled the Davidic promise, it now felt it was exempt from Moses’ law. ⁴⁵ Not that the law is bad or primitive—indeed, Paul says it is good and holy (Rom. 7:12)—but simply that it had now expired. Levenson goes on to point out why this position is problematic: it loses the creative tension found in the Hebrew Scriptures between Torah and Temple, the two major foci of ancient Israelite religion. Also represented by the symbols of Sinai and Zion, respectively, these two foci provide each other with mutually critical but nonetheless complementary vantage points for examining and testing each other.

Given our reading of letter and spirit in Second Corinthians, we might say, contrary to Käsemann, that Paul actually does preserve the tension between these foci in his letters. If he used the tradition of Abraham (associated with the Davidic promise) to correct a faulty understanding of the law within the emerging Christian movement in Romans and Galatians, then he used the story of the Golden Calf, which has Moses at its center, to correct faulty appropriations of the ‘Zion’ tradition that were emerging within the Corinthian community. ⁴⁶

Why is it important to notice this nuance in Paul’s use of biblical traditions? Because it addresses a problem that Nils Dahl spotlighted several decades ago—that Christian theologians have tended to apply all of the promises in Scripture to Christ and the church, but all of its indictments of ancient Israel’s sins to the Jewish people. In his words, ‘Testimonies to the crucified Messiah and testimonies against the Jews became two sides of the same coin’. ⁴⁷ This exegetical move would have a profound influence on later history, especially after Christianity became the religion of empire under Constantine. It served to redirect eschatological force against not only Jews, but also pagans, Muslims, and even marginalized groups within Christianity. As Adam Kotsko has observed, New Testament apocalypse was now re-imagined by ‘displacing the demonic apocalyptic role of earthly rulers onto some other group—usually a religiously defined group such as Jews or heretics, representing a displacement from the political-theological to the theological as such’. ⁴⁸ In other words, what had been a figural means for announcing God’s cosmic judgment on dominating uses of worldly power and wealth now became the basis for persecuting those who were outside the Christian faith, or who held minority views within it, as enemies of God’s empire. ⁴⁹

Although the Reformation would seek to address ecclesiastical abuses, it soon became a source not only for new divisions and wars, but also, especially through Luther, an intensification of the theological split between spiritual and temporal realms, a split that would have profound ecclesial, political, and cultural implications in later centuries. Thus, while, as Dahl maintains, Christian theologians and churches cannot be held directly responsible for the crimes and lies of the Nazis, they still carry indirect responsibility for what they tolerated, and we might add, for the deleterious impact of certain theological ideas and the attitudes and behaviors they nurtured, whether these took a religious or a secular form. ⁵⁰

In addition, Dahl points out that from the nineteenth century on, the ‘general trend’ was to define Christianity not in relation to the New Testament’s appropriation of themes in Jewish scriptures, but in favor of a concept of it ‘as a universal and superior religion’. ⁵¹ Thus, ‘post-enlightenment theological liberalism’, no less than ‘theological conservatism’, often promoted versions of Christian triumphalism that ‘could go hand in hand with political imperialism and economic exploitation, colonialism abroad, and racism at home’. ⁵² Given this history, it is not surprising that Howard Thurman, writing in view of the way Pauline texts were used to justify slavery in the United States, asked whether Christianity has anything to say to the masses of people who live with their ‘backs against the wall’—‘the poor, the disinherited and the dispossessed’. ⁵³

Thinking after Käsemann: Transfiguring Theological Education ‘after Whiteness’

Having made this critique, I need to point out that especially in his later life, Käsemann increasingly defined all of his theology—including his understanding of the ‘righteousness of God’ and the ‘Reformation heritage’—in terms of the first commandment, which ‘calls to resist idols and demons and makes of the church a resistance’. Such resistance, he adds, ‘does not begin without the experience of the cross’. ⁵⁴ Indeed, in On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene, he was quite explicit that ‘apocalyptic’ pertains to ‘the message of God’s kingdom revealed in Christ’ that brings about ‘the worldwide liberation of the children of God’ even as it expels and restrains ‘the demons in politics, economics, and the worldview of the white race in the modern age’. ⁵⁵

In view of these emphases, I will be thinking after Käsemann in a double sense in this final section. On the one hand, writing after his death, I will be thinking subsequent to him. On the other, I will also be following the trajectory of his own commitments as I set our account of Paul’s apostolic practice in dialogue with themes explored in Willie James Jennings’s After Whiteness, a short monograph that seeks to reframe theological education in ways not aligned with white, Western cultural hegemony. ⁵⁶

Many have called attention to a current ‘crisis’ in theological education based on ‘decline’—in relation, for example, to such factors as enrollment, financial resources, ecclesial and denominational support, and so on. However, in After Whiteness Jennings concerns himself with another crisis: the ‘distorted formation’ that in his view characterizes so much theological education in the West. Whether it seeks to ground students in an ecclesial tradition or to teach them modern critical skills for analyzing texts and traditions, theological education in the West often centers on the image of the educated person as a ‘white self-sufficient male’ (p. 6). Referring not to a person or a people, Jennings uses this phrase to refer to ‘a way of organizing life’, a mode of ‘habitation and meaning making’, that distorts identity and the possibility for life together by emphasizing mastery, possession, and control. In addition, this image has often reinforced over the centuries a ‘Christian racial and cultural homogeneity’ linked with a ‘nationalist vision’ (pp. 6–9).

Especially intriguing about Jennings’s critique of ‘white male self-sufficiency’ is the way it parallels Paul’s critique of the ‘super-apostles’. Paul parodies the super-apostles’ notion of the ‘sufficiency’ or ‘competence’ apostles needed to have—powerful rhetorical skills, a strong physical presence, intellectual competence, and expertise at wielding spiritual power. As moderns, we might find strange the criteria of being able to endure severe physical pain or to leave and return to one’s body at will; however, we are familiar with a fundamental assumption underlying these feats. As the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued, for centuries Western intellectual thought and spirituality have assumed that the body is a mere vessel for a disembodied mind that ‘sees’ what is going around it, and from that standpoint controls physical objects and evaluates our own actions and those of others. ⁵⁷

With his critique of ‘white male sufficiency’, Jennings helps us understand what is at stake in Paul’s critique of the super-apostles. Their mode of ‘habitation and meaning’—or, in Paul’s words, their mode of interpreting (metaschēmatizomenoi, 2 Cor. 11:13, 14)—for understanding their encounter with the Messiah, provides them with a rationale—or an ideology—that justifies their ‘mastery’ not only over their own bodies, but also over other people’s bodies. By contrast, Paul’s hope in writing Second Corinthians is precisely that they might together share in the overflowing pathos and consolation of the Messiah. Instead of giving them mastery over bodies and the relationships that take place within them, the Spirit unveils their pretensions so that together they can see and reflect the Messiah’s image in one another’s faces. Indeed, one could say that for Paul, as for Jennings, the goal of apostolic pedagogy—or theological education—has to do precisely with ‘the art of cultivating [the] belonging’ we already have together in the body of Jesus (p. 10).

To describe what lies at the heart of Paul’s apostolic pedagogy, we might say, using Jennings’s language, that theological education must be reframed more broadly in relation to the ‘erotic power’ of God—the divine compassion and consolation embodied in the Messiah’s pathos for and with us. Within that pathos, we become embedded in the original trajectory of a God, in Jennings’s words, who has ended hostility and has drawn all of creation into a reconciliation not any one of us can control, a gathering in which God recreates and transforms us so that we become those ‘who gesture communion with our very existence’ (p. 152).

If it is to be genuine, this reconciliation cannot be divorced from the actual economies of exchange and power dynamics that constitute the relational fabric in which any communion takes place. Thus, Paul wove together his appeal for reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:14–6:10) with an appeal for funds for the Jerusalem church (2 Cor. 8–9), which he incorporated in turn into a generous and generative liturgical tapestry. Similarly, Jennings calls us to reform our exchange networks—the ways we buy, sell, and borrow—in ways that counter the colonial, or ‘white’, tendency to separate exchange networks from what is personal, communal, and storied (p. 144).

Finally, Paul made clear that only ‘power in weakness’ could ground the ‘upbuilding’ the Corinthians needed so that they could free themselves from the false tutelage of the super-apostles and discern truth for themselves by examining their own consciences in Christ (2 Cor. 10–13). In a related vein, Jennings stresses that the gospel promises ‘a form of cultural agency for peoples through which they can hear their own voices, know their own voices, and see God for themselves’ (p. 9). Thus, he calls us to reject the ‘diseased centeredness’ of ‘pedagogical imperialism’ so that we can willingly enter the vulnerability of ‘a centeredness from below’ (rather than from the ‘heights of whiteness’) and ‘be changed not by a non-descript other but by nonwhite peoples historically imagined at the sharp point of instruction’ (p. 141).