Centre for Public Christianity (March 2023)

Among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity has just posted a ‘Life and Faith’ interview with Christopher Watkin on his recently-published book, Biblical Critical Theory.

‘In a conversation that touches on globalisation, the profit motive, radical justice, the nature of society, and a God of “superabundance”, Chris makes the case for why he thinks looking at our culture through the lens of the Bible makes the most sense of reality as a whole.’

Listen from here.

The Bible and Critical Theory 8, 2 (2012)

The latest edition of The Bible and Critical Theory, published in open-access format, contains the following essays:

Editorial

Neil Elliott

Diagnosing an Allergic Reaction: The Avoidance of Marx in Pauline Scholarship

Contemporary study of the New Testament and of Paul more specifically shows symptoms of avoidance of basic categories of Marxist analysis such as economic class, class struggle, and mode of production. The result is that discussions of economic and social realities are often so abstract and sanguine as to be misleading – an expression, from a Marxist point of view, of the shadow cast over biblical studies by capitalist ideology.

Larry LaFon Welborn

Towards Structural Marxism as a Hermeneutic of Early Christian Literature, Illustrated by Reference to Paul’s Spectacle Metaphor in 1 Corinthians 15:30-32

This essay explores the potential of the structural Marxist theory of Louis Althusser to provide a path beyond the mechanistic and expressive models of causality that have dominated comparative studies of early Christianity in the Greco-Roman environment. The essay analyses representational forms of the self in the ‘society of the spectacle’ that characterized imperial Rome, drawing upon the work of Guy Debord. The potentail of a structural Marxist hermeneutic is illustrated by a comparison of Paul’s spectacle metaphor in 1 Corinthians 15:30-32 with the eighth discourse of Dio Chrysostom.

Giovanni B. Bazzana

Neo-Marxism, Language Ideology, and the New Testament

This essay introduces the discipline of linguistic anthropology and, more specifically, the notion of language ideologies, arguing that it might be put to fruitful use in the study of New Testament texts. Linguistic anthropologists, working on a notion of ‘ideology’ of clear neo-Marxist ascendency, have elaborated a very effective set of tools for the analysis of language as a social practice that both re-inscribes socio-political structures and shapes them through its creative impulses. New Testament scholars, who are bound to deal with texts that are detached from their almost irretrievable original contexts, can benefit from the help of linguistic anthropology in delineating the socio-political profiles and agendas of the writings they are working on.

Joseph Mark Bartlett

Bourgeois Right: Social Location and the Limits of First-Phase Communism in the Rhetoric of 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15 (A Historical Materialist Exegesis)

Second Thessalonians 3:10b offers the teaching that ‘anyone unwilling to work should not eat.’ Both conservative and socialist readers have cited this teaching as an encapsulation of their mutually incommensurable worldviews. I conduct a historical-critical investigation of the situation in which this passage was written; I argue against recent historical reconstructions that posit that 2 Thessalonians is authentically Pauline, and articulate a Sitz im Leben for the text in line with the principles of historical materialism. Specifically, I contend that the Thessalonian community was a tenement church composed entirely of marginalized people who were particularly vulnerable to economic crises in the late first century Roman Empire; this community fit the criteria for what Marx and Lenin would later call first-phase communism. A lack of sufficient employment opportunities led many members to rely too heavily on the community’s agape feast, thus threatening the community’s viability. The situation at Thessalonica can thus be characterized as what Habermas calls a rationality crisis, whereby the community was forced to abandon the core principles of its agapaic communalism and revert to a regressive policy that Marx calls ‘bourgeois right.’ I conclude that modern conservative uses of the text serve different class interests from its author’s and that, while socialist uses of the text share its author’s class interests, those uses starkly illustrate the precariousness of first-phase communism. This precariousness, then, demonstrates that Permanent Revolution is necessary to secure the viability of communist societies against the structural vulnerabilities to which they are especially susceptible in the context of hegemonic capitalism, and thus that Socialism in One Country is a fatally flawed doctrine.

Lance Byron Richey

MarK/X After Marxism: Fernando Belo and Contemporary Biblical Exegesis

In 1974 Fernando Belo’s A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark combined Marxist and structuralist ideas to uncover the revolutionary political themes he claimed were encoded in Mark’s narrative. Although hailed at the time as a visionary exegetical strategy, it has been largely forgotten over the last generation. While some of Belo’s theoretical and political concerns are inevitably dated, his contributions to understanding both the social and political environment of first-century Palestine and how religious texts such as Mark’s Gospel operated within it merit our attention and critical assessment, both of which this paper will attempt to provide. I offer a two-fold discussion of Belo’s materialist approach to Mark in light of subsequent developments in both philosophy and Marxist social theory. First, I will outline and critically assess the theory of texts found in his discussion of the ‘Concept of “Mode of Production”’ which makes possible his exegesis of Mark as a subversive political text. Secondly, I will briefly explore his account of the specific ‘Mode of Production’ operative in first-century Palestine which Belo sees Mark’s Gospel as challenging, with special attention given to its theoretical underpinnings. I conclude that, while Belo’s work is certainly limited both by the state of theory and of the historical knowledge of his time, his ground-breaking efforts to read Mark’s Gospel as a subversive text remains highly relevant to contemporary efforts at materialist exegesis.

Jonathan Bernier

From Historical Criticism to Historical Materialism in the Study of Earliest Christology

Deploying Fredric Jameson’s model of Marxist literary analysis, this article explores the contradictions in developments of early reflections on Christology. Jameson distinguishes between three levels in such analysis: the immediacy of the political, the wider horizon of the social (class and ideology), and then that of history (now understood in terms of mode of production). The key is that texts never operate in isolation, for they become crucial negotiations – as imaginary resolutions of real social contradictions – of wider social and economic shifts. In this light, we may understand the tensions over different Christological models as dimensions of the ideological responses and contributions to the complex shifts in modes of production. Those models may be designated as follows: ‘personified divine attributes,’ ‘exalted patriarchs,’ ‘principal angels,’ ‘messiah,’ and Jesus as the embodiment of ‘divine agency.’

Book Reviews

The Bible and Critical Theory 8, 1 (2012)

The latest edition of The Bible and Critical Theory, now published in open-access format, contains the following mixture of essays.

Editorial

George Aichele

The Hidden City

I read the gospel of Mark’s kingdom language intertextually with Italo Calvino’s strange novel, Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo describes a collection of fantastic cities. This approach illuminates a different way to understand the Markan kingdom of God, for which that kingdom is neither realized nor imminent, indeed not eschatological at all. Nor is the kingdom a symbol. Instead the mysterious kingdom is comparable to (in Marco’s words) ‘a crack [that] opens’ and ‘all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly’ – and yet even that, as Calvino’s story implies, is but one of many possibilities.

Jeremiah Cataldo

Remembering Esther: Anti-Semitism and the Conflict of Identity

Reading the biblical narrative of Esther – a narrative giving way to the ritualized Feast of Purim – against more recent testimonies and accounts of anti-Semitism demonstrates common patterns in social, political, and religious responses to conflict. When studied carefully, these patterns support a common model capable of cross-cultural application. This model supports the fundamental thesis that anti-Semitism is not simply a belief but a conflict over identity that produces beliefs and behavioral patterns consistent with deep-rooted prejudices. Moreover, this conflict is typically an ‘absolute conflict’ disguised as an ‘institutional conflict’, terms that will be defined, and is usually triggered by perceived interruptions to institutionalized power. Studies of anti-Semitism must always include detailed understandings of both the identity of the perpetrator and the identity of the victim.

Fiona C. Black

Lamenting or Demented? The Psalmist-Subject of the Complaints and the Possession at Loudun

In an effort to investigate the poetic contours of lament as a consequence of subjectivity, this essay reads the lamenting subject in the Complaint Psalms against the backdrop of Michel de Certeau’s evaluations of the Ursuline nuns in the Possession at Loudun. The 17th-century nuns, possibly as part of a response to the major metaphysical crisis of a plague, began to exhibit signs of possession, and eventually an elaborate system of classification and exorcism developed around their illness. A major interest for Certeau, and for this essay is not, however, the actuality of demon possession, but the apparent creation, social control and management of alterity – in the nuns’ case, madness – in the psalmist’s case, (hysterical) lament. In the psalms, lamentation provides a means of articulating an alternative reality, one that has its own conventions and limitations. In this context, the lamenting utterance threatens to position the subject of the psalms as a place of siege; the subject fights to be heard above the din of ‘normality’ and the rigours of divine expectation. Moreover, his body is a contested site for enemies and illness, among other afflictions. On the other hand, though, the ultimate act of confession at the end of the complaints threatens to undermine his existence, to make him vanish into that very context from which he initially differentiated himself as a speaking subject. The essay considers, therefore, the psalms’ alternative reality as the locus of a balancing act between the subject’s complicity and annihilation. This, in turn, is pondered within the context of poetic discourse, which might be viewed as an impulse to showcase – and manage – ‘possession’.

Maia Kotrosits

Romance and Danger at Nag Hammadi

The story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts – a tale about a hapless Arab peasant who uncovers the buried secrets of early Christianity – has accompanied most scholarly and popular explorations of Nag Hammadi literature. As a colonialist relic, however, it is more than a quirky tale of the accidents of history. It represents and perpetuates the orientalist epistemological tropes that have since been fixed onto the individual texts themselves: seeking/finding, secrecy/unveiling (esoterism), and sexual taboo/sexual excess (asceticism/libertinism). This paper explores the resonances of this story with the history of Nag Hammadi scholarship, as well as with popular renderings of Nag Hammadi texts. It uses the recent cultural studies interests in affect theory to ask: what is at stake in casting what is called ‘Nag Hammadi literature’ as the romantic and dangerous ‘East’ to the Bible’s domesticated and rational ‘West’?

Kristian Mejrup

Dostoevsky’s New Testament: The Significance of Random Reading

The Bible was a lifelong companion for Dostoevsky, who often read it and sometimes annotated it. But what meaning lies in the marking of a text? The first critic to examine the markings in Dostoevsky’s Bible was the Norwegian professor in Russian literary history, Geir Kjetsaa. He did so in the early 1980s and wrote a book on the subject. This essay will discuss Kjetsaa’s method of reading Dostoevsky on the basis of the annotations. Kjetsaa’s analyses are intriguing but not immune to criticism, as too much focus on the markings tends to neglect the significance of the randomly read passages. After a short introduction (1) I will closely examine Kjetsaa’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s novels (2), and then add my own critical remarks (3). Finally I will compare Kjetsaa’s reading of Dostoevsky with theological readings of him (Romano Guardini and Karl Barth/Eduard Thurneysen). Unlike Kjetsaa, the theologians were unaware of the markings in Dostoevsky’s Bible. The overall question of the essay is, then: how do we approach Dostoevsky’s use of the Bible in the light of his annotations to the New Testament, and when numerous voices clamour to inform us how they should be read?

Book Reviews

The Bible and Critical Theory

The Bible and Critical Theory operated on a subscription basis from its inception in 2004. I was one of those who was very interested in reading some of the essays published, but was not prepared to pay for the privilege of getting access to them. Now, however, as Roland Boer and Julie Kelso explain here, the journal is being published in open-access format, making the material available to a wider readership, which was the editors’ desire from the start.

Here’s the blurb:

‘The Bible and Critical Theory is an exploratory and innovative online scholarly journal for biblical studies, published by the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar. The journal explores the intersections between critical theory, understood in the broad sense, and biblical studies. It publishes peer-reviewed articles that investigate the contributions from critical theory to biblical studies, and contributions from biblical studies to critical theory. The journal has an active series of book reviews, which are published as they are ready.’

Peter Barry on Beginning Theory

Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Beginnings, 3rd edn. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

I bought this yesterday having previously bought the first edition in 1995 and the second edition in 2002. I think it ranks as one of the best introductory overviews of critical theory available.

It covers the usual suspects of liberal humanism, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism, lesbian/gay criticism, marxist criticism, new historicism, etc., and does so lucidly with examples of how the approaches work in practice, as well as places to ‘stop and think’ to check one’s understanding along the way.

The second edition added a chapter on ecocriticism, acknowledging the burgeoning interest in ‘green’ approaches to literature, and added a chapter (an excellent brief treatment, in my opinion) on narratology as a branch of structuralist theory.

This third edition is also expanded rather than revised, and now includes a chapter outlining the story of recent literary theory in ten significant episodes, from the Indiana University Conference on Style in 1958 to the Sokal Affair in 1996. A second additional chapter provides a summary of some new ‘isms’ which have appeared since 2000 or so, not least at a time when a number of significant voices have been declaring that we now find ourselves in an ‘after theory’ period.