A Materialism for the Masses by Ward Blanton

Author:Ward Blanton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: REL051000, PHI019000, Religion/Philosophy, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-02-25T05:00:00+00:00

VICISSITUDES OF BEATIFICATION

To articulate the full irony of this situation, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the carefully organized and ploddingly elaborated Christian historiographical conservatism of Theodore Zahn, whose approach—strangely enough—ends up effectively being repeated by Foucault at the end of the published History of Sexuality. As a staunch German defender of a late nineteenth-century Christian orthodoxy against the inroads of “critical” modern scholarship on the New Testament, Zahn became the darling of an English biblical scholarship that often imagined itself called to use empirical research to defeat unbelieving and abstruse German theorizing about religion and culture. In a preface to the 1899 translation of Zahn’s Apostolic Creed, for example, the English translators write:

It is too often taken for granted that the trend of modern criticism is destructive of the ancient literal acceptation of the Creed which we revere as the faith of our fathers, and as the faith which we ourselves confess in our daily prayers…. At this critical moment it is a fact of great importance that loyal churchmen should be able to claim Professor Theodor Zahn as an ally in the great campaign…. The manly straightforwardness of the faith, expressed in the following pages, will commend itself to “all who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity.”44

A comparable but more famous English ally of Zahn in the battle against the influential Tübingen school of biblical interpretation was J. B. Lightfoot, perhaps the most influential English New Testament scholar of the nineteenth century. As in other ways, Lightfoot joined Zahn in attempting to defuse and defer a thinking of the (Christian) apostle that would emerge by a sustained search for similarities at work between Paul and the Stoics. On one occasion, for example, anxious about close verbal and thematic similarities between Seneca and Paul, Lightfoot wrote: “Did St Paul speak quite independently of the Stoic imagery, when the vision of a nobler polity rose before him, the revelation of a city not made with hands, eternal in the heavens? Is there not a strange coincidence in his language—a coincidence only more striking because it clothes an idea in many respects very different?”45

Lightfoot and Zahn will be united in the force and beauty of beatification, that aura of protective sheltering of their apostle from the consideration of the common which drives comparative thought. In Lightfoot the move toward sublimation, exceptionalism, or the general refusal of comparisons returns when, again struck by comparative similarities between Paul’s letter to the Philippians and the writings of Seneca, Lightfoot finally rhapsodizes: “Here again, though the images are the same, the idea is transfigured and glorified. At length the bond of coherence, the missing principle of universal brotherhood, has been found. As in the former case, so here the magic words en christō have produced the change and realised the conception. A living soul has been breathed into the marble statue by Christianity; and thus from the ‘much admired polity of Zeno’ arises the Civitas Dei of St Augustine.”46 Paul as the

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