On the Glory That Is Indefinitely Deferred (Part 8)

V.

Synthesis—and Reflection

My detailed analysis has uncovered several fascinating linguistic and thematic currents in Rom 8:18-25 that serve to integrate the passage more fully with the letter’s surrounding sections and arguments, especially in its evocation of various Jewish motifs and narratives. Furthermore, I showed how Paul’s use of those Jewish motifs and narratives are used polemically to offer an alternative vision of ecology and anthropology to the state ideology, which brutally subjected nature to the originary fiction that empowers the sovereign. Finally, I showed how this passage, which is characterized by a warm, reassuring tone, actually works to defer the possibility of an ultimate resolution of the tensions that threatened the ecclesia. Paul’s genius, I suggested, was less in “solving” problems than in rephrasing the problem into an unassumable non-solution. Now, in these final paragraphs, I want to turn from reading this passage in what I take to be Paul’s context and produce a more open, self-reflexive meditation on the problems and uses of such a passage today, especially in the context of radical leftist politics.

Richard A. Horsley remarks in the introduction to an edited volume that Paul was “in but not of” the Roman imperial order,[i] and while it would be unfair to expect of Paul to fashion a coherent, mobilized resistance to the Roman imperial order, as much as modern readers might like him to, perhaps it is the liminality experienced by Paul that is reflected in his destabilizing solution to the problems of sovereign power and ethnic difference. Today, the contemporary left finds itself in a similar liminal situation, as its radical project has been subjected to the futility signified by “the end of history.” Thus, the contemporary left, as it undergoes its own crisis of identity, might find a mirror for its concerns in passages such as 8:18-25, and a possible way out, though the left must read Paul with a cautious and critical eye, if it chooses to approach this figure as an ally. Paul’s unconscious critique of the power of the secular sovereign is, after all, stabilized by theological appeals to the divine sovereignty of an intervening God, a fact that is unacceptable to the majority of the left because, as Paul clearly shows, such “certainty” can be crippling to the mobilization of collective action and resistance.

And yet Paul’s aim to defer resolution, which may be the only way to establish a universalistic vision, speaks volumes to a fragmented, internally disorganized left. That the solution to such disorganization is the awareness and acceptance of disorganization opens the possibility of a new universalism, founded not on claims but on action. For the left, or so the well-rehearsed argument goes, no longer has recourse to alternative, universalistic narratives to oppose the master narrative of world capitalism.[ii] The recent return to speculative universalism advocated by the “post-postmodern” left (including Badiou and Žižek) is at once a bold advance and a retreat from the terrifying and liberating condition of constructing a politics and praxis without reference to the now-defunct motivating force of the Hegelian Idee, which, such authors have argued, can no longer be experienced as constitutive of reality. Karatani Kojin, a Japanese Marxist philosopher, presciently diagnosed the situation in 1995 by evoking Marx’s critique of religion to frame the current debate on the crisis of the left: “Communism’s collapse, however, has not led to the total disintegration of the Idee, because Idee is, from the beginning, merely a Schein [semblance]…Although communism as well is a mere Schein, to criticize its ‘illusion’ means no more and no less than ‘to call on [people] to give up a condition that requires illusions.’”[iii] I have argued that Paul’s attempt at establishing an artificial sense of unity and direction brings with it a powerfully destabilizing claim in the form of radical hope. Paul’s hope took the shape of an eschatological awareness for impending radical change, in anticipation of which he craned his neck along with the enigma of creation. While he identified the source of this hope with the hands of God, the hope of a secular leftist cannot be displaced onto an actor outside of history. Instead, as Karatani insists, the loss of faith in such ideals must come with the call for the realization of those ideals: The hands that collaborate to make and shape history, therefore, will be human hands.

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[i] Introduction to Paul and the Roman Imperial Order, 19.

[ii] See, for instance, Alain Badiou’s own politico-philosophical reflection on the letters of Paul, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10.

[iii] Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, ed. Michael Speaks, trans. Kohso Sabu (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 187-188.

On the Glory That Is Indefinitely Deferred (Part 7)

IV.

Detailed Analysis

4.      The “inclusive exclusion” of the believers (v. 23)

This verse signals Paul’s shift from discussing the state of things in universalistic language to discussing the immediate experience of the Christian community; however, instead of forming a contrast, the experience of the believers mirrors that of the whole of creation, and the ecclesia finds itself groaning along with creation (or, perhaps, giving voice to the voiceless nature). Dunn, for whom the Spirit “defines the process of salvation,”[i] argues that this “groaning” is both “the result” and “expression” of the salvific process.[ii] Thus, the two groans Paul speaks of in this passage, the one rising from nature itself and the other inwardly intoned in the throats of the believers, are “of a piece.”[iii] This is because the division between the believing Christians and the rest of creation is not a perfect division. The boundary that separates them is absolutely contingent, and one could argue that, whether human beings are merely implied by the word “creation” or deliberately included, it is essential that the boundary itself is negotiable, since the liberation of nature depends upon the ability for salvific affect to traverse the boundary. Therefore, upon considering this verse, Ernest Best rightly observes, “If man [sic] is saved, then through him the universe itself might be saved.”[iv] If the ecclesia experiences exclusion from creation in the present time, then it is for the ultimate goal of total inclusion. The Christians are a strategic exclusion who, by virtue of the connecting currents allow and necessitate the liberation of all creation—they are an inclusive exclusion. The destabilizing and decentering effects of this arrangement can be further discussed in elaboration on the following two verses.

5.      Hope defers the ultimate resolution (vv. 24-25)

In the final verses of this passage, Paul inverts the comfort promised in v. 18 into a less definitively categorizable optimism that locates the source of comfort not in certainty but in a radical, collective uncertainty: “For in hope we were saved” (v. 24a). The ecclesia is not saved absolutely, but in hope. The codependent interplay between the past tense (“saved”) and the looking-forward (“in hope”) is what Dunn has called the “not-yetness” of redemption.[v] More fundamentally, once one acknowledges the inherent tension in this passage, between salvation (the believers experience the first fruits of salvation in the present) and the eschatological appeal through which salvation (and therewith resolution) is indefinitely deferred (the present becomes an indistinct meeting of myriad forces and activities, all of which are beyond the subject’s control or understanding), one can develop this tension into the dialectical movement that animates Pauline Christianity. For Paul, this dialectical tension is useful as a strategy that wrests the believers from any foundation from which to oppose him and divests them of individual voices from which to articulate alternate paradigms or conditions for salvation. There can be no human-guided resolution because no human being has been saved. What else to do but “wait for it with patience” (v.25b)?

“Conversion and baptism,” opines C. K. Barrett, “are not an end but a beginning.”[vi] Pauline Christianity, then, is a story without an end, a story with no ultimate resolution, and Paul’s method of storytelling is to magnify and multiply narrative tensions constantly through an endless series of again-begun beginnings. Thus, despite the longstanding consensus that Romans attempts to reconcile the Jews to the Gentiles, the process of reconciliation is more complicated than any reductive attempt at summary might make it seem. It is complicated by Paul’s foundational vision of community, which is located in a dislocative landscape of hope.

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[i] “Spirit Speech,” 85.

[ii] Ibid., 87.

[iii] Ibid., 87.

[iv] The Letter of Paul to the Romans, 98.

                                                                                                                

[v] Romans 1-8, 491.

[vi] A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 161.

On the Glory That Is Indefinitely Deferred (Part 6)

IV.

Detailed Analysis

3.      The narrative of creation (vv. 20-22)

These three verses can be so grouped by the implicit narrative they rely on and relate. The narrative is difficult to reconstruct chronologically because it takes place in the heterogeneous temporality that always accompanies messianic anticipation, yet it seems to follow a familiar progression: Jewett shows how the passage progresses in such a way that it recalls several major events (and styles) from the Bible, including the fall narrative (creation was “subjected to futility”), the exodus from Egypt (the creation hopes to be “set free from its bondage”), the wisdom tradition (“futility” recalls the “vanity” of all things in Ecclesiastes), and the prophets (the symbol of “labor pains” is a common motif in such literature).[i] In other words, there is a veritable compacting of the major touchstones of Jewish history into a few verses into which Paul skillfully weaves his own belief in the imminent culmination of that history.

Paul’s recounting of history obviously functions as more than a simple instructional device or rhetorical scheme. Laurie J. Braaten has published an enlightening study of the use of the phrase “labor pains” (sometimes translated as “travail”) with reference to uses of the same or similar words in the Septuagint to argue that the “subjection” of creation is not, for Paul, a “onetime primeval event” but is instead a “repeated occurrence”[ii] that is intricately “connected to the interplay between human sin and the divine response of judgment or redemption.”[iii] Moo has also highlighted the biblical background of Paul’s imagery here and convincingly points to Isaiah 24-27 as the likely lexical and ideological source of this passage; though Moo does not emphasize the repetition of nature’s subjection, he agrees with Braaten that Paul believed that once the source of ecological corruption (humanity) is addressed, creation, or nature, will be reverted to its original, pristine state.[iv] It is this sense of repetition that I wish to pursue and relate to Paul’s own eschatological expectation. Paul, I argue, believes that the eschatological event will provide the believers with a way out of this repetition, which for him as for his readers must represent not only an ontological conundrum but also a problem he confronts as a political mechanism that undergirds sovereign power.

As I have previously mentioned, Jewett points out that the ascendency of new emperors (and Romans was almost certainly written in such a context) was usually accompanied by celebrations that commemorated the rejuvenation of nature, a symbolic activity that explicitly tied the state of things to sovereign, worldly power. Thus, by yoking the repetition of political processes to the repetition of natural processes, the created order itself was “subjected, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it.” This is the hegemonic narrative that Paul is attempting to overcome by evoking fundamentally Jewish motifs. For, as Jewett goes on to point out, “Whereas the Roman premise was that disorderly barbarians and rebels caused the corruption of nature, Paul argues that all humans reenact Adam’s fall.”[v] In other words, Paul’s belief in history as a teleological process prevents him from accepting the perpetuation of a cycle or a reversion to a previous stage on the cycle—rather, the renewal of nature at the moment of the eschaton demarcates the cycle’s end, the way out of the Adamic cycle’s futility (and the futility of the nation-state), which human beings, along with nature, are currently doomed to reenact endlessly: Corruption. Suffering. Death. Decay.

Paul does not substitute a theological problem for a political problem so much as he uses each as a mirror for the other; as the following verse indicates, Paul’s ingenious solution (to both the political and theological problems) was the inclusive exclusion of the Christian believers.

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[i] Romans, 513-515.

[ii] “All Creation Groans,” 136.

[iii] Ibid., 147.

[iv] “Romans 8.19-22 and Isaiah’s Cosmic Covenant,” 89.

[v] “The Corruption and Redemption of Creation,” 31.

On the Glory That Is Indefinitely Deferred (Part 5)

IV.

Detailed Analysis

2.      The anticipation of creation (v. 19)

In this verse, the meaning of the word “creation” and the identity of “the children of God” whose apocalypse the creation awaits have been of the greatest interest to scholars and biblical commentators, and indeed, the interpretation of the entire passage must necessarily follow a thorough investigation into the possible meanings of these two elusive beings. For this reason, I argue that this verse is perhaps the most important one of the passage—it is certainly the most contentious—and it is the verse which requires the most careful deliberation. I will discuss the possible meanings of “the creation” and the implications of “the revelation of the children of God” each in turn.

Though Dunn has stated, to my mind authoritatively, “It is unlikely that Paul intended a precise definition” of the word “creation,”[i] the majority of modern commentators take it for granted that the word “creation” signifies only “subhuman” creation.[ii] Premodern exegetes, on the other hand, tended to offer more open readings: Origen, for example, believed “creation” refers to human, nonhuman, angelic, and inanimate beings, while Augustine believed “creation” simply refers to all of humankind, believers and nonbelievers alike.[iii] Their rationale was simple: in addition to the doubt of these scholars that Paul would attribute such faculties as “knowing” and “anticipation” to the nonhuman created order, vv. 38-39 in the same chapter include “angels” and “rulers” as part of “creation.”[iv] According to Olle Christoffersson, the understanding that “creation” refers exclusively to the nonhuman order came into prominence following the rise of the Catholic Church and the concomitant crystallization of Christian theology.[v] However, modern exegetes have pointed out that it is not inconceivable that Paul should take poetic license and anthropomorphize nonhuman creation by endowing it with the ability to feel and to know, since Paul likely saw himself as operating within a prophetic tradition that often personified “the Land” and symbolically attributed it a sort of consciousness (see, for example, Isaiah 55:12 and Hosea 4:3).

The work of such modern exegetes is exciting in that it strengthens the connection between this passage and Paul’s own Judaism. However, there is no reason to accept uncritically the dominant interpretation simply because it is dominant. Other interpretations are possible, and even helpful, for understanding the sedimentary meanings of the word “creation.” To my knowledge, J. Ramsey Michaels is the only scholar who has offered a serious challenge to the modern understanding of “creation.” He has argued that the “creation” (or “creature,” as he prefers to translate the Greek) to which Paul refers is, in fact, the human body, which ties this passage to the hope of bodily resurrection in 1 Cor 15 and anticipates the hope for the redemption of the body in v. 23 of this passage.[vi] Though this deemphasizes the Jewish roots of Paul’s argument, Michaels does open a more consistent reading of this entire section specifically and a more nuanced understanding of Paul’s beliefs about the bodily resurrection more generally.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I see no reason to ignore the prophetic tradition that Paul either consciously or unconsciously evokes in his personification of nature. Similarly, I see no reason to exclude humanity, especially unbelieving humans or, as Michaels has perhaps more convincingly offered, the depersonalized human body, from Paul’s consideration in his use of the word “creation.” In the final analysis, the interdependency of human sin and ecological fallout, which has been highlighted in recent articles by Braaten[vii] and Moo,[viii] necessitates a cognitive if not causative relationship between human action and ecological condition in Paul’s mind, meaning that humans are, at the very least, implicated by the word “creation.” Paul himself makes this clear by having the believers groan along with creation in v. 23. What is most important is that Paul’s understanding of creation is intricately tied to his Jewish context, and that his Judaic understanding of creation is necessarily framed in opposition to the imperial ideology that sought to link the natural world to worldly authority.

The identity of the “children of God” is generally glossed as the contemporaneous Christian community, and thus their revelation or apocalypse constitutes the final elevation or salvation of the believers—the continuation or conclusion of an already-in-progress process. Others consider the “revelation of the children of God” as the liberation of the concealed spirit from its corporeal anchor. Moo, for example, thinks that the revelation is the manifestation of a pre-existing Christian “true nature.”[ix] However, this reading is problematic, and I would counter Moo’s argument by pointing out that for Paul Christians do not seem to have a “true nature” apart from the eschaton. In divergence from the opinion of many commentators that this revelation is for Paul the coming-into-public of a now-private glory, I want to suggest that this apocalypse is nothing less than a coming-into-being in its own right.

I therefore agree with Susan Eastman, who, in opposition to the majority understanding that the revelation of the children of God will constitute the “public revelation of [the Christian believers’] now-hidden glory,”[x] suggests that the “children of God” may mean, or at least include, the nonbelieving Jews.[xi] Thus, this apocalypse of glory is much more than a public revelation of a currently concealed reality: “Whereas once the Gentiles were not God’s people, but now they have ‘attained righteousness’ and status as ‘sons’ (9:30), now the Jews are ‘outside’—they are standing in the place of those who are ‘not my people’ and thus are in the same need and assurance of divine mercy.”[xii] In the final analysis, “The ‘apocalypse of the sons of God’ begins to look like the full redemption of Jew and Gentile together, in fulfillment of God’s promises.”[xiii] If Eastman is correct, her reading would strengthen the connection of this passage (as well as the discourse on the Law that precedes it) to the discourse on Israel’s salvation that immediately follows it in chs. 9-11. While one must be cautious not to overstate or exploit the lexical similarities here, the proximity of this passage to the passage on the salvation of all Israel in ch. 11, which is there discussed as the culmination of God’s plan, allows each passage to inform one’s reading of the other.

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[i] Romans 1-8, 469.

[ii] See, for instance, Jewett, Romans, 511; Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, 514; Witherington, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 222. In “An Environmental Mantra,” Hunt, Horrell, and Southgate have pointed out the “infelicity” (to put it lightly) of referring to the natural world as “subhuman creation,” which reflects at the very least a damning theological or anthropocentric bias (549). I would add to this point that Paul’s own language, which simultaneously “humanizes” nature by ascribing to it human aspects and faculties and “dehumanizes” human beings by stripping them of their bodily signifiers and temporality, seems to resist such a reading.

[iii] Cited in Christoffersson, The Earnest Expectation of the Creature, 19, 21.

[iv] “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” Similarly, in Rom 1:20-25, “creation” includea humans as well as nonhuman beings.

[v] The Earnest Expectation of the Creature, 19-20.

[vi] “The Redemption of Our Body: The Riddle of Romans 8:19-22,” in Romans and the People of God, 111.

[vii] Laurie J. Braaten, “All Creation Groans: Romans 8:22 in Light of the Biblical Sources,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 28 (2006), 147.

[viii] Douglas J. Moo, “Romans 8.19-22 and Isaiah’s Cosmic Covenant,” New Testament Studies 54.1 (2008), 88.

[ix] The Epistle to the Romans, 512, 515.

[x] “Whose Apocalypse? The Identity of the Sons of God in Romans 8:19,” Journal of Biblical Literature 121.2 (2002), 263.

[xi] Ibid., 266.

[xii] Ibid., 270-271.

[xiii] Ibid., 272.

On the Glory That Is Indefinitely Deferred (Part 4)

IV.

Detailed Analysis

1.      Proclamation of the imminent revelation of glory (v. 18)

Verse 18 introduces the major topic of this passage, which one commentator has summarized as a discourse on “eschatological time anticipated in the present.”[i] Yet this summary is misleading since, for Paul, the condition of what has been referred to as “messianic” or “eschatological time” is not only anticipated in the present but overlaps with it and seems to participate actively in the shaping of events and attitudes: The Old and New Ages, as most modern commentators have pointed out, exist simultaneously, allowing elements of both aeons to be active during the transition.[ii] The eschatological framework of this passage must then be considered not only as reflecting a coming age which one awaits with ardent expectation but also as an authorizing force to be reckoned with in the present situation of the ecclesia and the Roman Empire.

The peculiar temporality of Paul’s realized eschatology leads paradoxically to a state of pre-determined indeterminacy, a theme that Paul will build upon in the following verses, in which history unfolds according to the telos of God but humans and institutions experience a loss of agency. There is a significant gap between the expectations the believers have of their God and the raw reality of their lived experience in “the last days.” Consequently, this verse holds within it both the recognition of the violent conditions of the present (“the sufferings of this present time”) as well as a uniting hope for delivery from such conditions (“the glory about to be revealed to us”) to the extent that the violence of the believers’ material conditions is minimized by the promise of that glory. Yet the comfort of this promise is tempered with the following observation: Though all creatures experience this suffering and frustration (which, in this verse, is not restricted to suffering “on behalf of Christ”[iii]), the promise of salvation seems available only to a select few. It is this tension that Paul develops in the following verses in an eschatologically informed attempt to defer the resolution of inter-religious tensions by exploiting the radical possibility inherent in the heterogeneity of messianic time.

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[i] Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 165.

[ii] See, for example, Ernest Best, The Letter of Paul to the Romans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 98; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 26; Dunn, Romans 1-8, 486-487.

[iii] Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, 511.

On the Glory That Is Indefinitely Deferred (Part 3)

III.

Form, Structure, Movement

Having considered the historical and literary context of Rom 8:18-25, it is now possible to discuss the form, structure, and movement of the passage.

Though Paul is vague as to his specific purpose for writing Romans, one surmises that Paul is writing in preparation for his visit to the churches, to establish a rapport with the membership (of whom few if any, it must be emphasized, were Paul’s own converts) while covertly constructing his authority and power.[i] For this reason, Romans is often referred to as an epideictic, or demonstrative, epistle, the principal purpose being to overcome divisions and foster a sense of collectivity[ii]—the divisions in the churches clearly would have represented a major threat to Paul’s power and authority, and the unity of the churches would have been in Paul’s best interest for practical reasons as well since he was expecting the assistance and support of the believers on his mission to the Iberian Peninsula. The passage under current consideration, which is marked by its use of first person plural pronouns “we” and “us,” appeals to a common history of salvation, and ultimate resolution in “hope” and “patience,” would seem to play into such a purpose of attempting to resolve or at least displace interreligious disputes.

Many modern commentators also emphasize the “poetic quality” of this passage,[iii] as distinguished from the surrounding, more involved (though no less affective) discourses on the Law and Israel’s salvation, with Witherington going so far as to say that in this passage Paul’s “prose style almost becomes hymnic.”[iv] Indeed, a straightforward reading of this text allows the reader to marvel at the literary character of the passage. As Paul shifts gracefully from the two long, multi-clause sentences in vv. 19-23 to the four sharply simple sentences in vv. 24-25, his subject matter and narratory style shifts from a micro-chronicle of creation[v] to a micro-discourse on hope. However, I have reservations about focusing on the literary merit of the passage without first committing to a thorough and rigorous investigation into its theological and political implications. Though Paul speaks to his readers with a different voice in this passage, to make that the basis of a facile and totally artificial distinction between generic modes seems to me to follow a strategy that acknowledges the conspicuousness of the passage in relation to the surrounding sections only to submerge it beneath those sections and minimize its importance relative to the rest of the letter. In the detailed analysis that follows, then, I want to focus on the way this passage represents the ideas of Paul. I will divide the passage into the following five sections and discuss each in turn:

1.      Proclamation of the imminent revelation of glory (v. 18)

2.      The anticipation  of creation (v. 19)

3.      The narrative of creation (vv. 20-22)

4.      The “inclusive exclusion” of the believers (v. 23)

5.      Hope defers the ultimate resolution (vv. 24-25)

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[i] Witherington, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 1-2.

[ii] Jewett, Romans, 42. Jewett himself prefers an adapted version of this thesis and calls the letter a hybrid form of the “ambassadorial letter” (44); Jewett’s variation takes into account the fact that Paul was not acquainted with most if not all of the members of the churches to which he is writing.

[iii] See, for instance, Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 404; Christoffersson offers a similar (but less theologically compromised) summary of the literary merit of the passage in The Earnest Expectation of the Creature, 28.

[iv] Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 221.

[v] See Cherryl Hunt, David G. Horrell, and Christopher Southgate, “An Environmental Mantra? Ecological Interest in Romans 8.19-23 and a Modest Proposal for Its Narrative Interpretation,” Journal of Theological Studies 59.2 (2008) for an admirable attempt to reconstruct of the implicit narrative of ecological collapse and restoration envisioned by Paul. The climax of this narrative, the authors suggest, is not the final adoption or revelation of the children of God—it is the liberation of nature from subjection to human whims!

On the Glory That Is Indefinitely Deferred (Part 2)

II.

The Context of Rom 8:18-25

Robert Jewett, in his magisterial commentary on Romans and in an article that deals specifically with the passage I am discussing, has argued most convincingly for situating the epistle in the context of Roman imperial ideology, as reflected in legally solidified, asymmetrical structures of power that Paul opposed. In the preface to the commentary, Jewett argues that Paul was attempting to overcome the “imperialistic competition” of the churches in Rome, “under the premise that the gospel of impartial grace shatters all claims of superior status or theology.”[i] In the article, Jewett points to Rom 8:18ff. as an instance in which Paul’s most basic conception of history and anthropology is fundamentally and radically opposed to that of the empire: In imperial Rome, beliefs about the rejuvenation of nature were tied to a cyclical construction of history in which humankind experiences a succession of aeons—from the Golden Age to the Age of Iron—a construction that emphasized the link between nature and sovereign power by periodically attributing the rejuvenation of nature to the ascendency of a new emperor.[ii]

Though I find Jewett’s analysis greatly helpful, I nevertheless think it is wisest to regard Paul’s critique of the imperial system as implicit and embedded in his arguments rather than explicit and overtly stated—and this is assuming Paul was even conscious of committing such a critique at all. For Paul wrote Romans during a transitional phase in the Roman imperial order. Witherington points out that the first years of Nero’s reign, during which time this letter was almost certainly written, were a period of relative stability in which the Jews were allowed to return to Rome after their expulsion by Claudius in 49 CE and the Christian community, made up of some Jews but primarily of Gentiles, faced less persecution than previously.[iii] Thus, a straightforward reading of the letter reveals that Paul was most concerned with the relationship between the Jewish and non-Jewish members of the church, which must have been strained or damaged by the expulsion from Rome or the subsequent return to Rome of some of the Jewish members. As evidenced in the text of Romans itself, there was definitely a Jewish community present in the churches of Rome, and a substantial one at that,[iv] and Paul’s audience, though primarily non-Jewish, must have contained a significant Jewish element, as the content and structure of the epistle reveals.

Indeed, in the larger context of the letter, the passage I am discussing is the meeting point between two major arguments that deal with the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. While the traditional understanding of this letter construed chs. 1-8 to be Paul’s fullest explication of the Gospel, followed by the tangent of chs. 9-11 and concluded with a series of miscellaneous exhortations, scholars after World War II have construed the emphasis of the letter differently, preferring instead to read Paul’s conciliatory tone in chs. 1-8 as a tentative recapitulation of common ground before arriving at the major issue in chs. 9-11, with the final chapters anticipating and attempting to circumvent whatever “ethical fallout” the letter was sure to bring.[v] This essay is working under the assumption that the most important section of the letter for Paul was likely chs. 9-11, and thus understands Rom 8:18ff. as specifically designed to prepare the reader for the argument in that section. Dunn points out that this passage, rather than being a superfluous or tangential digression into eschatology, is integral to the flow of the letter in that it masterfully concludes the argument of the first eight chapters, which deals with universal sin and Mosaic Law, and prepares the reader for the following argument in chs. 9-11 by evoking traditional Jewish motifs and language (especially suffering and future vindication).[vi]

In the more immediate context of Rom 8, a chapter that can be tentatively isolated by the references to the Spirit throughout it, Jewett’s outline[vii] shows that v. 18 is the second of two minor theses. The first thesis, 8:2, opens a discussion on the contest between the Spirit and flesh, which essentially restates in typological language Paul’s argument about sin and the Law in chs. 5-7. Verses 18-25 are immediately followed by an exaltation of the Spirit (vv. 26-27, sometimes considered together with vv. 18-25) and a concluding discussion on the status of the elect and the soteriological function of love (vv. 28-39).

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[i] Robert Jewett, Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), xv.

[ii] “The Corruption and Redemption of Creation: Reading Romans 8:18-23 within the Imperial Context,” in Paul and the Roman Imperial Order, Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg, London, and New York: Trinity Press International, 2004), 26-27.

[iii] Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 11. Witherington notes that it was unlikely that all the Jews were expelled from Rome as Acts and other ancient sources perhaps hyperbolically report (6).

[iv] For two apposite discussions of the makeup of the churches in Rome, see C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark Limited, 1975), 18-20 and Jewett, Romans, 72-74.

[v] Witherington, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 17.

[vi] James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1988), 486.

[vii] Romans, vii-ix.

                     

On the Glory That Is Indefinitely Deferred (Part 1)

[Full title: On the Glory That Is Indefinitely Deferred: A Reading of Romans 8:18-25]

¹⁸ I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. ¹⁹ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; ²⁰ for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, ²¹ in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; ²³ and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴ For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (NRSV)

I.

Introduction

Though James D. G. Dunn unequivocally refers to Rom 8:18ff as the “climax” of the first eight chapters of Romans,[i] the various attempts of scholars and biblical critics to arrive at an interpretive consensus have been largely ill-fated and unsatisfying. Olle Christofferson, in one of the few published monographs on this passage, lists several significant reasons why this particular passage has remained inscrutable: the unusual vocabulary, the stylistic incongruity and unclear relationship to the argument of the rest of the letter, and the debated religious background or source of the passage.[ii] This essay does not attempt to solve definitively any of the problems of this passage but rather will attempt to focus on dimensions of the text that I feel other biblical scholars have missed of insufficiently examined.

Modern interpretations have tended toward recourse to the theological rather than political dimensions of Paul’s thought.[iii] My reading, however, more or less dispenses with a theological rendering of Paul’s intention, though I recognize that Paul’s theology of the eschaton is important, and focuses on the startling social, political, and ecological implications of this passage in order to unlock some alternative meanings and readings. My reading of this passage is based on three arguments. First, I argue, against interpreters who see the passage as an unrelated digression, that this passage is intimately connected to the rest of the epistle, and it is integral to the understanding of the unfolding of Paul’s major argument regarding the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians. Second, I argue that Paul consciously or unconsciously evokes Jewish narratives and motifs about creation and the natural world as a mode of counter-hegemonic resistance to the Roman imperial order and as a covert, perhaps even unintentional, challenge to sovereign power. Third, I argue that while on the surface the passage appears to offer comfort and consolation, Paul also exploits the destabilizing effects of his (realized) eschatology to indefinitely defer the resolution of the tensions experienced by the churches in Rome. The radical potential of this passage is built into its structure and movement, which I will demonstrate over the course of my analysis and in a more open concluding reflection that considers the meaning of the passage today in the context of leftist politics. However, I will begin with a brief investigation into the historical and literary contexts of Paul’s letter.

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[i] James D. G. Dunn, “Spirit Speech: Reflections on Romans 8:12-27,” in Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, Sven K. Soderland and N. T. Wright (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 90.

[ii] The Earnest Expectation of the Creature: The Flood-Tradition as Matrix of Romans 8:18-27 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1990), 14.

[iii] C. K. Barrett, for example, focuses on how the passage offers consolation and encouragement. See A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1957), 165. Ben Witherington III, in Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 221, similarly argues, “What needs to be appreciated about 8.18-39 is that it reveals one of the most masterful dimensions of Paul’s theology.”

Nostalgia

Depart from the shifting threshold of presence that gathers time around itself, and face the void of a fragmentary memory.

Stare deep into the past and dwell there, in the absence of earth, as the last light fails and the rain extinguishes celosia heads.

There is no homeland and there is no place worth longing for.

The nocturnal abyss of crickets and the perfume of soot are our only conciliation.

There is no homeland, nor was there before.

August 3, 2012

Music journal, 5-6/2012

May-June

May 25. Beach House: Bloom. Beach House’s beautiful slow-motion music would make the perfect soundtrack for watching the earth slowly recede into the inky deepness of space. Bloom, album number 4 and by far the most sophisticated, is their best yet, leading me to conclude that even if somnambulist lead singer Victoria Legrand is responsible for much of the band’s mystique, it’s really the gauzy, haunting, but imminently melodious musical beauty that allows the album to coalesce into a singular, perfectly distilled vision.

June 2. Earth: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II. In five meandering, slow-motion instrumentals, the guitar, bass, cello, and very light percussion search for—search for but are necessarily incapable of finding—the silence of empty space, though what the four players ultimately settle for, a kind of subdued but uneasy melodicism, is reminiscent of the Dirty Three, if the Dirty Three were to play a session on many, many barbiturates.

June 10. Battles: Dross Glop. Worth-hearing remixes of Battles’ second album, but strictly supplemental.

June 10. Off!: Off! Though sixteen start-stop-start hardcore punk songs in as many minutes (actual runtime: 15 minutes, 44 seconds) doesn’t add up to an “album” using even the loosest definition of the word, the short length is perhaps the band’s wisest artistic decision. [MARGINALIA, June 11: After attempting to listen to 2010’s First Four EPs and this new one in a single sitting, I can safely say that spending much more than 15 minutes with these increasingly indistinguishable rants takes away from the novelty of four middle-aged guys who simply refuse to mellow.]

June 11. Julia Holter: Ekstasis. Though challenging and essentially esoteric, this album, Holter’s second, is an arresting and intellectually invigorating artistic triumph. Ekstasis is a devastatingly great work, indeed a masterpiece, that more than lives up to the incredible standard set by Holter’s debut, Tragedy, with which it shares its arduous perfectionism, innovative construction of instrumental and vocal passages, and, of course, “Goddess Eyes” (now expanded and divided into two parts). Of the two albums, Ekstasis is more immediately accessible due to a newfound (but by no means “conventional”) emphasis on lyricism and melodicism, showcased especially in the overlapping vocal arrangements of the album opener “Marienbad” and “Für Felix.” Holter’s mastery of sonics is always at work, particularly in the instrumental coda of “Boy in the Moon” and the unconventional, jazz-influenced structure of the nine-minute finale, “This Is Ekstasis.” This is one of my favorite albums of the last 5 or 10 years, even though it’s way too cool to care about how much I love it: “I can see you but my eyes are not allowed to cry,” she sings through a vocoder on “Goddess Eyes.”

June 17. Japandroids: Celebration Rock. If it is not remembered for the music, this album will surely find a place in the annals of Perfectly-Named Albums, at least. The first and last sounds you hear on the album are firecrackers popping and hissing in the starlight, and in between these apt bookends are eight firecrackers of a different, musical kind: orgiastic bombast of drum and guitar, accompanied by streams of equally bombastic Springsteenian anti-poetry that celebrates everything worth celebrating about the dumb simplicity of youth.

June 18. Killer Mike: R.A.P. Music. Make it stop make it stop make it stop make it st [MARGINALIA, June 18: Aborted listen, switched to new solo album by EL-P.]

June 18. EL-P: Cancer for Cure. Unmellowed and never one with a particular knack for subtlety, EL-P’s third proper solo album is a relentless, invasive, and eviscerating 49-minute slab of angst and outrage. The lyrics, some of EL-P’s most painfully direct, evoke an American politician undergoing psychoanalysis. As always, his scorching approach leaves the listener nary a chance to catch her breath, making even this, one of his shortest works, wearying.

June 19. Spiritualized: Sweet Heart Sweet Light. “Hey Jane” is probably a career highlight—it’s at least a good abstract for everything Spiritualized do, for better and worse. It’s not just a re-write of “Sweet Jane” or “Hey Jude” but a third song, somewhere between and below them, where Jason Pierce, the loving thief, has etched out a living.

June 29. The Tallest Man on Earth: There’s No Leaving Now. In which the American-sounding Swede, now married and, apparently, quite content trades in his trademark intensity and intimacy for a more relaxed, collaborative sounding album. But this description is misleading, imprecise: the Erstwhile Tallest Man on Earth (now asked to shrink and stand among others!) overdubs much of the added instruments this time around, creating an album whose music, once so self-consciously insular, tries (but fails) to capture the open, majestic freedom evoked by the lyrics. So the result is, disjointedly, somewhere between what he’s moving toward and where he’s already been. No wonder the mountains treat him like a stranger.

Music journal, 3-4/2012

March-April

March 10. Andrew Bird. Break It Yourself. Overlong because repetitive and repetitive because overlong.

March 16. BBU: bell hooks. Das Racist magpies who make sort of clever, sort of political rhymes. I mostly listened because of the bell hooks namecheck.

March 16. Matthewdavid: Jewelry. A solid, 20-minute download-only release from the Outmind guy. Like the weird Stones flip that opens.

March 24. Lambchop: Mr. M. I’ve never listened to a Lambchop album before this one, despite that fact that they formed, apparently, in the Reagan years and released their first official album in the Clinton years, but I dig the songwriter’s mellow, Cat Stevens-ish voice and his subdued, ironic vision of life and death just as much as I dig the soft musical accompaniment and clever string accentuations throughout the album. “Gone Tomorrow” is a great song.

March 28. Del the Funky Homosapien: West Coast Avengers [WCA D-Funk Limited] Mixtape. Del’s rapping with what seems to me to be more verve than he’s shown in years over some not bad flipped P-Funk samples, which bodes well for the second Deltron album, if it does end up coming out this year (I’d laugh, but I think the joke is actually on us).

April 3. s/s/s: Beak and Claw. An interesting experiment but the three artists—the rapper Serengeti, the indie symphonist Sufjan Stevens, and anticon. producer Son Lux—don’t quite pull off the synthesis they’re going for.

April 3. Grimes: Visions. This music—the first I’ve ever heard from this slinky Canadian with a poorly chosen moniker and a kinda wimpy voice, even though Visions is, by all accounts, her third album—exists in the sleepy netherworld between electronica and Cocteau Twins-inspired dream pop. Even though much of it seems slight, the songs still wrap themselves around you like a scarf around an exposed neck on a cold day. [EXCURSUS, Aug. 6: Where the hell did that sentence come from?]

April 4. Dirty Three: Toward the Low Sun. Even when they aren’t obsessively searching for new ground, the Dirty Three are as good as or better than pretty much everyone else. So it goes without saying that this album, which is shorter and tighter than the band’s last two with a greater focus on interplay and movement, features several stunning compositions, of which my personal favorite is an unrepentantly beautiful ballad called “Ashen Snow.”

April 4. The Shins: Port of Morrow. Vanilla indie pop about vanilla sex domestic life.

April 5. Mirel Wagner: Mirel Wagner. So this 23-year-old singer/guitarist (born in Ethiopia, raised in Finland) is sort of like a (lyrically) morbid and (musically and vocally) moribund version of the Tallest Man on Earth, drawing freely and equally from American folk and blues music and her own (seriously twisted) imagination. I wouldn’t want to be alone with her on an elevator, but jeepers! this album is intense—even the sort of cute song about riding a bicycle with her mother watching ends on a dark note, perhaps the darkest note.

April 5. THEEsatisfaction: awE naturalE. “Queens of the Stoned Age.” It was THEEsatisfaction that brought that seriously spaced-out, funked-up, jazzy soul/rap to the Shabazz Palaces album last year; they continue in the same vein on their first major album (various mixtapes and possibly worthwhile experiments are available on the duo’s bandcamp page). Just as blissfully weird (and wired) as Monae but earthier and perhaps too concise for its own good.

April 6. Homeboy Sandman: Subject: Matter. The first that struck me about this EP, released on Stones Throw, is that Homeboy Sandman—whether he’s spinning silly or abstract verses rife with wordplay to make Aceyalone blush or unloading serious social commentary infused with way more nuance than, say, EL-P—has both technical proficiency and range on his side, exuding more passion and vigor than most rappers five or ten years younger than him can muster (turns out he’s in his early 30s); and, after taking the trouble to dig up his first albums, the second thing that struck me is that he’s only getting quicker, brighter, leaner.

April 9. Serengeti: Kenny Dennis EP. What would it be like for the uninitiated to listen to this? I made up my mind to love it upon hearing the hook of the first cut (“Rib tips / rib sandwiches / and chicken wiiiings!”), but I imagine there are those who will struggle through its sixteen glorious minutes, squinting as if hearing an inside joke from which they are excluded. [EXCURSUS, August 6: Those who identify with the latter category would be well advised to start with Serengeti’s masterful Dennehy and work their way simultaneously forward and backward from there.] Serengeti includes some new biographical tidbits and Kenny’s sympathetic take on the Steve Bartman fiasco.

April 9. Del the Funky Homosapien: West Coast Avengers [WCA Limited II Fela] Mixtape. Second mixtape of the year has Del doing to Fela Kuti horns what he did to the P-Funk samples earlier this year; the lyrical well is noticeably drier on this one.

April 21. Willis Earl Beal. Acousmatic Sorcery. A guy lucky to have anyone hyping him; he has a strong voice but is musically and lyrically inept.

Music journal, 1-2/2012

[This and following posts in this series were extracted from my diary; some have been revised or cleaned up to read better on the blog. I’ll only be posting reflections on 2012 albums.]

January/February

January 31. Leonard Cohen: Old Ideas. The titular “ideas”—vis., God, sex, love, death—are old in every sense of the word, inasmuch as these well-worn signifiers have long since stopped signifying much yet continue to be the primary concerns of this age. They are also the very themes that have followed Cohen (or that Cohen has attempted to follow) throughout his long career, though, all the same, there aren’t any New Insights into the Old Ideas—the lyrics seem familiar and don’t necessarily rank with Cohen’s best. Instead I focus on the album’s true drawing power, which is in the performance, both vocally (the septuagenarian’s cracked and creaking voice has never sounded so appealing and, dare I say, dapper) and musically (these tracks glisten and pop with much more imagination than Cohen’s last few studio efforts).

February 5. Gonjasufi: MU.ZZ.LE. Can’t believe the guy needed the Gaslamp Killer to ground him!

February 5. Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory. So they listened to Fugazi growing up but ultimately sided with Radiohead’s suburban ennui, I guess.

February 17. Alcest: Les voyages de l’âme [Journeys of the Soul]. Alcest make metal that might actually be worth listening to because they don’t really make “metal” music exactly (which, in its “pure” form, is aesthetically repellant and, let’s be honest, politically reactionary). As many critics have noted, this is clearly closer to early 90s shoegazing: there are no guitar solos (thus emphasizing layering and interlocking harmonies), most of the vocals are sung and sunk low in the mix (thus making the occasional growl or howl sound Dionysian rather than totalitarian), and a haunting sadness hangs over the proceedings, which is deeper and more pointed than black metal’s well-noted obsession with decay and decomposition. And yet…

February 17. Burial: Kindred EP. While last year’s Street Halo offered such subtle variations on a theme that the variations only registered to the most acute listener, Kindred actually does recognizably break with the musical techniques of previous Burial releases, even though you wouldn’t mistake these three extended tracks, extended toward but never reaching the point of collapse, for anyone else working in electronica today. And for that I’m thankful, for that I listen repeatedly.

February 19. Of Montreal: Paralytic Stalks. I don’t want to insult the weighty abstractness that (pop songsmith/self-styled intellectual) Barnes is shooting for here, but this album borders on listenability!

February 21. The Caretaker: Patience (After Sebald) and Extra Patience (After Sebald). Given that a film’s soundtrack was the original inspiration for Kirby’s entire Caretaker project, it’s a surprise that it took this long for someone to commission him to do a soundtrack (and how perfect is it that it’s for a project on W. G. Sebald, perhaps the greatest European writer on memory and oblivion?). But it’s anything but surprising that the result should be such a breathtaking and haunting meditation on creation and memory, conveyed through treated samples of Schubert’s Wintereisse cycle that tragically fall apart somewhere along the journey between the stereo speakers and the ears. [EXCURSUS, Aug. 6: The bonus EP, Extra Patience (which was made available for free on the guy’s bandcamp), a selection of outtakes so subtle that they barely register, is the perfect atmospheric companion piece.]