II.1
Blanton’s Displacing Christian Origins
In the context of the veritable discursive explosion among
contemporary continental philosophers on the topic of early Christianity (especially
of the Pauline variety), Blanton’s published dissertation, Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New
Testament, investigates the agonistic relationship between critical New
Testament scholarship and philosophy. Drawing parallels between the current
disciplinary struggles and those of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, Blanton argues that “a given depiction of earliest Christian
religion may…be read as a struggle between philosophy and New Testament studies
to secure a kind of disciplinary ownership of the early Christian legacy by
declaring its own realm of thinking to promise a superior mode of access to
primordial or original Christianity” (5). Following this realization, Blanton
wishes to establish nineteenth and twentieth century “media environments” as a
crucial topic for further research that will discuss the machinistic
reconstitution of religion following revolutionary technological inventions
(14). Blanton sketches out the territory with his skillful and inspired
readings of both philosophers, biblical critics, and those who straddled the
boundaries—Hegel, Strauss, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deissmann, and Schweitzer.
Blanton most effectively synthesizes his diverse research
interests in the first two chapters, which provide a detailed account of the overtly
Hegelian scholarship of David Friedrich Strauss. Strauss’s struggle to
constitute himself as a thoroughly modern recipient of Enlightenment
rationality manifested itself in the “secularizing” and “profaning” effects of
his biblical scholarship (25). Consequently, Strauss’s biblical scholarship was
an open attempt to expand the porous gap between the non-modern world of the
New Testament and his own Hegelian conception of modernity. To complicate
matters, Blanton asks the reader to consider Strauss’s struggle for modernity
as a pseudo-Pauline struggle between the dead letter of the Bible and the
life-breathing Spirit promised by mass printing (71). For Strauss, mass
printing, especially in the form of the newspaper industry, provided the
technological means for immediate connection, which he opposed to the corporate
non-authorship of the “foreign” biblical text (85).
“Authorship” is a guiding question for Strauss, and it
becomes a guiding question for Blanton as well, who magnifies the quest for the
author as a kind of doomed quest for modern integrity in the work of Strauss,
Nietzsche, and, later, Deissmann and Heidegger. Though contemporary
philosophical readings of Paul, having passed through the death of the author,
seem to focus on the meaning of community and identity in the context of world
capitalism, Blanton shows that the (absent) author was central to the debates
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is therefore no
surprise that Strauss, for whom the mass printing and newspaper industry were
heralds of a thoroughly modern and thoroughly secular community, attempts to
demystify the Bible by beginning with an investigation into its (often quite
dubious) textual origins; nor is it particularly surprising that Nietzsche, in
his rebuttal to Strauss, would also evoke the notion of authorship to upbraid
Strauss for his misplaced faith in the newspaper. Blanton writes, “Nietzsche
perceived the paradoxical connection between Strauss’s obsession with the
newspaper as a secularizing, enlightening force and Strauss’s kerygmatic
announcements of this secular community to come as a new (and industrially produced)
mythology” (103). For Nietzsche, this new mythology posed a significant threat
to the entire notion of literary authorship and modern individuality (101), the
loss of which would signal the extinction of the so-called “German spirit”
(81).
