NOVENSON. I open, unrepentantly, with the Pledge of Allegiance. Francis Bellamy, Christian socialist, wanted 'liberty, equality, fraternity' in 1892 and judged it too French and too utopian for his fellow school superintendents — this being the heyday of Jim Crow — so American schoolchildren got 'liberty and justice for all' instead. I was one of those schoolchildren, and I cannot help hearing Bellamy when I read Romans 6, which happens to be the only passage in the New Testament where ἐλευθερία and δικαιοσύνη occur together. Liberty and justice for all is a near-perfect summary of the strange state of affairs Paul attempts to describe in Romans 5 through 8: the phenomenology of moral experience on the part of immortal human beings. Watch what Paul actually does in Romans 6. Having painted himself into the diatribe's corner — if more sin brings more grace, shall we carry on sinning? — he answers no, and the reason it is nonsense is, as my children put it, science. Only three of the chapter's twenty-three verses contain an imperative. Paul does not, for the most part, instruct his gentiles not to sin; he explains the physics by which their doing so is prevented. Baptism — with Albert, here, against nearly everyone — is not about forgiveness at all; it is a ritual of metamorphosis. The immersed person dies with Christ, and 'the person who has died has been rightwised away from sin.' Henceforth she is, and will be, what the risen Christ is: pneumatic, incorruptible, altogether righteous — an immortal pneumatic being still, fleetingly, carrying a mortal body. A ghost in a shell, one might say — except that Paul's pneuma is material, in a Stoic-like sense, so more precisely: an angel in a corpse.
NOVENSON. Now the title's two nouns. Liberty, in the republican sense: the absence of domination by the arbitrary power of another. And here is the correction that this table's senior member will feel: the dominating power from which people-in-Christ are freed is Sin — never the law. There is a long tradition, especially Protestant, of speaking of freedom from the law; it is not Paul's idiom. The one time Paul says the law freed anyone, the liberator is also a law — 'the law of the pneuma of life in Christ Jesus freed you from the law of sin and death.' And the freedom itself is ironic: the freed are immediately enslaved to righteousness, to God. Freedom, in Paul's idiom, consists in being dominated by a benevolent force rather than a malevolent one. Justice, then: not everyday righteousness-in-the-law, in which one can be blameless and mortal, but the maximal kind — all the duties, performed effortlessly, ceaselessly, forever; robo-righteousness; the stuff the kingdom of God itself consists in, which the law rightly legislates and cannot effect. And 'for all': here I answer my own school, which has entertained the claim that Christ's righteousness is for gentiles only, Jews being already provided for. There are respects in which Paul thinks Jews and gentiles deeply, even naturally different. In respect of attaining eschatological righteousness and life, they are in the same boat. As debauched as Paul says gentiles normally are, and as decent as he says Jews normally are, they are all mortal — and mortality is to sin as fire is to smoke. Death comes for everyone. Or it did, until Christ bested death and rose to pneumatic immortality. Jews always had the promise of this liberty and justice; gentiles had not even that; in God's mercy all now have access to the thing itself — they can live the pneumatic life of the resurrected dead even now, during the short interval until the final ransom of their entire bodies. That — the moral life of the resurrected dead — is Paul's religious project in one phrase. And here is the hinge of my whole book. High-minded Jews and Christians, from Maimonides to Heschel, from Aquinas to Bellamy, have dreamed of and worked toward something like a world of liberty and justice for all. Paul did not dream of and work toward such a world. He simply announced that that world was now here — that is what εὐαγγέλιον means. Which entails that Paul's project corresponds neither to Judaism nor to Christianity as the everyday lived religions we normally mean by those terms — when John Barclay insists Paul goes beyond what any mainstream ancient Jew would say about the law, and Paula insists Paul does not straightforwardly underwrite Christian theologies, in a significant sense both are right. And the fact that, to most observers then and ever since, that utopian world was not in fact here is not a problem for Paul's own theology. It is a problem for the theologies built on his letters — which is to say, most Christian theologies to one degree or another. Not insuperable. But it requires honest and serious reckoning.
LUTHER. 'Freedom from the law is not Paul's idiom' — Professor, I wrote a book called The Freedom of a Christian, and you have just repealed its title with a footnote. But open the book before you burn it, and read its two theses together: a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none; and a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Dominated by a benevolent force — I preached your paradox first, and in German, and to peasants. So the marriage stands; only the dowry is disputed. What you have taken from me is the accuser. If the freedom is only from Sin and Death and never from the law's sentence, then tell me what silences the law when it reads the charges at midnight — for it does read them, Professor, whatever your lexicon says, and 'you will be an angel presently' has never yet quieted a conscience at three in the morning. Paul gave me 'no condemnation.' I ask whether your chapter still has a use for that verse, or whether the angel in the corpse has no need of a pardon.
NOVENSON. It has every use for it, Doctor — read one verse further. Κατάκριμα in Romans 8:1 is not 'condemnation,' the verbal thunder you heard at midnight; in the papyri it is the sentence, the penalty assessed — and Romans 5 tells us which penalty Paul means: death itself. 'No κατάκριμα for those in Christ Jesus' means the death sentence no longer applies to them. How? 'The law of the pneuma of life in Christ Jesus freed you from the law of sin and death' — the one place Paul expressly speaks of freedom from the law, and there one is freed from the law by the law. Ironic, don't you think? Your accuser is not talked down, Doctor; he is superseded — same law, same God, in a form suited to immortal sons who neither sin nor die. I would preach it at any bedside in Christendom: the one who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also. But your midnight itself I must decline as an exhibit, on the book's own rule: if what we want is a good historical understanding of Paul's letters, then modern religious experience, whether Jewish or Christian, is not admissible as evidence.
SCHWEITZER. And now let the record show what the footnotes show. Baptism a physical event beginning a real transformation — 'with Schweitzer,' the author writes, against the forgiveness-mongers. The obstructing spirits named 'what Schweitzer called the angel powers.' The summary judgment: Schweitzer basically right about the resurrection mode of existence, Stowers basically right about the physics — the two readings converging on a Paul who is, in the book's own astonishing phrase, an architect of transhumanism, on a mission from God to chaperone mortal humans through their transformation into immortal form. My own century reviewed me otherwise. Kennedy of Edinburgh called my reading 'this grotesque misconception of Paul's religious standpoint… an arresting instance of the results of consistent eschatology' — and the author of this book, Kennedy's successor at more than one remove, quotes the sentence in order to overturn it. For sixty years my Paul was accounted a fever-dream of Alsatian romanticism. The account has now been corrected, in footnotes, a century after the argument — and that this is how the discipline corrects itself is also a datum, gentlemen, and belongs in the history of the discipline.
HART. 'An angel in a corpse' — the finest sentence yet produced at this table, and I include my own. And mark, please, its provenance: it comes from taking Paul's physics seriously — material pneuma, celestial bodies, the σῶμα πνευματικόν — precisely the register the pious translators have spent centuries fogging into 'spiritual' abstraction. The chapter's people-in-Christ outrank the angels; the ἅγιοι are not 'saints' but the heavenly host they are joining; the mortal body is 'ransomed,' not escaped. All of this I rendered and was called eccentric. But I keep my earlier complaint, sharpened: the chapter proves that mortality, not Jewishness, is the human predicament, that death comes for everyone and Christ has bested death — 'rightwising of life for all people,' Romans 5:18, quoted without flinching — and then folds its hands one sentence short. If the corpse is what withholds righteousness, and the corpses are all to be raised, then finish the arithmetic, Professor. The book stops where courage would begin.
FREDRIKSEN. While David demands the author exceed his evidence, let me note where the chapter corrects me — since it does, by name, and fair is fair. I proposed that Paul's righteousness is the Second Table, the duties to the neighbor, and that the covenant already provides for Israel — righteousness through Christ being the gentiles' entrance, not the Jews' need. Matthew answers: the righteousness Paul means is not the everyday kind at all, and against that standard my distinction dissolves — decent Jews and debauched gentiles alike are mortal, and mortality is the problem the resurrection solves. I am not fully persuaded; the promises to the patriarchs were promises of land and seed and blessing, not a promise of physics. But I will grant what matters: he has made the disagreement inside our own school precise, and in this field precision is the rarest form of respect.