Meeks, Writings, Part 6

Notes on Meeks, Writings, Part VI: "Pauline Christianity and Judaism," 321-360

Meeks notes a twentieth-century consensus: "Paul has to be understood as a Jew and a Hellenist, and both his Jewishness and his Hellenism were transformed by his Christianity" (323).
Martin Buber, "A New Kind of Faith" (1951), 324-334.

Paul betrays a "Gnostic view of the world" (330). God does not merely permit evil; rather, "God, in creating man [sic], inflicted him [sic] with a 'flesh', in which 'nothing good dwells' [Romans 7] (v. 18) and the consequence of which that each man [sic] does the evil which he [sic] does not will (v. 19)" (330).
"'He who believes can experience no miracle. During the day one does not see any stars'. This is the nature of the Jew's security in the dark, one which is essentially different from that of the Christian. ... The unredeemed soul refuses to give up the evidence of the unredeemed world from which it suffers, to exchange it for the soul's own salvation. It is able to refuse, for it is safe" (333).
distinction between Emunah and Pistis (333)

Leo Baeck, "Paul's Romanticism" (1938), 334-349

there are two dominant types of piety/religion: classical and romantic
"These two religions are Judaism and Christianity. In essential respects they confront each other as the classical religion and the romantic religion" (334).
"romantic" describes something "'which treats sentimental material in phantastic form'" [quoting Frederich Schlegel] (334)
"In this ecstatic abandonment, which wants so much to be seized and embraced and would like to pass away in the roaring ocean of the world, the distinctive character of romantic religion stands revealed -- the feminine trait that marks it. There is something passive about its piety; ... it wants to be seized and inspired from above, embraced by a flood of grace which should descend upon it to consecrate it and possess it -- a will-less instrument of the wondrous ways of God. When [Friedrich] Schleiermacher defined religion as 'the feeling of absolute dependence,' he condensed this attitude into a formula" (336).
"Romanticism therefore lacks any strong ethical impulse, any will to conquer life ethically" (336).
"[Paul] must be credited with one achievement -- and this single achievement was of world-historical significance and truly something great -- that he carried living Jewish ideas into the mysteries which even then commanded the allegiance of a whole world. He knew how to fuse the magic of the universal mysteries with the tradition of revelation of the secrecy-wrapt Jewish wisdom. Thus he gave the ancient romanticism a new and superior power -- a power taken from Judaism" (339).
"Finally he had perceived an answer. ... Alongside the one God before whom the gods of the pagans were to vanish, it now place the one redeemer, the one savior before whom the saviors of the nations could sink out of sight .... Thus he experienced it: paganism, with its deepest aspirations and thoughts, was led to Judaism; and Judaism, with its revelation and truth, was bestowed on the pagans, too." (340)
"The salvation that comes through faith is in no sense earned, but wholly received; and it comes only to those for whom it was destined in the beginning. ... Man [sic] is no more than the mere object of God's activity, of grace or of damnation ...." (342)
"This faith is therefore decidedly not the expression of a conviction obtained through struggle, or of a certainty grown out of search and inquiry. ... True knowledge is not worked out by man [sic] but worked in him [sic]; man [sic] cannot clear a way toward it; only the flood of grace brings it to him [sic] and gives him [sic] the quintessence of knowledge, the totality of insight. Knowledge here is not what instructs but what redeems, and it is not gained by thinking but given in faith; it goes with the consciousness of absolute dependence." (343)
"Sooner or later, every romanticism demands the sacrificium intellectus, the sacrifice of the intellect. Here, too, the best commentary for Paul is found in Luther's words: 'In all who have faith in Christ,' he says, 'reason shall be killed; else faith does not govern them; for reason fights against faith.'" (344f)
"...[I]t is not faith in the challenging, commanding law of God, but merely in the gift of divine grace. ... The only activity of the genuine romantic is self-congratulation on his [sic] state of grace." (345)
"One might characterize the Pauline religion in sharp juxtapositions: absolute dependence as opposed to the commandment, the task, of achieving freedom; leaning as opposed to self-affirmation and self-development; quietism as opposed to dynamism. There the human being is the subject; here, in romantic religion, the object. The freedom of which it likes so much to speak is merely a freedom received as a gift, the granting of salvation as a fact, not a goal to be fought for. It is the faith that does not go beyond itself, that is not the task of life; only a 'thou hast' and not a 'thou shalt.' In classical religion, man [sic] is to become free through the commandment; in romantic religion he [sic] has become free through grace." (345)
"Romantic religion is completely opposed to the whole sphere of existence with which the social conscience is concerned." (346)
"Hence romantic religion also lacks any inner compulsion to approach political and economic life in order to make it more ethical and to drive it forward. Its indifference toward any earthly upward tendency has always made it easy for romantic religion to defend submission to every earthly yoke, even to preach it. From the Pauline exhortation, 'Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers,' one has always and with the greatest of ease got to the point of first tolerating every despotism and of then soon consecrating it. This Pauline doctrine, too, was taken especially seriously by Luther and those who followed him. Consider the silent coldness with which the Protestant Church of Germany endured, for example, serfdom and traffic in human beings." (347)

Hans Joachim Schoeps, "Paul's Misunderstanding of the Law" (1959), 349-360

"Paul deduces from his faith that the Messiah has come in the person of Jesus the conclusion: 'Christ is the end of the law' (Rom. 10:4). The validity of the law as a divine way of salvation has finished since the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which proves both his Messianic status and the inbreak of the last age. ... From the standpoint of rabbinic thought this inference is obvious and is already drawn by the Amora of the 4th generation, R. Joseph bar Hiyya." (349)
"But the Pauline inference that the law, which could not prevent universal sinfulness, and on the basis of which no man [sic] could be justified by his works, is a law unto death (Rom. 8:2-3; Gal. 3:21) is one which no Jew could draw." (351)
"Ch. 7 [of Romans] is not autobiographical, nor even rhetorical, but is to be understood symbolically as a description of the life of all Jews .... [It] represents in the first-person form a phenomenological account of Adamic man [sic] under the law, judged from the standpoint of Christian experience. ... Beyond this the chapter is intended to describe the crisis of the legalistic attitude as experienced subjectively by Paul. Thus here the abrogation of the law is developed not from an eschatological basis but from the experience of sin. In his argument Paul goes far beyond the preaching of Jesus and the synoptic tradition, but has many rabbinic parallels." (351f)
citing Rabbinic and apocalyptic writings, ... "Paul's doctrine of sin was not unusual but indeed typical of his time." (354)
Paul's only solution to the conflict, however, is faith in JC. "Here in fact we come upon a real opposition, because the Pauline doctrine must be deemed erroneous from the standpoint of Biblical theology." (354)
"Paul, however, arrived at the fundamental conviction that man [sic] is basically incapable of doing the will of God. We see here a singular maiming of the will -- even of the will of recognition -- in the apostle, who apparently does not know the power which resides in t'shuvah [repentance] which according to Jewish belief of all ages is able to break the mastery of sin." (354)
"The dualism which so strongly characterizes Pauline thought: flesh-spirit, sin-righteousness, etc. ... is eschatological in structure, and in the last analysis is based on his fundamental dualistic position: the aeon of the law -- the aeon of Christ. ... If then the Mosaic law whose validity was limited temporarily could be shown to be no longer the divinely appointed way of salvation, if Christ as the end of the law and the content of the new covenant could be shown to have taken its place, then the legal principle of life through obedience to the Torah could be replaced by the new principle of life through faith in Christ." (355)
Paul failed "to appreciate the berith [covenant] as the basis of the fulfilling of the law ...." (357)
"In Hebrew, both Biblical and post-biblical, ... the Israelite berith has not only the significance of an order of grace, of divine institution, but also that of a covenantal charter, the determination of statutes and laws to govern the life of the Israelite people." (359)
Paul relied upon the LXX reading, in which berith was translated by diathêkê. Paul understood diathêkê to refer to "a one-sided declaration of the will of God, an arrangement which God has made and authorized. ... Because Paul had lost all understanding of the character of the Hebraic berith as a partnership involving mutual obligations, he failed to grasp the inner meaning of the Mosaic law, namely, that it is an instrument by which the covenant is realized. Hence the Pauline theology of law and justification begins with the fateful misunderstanding in consequence of which he tears asunder covenant and law, and then represents Christ as the end of the law." (360)