But thank you for your comments; please visit again and lead us into other important nuanced discoveries.

peace.

I read with much surprise your post on Taubes (which is already rather old) and I would like to offer my two cents; albeit the whole blog is very interesting and wish I had more time to read through much more. Now down to business:

Scholem and Taubes parted ways already in the 1960’s not only for personal reasons but out of their variegating interpretations of Benjamin’s politics and history. I think it’s highly misleading to approach Taubes only from his lectures on Paul without the “Abendlaendische Eschatology” which unfortunately has never been translated, and also without the lectures on Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History that were delivered in 1984. The project of Nihilism as world-politics is of course a frame of the 19th century and derives out of a notion of history which in the postmodern political condition and reflected autonomy-contigency-historical consciousness is no longer tenable because it implies a critique of “techne” similar to that seen in Heidegger’s “die Zeit des Weltbildes”. This is no longer tenable if only because it constitutes a critique of modernity that leads the way into an unsolvable problem that can be somehow repaired by means of a catastrophic/apocalyptic view of history. You see in Hans Blumenberg book when he speaks about “Modernity in place of Eschatology: Modernity as Eschatology”.

Taubes’ greatest contribution to the field of religious history was his decisive step to place the beginning of all eschatological thinking not in the Church itself but in Paul and therefore throwing it back upon older Jewish sources no less than hermeneutically speaking finding these same antinomies in other places in the Jewish tradition; notwithstanding how disputable this could be. But coming out of the world that came to an end with the Nazi Holocaust, that what Hans Urs Von Balthasar called “the apocalypse of the German soul”, is very unlikely that Taubes would have seen his model of politics in the way you interpret it. That despair of mourning is the key virtue of postmodern thought and by tour de force its greatest failure because it adopts the same values that it rejected: the catastrophic end of rationality within reason that the Weimar Republic experienced. For example, you can find much better models for this post-apocalyptic politics or the reflection thereof in Herbert Marcuse, but more than anything you find in Guenther Anders and in Hannah Arendt.

I agree that Stout is wrong, along with many others… it is this refusal to look at theology as politics, the legacy of the Enligthenment. What is so problematic with them is the total instrumentalization of everything, including politics and therefore human life per se which leads to human superfluousness, whereby the common world disappears and therefore the political sphere turns into a realm of theatricality, but theatricality without virtuoso performance. The “black” vision of Paul and Taubes is doubtless aesthetic and that’s why it’s so important… because it relies on some basic tenets that enable trascending a model that has wiped out all possibilities thereof. Yet, the eschaton is a line, whereas time is not, nor is eternity… the three concepts seem to stand on different conceptual planes, and eschatology as politics means throwing the teleology upon the absolute present of St. Augustine, and also of postmodernity by the way… It recreates the immanentism which it’s trying to eliminate somewhere else. Taubes’ Christology is also disputable, and I think one should go better by Bloch in those cases… because Bloch rejected the theocracy (the kingdom polity/politics) but didn’t overlook the importance of political theology, if not see his book on Thomas Muentzer as theologian of the Revolution. I’m no Theologian of sorts, or was a little bit but no more. May you succeed in the seminar, and me in the meantime just in the research room

Ari
Between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

My question of Taubes’ exegesis, however, goes in a different direction. It approaches suspiciously the line of recent exegetes from Barth, Bultmann, and Bornkamm, to Hans Jonas, Ricouer, Kasemann and Wright. The problem may be seen in Taubes’ deliberation about visiting conservative Catholic jurist Carl Schmittt. He writes (I do not have the lecture with me, but quote from memory), I cannot judge the man CS, since as a Jew, we were all tempted to join the Nazi movement. It was only by an historical accident that we Jews were excluded. How enlightening! Remember, CS wrote as a legal theorist, in which he defines sovereignty as a decision for the exception. The key word is “decision.” Like CS, Taubes’ defines Paul’s theory of law as decision-based, and Paul’s mission as a decision (not “”conversion”) to preach the Jewish apocalytic Messiah. The philosophical heritage is Kierkegaard, and the image is a decision to “leap” into the abyss (nihilistic world). Unlike the Lutheran leap, in which the individual jumps, the Taubesian tumble is a collective movement of the community. Perhaps, Taubes’ tumble misses the all-pervasive, omnipotence of God? His fear of Spinoza’s pantheism may have pushed him too far to the other side. Just as the local Jews “excommunicated” Spinoza, Taubes assigns to the synagogue the power to excommunicate the Son of God.

The order decided on by Taubes is, first, all have sinned (guilt), second, decide to give up the ego (sacrifice), third, the Messiah establishes the righteous community. Taubes does not like the interpretations of Paul and the conversion experience, because this theology has potential to undermine his schemata. It might be possible “to be saved” without recognition of sin! That is, by demoting Jesus the Messiah to the creator of community, Jesus the Christ has little to do in the transfiguration of both the community and individual. What is the role of grace in Taubes’ interpretation of Romans?

Haunted by Heidgger, a Nazi who sided for a kind of intellectual passivity (what Pieper calls “the life of leisure;” and Arendt “vita intellectus”) and, interestingly, Junger and Schmitt, the first a military officier and, the second, a jurist, both actively involved in the National Socialist German Workers Party, Jacob Taubes balances the mystical (Albert Schweitzer) with the voluntarist (Bultmann) hermeneutic. Taubes seems to favor the mystical, yet always within the redeeming community (his critique of Buber’s I and Thou would bear this out).

I like your homiletic connection with Johnny Cash; however, it works only if you buy the argument that Paul, as Nietzsche describes, requires the acknowledgement of sin prior to belonging in Christ. Does Paul renounce Jesus when he says (in John 15:16), “You did not chose me but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit–fruit that will last.?”

Philip J. Hanson
http://faculty.ulv.edu/~hansonp/Index.htm
iblog: http://web.mac.com/hansonp/iWeb/Arizona%20Aridity/Welcome.html

I thought you might also be interested in a quote from Cash’s autobiography, Cash. When reporters ask him why he wears black, Johnny Cash quotes the same verse from the song “Man in Black” that you quoted. This is what he writes, “I wore the black, I sang, ‘for the poor and beaten down, livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town.’ I wore it ‘for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, but is there because he’s a victim of the times.’ I wore it for ‘the sick and lonely old’ and ‘the reckless whose bad trip left them cold.’ And, with the Vietnam War as painful in my mind as it was in most other Americans, I wore it ‘in mourning for the lives that could have been. Each week we lose a hundred fine young men. I wear it for the thousands who have died, believin that the Lord was on their side.’... Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don’t see much reason to change my position today. the old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we’re not making many moves to make things right. There’s still plenty of darkness to carry off.”

I thought you would appreciate the quote. I bet Cash would still be wearing black today for all those deaths in Iraq, and all the poor roaming the streets, made invisible by our secluded life-styles.

I like to be cautiously pessimistic about things and I think this is only realistic given where we are. Too much wild-eyed, pie-eyed optimists about ignoring some harsh truths.

About Stout… I don’t think this post is an accurate account of what I think about Stout’s Democracy and Tradition. Like I said above, I was pissed at him when I wrote this thing. I actually have great appreciation for his work because it really shifts the landscape of political theory and has the potential to move democracy in interesting directions. I would choose him over John Rawls any day. But, that said, I think Romand Coles gives you everything Stout has and more (see Beyond Gated Politics).

I definitely think you should post that bit you wrote on Hauerwas. And, like you said, definitely see where that new Cross Currents article takes you (I assume that’s the one you’re talking about—I don’t know of any others). It’s about time Hauerwas shows his debt to Sheldon Wolin. By the way, check out the piece Peter Dula and Alex Sider wrote on “Radical Democracy, Radical Ecclesiology.” Great stuff. But I’m biased—they’re friends of mine from church. They give a more generous read of Stout, and offer some interesting criticisms of Hauerwas. They also bring Stanley Cavell into the conversation about American democracy, which seems like it would be quite helpful. Cavell’s Emerson is a whole lot more interesting than what Stout has to say about “emersonian democracy”.