St Paul and Philosophy

This is an incredibly fresh understanding of the philosophy underlying and implied in Paul’s letters. By bringing the Pauline writings into dialogue with their philosophical interpreters and misinterpreters of later dates, Olivier Boulnois transposes Paul’s thought into different keys and allows us to explore its profundity and resonance. * George van Kooten, Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge *

It is fascinating to see how this superb and deep, French, philosophical analysis of Paul, which is steeped in French and German philosophy and theology, fits with the latest developments in English-speaking scholarship on Paul within Judaism. This is mandatory reading

* Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Professor Emeritus, University of Copenhagen, author of Paul and Philosophy (2003) *This remarkable work offers a strikingly lucid, thoroughly argued intervention in the growing recent philosophical reception of St. Paul’s original letters. Yet rather than belaboring once again the apostle’s apparent anti-Judaic antithesis between Mosaic Law and Christian love, and instead of revisiting Paul’s presumed anti-philosophical rejection of Greek Logos in almost every aspect, Olivier Boulnois phenomenologically minutely describes and genealogically meticulously reconstructs what being Jew-Greek or Greek-Jew may have actually meant for this earliest representative of genuine Christian theology. What emerges in unapologetically theoretical and practical terms is this early Christian life and thought’s enduring essence, as it still speaks to us. * Hent de Vries, Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities, New York University, and co-editor of Paul and the Philosophers. *‘There has been something of a cult of Paul and Philosophy in recent years. In this book, Olivier Boulnois contributes to the discussion a rather more sober and philologically-based assessment. For him, Paul was trying to articulate a new form of life focused around faith, hope and charity that corresponded to the unique event of the arrival of a Messiah who called into question not just the Greek naturalistic past, but also the Jewish legalistic and prophetic legacy. From henceforth, we are all to become ‘messianic’. This, for Boulnois, is the phenomenological ‘essence’ of Christianity, with priority over both theological and ontological reflection. Such a perspective also rules out any overly political readings which would either absolutize the coercive power of the state, or condemn it as demonic. Rather, for Paul, we remain until the eschaton in an ambivalent and confused transition from law and nature to the messianic condition of charity attained through grace. Boulnois’s reading is controversial and illuminating. This book will renew the debate about Paul as a decisive thinker.’ * C. J. C. Pickstock, Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge *

Olivier Boulnois is Full Professor (Directeur d’Études) at l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, France.

Andrew Sackin-Poll is a doctoral researcher in the French department at the University of Cambridge. He has translated works by Jean-Louis Crétien, Emmanuel Falque and Michel Henry.