An Autobiographically Conditioned Antithetic Hermeneutic: What I've Been Studying, Part 3

Having come to the end of this project (cf. here, and here), I am convinced that Paul’s autobiographical statements are carefully designed, multi-dimensional, and often theological in orientation. I think they reveal something very important about the impact of Paul’s experience on his theology, and I would like to illustrate that by describing how Paul’s hermeneutics reflect one of the same fundamental patterns embedded in his accounts of his past and present life.

Francis Watson (Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith) has convincingly shown that the Pauline antithesis between divine promise and demand, between grace and obedience is a scriptural hermeneutic. Within scripture itself Paul detects two fundamentally distinct modes of agency. Paul resolves this tension not in a synergism but an antithesis which privileges divine promise over demand and its predicated human obedience. Though he notes that this hermeneutic is distinct, Watson does not speculate as to how Paul came to read scripture in this way, apart from general reference to the Christ-event.

Paul’s autobiographical texts, such as Gal 1.13-17 and Phil 3.4-9, supply the answer. Paul contrasts his life of zealous observance of the law, which made him into a persecutor, with the gracious revelation of Christ. This enables Paul to speak of his past in terms of “my righteousness,” a righteousness constituted in part on the basis of one’s observance of the covenant, verses “God’s righteousness,” one which, both because and in spite of one’s sin, is received as divine gift (Phil 3.4-9; cf. Rom 10.3[!]).

It appears then that Paul’s antithetic hermeneutic is grounded in a profoundly disjunctive experience in his own life. The experience shapes the theology; in a sense, we can say his theology is a form of autobiography. One could argue the reverse, that Paul presents his past/present as having this sort of antithesis between divine and human agency because it suits his purpose of reading scripture antithetically in the context of the crisis over circumcision, but this runs into problems. There were more conventional grounds on which Paul could have argued for his “law-free” (a bit of misnomer) Gentile mission, such as we find in Acts 15.14-21. Thus, given that Paul’s hermeneutic and antithesis is so fundamentally unique (even within the NT), the hypothesis that it is grounded in the particular narrative events of Paul’s call/conversion has more explanatory power.

Moreover, when we combine these insights of the hermeneutically and autobiographically conditioned nature of Paul’s doctrine of righteousness by faith, we can explain its relatively late appearance in Paul’s career. Observing that it is a scriptural hermeneutic helps us to situate it in the context of the crisis over circumcision of Gentile converts. Observing its autobiographical component helps us to relate it to the effects of the Damascus experience.

If Paul’s reading of scripture has this autobiographically conditioned antithetical shape, and not just his understanding of righteousness, then the same framework should also be helpful for describing Paul’s understanding of the election, plight, and salvation of his compatriots, the Jewish people. John Barclay ("Paul's Story," in Narrative Dynamics) has already begun to explore the relationship between Paul’s story and the story of his people, as told by Paul. I think it would be worthwhile to expand his investigation and to add to it an explicit scriptural-hermeneutical component. This would give me the opportunity to substantiate my thesis concerning autobiography and antithetic hermeneutics and potentially to shed new light on an old debate, the problem of “Paul and the Jews.”