Paul’s Interpreters Interpreted by Schweitzer

Here is a little review of Albert Schweitzer’s Paul and His Interpreters. I don’t have the book (I borrowed it from the library) so I can’t put in page numbers, etc. It was interesting to read.

Scwheitzer is not really attempting to deal with Paul �that is reserved for The Mysticism of Paul. Here he is simply reviewing the differing approaches to Paul. It is obvious that none of them wholly commend themselves to him, though Grotius, Baur & Lipsius seem like the most worthwhile so far. The difficulty seems to revolve primarily around the understanding of Paul with regard to justification and sanctification. Paul seems to have a juridical aspect and a physico-ethical or mystico-ethical aspect, but how do they combine? Complicating the issue are subsidiary questions such as Paul’s relation to the other apostles, the Old Testament, Jesus Himself and then the relationship of later theology to Paul. Schweitzer is obviously against the Reformation, as he thinks their exegesis twisted Scripture. But in an interesting passage he confesses if not his own at least the liberal scholars lack of understanding of Paul:

The odd thing is that they write as if they understood what they were writing about. They do not feel compelled to admit that Paul’s statements taken by themselves are unintelligible, consist of pure paradoxes, and that the point that calls for examination is how far they are thought of by their author as having a real meaning, and could be understood in this light by his readers. They never call attention to the fact that the Apostle always becomes unintelligible just at the moment when he begins to explain something; never give a hint that while we hear the sound of his words the tune of his logic escapes us. What is his meaning when he asserts that the law is abolished by the death of Jesus�according to other passages, by His resurrection? How does he represent to himself the process by which, through union with the death and resurrection of the Lord a new creaturehood is produced in a man, in virtue of which he is released from the conditions of fleshly existence, from sin and death? How far is a union possible between the natural man, alive in this present world, and the glorified Christ who dwells in heaven; and one, moreover, of such a kind that it has a retrospective reference to His death? The authors we have named [Reuss, Weiss, Pfleiderer, Holsten, Renan, Sabatier, M�n�goz, Weizs�cker] do not raise questions of this kind. They feel no need to trace out the realities which lie behind these paradoxical assertions. They take it for granted that Paul himself has explained has himself explained his statements up to a certain point�so far, in fact, as this is possible in the world of feeling to which religion belongs. This self-deception is made the more easy for them by the fact that they are accustomed to clothe their own religious views in Pauline phraseology, and consequently they come to treat as the authentic logic of Paul, arguments which they have unconsciously imported into their account of his teaching. They fail to reckon with the possibility that the original significance of his utterances may rest on presuppositions which are not present to their apprehension and conception. For the same reason they all more or less hold the opinion that what they have to do with is mainly a psychological problem. They assume that the Pauline system has arisen out of a series of reflexions and conclusions, and would be as a whole clear and intelligible to any one who could succeed in really thinking himself into the psychology of the rabbinic zealot who was overpowered by the vision of Christ on the road to Damascus.

While the point about not understanding Paul precisely because of the custom of using Paul’s language was keen, and while one does not doubt that his general criticism of the authors in question is correct, it does rather tend to cross the mind that perhaps Paul is not so opaque to everyone as he is to Schweitzer. He remarks of these same works, “The welcome which these authors’ works received from their contemporaries shows that the latter saw in them an advance in the knowledge of Paulinism. They felt them to be satisfactory. That only means that the readers’ presuppositions and requirements lay within the same limitations as those of the authors.” Again a keen general point; yet it is also possible that either in those work, or those (more likely in my estimation) from a Reformed perspective some real knowledge is gained of Paulinism, which Schweitzer does not appreciate precisely because he lacks the correct presuppositions.

He grumbles about the lack of attention paid to Pauline parallels in Enoch, Apocalypse of Baruch, Apocalypse of Ezra and to a lesser extent in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. A summarizing criticism of the Pauline studies from Baur to Holtzmann is that the “claims of Late Judaism on Paul were therefore taken to be discharged when his Rabbinic dialectic and exegesis, and to a certain extent his eschatology also has been ascribed to it.”

It is interesting that he and other scholars are constrained to admit Paul’s genius, while still reflecting on the “verbal comparison and contrast of passages which he practises, and the illogical and fantastic reasoning which appears in his arguments” as always having been “distasteful to theological science.”

Everling’s exposition of the Pauline doctrine of angels and demons is thought-provoking. Schweitzer gives it in these words:

In the result it appears that the Pauline statements about angelology and demonology have not sprung from his own imagination, but all have their earlier analogues in the Late-Jewish theology, or at any rate can be understood as inferences from the conceptions there laid down It further appears that his statements stand in systematic connexion and mutually supplement one another. In its main lines the Pauline doctrine of the angels shows us the following picture. Spiritual beings who, in accordance with the hierarchic arrangement adopted in Late-Jewish theology, are divided into various classes, played a prominent part at the giving of the law. From that time forward they acted as overseers of the chosen people, and also as the real powers behind the gods of the heathen. By the death and resurrection of Christ their power has been in principle abolished, although it continued to be still in some way exercised upon those who offer sacrifices to idols or submit themselves to the law. Believers in Christ, however, stand over against them as a class of men who are liberated from their sway, and who possess a wisdom which understands better than their own the great events in which the history of the world is about to close. These angelic existences feel that their domination is threatened, and fight with all the weapons at their command. It is at their instigation that the attempt is made to corrupt the Gospel by legalism; all the difficulties which the Apostle encounters, all the corporeal sufferings which he has to bear, are to be attributed to them. It is on their account that women must be veiled when attending the services of the Church, since otherwise they run the risk of becoming the victims of their lust, as of old their mother Eve was seduced by the devil. Most dangerous of all is their skill in deception: Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light.

Schweitzer then proceeds to expand on the importance of these views for Paul’s theology:

Everling had shown that angelology and demonology were, as a matter of fact, component parts of Paul’s cosmology. That they consequently also entered into his fundamental conception of redemption was a point which he had not especially emphasized. But the fact was written in giant characters across his work. From the moment when Paul’s statements regarding God, the devil, the angels, and the world are apprehended in their organic connexion, it becomes abundantly evident that for him redemption, in its primary and fundamental sense, consists in a deliverance from the powers which have their abode between heaven and earth. It is therefore essentially a future good, dependent on a cosmic event of universal scope.

Then comes an analysis of Kabisch’s work:

‘Salvation,’ so runs his argument, is thought of by Paul as ‘deliverance’ from judgment and destruction. ‘Justification’ and ‘reconciliation’ are subservient to this deliverance and do not describe a state of salvation independent from it. The spiritual goods which are characterized by many theologians as the object of the Apostle’s wrestling and striving are in reality only the anticipatory first-fruits of the blessedness which the future has in store. This blessedness consists in the believer’s being freed at the parousia from the fleshly body in order to put on the heavenly robe of glory. Thus eschatology is the foundation both of the dogmatics and ethics of the Apostle.

Kabisch, however, makes Paul’s doctrine of the Spirit to be this:

A super-earthly substance enters into the corporeity of those who in virtue of the unio mystica with Christ have entered into the experience of His death and resurrection. It produces in them a new being, and gives them a claim to the future perfected glory, and this while their fleshly existence still continues to the outward eye unaltered.

In Schweitzer’s opinion, Kabisch is the first to clearly point out and describe Paul’s great paradoxes.
Some shorter things worth remembering:

“It has, indeed, always been weakness (sic) of theological scholarship to talk much about method and possess little of it.”

Of modern dogmatics, “As the Pauline theology has, if possible, less affinity with the latter [modern dogmatics] than with the Reformation theology….”

He gives some examples of scholarly stupidity. Kabisch, for instance, after studying Paul’s eschatology comes to the conclusion that there is only a resurrection of the righteous; therefore the righteous enter the kingdom without experiencing judgment; therefore the judgment always refers to the destruction of the wicked at the Parousia. Schweitzer comments aptly: “That is to make the Apostle contradict not only Jewish apocalyptic, but his own utterances.”

There are some interesting, if not trust-inspiring statistics on Paul’s use of the LXX drawn from Kautzsch. �Out of eighty-four quotations which occur in the epistles thirty-four agree exactly with the Septuagint, thirty-six show small deviations, and ten depart from it more widely. Two others show a considerable difference,without however, throwing doubt upon the author’s acquaintance with the wording of the ordinary translation; two other, again, from Job, differ from it entirely,� A little later Schweitzer concludes (though whether as his opinion or that of Vollmer is not clear) that �It is in any case certain that the Apostle always makes use of Greek translations; and it is further certain that he argues from peculiarities in their wording which for one who knew Hebrew, as he also certainly did, must have been recognizable as mistranslations. He therefore goes so far as to ignore the original. (…) In all historical cases of theological bilingualism the same fact is to be observed. Scripture is never ‘personally’ translated, but always cited in accordance with a recognized version.�