St Paul and Philosophy - (Explorations in Philosophy and Theology) by Olivier Boulnois (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Olivier Boulnois investigates the relation between Paul, as apostle of Jesus Christ, and the philosophy at work in his letters. Boulnois lays bare the manner in which Paul adapts Greek thought to his own purposes. This sheds light on the work of an entire range of philosophers who have identified themselves with the Pauline effort to hold thinking open to the claims of Christian life and doctrine, from Augustine to Kierkegaard, as well as more recent figures who have engaged Paul from a greater distance, including Heidegger and Ricoeur. Boulnois also draws on modern and contemporary scholarship, and reveals his reservations about the turn to Paul appearing in European philosophy in the work of such thinkers as Agamben and Badiou. Successive chapters take up Paul's logic of the Cross; cosmology; approaches to being in the world, law, evil and good; messianism; salvation and history.

Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Cambridge and at the Institut Catholique de Paris, St Paul and Philosophy is at once a painstaking study of Paul's own thinking and an open exploration of its continued relevance for modern and contemporary reflection on Christian religion. This book is an important demonstration that theology and philosophy are at their best when brought into dialogue with one another around perennial questions and themes.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.