What do you get when a Jewish professor of Talmudic culture, steeped in postmodern thought, applies himself to the texts of the apostle Paul with such a lively interest that he teaches himself ancient Greek to read them in the original and plows through a great deal of voluminous secondary literature? When such a person is as creative and disciplined as Daniel Boyarin, you get a fresh and brilliant overall reading of Paul and a piece of astute cultural criticism in one.

Much is intriguing about Boyarin's A Radical Jew. Here is a contemporary Jewish scholar reading the Apostle to the Gentiles not as an anti-Judaic apostate but as "a Jewish cultural critic," and inquiring into "what it was in Jewish culture that led him [Paul] to produce a discourse of radical reform of that culture." Here is a reader who finds Paul's thought deeply flawed, yet succeeds where many a Christian exegete and theologian fails—he makes Paul, the author of "some of the most remarkable texts in the canon of western literature," speak almost as if he were our contemporary. Here is a postmodern thinker with a heightened sensitivity to fragmentation and fluidity arguing that Paul's thought is not simply "responsive to particular situations in the churches" to which he wrote, but is "generated by a consistent theological mainspring as well." Here is a newcomer to Pauline studies not only boldly putting Galatians 3:28 at the center of Paul's thought but offering a careful close reading and spellbinding overall interpretation of Paul's writing in support.

All this, communicated in clear and engaging prose, would be enough to keep our eyes wide open with interest, even our jaws dropped in admiration. What makes the book profound—and, as we will argue later, profoundly flawed—is that Boyarin, true to his postmodern sensibilities, undertakes to invert the common valorization of Paul's most radical claim, the putative pinnacle of his whole thought, namely that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for all are one in Christ Jesus. This Magna Carta of liberation and equality, Boyarin argues, is inimical to difference. It contains "the seeds of an imperialist and colonizing missionary practice" and seems "to conduce to coercive politico-cultural systems that engage in more or less violent projects of the absorption of cultural specificities into the dominant one."

In a sense, Boyarin's uncommon critique of what over the past few decades was widely considered the very best in Paul's thought is to be expected. It is almost predictable that from the vantage point Boyarin takes, Paul's egalitarianism and universalism would appear badly marred. In the larger cultural debates between "modernists," who build on the universalist tradition and advocate identical rights and immunities of all, and "postmodernists," who build on the particularist tradition and advocate recognition of particular identities, in the clash between what Charles Taylor calls the "politics of equal dignity" and the "politics of difference," Boyarin places himself squarely on the side of the politics of difference. Hence he reads Paul's egalitarianism and universalism as the pursuit of a deeply flawed "politics of identity" (so the subtitle of the book).

Boyarin's Paul advocates sameness—"all of you are one" (Gal. 3:28)—and tendentially assimilates all differences to a dominant identity. Coming from a postmodern thinker, that charge is not surprising. What is surprising is the persuasiveness with which Boyarin is able to interpret the Pauline texts so as to make the charge plausible.

Here is Boyarin's reconstruction of Paul's original difficulty with his Jewish heritage and Paul's "deeply flawed" solution. First, the difficulty:

An enthusiastic first-century Greek-speaking Jew, one Saul of Tarsus, is walking down a road, with a very troubled mind. The Torah, in which he so firmly believes, claims to be the text of the One True God of all the world, who created heaven and earth and all humanity, and yet its primary content is the history of one particular People—almost one family—and the practices that it prescribes are many of them practices which mark off the particularity of that tribe, his tribe.

The problem, then, is this: belief in one God entails belief in the unity of the human race as the recipient of the blessings of this God, yet in order to enjoy the full blessings of this God one had to be a member of a particular tribe.

What is Paul's solution to the fissure within the thought world of his ancestral religion, a fissure to which he, a citizen of the multicultural world of the ancient Roman Empire, was particularly sensitive? Motivated as he was not only by Hebrew monotheism but by "a Hellenistic desire for the One," Paul offers "an ideal of a universal human essence, beyond difference and hierarchy." Such undifferentiated and universal human essence had to be predicated "on the dualism of the flesh and the spirit." The body is inescapably "particular, marked through practice as Jew or Greek, and through anatomy as male or female"; only "the spirit is universal." Paul's universalist program predicated on a dualist anthropology is most pointedly expressed in Galatians 3:28. Building on the androgynous reading of this text suggested by Wayne Meeks in his seminal article "The Image of the Androgyne," Boyarin takes the passage as the key expression of Paul's ideal of a spiritual oneness beyond difference and hierarchy. In baptism believers put off the individual body, which is male or female, Jewish or "Greek," and "put on Christ," or "the non-corporeal body of the risen Christ," which is neither Jewish nor "Greek," neither male nor female but a spiritual androgyne. Christ, the One and the Spirit, overplays the particularities of the body and hence unites all in a new humanity in which "all difference" is effaced "in the new creation in Christ," a "non-differentiated, non-hierarchical humanity."

But here is the catch: a liberation predicated on erasure of differences and an equality between human beings that presupposes sameness is necessarily oppressive. The problem with Paul's thought, then, is not that he only half-heartedly embraced the vision contained in Galatians 3:28 (so, for instance, Elaine Pagels, "Paul and Women: A Response to Recent Discussion," JAAR, Vol. 42 [1974], pp. 538-49), not even that he tried to suppress its implementation by others (so Antoinette C. Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction Through Paul's Rhetoric [Fortress Press, 1990]). The problem is that this "passionate striver for human liberation and equality" is an unwitting accomplice in oppression and a new hierarchization whose victims are above all women and the Jews. In Boyarin's account, it would not be quite right to say that Paul is anti-Judaic and misogynous, strictly speaking. He is worse; in a limited but important sense, he is in-human: Because Paul insists on grounding the unification of humanity in "sameness through faith in Christ," all those human beings who choose difference "end up effectively non-human." Paul at his presumed best is Paul at his worst.

Much of A Radical Jew is devoted to showing how Paul goes about formulating a vision of a united humanity corresponding to the belief in the one God at the price of spiritualizing out of existence women and the Jews. Take Paul's attitudes toward women. Boyarin places Paul, who ranks celibacy above marriage in 1 Corinthians 7, in the context of the early Christian celebration of virginity and celibacy, as in Clement of Alexandria and the Gospel of Thomas, or Philo, who praises the celibate Therapeutae and Therapeutrides, male and female members of a meditative community of Jews in De Vita Contemplativa. In all these instances, celibacy as a form of "social acting out of a disembodied human existence" is the way to gender parity; to be equal to men, women had to adopt celibacy—that is, renounce female sexuality and maternity. Such renunciation, however, undoes their womanhood. For virgins are no longer really women but "androgynes, a representation, in the appearance of flesh, of the purely spiritual nongendered, presocial essence of human being."

If women are spiritualized out of existence by being located in Christ and required to renounce sexuality, the Jews are spiritualized out of existence by being located in Christ and being told that their "outward," fleshly observances are irrelevant. Paul makes this move, Boyarin suggests, by applying an allegorical method that rests on the idea "that the spiritual signified can replace its literal signifier completely." Flesh-and-blood circumcision is replaced by spiritual circumcision in baptism, the letter of the Law is replaced by the spirit of life, genealogical belonging to the people of Israel is replaced by spiritual belonging through faith to the new people of God, the church.

Behind the drive toward spiritualization lies Paul's distinction between Christ according to the flesh and Christ according to the spirit and a clear decision in favor of Christ according to the spirit. Here is how Boyarin himself puts what he calls Jesus' "dual ontology" and its significance in Paul's thought: "On the present reading, the fundamental insight of Paul's apocalypse was the realization that the dual nature of Jesus provided a hermeneutic key to the resolution of that enormous tension that he experienced between the universalism of the Torah's content and the particular ethnicity of its form." The spiritual nature of the risen Christ, supported by a dualist ontology, hermeneutics, and anthropology, "enabled Paul to understand the allegorical structure of the entire cosmos as the solution to the problem of the other."

A contemporary postmodern cultural critic, Daniel Boyarin, has discovered in his fellow Jew, Saul of Tarsus, an ancient cultural critic with a commanding and immensely influential but deeply flawed social vision of a unified humanity without "the other."

The fascination of Boyarin's argument lies in his ability to integrate much of Paul's thought around what is considered to be his most egalitarian passage and then suggest that Paul gains equality and universality only at the price of squandering difference and particularity—thereby rendering equality empty and universality abstract. But is Boyarin right? We think his understanding of Paul is flawed. Here are some reasons why.

To start with, it is not at all clear why locating the unity in the sphere of the "spirit" as opposed to the "flesh" necessarily entails loss of particularity. As a general claim, it simply does not hold true that "while the body is particular ... the spirit is universal," as Boyarin states. Though sexual differentiation is clearly rooted in the body, in Platonic thought the sphere of the spirit—a nonmaterial, intelligible world—is by no means devoid of difference and particularity. If it were, how could it stand as a paradigm for this world? Boyarin could, of course, grant that he occasionally overstates his case about the erasure of all difference at the level of the spirit but still insist that the specific differences he is interested in—gender and ethnic differences—are all rooted in the body and are erased at the level of the spirit, which can accommodate only the common human essence.

But does such erasure of bodily rooted differences happen "in Christ"? Is the resurrected Christ "pure spirit"? From the wording of Galatians 3:28 it would indeed seem that Paul thinks so. Do we not read there that "there is no longer Jew or Greek, ... there is no longer male and female"? But as Judy has shown elsewhere ("Christ and Gender: A Study of Difference and Equality in Gal. 3:28," in Christus—Mitte der Schrift, ed. H. Lichtenberger et al. [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997], pp. 439-477), a careful reading of these phrases in their context (as a piece of Pauline theologizing, not as a free-floating tradition!) suggests no such thing. The larger argumentative context even requires retention of differences, and the theological grounding Paul gives the statement that there is "no longer Jew or Greek ... no longer male and female"—such as, being "in Christ," "baptized into Christ," "one in Christ," "put on Christ," and "belong to Christ"—in no way entails erasure of differences.

This reading of the phrases is indirectly confirmed by the fact that the resurrected Christ is not "pure spirit" for Paul. As Miroslav has argued elsewhere (Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation [Abingdon, 1996]), Boyarin overplays the parallels between Paul and some platonic cultural themes, notably the belief that "the commitment to 'the One' implied a disdain for the body, and disdain for the body entailed an erasure of 'difference.' " The "One" in whom Paul seeks to locate the unity of all humanity is not disincarnate transcendence, but the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. No, "when that fleshly, Jewish body (born of a Jew, under the Law) was crucified," "the new spiritual universal body" was not created in order to replace the fleshly and particular body, as Boyarin suggests. It was this same body that was raised. The "principle" of unity is not the abstract "One" but the resurrected Christ with a body that has suffered on the cross. The grounding of unity and universality in the scandalous particularity of the crucified and resurrected body of Christ is what makes Paul's thought structurally so profoundly different from the kinds of beliefs in the all-importance of the undifferentiated universal spirit that would make one "ashamed of being in the body" and unable to "bear to talk about his race or his parents of his native country" (so Porphyry of Plotinus).

What was Paul's attitude toward the body? The main thesis of Boyarin's book is that a "dualist ideology" provided Paul with the solution to his original problem: "the dualism of spirit and flesh was thus necessary for his entire political and theological program to be carried forth." Yet Boyarin must grant that Paul was not a "radical" dualist; "the body had its place, albeit subordinated to the spirit." But for the thesis about the erasure of bodily differences in the spirit to work, does not Boyarin need full suppression of the body rather than its mere subordination, just as he needs the resurrected Christ to be pure spirit, stripped of all bodiliness? If Paul understands the "flesh" as less important rather than unimportant or even evil, erasure of bodily differences does not necessarily follow.

To continue with the contrasts to Platonic tradition, how about Paul's attitude toward his "race"? Could he bear to talk of his "race" or his parents? According to Philippians Paul did count being "of the people of Israel" and being "a Hebrew born of Hebrews" as "loss because of Christ" (Phil. 3:5). But it is not at all clear that this is a negative judgment about his Jewishness as ethnic belonging. From Romans it is clear that Paul continued to ascribe special soteriological significance to being ethnically Jewish. True, he argued that "a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal" (Rom. 2:28f.). In this sense "Israel" is for Paul "a signifier of the community of faith which could include all humanity and not only the ethnic Israel."

Yet, despite appearances to the contrary, Paul did not simply level all soteriological difference between those who are "Jews by birth" and "Gentile sinners," to borrow a distinction from Galatians (2:15). The Jews who are so "by birth" and "outwardly" have a lasting historical and soteriological priority over the Gentiles (Rom. 9:4f.). Combining the universal offer of salvation on equal terms with the priority of the Jews, Paul insists that the gospel is "the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek" (Rom. 1:16; cf. 3:1). The Jews' lasting special place in the economy of salvation—"their peculiar status as God's beloved people" (Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics [Harper San Francisco, 1996], p.417) is based on the promise but is transmitted genealogically. It is of his "kindred according to the flesh" that Paul writes: "They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever" (Rom. 9:4f.).

Paul holds on to bodiliness also when it comes to gender. Take the passage in 1 Corinthians 11:11, where Paul writes: "Neither is woman without man nor man without woman in the Lord." Boyarin wants to read this text in the same way as Galatians 3:28: "as a representation of an androgyny that exists on the level of the spirit." Notice, however, that in verse 12 Paul does not take recourse to the sphere of the spirit to argue for his claim, but grounds it squarely in the creation of man and woman entailing their differentiated bodiliness: "For just as woman came from man so man comes through woman." "In the Lord," the difference of sexed bodies is not erased; to the contrary, Paul appeals to this difference to ground the interdependence of men and women.

So far we have made two correlative arguments against Boyarin's main thesis: Paul neither seeks universal unity in the pure spirit nor disregards differentiating bodiliness to achieve such unity. Therefore the solution that Paul offers cannot be sameness. The way Paul construes the most basic problem he is seeking to address confirms this conclusion about his solution. If Paul's solution were "sameness," we would expect that the problem, as he perceives it, would be "difference" or "the other." Yet this is clearly not the case. The basic problem Paul is addressing in Galatians, and to which 3:28 is a preliminary response, is not that there exist different peoples, Jews and Greeks. "Jewishness" is not a "problem" for Paul, as we have seen; neither was "Gentileness" something to be overcome.

At the deepest level, the problem that Paul is addressing in Galatians—a problem that stands behind his denial that salvation can be either by "race" or by "law"—is not the differences in the flesh but a certain kind of sameness, the sameness of Jew and Greek, men and women as prisoners of sin (cf. Gal. 3:22). It is, however, a sameness that does not unite but, paradoxically, a sameness that divides. Bound together by the invisible cord of sin, human beings are confined in solitariness by the visible walls that divide. Paul's response to the common imprisonment to sin that divides is his insistence on the same way of salvation for all that unites. "All are one in Christ" is the solution to "all are imprisoned in sin." Expressed in the vocabulary of Romans: the negative background to the soteriological claim "there is no distinction between Jew and Greek" (10:12) is not the culturological and creation-theological claim that there are "Jews and Greeks," "slaves and free," "men and women" but the hamartiological claim that "there is no distinction [between Gentile and Jew] since all have sinned" (3:22f.). If we trace the line of Paul's thought from the problem to the solution, it does not run from "difference" to "undifferentiated unity," but from "equality and sameness in sin that makes differences problematic" to "equality and unity with differences in Christ."

Throughout the book Boyarin contrasts what he construes as a genuinely Jewish stress on body and therefore on particularity with a Pauline Christian stress on the spirit and therefore on universality. He overplays the contrast, however. Though we do not wish to teach Boyarin about Judaism, we want to note that there are important Jewish theologians who would call into question the "tribal" nature of Judaism Boyarin celebrates. Jacob Neusner, for instance, has argued that Judaism and the two other great monotheist traditions, Christianity and Islam, insist on forming "trans-national, or trans-ethnic transcendental communities" and that they give witness to "a single, commanding God, who bears a single message for a humanity that is one in Heaven's sight." Hence Neusner can write an article entitled, "Why I Am Not an Ethnic Jew, Why I Am a Religious Jew" (Jewish Spectator [Winter 1996/97]).

Inversely, Pauline Christianity is not only universal; it is profoundly particular in that it demands of its adherents a set of beliefs and practices in character not unlike the ones demanded by Judaism. Instead of contrasting Jewish particularity with Christian universality, it would be better to inquire about how each of these faiths deals with the profoundly significant and difficult issue of the relation between particularity and universality, and how their distinct ways of dealing with the issue are related to their specific monotheist persuasions.

Finally, does Boyarin's own proposal about relating universality and particularity persuade? From the main thrust of his argument, one might think that he will be clearly on the side that celebrates particularity and derides universality. But this is not so. He is well aware that "the challenge of Paul's positive call to autonomy, equality, and species-wide solidarity cannot be ignored or dismissed" because of its flaws. Boyarin also knows what dangers lurk in the exclusive stress on particularity. His proposal? "The theme of this book is that the claims of difference and the desire for universality are both—contradictorily—necessary; both are also equally problematic." Contradictory necessity and inescapable danger of the stress on both universality and particularity! No one should have expected from Boyarin, a postmodern thinker, a synthesis of the two.

Toward the end of A Radical Jew Boyarin acknowledges that "somewhere in this dialectic [between universality and particularity] a synthesis must be found, one that will allow for stubborn hanging on to ethnic, cultural specificity but in a context of deeply felt and enacted human solidarity." Yet what he actually offers is not a synthesis in thought but a conjunction of the two in the practice of "powerlessness" in Diaspora: "The rabbinic answer to Paul's challenge was, therefore, to renounce any possibility of dominion over Others by being perpetually out of power." It would have been helpful to hear from Boyarin how all three—universalism, particularism, and their synthesis, "diasporic powerlessness"—are related to that most Jewish of all beliefs, namely that there are no other gods but Yahweh (Deut. 6:4).

Strangely enough, after Boyarin has taken us on the long exploration of Paul's allegedly deeply flawed abstract universalism, in the end he takes us not too far from where we think Paul has been all along, as seen in his theology of the Cross. For Paul, the unity of those who are different is based neither on the single personal will nor on the single impersonal principle—two variations of the transcendent "One"—that enforces unity by suppressing and subsuming difference. Instead, the unity is based on the crucified Christ, who breaks down the dividing wall of hostility between particular groups by giving his own self. Unity here is not the result of "sacred violence" that obliterates the particularity of "bodies," but a fruit of Christ's self-sacrifice that breaks down the enmity between them. The church that seeks to follow this Christ will neither advocate a falsely universalistic and violent "politics of identity" nor its misguidedly particularistic and no less violent obverse, the "politics of difference." Situated in its own "diasporic" locations, it will instead pursue its own kind of dialectic between universality and particularity by uncompromisingly following in the path of grace opened up by the self-giving of its Master.

Judith M. Gundry-Volf is associate professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. She is the author of Paul and Perseverance (Westminster/John Knox) and is currently completing a book on Paul and gender. Miroslav Volf is associate professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon).

Copyright © 1997 by Christianity Today/Books and Culture magazine.