How Do We Recognize Christianity?
My AAR 2022 paper
Welcome back to Sebastianism.
Below, you’ll find the text of my AAR 2022 paper—titled “How Do We Recognize Christianity?”—which I presented last weekend in Denver, CO, on a panel on the subject of supersession. The paper is a first attempt to speak publicly about my dissertation research. Some of the material from the paper will be incorporated into my Introduction; some of it will appear in Chapter 1. For now, I’ve left the paper exactly as it was presented. I tried as best I could to stick to the golden maxim of conference papers: do one thing, and try to do it well.
The panel provoked a lively conversation. If you are interested in the reaction to the panel, in Q&A and in private conversations thereafter, I’ll be reflecting on all of it in my next post, likely by Monday next week.
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How do we recognize Christianity?
A strange question. Any numbers of answers might suffice. Some might satisfy, others might disappoint; still others might give offense. Given that this is an academic presentation, I suppose I’m obliged to spoil it: the answer—my answer, at any rate—is supersession. But what is supersession? We haven’t gained much ground. So, suppose we ask, first: where is supersession? Where do we see it? Nothing could be more obvious: in Christianity. Well, now we’re back where we began.
Christians routinely—perhaps universally—understand themselves in relation to Jews: as the new Jews, or as the perfection of the Jews; in any case a people produced and protected by a new covenant that at once fulfills and annuls its Jewish antecedent. This is true even of Christians who do not understand their tradition, and thus do not understand themselves. They nonetheless know, at minimum, that they are not Jews, even if they do not know exactly why or how they have ceased to be Jews or have never been Jews. So we can see straightaway that Christians have to do with Jews. Without Jews, Christians are not Christians. Nothing could be more obvious.
I don’t dispute any of this. In fact, I wager that, whether we are Christians or Jews or otherwise, we can affirm all the above with perfect certainty. In what follows, I only want to show the truth of that certainty.
To that end, I want to draw our attention to an historical figure who, according to Christians, is definitely not a Christian, and who is certainly not a Jew. I mean Marcion of Sinope, bête noire of the Church Fathers; the arch-heretic of the Patristic age.[1] Marcion’s church is said to have stretched throughout the Mediterranean, likely along the trails blazed by his master St. Paul a half-century prior. Marcion’s religion proclaimed a radically transcendent, alien God, a docetic Christ, and—infamously—omitted the Old Testament in its entirety from the scriptural canon. Marcion was no friend of the Jews, and thus—I hope—no friend of ours. Yet Marcion’s virulent anti-Judaism was matched tit for tat by another historical figure with whom we will have to linger at some length, namely, Tertullian of Carthage, the first major theologian to write in Latin. Neither was Tertullian a friend of the Jews; nor, for that matter, was he a friend of Marcion.
I am going to approach the question of supersession by staging—or re-staging—the dispute between Marcion and Tertullian. I undertake this task not as a biblical scholar but as a continental philosopher of religion. My aim is thus not to weigh in on obscure, antique theological debates about ancient heresies or the interpretation of scripture, but to show that such debates bear heavily upon us, here, today. Supersession is a problem for thought. What I want to suggest is that this problem was originally and decisively broached in the encounter between Marcion and Tertullian; and that we scholars and philosophers of religion are, wittingly or unwittingly, in no small part the product of this encounter.
Supersession is a distinctively and even uniquely Christian concept. Nothing could be more obvious. What is less obvious is why supersession is indexed so tightly, perhaps inexorably, to Christianity. I am going to show that the structure of supersession—its logic, as it were—can be glimpsed by way of an inquiry into the hermeneutical dilemma that confronted the early Christians; namely, what to make of the relation of the so-called Old Testament to the New. My claim is that Tertullian’s innovation—what the German philologist Erich Auerbach calls ‘figural interpretation’—can reveal to us the logic of supersession, and thus give us something like a criterion for recognizing Christianity for what it is; namely, as what it says it is: vera religio, the true religion.
The Marcion-Tertullian dispute is enlightening because, for all their differences, they agree profoundly on one very important thing: the events and persons recorded in the Septuagint are truly and concretely historically real. Both Marcion and Tertullian insist upon a literal reading of the Old Testament. Neither is willing to cede ground to allegorical readings of the Old Testament; neither wants to allow its literal truth to be eroded by ‘spiritual’ interpretations. Yet each draws a very different conclusion from the literality of the history of the Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews.
Marcion, for his part, jettisons the Old Testament in its entirety from his list of authoritative scriptures. For Marcion, the narratives presented in the Old Testament are literally and historically real, but are, in fact, totally irrelevant to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Marcion’s Christ is the emissary of a radically transcendent, alien God, sent to Earth on a mission of salvation as an act of total, unconditioned grace. The God of the Jews, according to Marcion, is the capricious creator of the world, a demiurgic legislator whose Law means slavery, from whom the Christ has been sent to free us. The Old Testament is, for Marcion, a document that tells us where we are, and that we are lost, but tells us absolutely nothing about our rescue.
Compare Tertullian. He is convinced not only that the Old Testament must remain in the canon, but that it is, in fact, essential to the Christian faith. For Tertullian, the narratives presented in the Old Testament are literally and historically real, and every jot and tittle of the Septuagint prophesies and prefigures the revelation of Christ in the New Testament, all of which is also literally and historically true. I’m not going to get into the weeds regarding Tertullian’s trinitarian Christology here; what is important for us is that he vehemently denies Marcion’s claim that the God of the Jews is not the father of Jesus Christ. For Tertullian, Christ is indubitably the Son of God the Father, who is the very God depicted in the Septuagint. Thus, the Old Testament is, for Tertullian, a document that tells us where we are, that we are lost, and—if one has ears to hear—how to recognize our rescuer.
So, what does this have to do with supersession? In order to answer this question I am going to draw on Erich Auerbach’s 1938 essay, entitled “Figura.”[2] Auerbach shows that the Latin term figura—which translates Paul’s Greek term, typos—achieves a new and decisive connotation in Tertullian. In short, figura means “historically real prophecy.”[3] Tertullian’s hermeneutical strategy involves reading a person or event in the Old Testament as a historically real prophecy, a figure, of a historically real person or event in the New Testament. I should stress here that Tertullian’s ‘figural interpretation’ is distinct from what we typically think of as ‘figurative’ or non-literal, allegorical interpretation. A figura is a real, historical person or event that, nonetheless, signifies something apart from itself: it points up, so to speak, its own negativity. But this negativity is historically real.
Tertullian’s procedure is decisive for at least two reasons. First, for Tertullian, the second term (the person or event in the New Testament) is the fulfillment of the first term (that is, the figure, the person or event in the Old Testament). Thus, in Against Marcion III.16, Tertullian claims that the Old Testament figure Hoshea son of Nun receives his new name (Joshua) from Moses in order to prefigure or prophesy a Joshua yet to come, namely Joshua—or Jesus—of Nazareth (the two share the Hebrew name Yehoshua). Joshua is thus a figure of the Christian concept of grace. Unlike the law, figured by Moses, Joshua can, and does, lead the people of Israel into the promised land. As a figure of grace, Joshua son of Nun is also, and already, a figure of Joshua the Christ, who is—precisely—the fulfillment of Joshua son of Nun. There are many such examples in Tertullian; his polemic against Marcion is suffused by them. I wish we could linger on them.
As I’ve already mentioned, the fulfillment of a figure is also the annulment of the same. Strictly speaking, the fulfillment only reveals the nullity of the figure, since the figure itself ‘knows itself’ precisely as annulled or canceled—as prophecy. The figure existed: the Paschal lamb really was slaughtered. The lamb was, and thus is, historically real. Yet it is nothing in itself; it is history in negative, ever already Christ the Lamb of God in the eternity of God’s wisdom.
This is why it is not quite right to understand supersession as ‘replacement’ theology. In superseding Jewish history, existence, and experience, Christians do not replace Jews as God’s chosen people, or exclude Jews from the history of salvation. On the contrary, Jews must be included in the history of salvation in order for the history of salvation to be what it is, and for Christians to be who they are. The problem of supersession is not a problem of exclusion but of inclusion. Christianity is the fulfillment and the annulment of Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish experience, and Jewish existence. In fact, fulfillment is annulment; annulment is fulfillment. From the supersessionist point of view (which is to say, the Christian point of view), the Jews are the absolutely essential but fundamentally negative condition not only of the true religion, but also of the reality of history as such.
As an aside: if this sounds like Hegel, that’s because it is. Or, to be more precise: there is something of Tertullian in Hegel, even if Tertullian is not—obviously not—Hegel. But there’s more.
For we are already speaking of the second reason that Tertullian is so decisive. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Christian theology knows that grace supersedes the law. This is the fundamental Pauline move. What distinguishes Tertullian in this regard is his relentless endeavor to extend the dialectic of grace and law, as it appears in Paul, to historical reality as such. To say—as Paul very clearly does—that grace fulfills and annuls the law is a deeply spiritual and existential claim, but Tertullian goes further. His claim is that history itself is graced by grace, that everything from creation to redemption is governed by the logic of supersession. Everything is ultimately a figure of its own overcoming, but nothing ultimately meets oblivion, because God—as Paul reminds us—will be all in all. Supersession is good for you, in the end…
Here it is worth noting that Marcion’s Christ neither fulfills nor even properly annuls the law, nor the history of the Jews, but rather simply and straightforwardly replaces the law, and the history of that law, with something new. If one wants to point to a ‘replacement theology,’ one should point to Marcion. Marcion’s gospel is new in the radical sense. It is not new in relation to the old; it is rather the absolutely singular novelty, the total novum, advent in the pure sense. One of my favorite passages from Jacob Taubes’s lectures on the letter to the Romans concerns this inconceivable novelty proclaimed by Marcion. Taubes says:
…the thread that links creation and redemption is a very thin one. A very, very thin one. And it can snap. And that is Marcion. There the thread has snapped. He reads—and he knows how to read!—the father of Jesus Christ is not the creator of heaven and earth.[4]
Again, compare Tertullian, who is compelled to marshal every last whit of the awesome power of figural interpretation to stitch together creation and redemption, as if Ariadne herself had lent him her thread. Figura is this very thread, supersession the needle, God himself the seamster. What we witness in Tertullian is something like the birth of history, properly so-called. His insistence that the events and persons of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments are historically real in equal measure suggests not only that history has a structure, but that this structure expresses a unity. That is to say, history appears, perhaps for the first time, as totality, as providential salvation history. As we well know, Providence leaves nothing out. Ditto supersession, which is naught but the shape that Providence takes in time.
Tertullian had—or made—many enemies. The Jews, certainly; and the philosophers; and the allegorizers; but Marcion was the true enemy, the great danger. Well, Tertullian won the day. There is no escape from history, save the true religion.
How do we recognize Christianity? The same way that Christians recognize themselves: by supersession. Nothing could be more obvious.
[1] For my discussion of Marcion, I am drawing mostly on Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1990). I have also consulted E.C. Blackman, Marcion and His Influence (London: SPCK, 1948) and Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
[2] Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach: Time, History, and Literature, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014).
[3] Auerbach, “Figura,” 79.
[4] Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 60.
“The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul.”
—François Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy
You may actually be retarded lol