Alexandra Brown , Washington and Lee University, Virginia

Paul’s announcement in 1 Corinthians that “by the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom”(1 Cor 1:21) has been heard by interpreters since antiquity as advice that believers give up philosophy as a mode of comprehending God. It is something like the inverse of Mark Lilla’s insistence that we give up God as a mode of comprehending philosophy. For Lilla and some other secular theorists, Paul’s advice encapsulates the danger of all theological speculation for enlightened living; it is the very abdication of reason and hence responsibility, in favor of romantic imaginings of larger impersonal forces.

And yet other contemporary theorists, notably certain continental philosophers, find in Paul an anti-wisdom of crucial significance and promise for our times. For them Paul brings fresh, salutary insight to questions of the integrity or disintegration of the human subject, of divine and human agency, of the separation of secular and religious modes of thought in Western political philosophy and the persistence (nevertheless) of political theologies. He is for them variously the prophetic interpreter of the “new messianic condition” (Agamben) or the announcer of a “universal logic of salvation, a-cosmic and illegal” (Badiou).

My inquiry into the intersection of Pauline theology and secular thought is grounded in my work over the years on apocalyptic thought in Paul and will take place within the context of my commentary on 1 Corinthians. While the commentary will be traditional in many respects, it will also engage these and other intersections of Pauline theology with contemporary thought toward the end of contributing to the broader conversation emerging about Paul in late modernity.

Alexandra R. Brown, Jessie B. Dupont Professor of Religion, graduated from Duke University in 1977, cum laude with honors in Religion. She received the degree of Master of Divinity from Yale University Divinity School in 1980 and the Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in 1990. Since 1987 she has taught at Washington and Lee where her principal areas of teaching are biblical studies, Bible and literature, early church history, theory and method in early Christianity and gender in Western Religion. While on leave she has also taught at Wake Forest University Divinity School and at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Her research interests and her publications are focused in New Testament studies, especially in the letters of the Apostle Paul. She is the author of The Cross and Human Transformation: Paul’s Apocalyptic Word in 1 Corinthians (Fortress Press, 1996, 2008) and co-editor of Putting Body and Soul Together: Essays in Honor of Robin Scroggs (Trinity Press, 1997). She is currently writing a commentary on 1 Corinthians for The New Testament Library (Westminster/John Knox Press) and pursuing studies in the reception of Pauline theology in post-modern European philosophy. She has represented Washington and Lee University in the Oxford Faculty Exchange program as a Fellow at University College, Oxford (2000) and was a Lilly Foundation consultant on Teaching the Bible in the 21^st Century (1999-2001).