Between Love and Law: Paul and Philosophy

Jeffrey Bloechl

Abstract. According to Paul, life in the spiritual community aspires to the virtues of faith, hope and love, of which love is the greatest. Love, be observes, allows members of the body of Christ to answer a call to transcend the law, though without cancelling it or destroying it. During the past few decades, various philosophers who have been interested in getting free of a modern preoccupation with law, have drawn on features of Pauline thinking in their attempts to develop new theories of community and subjectivity. What is generally not embraced, however, is any version of Paul’s Christian monotheism. This raises various questions. What is gained and what is lost when Paul is read in this light? What might be the relationship between certain Pauline conceptions--especially our relation to the law--and their correlates in the non-religious philosophies that are inspired by them? And what, finally, would it mean for us today to relate ourselves to the law without becoming subservient to it?

Jeffrey Bloechl is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College. He is an internationally respected scholar of contemporary European philosophy of religion and psychoanalysis, with a particular interest in the work and legacy of Emmanuel Levinas. He has also translated major works by Jean-Louis Chretien and Roger Burggraeve, and is currently at work on a phenomenological anthropology of Christian life, a critical commentary on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, and various other projects.