Jayne Svenungsson: "Wrestling with Angels: Or How to Avoid Decisionist Messianic Romances"
Throughout (Christian) history, the messianic event has been linked in the imagination to the idea of a consumption – and thus abrogation – of the (Jewish) Law.i Although there is little scriptural basis for such an opposition, Law has been pitted against Grace, Letter against Spirit, and the Jewish God of Judgment against the Christian God of Love. Even in secular Western thought, the pejorative connotations of the Law remain, most markedly in psychoanalytically influenced philosophies such as those of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. A similar tendency can also be detected in Alain Badiou’s and Slavoj Žižek’s more recent appraisals of Saint Paul as the founder of a universal gospel of justice and redemption, causing an irreversible rupture with Jewish legalism and particularism.
Deane Gailbraith bloggs about the article at Religion Bulletin homepage
