Session Information
13 SES 07 A, Educational Narratives and Citizenship
Paper Session
Contribution
The French philosopher, Alain Badiou (2003), along with contemporary European philosophers, Žižek (2003) and Agamben (2005), have examined the writings of Saint Paul in light of their own atheological frameworks. None identify with Paul’s Christianity but each has found relevance in his lettersfor the modern world. This movement to annex Paul by philosophers, who profess no religious belief, has generated its own response from theologians, New Testament scholars and historians, who as would be expected, challenge the philosophers’ approach (Caputo & Alcoff 2009; Harink 2010; Milbank, Žižek & Davis 2010). However, what is also clear from these discussions is that the contribution from contemporary philosophers has enlivened the debate about Paul as a significant influence on Western society. It is the intention of this paper to leverage this contemporary, materialist, philosophical approach, (although only the work of Badiou is considered in this paper), to explore Paul as a teacher with lessons for the twenty-first century educator.
Paul as educator begins with the Damascus event (when he claims to experience the risen Jesus of Nazareth), which ruptures existing practice for Paul, it ruptures the ‘real’. For him, nothing that happens after this event can be seen as continuous with what has gone before. Paul claims new knowledge has entered the world; knowledge that cannot be incorporated into known paradigms of living and therefore changes how we should act. Paul comes to describe this new way of experiencing the world as love (or agapē). For Paul, fidelity to the truth of this event means showing this new way of living to people across the Mediterranean region. It is for Paul a new life, or a ‘new truth’ to be communicated. Critically this new life is accessible to all. For Paul, and for Badiou, we can all become subject to the event. Therein lies the attraction for the educator, how to create an environment where new knowledge or ‘new truth’ can flourish and is open to all.
In this paper, Paul’s evental transformation and subsequent communication of this approach is interpreted through the lens of John Dewey, his pragmatist colleagues, and the contemporary educational philosopher, Biesta (2013). It is first established, through the work of ancient historian Judge (2008) and social historian Meeks (2003) that there was a transformation of people’s beliefs, actions and social relationships as a result of Paul’s intervention. (In this paper Corinth is used as a case study.) The Pauline intervention is then analysed and it reveals that the Corinthian community experienced the event through Paul as agapē. He lives with the community, modelling the desired life and this becomes the shared language between Paul and the people. The event in practice becomes the practice and language of agapē (Kruger 2015). The experience of living for the good of the other, the experience of agapē, leads people to a new way of living and learning in their community.
As evidence of Paul’s approach we have his letters. In a wider study from which this paper is extracted the 14 letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament are surveyed and the authentic letters of Paul are identified. The authentic letters are then further refined to those that were written to communities that Paul founded – hence they formed the educative process that followed the agapē event with Paul. Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) Narrative Inquiry framework is used to analyse the letters to test whether a narrative of Paul as educator has foundation. This paper presents the initial findings of the analysis of Paul’s Corinthian correspondence and some preliminary findings of relevance to contemporary educators.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Agamben, G 2005, The time that remains: a commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Badiou, A 2003, Saint Paul: the foundation of universalism, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Biesta, GJ 2013, The Beautiful Risk of Education, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder. Caputo, J & Alcoff, L (eds) 2009, St Paul among the Philosophers, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Clandinin, JD & Connelly, FM 2000, Narrative Inquiry: experience and story in qualitative research, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Connelly, FM & Clandinin, JD 2006, 'Narrative inquiry', in JL Green, G Camilli & PB Elmore (eds), Handbook of Complementary Methods in Education Research, American Edcuational Research Associates and Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Washington, D.C., pp. 477 - 88. Dewey, J 1938, Experience and Education, Collier Books edn, Collier Books, New York. Edsall, BA 2014, Paul's Witness to Formative Early Christian Instruction, Digital edn, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen. Fitzmyer, J 2008, First Corinthians, The Anchor Yale Bible, Yale University Press, New Haven. Furnish, VP 1985, II Corinthians, vol. 32A, The Anchor Bible, Doubleday & co., Garden City, New York. Harink, D (ed.) 2010, Paul, philosophy and the theopolitical vision: critical engagements with Agamben, Badiou, Žižek and others, Cascade, Eugene. Judge, EA 2008, 'The Early Christians as a Scholastic Community', in JR Harrison (ed.), The First Christians in the Roman World: Augustan and New Testament Essays, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen. Kruger, T 2015, A note on 'event', pragmatism and Dewey: the language of agapē. Meeks, WA 2003, The first urban Christians: the social world of the apostle Paul, 2nd edn, Yale University Press, New Haven. Milbank, J, Žižek, S & Davis, C 2010, Paul's New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids. Murphy-O'Connor, J 1997, Paul: a critical life, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Smith, CS 2012, Pauline Communities as 'Scholastic Communities': A Study of the Vocabulary of 'Teaching' in 1 Corinthains, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, Digital edn, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen. Žižek, S 2003, The puppet and the dwarf: the perverse core of Christianity, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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