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Holding on by our Teeth: A Response to Putt John D. Caputo After having been criticized as a faithless and unbelieving rascal by Ayres, Kearney and Westphal, it is delightful to be accused of being a follower of St. Paul by Keith Putt. Everyone should have a reader like Keith Putt, who has read everything and remembered everything, including a couple of early pieces I did years ago on Derrida that, to be honest, I would thank him to forget . He has adroitly singled out the last three chapters of Radical Hemeneutics , as the precise point where everything changes and I shift into the gear in which I am still motoring along today. His creative reformulation of these chapters, which sketch the route I subsequently pursued, cannot be improved upon. I did not see it coming but what Keith Putt says is completely true: Kant’s three questions have been transmuted into St. Paul’s three virtues: epistemology gives way to faith, ethics gives way to love, and hope becomes an openness to the unprogrammable future. Putt takes no little delight in pointing out that I have landed myself in a Pauline camp and ended up singing a hymn to Paul’s “taxonomy of Christian virtues” (I Corinthians 13:13). Putt is right and I will not try to twist free from the claim (accusation/congratulation) he makes in this sensitive and detailed reading. In fact I will strengthen it by revealing a secret. When I was, many years ago, a member of a Roman Catholic religious order (the Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded by Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, whose “normalizing” teaching methods Foucault singles out for abuse in Discipline and Punish), I freely chose the name “Brother Paul,” and Paul is the name we gave our second son (I had left the Christian Brothers by that time!) So there was a time in my life that if someone said, “Paul!,” I would have said me voici. I answer to the name of Paul, and so does our son. There is no escaping Paul in my life, and no desire to, even if, as happens in the best of families, I sometimes give him—which one? St. Paul? my son? or myself?—a piece of my mind. My reservations about St. Paul to which Putt discreetly refers have to do with his “economy of salvation,” the economy of sin and debt whose accounts are balanced by means of Christ’s sacrificial death. God sent Jesus into the world to take the hit for the rest of us because somebody had to pay God 251 back for what sin has cost Him (the masculine pronouns are appropriate here; this is a male economy). I much prefer to understand the crucifixion as a prophetic death, as did many early followers of “the Way,” in which a just man is unjustly executed for calling for justice, and to think in terms of God’s relationship to humanity in terms of giving, gifts, and of forgiveness instead of debts to be paid. I prefer the figure of the father in the parable of the prodigal son to Paul’s sacrificial economy, where the offended father forgives his errant son the first chance he gets and instead of letting him be crucified throws him a party. For a father, or let us say a parent, is the giver of gifts, not a keeper of accounts. Now even though Paul’s version became canonical, I prefer to think that the palms go to another view astir in the early Christian communities where forgiveness is in fact closer to what Jesus was up to and the sacrificial economy was much more Paul’s idea than anyone else’s. Paul’s extraordinary and powerful religious imagination overran the early Christian communities, including the ones populated by people who actually knew Jesus in the flesh, as Paul, of course, did not. Instead, Paul invoked special divine revelations about what Jesus said, with the result that Paul reinstated a lot of ideas that were meant to be disturbed by Jesus’s teaching of metanoia and unconditional forgiveness. That this line of New Testament scholarship is also congruent with Derrida’s The Gift of Death I will not point out.1 Keith Putt, a wise steward and prudent defender of the classical faith, and I, an impudent supplementary clerk of unorthodox troublemakers, have been arguing with each other about this for as long as we have known each other...

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