From: Ernst Meyer 
Subject: Heresies (5)
To: wse@jimmy.harvard.edu (Bill Edwards)
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 20:29:05 -0700 (PDT)

     I have four copies of the Greek New Testament (three of them
Nestle) two copies of the Vulgata, the Septuagint, Luther's "Die
gantze Heilige Schrifft/ Deudsch/Auffs new zugericht," which
includes his "Vorrede auff die Epistel S.Paul: An die Roemer;
Karl Barth's Der Roemerbrief; two examples of Liddell and Scotts
abridged Greek-English dictionary, and two Lateinisch-deutsche
Schulwoerterbuecher, as well as Grimm's deutsches Woerterbuch in
32 volumes.  Please feel free to bring along any other books you
think might be helpful.

     I also found on my bookshelves a two volume English
translation of Johannes Weiss' Das Urchristentum, in which I have
been reading some of the chapters about Saint Paul.

     Of eighteen patients I had scheduled today, seven dropped
out, and I had several hours to read Luther's translation of the
Pauline epistles.  By and by I became more and more exhilarated
with what I read.  It occurred to me that "Glaube" might be
construed as the epitome of Innerlichkeit. In the perspective of
subjectivity, previous objections to Pauline Christianity appear
trivial. Maybe, when he wrote that subjectivity is the truth,
Kierkegaard was right after all.

     One issue we might consider is the relationship between
belief as the avowal that certain "facts" are "objectively"
"true", and faith as the unshakeable and of course subjective
conviction of the immediacy of the divine, - or, if you prefer,
of the immediacy of God's grace. I cannot, at this point, follow
the compilers of the Apostles' or Nicene Creeds in their implicit
assumptions that endorsement of their statements of belief is
synonymous with faith.

     As I contemplate the text, it seems less and less likely
that philological criticism will be of much help in clarifying or
explaining the incongruities inherent in Saint Paul's theology,
although I look forward pleasurably to a rigorous reexamination
of the text and its various translations.  Rather it seems more
promising to try to identify the dialectic underlying his
exposition of the Christian experience, and to trace back this
dialectic not only to the Gospels and beyond them to the Old
Testament, but to the universal human experience - zu dem
Allgemein-menschlichen - which is reflected in the religious
tradition.

Ernst Meyer

                            * * * * *