First, thanks to John Barclay for an important and timely book on Paul and gift exchange which is sure to spur important discussions in several fields. From where I stand, it is difficult to overestimate the issues addressed, touched upon, or implied by this book, and I will only scratch the surface here of what this book provokes in me.

These days we are all trying to stay afloat in an ocean of discursive histories—about gift, debt, debt forgiveness, and economic life as a form of promise which is hard to place and impossible to guarantee. These topics, so many genealogies we are inheriting, sketch the coordinates in which we must now find ourselves and from which we must project futures in which we actually believe. It’s not an easy task.

As always—and certainly more than most New Testament scholars are currently addressing (John is here exceptional and agenda setting)—Paul is a crucial historical and comparative barometer of what these complex inheritances are becoming in and through our ongoing work and investment of belief in economy. Inherited historical and theological disciplines or ecclesiastical identities do not begin to own the boundaries, limits, or potentials of these conversations, and I appreciate very much John’s efforts here to gesture beyond them.

For me, philosophical and political discussions are the best indication of this loss of a clearly defined “limit” (which is to say also of a dramatic expansion) of the Pauline legacy. For example, philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s great lifework, his homo sacer project, concludes with yet another of his calls for the creation of a new account of “economy” as a hidden theology, a new story of God (cf. Agamben, The Use of Bodies; The Kingdom and the Glory). (How else to account for economy’s sovereignty, the enabling pressure or enthusiasm of pistis in which our economies traffick, not to mention the obedience with which we seem to play our respective roles in this apparently sacralized economic leitourgia?). Agamben’s new story of a surprisingly theological history of economy, moreover, has—as a subversive loose end (and dramatic conclusion to The Use of Bodies), the image of a repressed and forgotten Paul as that classic Jewish messianist who became, instead, remembered by this tradition as the first Christian. Agamben’s implication in these books is therefore entirely clear, namely, that there is an economic story wrapped up in what we usually narrate as an anti-Jewish or supersessionist legacy. Recent work on Paul, the New Perspective, and philosophical readings of Paul have begun to articulate the ongoing legacies of Christian supersessionism (cf. Paul and the Philosophers)—but to date little has been done to show why there is evidently such a close link between a supersessionist Paul and, precisely, the Paul which seems useful to revolutionary or anti-capitalist readings of Paul. Any answer to that question will need, for a start, to wend its way through some of the genealogies John develops in Paul and the Gift.

Another indication of the dramatic contemporary moment of Paulinism in which we are living might be summarized in this similar question. What are the intensive struggles between philosophers like Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou but an explicit variation of questions of gift exchange and universal, global, or post-nationalist solidarity which have—for all of these thinkers—been crystallized around the question of what is to be done with the Pauline legacy? Note the way Sloterdijk’s consistent tweaking the nose of post-Frankfurt School Critical Theory so often situates itself as a critique of the Paulinism of figures like Alain Badiou (cf. Sloterdijk, Nietzsche, Apostle; Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert?). If there were in recent generations a useful moment for biblical scholarship to grasp from its comparative resources the articulation of our time in its openness to transformation, this is certainly it.

Toward that end, I want to focus my attention on John’s engagement with a “philosophical Paul” and a theological one around the question of a so-called “pure gift.” Just to begin, it is, I think, a testimony of the important and still emerging processing of biblical studies’ encounter with the work of Jacques Derrida (instigated in no small part by Yvonne Sherwood and others at the 2002 SBL/AAR) that there seems to be emerging now almost a kind of cottage industry criticizing Derrida (particularly the Derrida of Given Time) for failing to understand ancient, non-modern economies of gift. In addition to John’s thoughtful criticisms here, see also Thomas R. Blanton, A Spiritual Economy (cf. 1–9), or David E. Briones, Paul’s Financial Policy (cf. 53–57).

Derrida (the criticisms run) is obsessed with a purity of gift exchange which exceeds the horizon of ancient gift exchange or, indeed, gift exchange as such. Derrida is therefore, it is argued, insensitive to a more everyday ancient sense of solidarity and reciprocity in gift exchange, a series of obligations which Derrida denigrates as mere transactions or calculations rather than the free or self-grounding economy of a pure gift. At a hermeneutical level, though John doesn’t say so in his articulation of this type of argument, one could expand this criticism of historical sensitivities into a more wholistic philosophical critique. After all, what is at stake here is Derrida’s late career making gesture proclaiming that everything is deconstructable except the undeconstructable demand of and for justice itself, a justice which is therefore always futural or to-come rather than something which might be actualized or made simply present. Read this way, John’s criticism of Derrida’s “perfecting” of the Pauline legacy is very similar to the Marxist criticisms of Derrida’s “perfecting” of justice in such a way that (some of the Marxists argued) it always eludes the horizon of an actual transformative politics (cf. Matthew Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Spectres of Marx).

Will the return to a de-perfected, de-sublimated Pauline gift afford another path toward a more robust contemporary critique of capitalism like the one for which the Marxists seem to be searching? The structural sharing in these criticisms of Derrida (John’s historical one, the Marxists’ political one) eventually deserves further reflection, and here I note only John’s very interesting initial comments about how it was wonder at money, about solidarity, and about new experiments in economic solidarity within a Christian church which provoked some of his early reflections on the Pauline texts about gift. Perhaps we could add, too, that the book is dedicated to John Riches, another Paulinist possessed by his experiments in a fair trade internationalism. No doubt any and all zones of such experimentation are precious experiences today, and no doubt we should rather share than sequester what we feel we are discovering in them. I mention this in light of the Marxist critique only to point at the shared hope in experimentation and to indicate potentially fruitful comparisons around John’s book.

For his part, John expands his criticism of Derrida into the theological and especially modern reception of Paul more generally, attempting to show how interpreters from, say, Luther and Calvin to Käsemann and Badiou, have lost the vision of Pauline reciprocity or gift exchange in their very desire to discern a kind of pure gift beyond the determined space of gift repayment. Read this way, the genealogical issues here are, potentially, both striking and massive: the Pauline legacy, mirrored in the history of theology and philosophy alike, is losing sight of a kind of everyday solidarity of gift obligation precisely in its valorization of a gift beyond calculation or exchange.

In a section of the book I found to be crucial in this regard, Barclay draws from Kenneth Burke the notion of “perfecting” a concept. Burke describes, for Barclay, a drive to perfection, to purity, to the thing itself, to a kind of ultimate end-game version of a category, a dynamic of perfectionism which, once named, could of course be found in many cultural spheres. Barclay uses Burke to inflect the history of interpretation of Paul, attempting to show how this sublimating or exceptionalizing tendency of perfectionism consistently warps the field of vision around Pauline tropes of gift, effectively reducing its polyvalency by limiting it to a kind of pure “beyond” or perhaps to an overly “private” sphere. (Here we might highlight the similarity between Derrida’s interest in the pure gift as a subset of the singularizing “secret” and Luther’s inflation of salvation into a purely fiduciary/singularizing affair, a link Mark C. Taylor has consistently noted in relation to the genealogy of modern market economies—cf. Confidence Games; Speed Limits.)

For me, the key methodological question to ask of Barclay’s book concerns the status of “perfection,” as a drive, as an economic actor, or as a comparative topic of economic self-understanding. Put bluntly, John’s assertion is that “perfecting” is a kind of sublimating gesture which, while promising to resolve the antinomies from which it emerges, is also liable to lose the sense given by precisely those antinomies. Yes, in everyday life we recognize the difference between merely calculating or merely tactical exchange and a sphere which seems, by contrast, freer and more spontaneous. But there is a way we can press this distinction too far, as if we were escalating a conflict into a total war, and that is just what John finds in the reception history of the Pauline discourse on gift.

As these broad conversations progress, I hope more will be said by the critics of Derrida—and indeed of a massive genealogy of the “perfecting” of Paul’s gift-talk—about why this sublimating investment (or this escalation of category conflict) is a danger. I suspect we all need further development of what, precisely, agitates us about the dynamic in question. Here (again, all too briefly) it may be that the philosophers are ahead of the biblical scholars in such articulations about the (rising) stakes of precisely this element within the Pauline legacy. Notice how Simon Critchley, for example, suggests that it is such a logic of perfectionism which drives the Paulinism of Zizek and Badiou to a rhetoric of violence and revolutionary catastrophe (Faith of the Faithless). In other words, the revolutionary violence tolerated (at least rhetorically) by Zizek and Badiou is a function of the way they understand Paulinism—especially his wage-gift distinction—in relation to world history.

In response, Zizek has frequently enough responded to Critchley by claiming that Critchley must necessarily fail to contest capitalism as the contemporary imperial order. Without the “perfected” critique, escalated beyond all mere reformisms into a demand for which (as Zizek likes to say) we would “go to the end” we will never escape our subservience to the current order of things. To limit myself to one other example, the very interesting debate between Sloterdijk and Badiou about the nature of twentieth-century political violence is of precisely the same order, and it is no surprise that efforts are underway to stage this debate directly in terms of a question of the Pauline legacy (cf. Sloterdijk, Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert; Badiou, The Century).

In a word, tell me what you think about the social function of sublimating or utopian “perfecting” and I will tell you what you think of contemporary anti-capitalism. Or, differently, tell me what you think of “Christian origins” and I will tell you what you think about contemporary revolutionary breaks in the historical continuity of capitalism. Such are the times in which we write, times in which the Pauline legacy is attaining unprecedented levels of expansion, escalation, significance. Importantly, however, to date one of the only books to tackle this issue directly is Concetta Principe’s excellent Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul’s “Real.” The comparative interests of this book jump directly to the fact that it is precisely as a subset of the (surplus, excessive, or sublimated) “real” (in a psychoanalytic sense) which has generated philosophical fascination in the Pauline legacy. Principe’s book deserves more attention than it has received, and alongside John’s study should provoke important new directions in comparative research about the function of utopian “surplus” in and around Pauline discourse.

On that score, one of the things that I don’t like (there are several others which I won’t mention) about the contemporary cottage industry of denouncing “perfected” gift-talk as we have it in Derrida is that these criticisms often name “modernity” as the source of a misrecognition of the pre-modern exchange aspect of gift-giving. Once, the story goes, we knew that a gift was imbricated into a grand order of reciprocal solidarity. With modernity, the realm of exchange was so debased and calculating that the sphere of gift-giving had to flee to a remote, transcendent, otherworldly sphere of fantasized purity. That story may well be important, as far as it goes. Certainly it is a tried and tested topos of anti-capitalist discourse from Marx onward. I am concerned here more specifically with the way this epochal distinction between pre- and post-modern “gift” economy obscures something that is, increasingly, important to me, namely, that Pauline (and Senecan) discourses of the free gift were already utopian, already “perfecting”—which is to say sublimating, counter-factual, fantasized images which funded a cultural critique, or which fueled an antagonism, toward everyday life. I grant John’s fascinating use of Burke, but I don’t want to limit those insights about the role of “surplus value” or “perfecting” to a post-Pauline misrecognition of his gift-talk. For me, everyone in this genealogy is wrestling with excessive or counter-factual energies and promissory invitations. We cannot escape it and, indeed, one of the ways to take Marcel Mauss on the gift is as an exploration of the fact that these social energies, while differently managed at different times, are in fact inescapable.

To read Barclay, Briones, or Thomas Blanton one could be forgiven for thinking that Paul was some sort of hard-nosed everyday accountant of our social belonging compared to the otherworldliness or promise-oriented “purity” of the Derridean gift. But isn’t it clear, rather, that Paul and Seneca alike looked to tales of the free gift as, precisely, counter-factual and utopian critiques of an everyday life which they painted—by contrast to this utopian counter-factual—as rapacious, miserly, and debased? Were their writings about gift not also, in important respects, escalations of social antagonism, utopian provocations of the naturalized or habituated everyday? Historians like Barclay, Briones, and Thomas Blanton are frequently criticizing a philosophical Derrida for failing to recognize the historical aspects of Paul (with its gift exchange rather than a “perfected” or transcendental gift). What I find myself wishing for in all this discussion is, precisely, a comparativism which does not oppose a naturalized reciprocity in Paul to a “perfected” or extra-historical gift in the modern philosopher. Rather, I want to see more nuanced comparative tales of what is—in both cases—a tale of a sublimated, utopian, and counter-factual “gift.” Otherwise we fail to develop important new reflection on the topic which seems essential for the ancient or contemporary moment, namely, the question of surplus value as, paradoxically, the ground of these conversations rather than their simple disfiguration. We need a kind of Pauline rapprochement to the earlier arguments of a book like Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology.

Seneca, for example, is frequently clear that the distinction between a gift and a wage or “mere” transaction is a kind of polite forgetfulness of obligation in the former category of action. Yes, we owe the debts we owe, to our superiors, to our benefactors, to divinity—but the tacky thing, for Seneca, the socially destructive thing, would be to name this obligation, to say it out loud or directly or in too much specificity about what, precisely, is owed or accounted for in the act of gift-giving. In Seneca, life-giving and socially beneficial giving of gifts occurs as a kind of willful repression of social obligation. Or, differently put, in Seneca proper gift-giving is another name for the repression of social antagonism. To be too explicit about the drama around a gift is, already and from the very start, to express antagonism and aggressivity toward the social space one inhabits. No wonder that, for Seneca and Paul, the language of praise is so crucial around the topos of the gift, praise being so often that great “let it be” of acquiescence to a given state of affairs one cannot even calculate, much less change. Perhaps what interests me most in this respect is the way that the force of social antagonism emerges out of repressive forgetfulness easily to shift either into sublimating excess (as a counter-factual utopian critique of the—by-contrast—debased present) or into a de-sublimating specificity about the obligations that polite society does not say aloud.

I don’t mean to imply that Seneca and Paul are situating their cultural criticism or their respective invitations to the philosophical life in the same way—far from it. But I do mean to say that we understand their protreptic invitations to the renewed mind as of the same order as a contemporary utopian discourse that we get in someone like Derrida. Both are trafficking in the delicious possibility of an impossibility, both provoking the everyday with a sense of what it is not. Or, to put it more provocatively, both are inviting others to find the solidarity which is a singularizing “secret,” that buzzy energy of the unexpected and even unnameable. That the infrastructural demands or financial obligations of these respective movements (Paul’s or Derrida’s) would—soon and quite obviously enough—become routinized and readily recognizable, goes without saying. But, against Derrida’s historical-critical detractors, I think it is clear that we miss something very important in both authors if we imagine the logic of “perfecting” to be only a modern failure to recognize a naturalized wholism in Pauline gift-exchange.

To put it more provocatively in order to highlight the social function of “perfecting,” neither Derrida nor Paul—not to mention ourselves—get very far without the gesture toward that which escapes the everyday, a kind of sacrality, or even a kind of promissory or entrepreneurial bullshit, that figure which is structurally never clearly distinguishable from the “pure gift” as a kind of secret or unjustified hope.

Finally, the reason I want to challenge what seems to me an inappropriate epochal distinction (between Pauline gift and Derridean “pure gift”) is because I think we need to keep our comparative wits about us precisely when the question touches upon how we should live at a moment when it seems that a brutal capitalist economy of exchange so seamlessly integrates the excesses or an-economic zones of the “promise.” Here, too, my sense is that our experience is much closer to a Pauline theology of work (for free, without contract, beyond usual exchange values) than we dare to admit to ourselves. How many people reading this blog are out of work or permanently underemployed scholars who are, in every respect, funding their own careers? How many of us wonder at our own investments (again, in every sense) in a game which seems increasingly almost entirely about an extra-historical “promise” which cannot be reduced to work-and-wage, to contract, to actual exchange? Do our very souls, our very world-mediating enthusiasms, not indicate an almost monstrous—a properly divine—pistis in an economy which seems to elude us, to evade our challenges? Are we not all Paulinists now, not because we have a blueprint to change the world but, precisely, because we do not, because we are trying—heart and soul, our “souls at work” as Bifo Berardi likes to say—to bear up at a moment when “economy” is the divinity whose machinations are unreadable and in fact apparently unsustainable, whose imposed austerities are unquestionable, and whose demands for sacrifice are almost impossible to resist?

John Barclay puts before us a very important intervention about the Pauline legacy which is, quite clearly, not simply reducible to the past or to a couple of contemporary academic disciplines. In solidarity and sympathy with the project, I conclude with the question therefore: what is to be done with the Pauline legacy? More specifically, how are we to situate the historically Pauline ambiguous and ambivalent reliance on sublimation, on perfecting, on the post-contractual promise, in a world in which such dynamics indicate at once our greatest hopes and our most profound destitutions? To read Paul today is perhaps one of the most exhilarating and disconcerting of entrees into fundamental struggles of our time.

John M. G. Barclay’s Paul and the Gift has been received as one of the most important historical and sociological studies on Paul’s theology of grace to emerge since E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism.1 In a work that disrupted centuries of discourse on Paul’s soteriology, Sanders claimed that Judaism was also a religion of grace,2 and thereby sought to dispel certain “Pauline” misperceptions of Judaism’s severe legalism that animated Protestant dogmatics. Barclay’s work picks up where Sanders’ left off, and in an appreciatively critical spirit, seeks to refine and correct certain imperfections in Sanders’ work that have dogged the New Perspective(s) on Paul’s soteriology by demanding a more nuanced definitional discussion of what is meant by “a religion of grace.”

One of the major improvements that Barclay makes on Sanders is the inclusion of Philo of Alexandria amongst the religious figures populating Paul’s religious terrain. Sanders famously excluded Philo from his Second Temple comparandi, putatively for reasons of geographical circumscription (Sanders was focused on “Palestinian Judaism”). The unintended result of this decision was to eliminate from the discussion the figure who might be called the second Jewish theologian of grace in the first Christian century. By including Philo, Barclay has fruitfully re-centered the discussion of Paul’s soteriology, widening the field to include a more representative sampling of the various patterns of Jewish religion potentially informing Paul’s theology.

But does Barclay characterize Philo’s soteriological emphases correctly? That is the critical question for this reviewer—and one which has been raised before. In a generally appreciative 2017 assessment of Paul and the Gift published in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Margaret M. Mitchell raises the caveat that she “would have expected more attention to free will in Philo than is given in this account.”3 Taking a cue from Mitchell, I should like to ask whether Barclay’s assessment of Philo’s “perfections of grace,” which he uses to drive a wedge between Pauline and Philonic Judaism, represents the Alexandrian’s position accurately, or whether it stands in need of refinement. It is my sense that Mitchell is right to query whether Paul’s soteriology can be “generically” distinguished from Philo’s and Seneca’s on the basis of their theologies of grace alone.4 To make this case, I proceed first by summarizing the structure and achievement of this major monograph in Pauline studies, and then turn to Barclay’s treatment of Philo in chapters 2 and 6.

Barclay advances his argument in three basic movements. The first (part 1: The Multiple Meanings of Gift and Grace) begins with a fascinating sociological study of the history of human gift-giving, its inextricable embeddedness in cultures of reciprocity, and the rise of the problematic concept of the “pure gift” in modernity. This first chapter leads into a constructive second chapter, in which Barclay offers a new typology for mapping theologies of grace/gift in terms of six spectra, which Barclay dubs “perfections.” By “perfect,” Barclay means not “ideal,” but “complete” (i.e., “perfect babel”). Barclay’s perfections are: (1) superabundance (how much grace is given?); (2) singularity (is the gift given for good or benevolent ends); (3) priority (does the gift temporally precede the initiative of the recipient); (4) incongruity (to what extent does the offering of a gift depend on the worthiness of the recipient); (5) efficacy (to what extent does a gift achieve its designed ends?); and (6) non-circularity (does the gift stand outside the “the system of exchange or quid pro quo,” 70–75). Barclay’s “perfections” provide a sharp critical vocabulary by which to clarify Sanders’ largely unrefined notion of religions of grace (covenantal nomism notwithstanding). Part 1 closes with a long but selective reception history of Paul’s understanding of grace in Marcion, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, theologians “from Barth to Martyn,” in “Sanders and the New Perspective,” and in “Recent Discussions on Paul and Grace.” Origen, the Cappadocians, and later Byzantine theologians (with the exception of John Cassian) are not mentioned. Although this is not the major focus of this review, it seems worth pointing out that the omission of the Eastern Christian voices as well as Thomas Aquinas in Barclay’s reception history seems to steer his discussion of Paul in a decidedly Protestant direction. I will return to this point (briefly) below.

In the second major movement of his argument (part 2: Divine Gift in Second Temple Judaism), Barclay returns to the sources and studies antecedent, contemporary, and later Jewish theologians of grace, including Wisdom of Solomon, Philo of Alexandria, the Hodayot, Ps.-Philo’s LAB, and 4 Ezra. The third major stage of the argument (parts 3 and 4) offers readings of Galatians and Romans, respectively. While Barclay admits that there are certain differences of context and emphasis between the two letters, he finds in them a fundamentally identical construal of grace. Paul stands out from all other voices in the field in his maximizing the perfection of incongruity. Galatians sets forth “a shocking lack of match with the worth of [the divine gift’s] beneficiaries, in ethnic, cognitive, moral or other terms” (446). Shifting contextual emphases in Romans “reflect not the weakening but the expansion of Paul’s central perfection of grace—its incongruity with the worth of its recipients” (454).

A full assessment of Paul and the Gift exceeds the scope of the present review. Here, I limit myself to Barclay’s treatment of Philo. There is much to commend about this aspect of study. Barclay reads Philo carefully, recognizing the difficulty of interpreting the Alexandrian’s variegated corpus, with its “different modes,” “different exegetical methods,” “different kinds of treatise,” and different philosophical influences (212). He prudently seeks “amidst Philo’s diverse and even contradictory expressions, the signs of maximum emphasis” (ibid.). Barclay makes Philo a major touchstone in his construal of the perfections in chapter 2, and offers a fair and balanced reading of him in chapter 6.

Where Barclay perhaps overstates his case and fails to follow his own interpretive principles is with regard to Philo’s perfection or non-perfection of incongruity. According to Barclay, Philo maximizes almost all of the perfections other than incongruity. The Alexandrian “wax[es] eloquent” about the (1) superabundance of God’s gift; he defends the (2) singularity of God’s beneficence (which is a corollary of his transcendence); he “emphasizes the [3] priority of grace” by way of asserting God as first cause. Philo also, according to Barclay, perfects the (5) efficacy of God’s gift: “Even while stressing the ascetic effort of virtuous persons . . . in certain remarks to the philosophically initiated, [Philo] will render the human agent entirely passive.”5 He “normally figures thanksgiving as the proper return to God” and thus only partially perfects (6) non-circularity. This leads us to Philo’s hallmark difference from Paul: “Philo is not generally concerned to perfect [4] the incongruity of the gift” (237). Thus, Barclay concludes: “If we rid ourselves of the assumption that divine grace is, by definition, given to the unworthy . . . it is perfectly possible to hail Philo as a profound theologian of grace, even though he does not perfect its incongruity” (238).

Barclay himself admits that he developed the perfections as a means of describing the difference between Paul’s and Philo’s views of grace.6 Any attempt to use Barclay’s perfections to draw Philo and Paul more closely together runs the risk of futility, wielding a critical instrument toward an end antithetical to its original purpose. Nevertheless, I wish to raise a critique of Barclay’s construal of Philo’s understanding grace on his own terms, vis-à-vis the perfections of incongruity and efficacy. In particular, one passage, Leg. 1.34, deserves greater emphasis in Barclay’s analysis. Here, in the programmatic beginning of the Allegorical Commentary, Philo answers the question “why did God deem the earth-born and body-befriending mind worthy (ἠξίωσεν) of the divine spirit?” Philo gives two answers, the first of which is most pertinent:

[To this question] it must first be answered that God, because he loves to give gifts (φιλόδωρος ὤν), graciously gives (χαρίζεται) good things to all, even those who are not perfect (τοῖς μὴ τελεῖοις), inviting them to a zealous participation in virtue. . . . God has fashioned no soul bereft of goodness, even if some should be unable (ἡ χρῆσις ἀδύνατος) to use it.

Barclay is aware that this passage complicates his thesis, but suggests in several places (73n12; 222, esp. 228) that this and several similar loci in the Allegorical Commentary (see Sacr. 124; Migr. 186) are not the main thrust of Philo’s thought. Here we ought, as Mitchell suggests, to “push a bit harder” and ask why Barclay has marginalized this and related passages. Philo strategically locates this statement on God’s indiscriminate, incongruous gift-giving at the programmatic beginning of his Allegorical Commentary in his foundational account of moral agency in the molded mind. He explicitly states that God, in his love of giving gifts, graciously attributes worth (ἠξίωσεν) to all souls regardless of moral potency. In Leg. 1.34, superabundance, singularity, priority, and incongruity are all perfected. In Leg. 1.34, it is the efficacy of God’s gift which instead remains unperfected.

Barclay’s case that Philo generally perfects efficacy of God’s gift (and reduces the efficacy of human moral agency and ascetic discipline to a mere linguistic fiction) depends largely upon a single, fragmentary passage from Leg. 4 and runs counter to the general impression given by Philo’s moral paraenesis throughout the Allegorical Commentary. Barclay’s claim that Philo perfects the efficacy of grace thus violates his own principle of seeking “signs of maximum emphasis” in Philo. A fairer assessment of Philo’s theology of grace would be that Philo alternates between perfecting incongruity and efficacy. In far more cases than Barclay admits, Philo apparently leaves the efficacy of God’s gift unperfected and dependent upon the free will and moral agency of the recipient. The root problem for Philo, in other words, is not why God gives good things only to the worthy (see, e.g., Migr. 18, where all “Israel,” the seeing race, stands on the brink of enslavement to blind Ignorance), but rather why some souls do not have as great a capacity to receive God’s gracious gifts as others (see Opif. 23).

If the imperfection of efficacy opens Philo to the charge of “synergism” by some Protestant scholars (238), one might respond by asking why this is a problem. Philo was received and transmitted by theologians of the Orthodox East, whose soteriologies from Origen onward have been characterized as synergist rather than monergist. Many theologians in the Western tradition, including (e.g.) Thomas Aquinas, Melanchthon, Luis de Molina, and reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga, potentially succumb to this “critique” as well.

Philo’s perfection, at key moments, of the incongruity of God’s gift destabilizes the foundation of Barclay’s differentiation between Pauline and Philonic Judaism. One need not argue that Philo and Paul had identical patterns of religion to recognize a closer generic proximity between their theologies of grace and thanksgiving than Barclay allows. Where Paul and Philo do part ways more consistently is with regard to their varied perfections of the efficacy of the human will; their differing perspectives on the external appearance of lives of virtue; and, most importantly, their highly divergent relationships to apocalyptic Messianism—the particular means by which God’s grace is given.

One of John Barclay’s key claims in Paul and the Gift is that the Christ-gift is given incongruously, but that Paul expects the recipients of grace to become congruous. Put provocatively, the gift is unconditioned, given without regard to prior worth, but not unconditional. Indeed, to receive the gift of grace is to become obligated to obey Christ, and subject to judgment for resisting the gift and its effects. Paul expects his converts to change, so that their social practices are “the realization of the gift.”

This essay raises some critical questions about how this realization happens and what it looks like experientially, particularly in regard to Barclay’s insistence that the gift is unconditioned but nevertheless comes with a quid pro quo. In part because Barclay has promised a further volume sketching out the social implications of the incongruous gift, I want to press for further specificity; what is the character of the community shaped by the unconditioned gift? What are the qualities of personal interaction in which “the incongruity between the gift and the recipients’ previous worth is designed to bring about a deep and lasting congruity between the character of the gift and the ethos of its recipients”? Indeed it is abundantly evident that Paul expects his converts’ lives to be no less transformed than his own. Nonetheless, it seems to me that by using the language of conditionality and reciprocity, perhaps Barclay subverts the transformation he rightly attributes to “the incongruity between the gift and the recipients’ previous worth.”

What do I mean? I have titled this essay “Love and Reciprocity.” Readers will note the shift from speaking about the gift to speaking about love. But for Paul, love above all is the “ethos” that expresses best the character of the gift, as he repeatedly tells the Galatians: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumsion is of any avail, but faith working through love” (Gal 5:6); “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be slaves of one another. For the whole law has been fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal 5:13–14); “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal 5:22).

If the communal realization of the unconditioned gift is love, what is the character of this love? Does it operate without prior conditions yet require subsequent reciprocity? Does it begin with an unconditioned gift but then become conditional, and if so, when does such a shift occur? How is its efficacy to be measured, if indeed it is? Does it create a new system of worth, or so radically undo even the idea of such systems that questions of worth become irrelevant? At issue is the way in which Spirit-indwelt human agents express the character of the gift in their interpersonal interactions. Because that is where, as Barclay repeatedly and rightly insists, the gift becomes existentially real.

To illustrate the point, I quote from Ken Carder, a retired United Methodist bishop who now serves as chaplain in a memory care facility; Carder’s wife Linda has advanced Alzheimer’s and is herself a patient in this facility. Observing that dementia offers tremendous lessons in Christian living, Carder highlights “love without reciprocity.” In his words, “Linda can no longer express love to me in the way she has for most of the 55 years we’ve been together, but I can love her without any expectation of return. . . . I do that imperfectly. God does it perfectly. That’s what agape love is.”1

Carder’s story and comments illustrate the creative power of persistently non-circular love that is itself an expression of the unconditioned, incongruous gift. Love in the face of non-reciprocity is the basis on which Carder ministers to dementia patients, precisely because such love does not require a return. In this sense it is radically free and thereby radically sustainable over time. Furthermore, in Carder’s view this “love without reciprocity” is precisely how God loves, and in that sense the permanently unconditioned love of God is the fount of Carder’s love. He is passing on what he continually receives. In a nutshell, the ethos shaped by the unconditioned gift is itself unconditional.

There is a deep paradox at work here. What Carder demonstrates, even as he acknowledges his own imperfection, is congruity between the gift and his own life. That is, the certainty of God’s self-gift in the face of incongruity funds his extension of love to non-reciprocating recipients. Therefore, such expression paradoxically finds its fulfillment in “love without reciprocity”—that is, a gracious relationship that does not require an obligation of return or depend on the transformation of the relational partner into a “fitting recipient.” This is the paradox that must, I insist, characterize the existential reality of the outworking of grace in the life of faith.

The issue is how the incongruous gift is mediated interpersonally. Is it mediated through human relationships that begin with unconditioned grace but develop through the imposition of conditions and obligations? Or does it persist despite incongruity? Might there be a sense in which the incongruity of grace undergirds and sustains the change Paul anticipates in his converts? And might there be a sense in which the goal of such change is a kind of permanent incongruity in the interpersonal enactment of the gift? That is, Paul wants his congregations to become communities in which the incongruity of grace is the norm that subverts all systems of worth and generates genuinely new social realities—not just once, but on a daily basis. This promise and expectation of transformation is intrinsic to the liberation Paul proclaims.

Thus the question is not whether participation in Christ’s faithful death and resurrection changes believers, but rather, how and to what end. What are the dynamics of change in the life of faith? How, that is, do believers become fitting recipients of grace who persistently extend unconditioned grace to others? Or does conditionality subvert that practice?

Any attempts to answer this question will have to take account of two aspects of Paul’s thought, both of which Barclay discusses: the notion of the person as a self-in-relationship, and Paul’s judgment language. First, the person. I suggest that talk about change in the Christian life has been hampered by an unexamined either/or veering between autonomous individualism on the one hand, and purely communal identity on the other. Paul himself seems to be more nuanced. He speaks easily and not infrequently in the singular first and second person, with a strong sense of himself as a unique agent, and a clear address to others as discrete individuals. Yet persons do not exist in isolation and they certainly are not autonomous in a modern sense. Rather, they are selves-in-relation. If this is so, then to talk about change is to talk about a reconstitution of the relational matrix in which persons live.

Barclay is aware of this; his focus, like that of Paul, is on the social transformations effected by life in the realm of gifts bestowed on unfitting recipients rather than on the basis of achievement or honor. In this regard, then, what changes is the quality of the relationships in which persons are held and constituted and interact, and here it is giftedness rather than achievement or other criteria of worth that forms the basis for the life of faith. Thus Paul’s harshest criticism falls on those who require normative behavior that undercuts the incongruity of the gift of Christ himself. To be sure, the demand for congruity is based on something other than the singular gift, such as observance of the Mosaic law, but as Barclay himself has argued elsewhere, the Christian missionaries requiring such observance saw it as completely congruous with faith in Christ. That observation bears further attention: it is not always clear when the obligation to respond to the gift in a “fitting” way becomes unfitting. In theory, the incongruity of the gift deconstructs all prior norms and requirements; in practice, the way in which a new communally constituted identity is formed is less clear. Put simply, as soon as the obligation to become a “fitting recipient” of the gift is imposed, it subverts the incongruity of grace on an existential level. Those being circumcised in Galatia may think they thereby are become fitting recipients, but in fact they have “cut themselves off from Christ.” It is crucial to note the paradox here: human beings do not change in a vacuum; if they do indeed begin to become “fitting recipients” of grace, they do so as those who know themselves to be unfitting yet welcomed in a community that does not impose criteria of worth.

There is a complex interplay between individual and social transformation at work here, and it is related to the complexities of Paul’s judgment language. Paul does warn those who subvert the incongruity of grace, yet he also tells the Roman Christians not to judge one another, but to leave judgment to God. Indeed, the certainty of God’s eschatological judgment is the basis for suspending mutual human judgment. Paul even tells the Corinthians that he does not judge himself (1 Cor 4:4–5). Ultimately judgment is in God’s hands, and the community of faith mediates grace in part, at least, by acknowledging that reality. Even the disciplinary action of turning the incestuous man over to Satan (1 Cor 5) is not for the purpose of exclusion, but rather salvation.

So while Barclay rightly insists that Paul’s letters are full of warnings of eschatological judgment, it is not always clear that those warnings function in a conditional way. The certainty of divine judgment in Gal 6:1–10 grounds Paul’s instruction to restore those who have gone astray, “in a spirit of gentleness” (Gal 6:1). As in Romans, divine judgment does not find expression in human judgment, but in a deeper extension of incongruous benefaction. Perhaps judgment is everywhere in Paul, but not everywhere the same. It seems to me there is judgment, but not ultimate condemnation; because God condemned sin in the flesh on the cross, the promise that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ grounds the transforming power of the Spirit in the community (Rom 8:1–3, 32–34). Discipline is one thing, condemnation is quite another. There is communal discipline in Paul’s letters, but final judgment is a divine prerogative.

Now all this limns the qualities of a community of believers in which change happens. The transformation of which Paul speaks occurs primarily in relationships between people, not in isolate, discrete individuals. That communal interaction does not impose systems of worth on its members, but rather extends unconditioned grace interpersonally over time. In this sense it is marked by the absence of criteria about who qualifies as “worthy” of belonging. Members of such a community expect to be judged by God, and live with the humility and openness that such expectation may foster, precisely because final judgment belongs to God and not flawed human beings.

Is the ethos of such a community “conditional” or “unconditional”? Insofar as Christ’s self-gift is, I suggest, permanently unconditioned, the ethos of a communal realization of the gift is unconditional. It never depends on the recipients’ capacity to respond appropriately. Yes, Paul expects transformation in his converts, as in his own life. But he leaves room to speak truthfully about the fragility of change this side of the eschaton, and therefore also about the ineluctable limits of human judgment. In this fleshly existence anyone might lose evidence of a transformed life—faith, love, the fruits of the Spirit—at any time. That loss does not gainsay the reality of the transformation Paul envisions, because it is enacted through the relationships that uphold each member of the community. But it does gainsay any conditionality imposed on individual believers, whose judgment is finally in God’s hands. Rather, as Rowan Williams puts it, “What happens in Jesus is that we are drawn into a community in which our engagement in the fate of human beings acquires something of the same exposure and unconditionality as God’s.”2