St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church

Alain Badiou is a continental philosopher who wrote an interesting little book on Paul a few years ago. It's a plain reading, without any particular "hermenutic" or rule of interpretation. He was interviewed in the journal Philosophy and Scripture.

He says "For Paul, there is certainly a kind of separation necessary for his universalism because we have separated ourselves from the old man. We have, out of this separation, a newness of life. But it remains a universalism because there is no limit to this separation, there is no closure. The Pauline conception of the church is not at all the realization of a closed separation. Instead, it proposes something that is open to everybody, a collective determination, the realization of a separation in a universal field. So, naturally, there is, for Paul, in the process of universalism, something like division but this is a division internal to the subject itself. It is not an external division between the subject and others, but a division within the subject. Every subject has to cross a sort of intimate division between the old man and the new man, between the power of death and the power of life. So I perfectly understand that universalism can take the form of a separation. There is always something like an intimate division when universalism takes the form of a separation."