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Apostle to the Conquered: Reimaging Paul's Mission (Paul in Critical Contexts)

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I wrote this review for one of my theology classes, and when I saw that it had no reviews on Amazon, I decided to go ahead and post it. I would add that the group of students and the professor in the class--all of whom were sympathetic to Lopez's project and politics--seemed to come to something of a consensus on the merits and shortcomings of the work, though I'm sure that we would differ somewhat on the star rating assigned to the book:


Davina C. Lopez's Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul's Mission (2008) is a useful work, helpful for locating the Letter to the Galatians (Paul's only text she considers) within the symbolic and ideological world of imperial Rome and, in doing so, revealing a fuller picture the political implications of Paul's words and mission. Lopez's achievement, however, is ultimately incomplete, marred by an overly eisegetical approach to Paul's text.

Lopez sets out to place herself in opposition to what she terms the "idealist" approach to Pauline exegesis which, in her view, "sees no context for Paul's rhetoric besides personal religious piety and struggles over dogmatic correctness" (6). She criticizes the idealist tradition for ignoring the political contexts of the New Testament and, in doing so, aligning itself with "privilege, elitism, and imperialism" (8). A non-idealist reading should, conversely, consider the concrete socio-political context of the biblical texts, treat these texts as part of the complex social texture in which they were originally embedded, and take "social transformation and justice as its agenda" (8). As part of this liberationist hermeneutic, Lopez adopts insights from "empire-critical, postcolonial, feminist, and queer" (7) theoretical perspectives. Her ultimate goal is to re-imagine Paul's mission to the nations. Lopez's use of the term "imagine" is cued by Louis Althusser's well-known definition of ideology: "[T]he imaginary relationship of individuals to their real condition of existence" (18). For Althusser and Lopez, the imaginary is "what is created out of the presentation of knowledge as inevitable and universal" (18). Imagination is the force that, when employed by the marginalized, reveals the empire-aligned imaginary as "deceptive, dominant, and harmful" (18) and envisions a new world that might break the empire's hold on fate. Thus, for Lopez, to re-imagine Paul's mission is to recognize him as a marginalized voice seeking to articulate against Roman rule a counter-hegemonic discourse.

Most of Lopez's book is spent detailing the naturalization of patriarchal and imperial ideology in Rome's symbolic spectrum. She considers a multitude of texts, including Rome's origin myth, the Aeneid, the Res Gestae, imperial coins, and others. Her paradigmic text is a relief from the imperial cult complex in Aphrodisius depicting the Emperor Claudius subduing Britannia, who is personified as a woman. In this relief, Rome is represented as male, active, high, conqueror, order, civilization, god, and penetrator, whereas Britannia is female, passive, low, conquered, barbaric, lawless, chaos, and penetrated (21). Lopez argues that this image epitomizes the semantic relationship Rome imagines between itself and the nations it seeks to conquer. All of the conquered nations, including Judea and Galatia, are represented and considered in Roman iconography in like manner to Britannia in this relief.

Lopez seeks to reconsider Paul's message to the nations (or Gentiles) within this framework. She understands Paul's conversion experience as a heightening of consciousness that is manifested in two particular ways. First, she considers Paul's conversion to be a prophetic call to be, like Jeremiah, a "prophet to the nations" (Jer. 1.5). By accepting this call, Paul achieves the consciousness that "the project of Israel is not to persecute the nations, but to reincorporate them and make justice with them" (135). Second, when God reveals to Paul that he has Christ in himself (Gal. 2.16), Paul realizes that he has "the dynamics of defeat by the Romans within him" (135). In other words, Paul realizes that he is in the same position as the crucified Jesus; he is a marginalized one, subjected to the Roman death machine. For Lopez, Paul's raised consciousness compels him to be the apostle to the nations, and the nations are, crucially, not to be understood simply in relation to Jews and Israel. Both occupy the same semantic space in relation to Rome and are, hence, in equal need of liberation. Thus, Paul, "the apostle to the defeated nations" (8), carries to his fellow conquered a gospel of "liberation from the slavery of Roman domination, via solidarity with Israel" (8).

According to Lopez, resistance to Rome requires "staying on the bottom and opposing vertical hierarchy from that location by making an alternative structure" (151). In order to do this, Paul represents himself in the same terms as Rome represents the defeated nations. With his metaphor of suffering birth pains on behalf of his readers (Gal. 4.19), Paul is depicting himself similarly to the way Britannia was portrayed: female, powerless, penetrated, and suffering. As such, he exists in solidarity with the suffering nations and refutes the ideological imagery of Rome. Lopez's interpretation of the Hagar/Sarah also urges solidarity and resistance to Roman power. In that allegory, Lopez sees the children of Hagar as those born into slavery and Sarah's as born into the covenant of Israel. The allegory should urge the Galatians, born into slavery under Rome, to reject the divide and conquer practices of Rome, enter solidarity with Israel, and gain freedom by becoming heirs to Abraham and Sarah within Israel's covenant with God. In Lopez's re-imagining, Paul's mission is to proclaim the message to the nations that by joining with Israel in their covenant with God they may be liberated from the enslavement of Roman imperialism.

Lopez's study is certainly creative and useful. Her analysis of Roman iconography and ideology will aid scholars trying to recognize the full political implications of New Testament language. Paul's use of gendered imagery and the connotations of the term "nations" no doubt speak to the circumstance of injustice so prevalent in the Roman Empire. The New Perspective movement has led to a reconsideration of how Paul understood salvation, and Lopez's insights seem to me as though they have a place within that conversation.

However, much of Lopez's argument seems ill-founded in the text. For instance, Lopez, building on basic semiotics, states that words mean by means of difference. It seems largely untenable, therefore, to argue that Paul understands his core mission to be the apostle to the conquered nations when he never explicitly defines "nations" in opposition to Rome. In fact, Rome is never mentioned in Galatians. Additionally, Lopez fails to take her own advice in considering the concrete contexts in which the texts were produced. For instance, she never considers the immediate exigency for Galatians, traditional explanations of which (as a local theological/political dispute) seem to provide much more reasonable explanations for passages that Lopez interprets (particularly Gal. 3.28). Another seeming gap is Lopez's explanation of Paul's conversion, which she characterizes as being essentially political rather than theological. This seems to be an overcorrection on Lopez's part. In an effort to correct the traditional neglect to the political aspects of Paul's thought, she seems to have neglected the theological aspects. Jesus is clearly central to Paul's conversion and to the self-understanding of his mission, but in this book, Jesus' role in Paul's mission is not adequately explained. The Apostle to the Conquered is useful in some respects, but the author's agenda overwhelms the text.