I was delighted to meet you at Faust's soiree last Tuesday. I find it fascinating that endearing anachronisms such as yourself still exist (only in the dear old U.S. of A., of course, do you still survive-but how charming!). As we agreed during our conversation, I am beginning a correspondence delineating post-Enlightenment objections to your personal version of Christianity; not that I think your faith has ever answered the Enlightenment, but the illumined sectors of today's society have progressed beyond it (what hateful concepts it promoted!), and so I will not pester you with the critiques of pure reason, which are so horribly dated. Rather, I will produce the critiques of impure reason, the infinite play of the Protean mind. Can you confine the unceasing, ever-altering human game within your Pauline, Augustinian, Calvinistic orthodoxy?
Your Presbyterian Christianity, for all its perpetual splintering, is quite typically Protestant in its reliance on the Bible. Objections of authenticity and canonicity aside (I left my can-opener at home today), you have the problem of the author to deal with. To make myself clear, I shall choose St. Paul as an example, since you Calvinists don't really concern yourselves with the rest of the Biblical crew anyway. In your infatuation with St. Paul, you orthodox Presbyterians assume that you can lift concepts from his purported epistles and pawn them off as enduring truths. Unfortunately, though you are a "people of the Book," you never study literary methods, a fact which I have always found most peculiar. If you had kept up with the Steins in the last few decades, you would have found that we've lost the author. As in, she has disappeared and we don't know where to find her. Rather like Poe, except we haven't found the rabid corpse in a ditch yet. We're looking in the 19th century, though; we think that Rousseau's noble savages may have eaten her. All this to say that Paul was a first-century Jew, and you are not. St. Paul's situatedness in his own cultural, historical, linguistic, and personal milieu implies that you cannot access what he meant, what he intended to communicate; you can only access what you yourself at this moment experience as a result of reading his words. Paul the author has disappeared from the scene of the crime, leaving no trace; you are only yourself, looking at the corpse through your own utterly disparate mental matrix.
This, of course, implies that you are literally unable to develop a "Pauline" theology; it also makes preaching from Paul's texts an exercise in infelicitous absurdity, as long as you are professing to preach a "Pauline" sermon. Any attempt to expatiate on "what Paul said concerning x" is an unbridled exercise in the theological oppression of your hearers, not an unpacking of the euangelion. [Maybe next time we can discuss the power-games inherent in having the laity sit passively while you stand above them, forcing the words of the sermon upon them.]
I hope that my comments do not appear derogatory, and that I have not crossed whatever reified bounds of propriety you may have found fit to establish. I write in the spirit of one who warmly embraces endless diversity, and who looks forward to your response with anticipation.
Sincerely,
Advocatus Diaboli
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