This article began life in another form as the piece “Lohmeyer and Philippians”, published in the early season of Common Ground, in April 2020. What follows here builds on that earlier work to incorporate further thinking about the nature of contemporary political life and language. The result is a fulsome and thought-provoking meditation on Paul’s letter to the Philippians and on the ways in which Christian martyrs direct us to what really matters – Ed.
Ernst Lohmeyer had worked for months toward a single goal. By turns he had hurdled, skirted, and flirted with the range of obstacles before him, and if he was to see the fruition of his labour, he had to take his responsibilities seriously, with two hands and whatever else besides.
Lohmeyer knew no way but diligence. Meetings, politics, political meetings, pastoral duties, preaching—such were the contents of Lohmeyer’s days as he laboured toward the scheduled day. The reinauguration of the University of Greifswald, which the Soviet occupation authority had closed at the end of the Second World War, was set for February 15, 1946. The day finally arrived. Lohmeyer, the University President, had already prepared the inaugural address, and he left home in the morning well in advance of the opening ceremony. He had much before him, and he called his wife, Melie, to say he’d not be home for dinner. At 11:00 pm Melie responded to the doorbell, and at the landing she found three members of the Soviet political police. The policemen asked after Lohmeyer and left upon finding him absent. Soon after, Lohmeyer returned home, “quite exhausted” according to Melie, and just in time for the police to return and arrest him. It was very early on February 16. Melie would never see her husband again.1
Lohmeyer was a New Testament scholar by training and profession, and before the war he had written a commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Philippians (1927) and a study on the “Christ-Hymn” of Philippians 2:5-11 entitled Kyrios Jesus (1928). Today, some might recognise Lohmeyer’s contribution in Kyrios Jesus, even if they fail to attribute it to him: among other things, Lohmeyer determined that the hymn probably predates Paul’s letter, and it is therefore an early instance of “high” Christology. High Christology consists in the view that the human being Jesus Christ, a first-century Palestinian Jew, is the Son of God and identical to YHWH, the covenant God of Israel.2
Paul’s letter to the Philippians has sat with me for some time, and I’ve read Lohmeyer’s work, and read about Lohmeyer himself, with interest. When Philippians and Lohmeyer are read together, martyrdom emerges as a key theme. We late-modern citizens of a liberal democracy struggle to get a handhold on martyrdom, even if we grapple with Paul. What are we to think of martyrdom? As we enter election season, what do martyrs have to teach us about faithful speech and meaningful public commitment? In this essay, we read Philippians and think about martyrdom to help us keep in view what really matters. I set out with the notion of “liberal irony” as a feature of our cultural clime that destabilises us and imperils our commitment. This notion cannot make sense of Paul and Philippians, or martyrdom. Soundings from Erik Peterson and Oliver O’Donovan aid us as we consider politics, witness and mission. Lohmeyer remains a companion throughout, and I close with his example.
Let’s begin with Richard Rorty’s notion of liberal irony.3 Liberalism is as much a cultural and social project as it is a political system, and all of us are shaped more or less by its environment. That is, Rorty touches on something with liberal irony that affects liberal democratic Aotearoa, regardless of identifiers such as “liberal” and “conservative”. I take it to be part of the atmosphere of liberalism, even if we wouldn’t quite find the language Rorty does or if we would qualify it.
What does Rorty mean by liberal irony then? He notes that we make extensive use of what he calls “final vocabularies”. Final vocabularies are at work in the stories we tell about our lives and include words such as “good”, “true”, “beautiful”, “Christ”, “kindness”, and “creative” etc. In a perfect world, we would really like a precise and complete vocabulary or narrative that tracks reality, for this would justify and secure us in our actions, beliefs and lives. It would indemnify us against loss: we would see order in historical events rather than face the obscurity and instability of mere change. But this is not our world, and the liberal ironist knows it. The ironist’s final vocabulary is groundless: one worries as one sneaks longing glances at another’s, quite different and non-liberal, final vocabulary; one cannot offer a satisfactory argument for one’s own final vocabulary; and one doubts that one’s final vocabulary tracks reality more closely than another’s. These three characteristics define liberal irony.
Ironists realise “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed”. They are therefore “never quite able to take themselves seriously”, and commitment is only provisional. This raises the problem of “rootlessness”.4 Seriousness and commitment require roots. We want and need roots that resist redescription and that stabilise us, giving significance to our actions and lives. Or, more dramatically and gnomically, we want something real to die for, but “no one dies for mere values.” 5
Rorty in fact doesn’t think it “ideal” to have a society of ironists. He thinks common hope binds communities together and gives them vocabulary.6 Rorty therefore holds a tension between “private irony and liberal hope”. Private irony consists in efforts, “by … continual redescription, to make the best selves for ourselves that we can.”7 Re-description serves self-creation, which is freedom.8 Rorty contrasts this with “social hope”, which looks forward to when “life will eventually be less cruel, more leisured, richer in goods and experiences, not just for our descendants but for everybody’s descendants.”9 He cannot reconcile these two, and he ends up with “solidarity” defined by “a common selfish hope”, which amounts to the survival of one’s “little things”: “the hope that one’s world… will not be destroyed.” This hope features final vocabulary such as “kindness” and “decency”, which will perhaps overlap between private irony and public hope, and it excludes “true” or “good”, for these two wait indefinitely on consensus.10But so long as there is political freedom (essentially self-creation), “truth and goodness will take care of themselves”.11
I wonder if the effect of something like liberal irony and of stripped-back “common selfish hope”, even if these are not explicitly embraced, figure in undermining trust in the body politic and confidence in liberal democratic institutions. Complacency looms where one is caught between praising certain language (or realities) and the commitment that this speech act promises. Rorty self-consciously stands at a distance to his final vocabulary and to commitment—he is an ironist.12 Are we able both to praise and commit to language such as “good” and “bad”, or, say, Jacinda Ardern’s “kindness”? What about “Christ”?
The Apostle Paul both praises Christ and commits to Christ. Paul is whole-hearted, full-throated and clear-eyed. Paul is serious, so far as Rorty understands seriousness.13 But we late-moderns are far more at home in Rorty’s picture or in a qualified version of it. Reading Paul can therefore be experienced as a scouring. Yet the exercise of reading is not masochism but an opening to the holy precincts, Scripture, with the prayer that God will meet us there and change us by the truth of his loving presence.14 Scripture is “the sphere of reality in which Christ glorified is present and speaks with unrivalled clarity”.15 The words of Scripture are not a “final vocabulary” that can be jostled over, re-described and re-purposed. They are rooted in reality. Christ is the last Word.16 Paul preaches Christ; he “gospels” (euaggelizó) urgently. Paul’s urgency is especially to the fore in Philippians.
Philippians is possibly Paul’s last letter, and it is possibly written from Rome. It is certainly written from prison. One way to understand the letter is to consider it consolation to the Philippians, who are grieving Paul’s imprisonment.17 1:8 is the capstone of Paul’s affection and it expresses his bond with the audience: “For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus.” In his commentary, Lohmeyer speaks of Paul’s “passionate expression of longing”, and he finds here Paul’s “decisive reason” for the letter.18 Paul’s longing (cf. 4:1) is rooted in Christ: he longs with, literally, the “inward parts (splagchnon) of Christ Jesus”. Paul, and by extension the believer, “has no yearnings apart from his Lord, his pulse beats with the pulse of Christ; his heart throbs with the heart of Christ”.19
Paul’s commitment to Christ and his fellowship with the Philippians overflows into prayer for them (1:9-11). The prayer unfolds in this way:
And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
In essence, Paul believes the Philippians’ grief is ill-founded: the Philippians have not adequately “determined what is best”. They have vested concern in what does not ultimately matter rather than what matters ultimately. Reorientation is necessary for the sake of the Philippians’ own holiness, “the harvest of righteousness”, and the glory of God. Paul’s imprisonment doesn’t matter; others’ spiteful and ambitious machinations do not matter (1:17). What really matters, for Paul, is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and its progress.
In this Paul rejoices. He harbours a deep and abiding joy regardless of imprisonment and the challenges posed by rivals. Joy acts as a signal that Paul sees the gospel spreading and shaping people’s lives. Adversity in Paul’s life has no relationship to joy, and he seeks to make this clear to the Philippians. Adversity only impedes joy where it affects the gospel negatively. Paul promotes only the gospel, and he calls for unity among the Philippians in the face of their own various adversities: grief, internal relational strife, and external opponents. Joy obtains where unity in the gospel does. Joy is an ecclesial emotion.20 The Philippians share in Paul’s joy when they recognise the progress of the gospel (1:12-3), and they complete it when they dwell in unity (2:2) and share in Christ’s “mind” (2:5).21 God is at work, Paul’s circumstances notwithstanding, or better: through Paul’s circumstances, the gospel of Christ breaks new ground.
So Paul writes to the Philippians. The letter seeks both to allay the Philippians’ grief and to direct them. He prays the Philippians would come to participate in his vision, which takes after Christ’s own (cf. 2:2ff), and that this vision would define their super-abounding love. Paul’s central petition is for “knowledge and full insight” (1:9). The word “aisthései” appears only here in the New Testament, and when modified by the adjective “pasé” denotes “breadth of perception”: “the ability to make proper moral decisions in the midst of a vast array of differing and difficult choices that are constantly presenting themselves to the Christian.”22 Such perception is not an end in itself but serves love. Love definitively displays commitment to Christ.23
Ernst Lohmeyer read Philippians as a martyr’s letter, and he identified the thematic centre at 3:10-1: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”24 Lohmeyer saw knowledge and the committed life of discipleship together with martyrdom, and he thought Paul expected martyrdom amongst the Philippians.25 Lohmeyer’s contemporary and fellow German Erik Peterson also understood martyrdom as central in Philippians.26 Peterson reflected expressly on politics and the martyr’s witness. He thought the Protestant church’s rejection of the martyrs and saints had left it susceptible to middle-class materialism and self-contentedness.27 Comfortable bourgeois “Christianity” had also affected the interwar Catholic Church. This was disastrous for Peterson, who penned an essay in 1937 on the early church and the book of Revelation, where he argued that “…the apostolic Church, which is founded on the apostles, who became martyrs, is also always the suffering Church, the Church of the martyrs. A church that does not suffer is not the apostolic Church.”28
Lohmeyer and Peterson, despite their many differences, agreed on the importance of suffering in faith—not gratuitous suffering, or suffering for its own sake, but where it is the unavoidable consequence of keeping the church from captivity to an alien power.29 They also agreed on Christ’s Lordship displayed in the peculiar events of Christ’s death and resurrection. For Peterson, the martyr suffers as a member of the body of Christ and not as a “heroic” individual. This act repeats the believer’s baptism into the Church and recapitulates Christ’s death and resurrection, the world’s turning point or reversal.30 In view of Philippians 3:10-1, Christ’s death and resurrection are not simply “information”; they also exert formative power on our bodies and hopes. The ultimate horizon of the martyr’s faith is eschatological, though it is not solely eschatological.31 Lohmeyer, too, thought of the martyr as both a representative (Stellvertreter) of God and an advocate of God who brings the “message of the coming world into this world”.32
Perhaps we can easily see why Peterson, in particular, meditated on martyrdom in his context in Nazi Germany, but what does martyrdom have to do with us and our political and cultural moment? Martyrs show us something of what really matters and what we should commit to. They help us navigate our times faithfully and non-ironically in several ways. First, martyrs are witnesses (martyres) who represent, in their flesh, the church on mission. Mission, publishing the gospel of Christ’s victory, is the church’s vocation in the world. Martyrdom is a visible sign of the church’s faithfulness to Christ and to mission. In martyrs we see, literally, mission prosecuted. We are encouraged to undertake mission, in its various forms, by the example of their devotion. The capacity of the martyrs to unsettle us, especially, prepares us for mission. This is a theme of Peterson’s: the complacent church, the comfortable church, is not the apostolic church, the church on mission.33
Martyrs show us something of what really matters and what we should commit to. They help us navigate our times faithfully and non-ironically in several ways.
Second, and relatedly, martyrs offer us a stark reminder of Christ’s Lordship and authority. Martyrs do not and cannot detract from Christ and the work of the Spirit.34 They wait on the Prince of martyrs (Rev 6:9-11), and witness to Christ through conformity to him. In their conformity, martyrs attest the breadth of Christ’s Lordship—it extends beyond the grave. Christ’s Lordship places all things in perspective. In particular, it relativises politics without stripping politics of dignity. Politics has dignity by dint of its place and importance in fostering the common good. We have to negotiate the various powers that structure our life together. We are to work out and work on mutual flourishing as we test and organise our freedoms. We are to find modes of concourse and compromise with those who think and live differently from us. This negotiation features from grass-roots to the global level. And it takes various forms as it is employed by different actors, including professionals, who “live by politics”, and activists, who “live for politics”.35 But if negotiation is the whole of our existence rather than part of it, restlessness and strife will be the bass notes of our lives. For Rorty, there is in fact no rest for our doubts as the endeavour of dialectic and continual redescription “hopes…to make the best selves for ourselves that we can”. In this, which Rorty names “literary criticism”, he is interested in “the playing off of figures against each other”.36 In contrast, Christ, the Prince of peace, breaks in on our negotiations and reorientates our individual and social lives in their totality, placing politics in perspective and relegating formal political authority from a sovereign to a delegated, though dignified, authority. Paul, and martyrs generally and secondarily, help us make this recognition.
The martyrs also, importantly, attest Christ’s Lordship and reckon with political authority from within the larger body politic. They proceed not from an apolitical perspective, but from their distinctive ecclesial position, which celebrates Christ’s victory. The martyrs are a constitutive part of the church, not only historically when they contributed to the growth of the church, as at least one early document notes, but also presently.37 They are a pillar of the faithful witnessing community that is the church. Symbols that render the manner of the apostles’ martyrdoms line the wings, or aisles, in the church where I worship. We process through the narthex, along the nave, toward the altar. This walk recapitulates the Christian journey from baptism (there are appointed deposits of holy water at the narthex) to communion with God (the altar rests in the sanctuary). The apostles, martyrs, accompany us along the walk. We approach the altar under the sign of the cross. But Christ’s authority extends not solely over the church but over all of life, including politics. The cross is visible from the street when the front doors of the church are open. The life of the church on mission simply is witness, and is as such, public and political. Christians are members of the Body of Christ and they are witnesses in and citizens of the political order they inhabit.
Third, martyrs help us with discernment. We are not only to affirm the work of the Holy Spirit in carrying forward the momentum of God’s love into the church and the world from its groundless source in the divine life. We are also to separate the Spirit’s work from its counterfeits as we seek to participate in God’s work. According to Oliver O’Donovan:
Mission is not merely an urge to expand the scope and sway of the church’s influence. It is to be at the disposal of the Holy Spirit in making Christ’s victory known. lt requires, therefore, a discernment of the working of the Spirit and of the Antichrist. These two discernments must accompany each other: to trace the outline of Christ’s dawning reign on earth requires that one trace the false pretension too.38
Where there is no recognition of the “false pretension”, Antichrist, there is insufficient seriousness about social evil. The result is a lack of critical purchase on existing conditions and arrangements. In contrast, the God-relation of the martyrs is decisive, for it determines their lives and their reckoning with political authority and programmes. Martyrs help clarify the demands of the gospel for us by embodying certain historical challenges to political authority. They do so from at least two perspectives. On the one hand, they warn us against that complacency involved in blithely affirming the status quo and/or sanctifying the state and its purposes. On the other hand, they warn against political programmes, radical or conservative, professional or activist, funded by formerly theological notions that have “migrated into the profane”, and now lead an afterlife at an angle to their original home in Christian vision, practices and forms of life.39 O’Donovan’s example combines both perspectives, though he focuses on the first. He talks of how “the trap of civilisational legitimation” captured late nineteenth century Europe and rendered “social evil only as a regression from civilisation into barbarism”.40 For O’Donovan, to recognise and reject Antichrist is to reject “a unified political and theological authority other than that which is vested in Christ’s own person”. Martyrs, then, unmask false pretension while attesting Christ’s ultimate authority.
But the martyrs are not mere nay-saying interruptions to our lives and/or political order. They are embedded in the life of the church and offer a positive and substantive vision that reflects the church’s “full evangelical shape” under the authority of Christ.41 Let’s return to Paul and Philippians. Paul seeks the progress of the gospel, and he seeks above all Christ’s exaltation, the glory of God, which occurs where “Christ is visible as the dominant content of [the community’s] life”.42 Paul kneels before Christ’s authority (cf. 2:10). Christ’s authority is not exercised by an impersonal power, and it doesn’t warrant just any sort of life, as we have seen. Citizenship under Christ’s authority (3:20; cf. Eph 2:19) has a definitive shape—an “evangelical shape”. The word politeuomai appears, for the only time in Paul’s letters, where Paul urges the Philippians to “live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ” (1:27). Politeuomai means “to conduct one’s life as a citizen”, and its contrast is idiōteuō, “to live as a private individual”.43 The Philippians are to live their lives as saints (1:1) in unity and in a manner congruous with the gospel. To paraphrase, Paul urges the Philippians to “imagine you are citizens of a heavenly city called Evangelopolis, [so] live as upright citizens and prove that you truly belong there.”44
The famous Christ-hymn at Philippians 2:5-11 renders the “evangelical shape” in the following way. The Philippians are called to share together in the “mind” of Christ. This mind is revealed in Christ’s humility and obedience “even (to the point of) death on a cross”, and it exalts the crucified Christ through the confession of his Lordship “to the glory of God the Father” (2:11). Ethically, this “shape” is far from vague “spiritualism” without bodily form and social and political traction. According to one commentator:
Paul, in his great Christological masterpiece, utilizes the image of crucifixion not to elicit the reluctant submission of the powerless to their social superiors but, instead, to encourage those with some status in the community to regard their social capital not as “something to be exploited” but, rather, as something to utilize – even renounce, if necessary – in the service of others… Paul’s message is quite transparent and, from the Roman perspective, decidedly subversive and anti-traditional: God honors persons of high status in the ekklesia who view their power as a resource to be used in the service of others in the community of faith.45
The “evangelical shape” most fully published at Philippians 2:5-11 and condensed at 3:10-1 offers criteria for making judgments between competing claims about what truly matters in any particular case. Martyrs embody this shape in different times and places, and in doing so represent “variations” on a theme.46 This is to speak of a “wisdom of the martyrs”. By paying attention to the lives of the martyrs we approximate Proverb’s distinctive form, “sentences”, which offer rules of thumb whose evocative force issues from concrete circumstances and seeks to foster insight into contemporary situations.47 The goal is not the ironist’s redescription but a Christian common sense.48 Christian common sense gains critical purchase from Christ speaking in Scripture, first and foremost, and the elaborations on Christ and the word that the martyrs represent. But critique at whatever level, from the system as a whole to the functioning of institutions, cannot be the only tool at work. There must be a constructive vision, and some attempt at reform, to realise adequately the promises of democratic institutions and to shore up confidence in them. Martyrs are one part of a political theology and not the whole, even if they embody the evangelical shape. They remind us of Christ’s Lordship and ultimate authority, they encourage us in mission, and they help us with discernment as they elaborate the evangelical shape most fully apparent in Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and in glorification, victory over death.
Martyrs are one part of a political theology and not the whole, even if they embody the evangelical shape. They remind us of Christ’s Lordship and ultimate authority, they encourage us in mission, and they help us with discernment.
Paul likely suffered a martyr’s death. Both Lohmeyer and Peterson suffered in various ways. Peterson was not a martyr by his own lights. He defined the martyr as one condemned to bodily punishment by public trial, where the punishment is a consequence of witness (Zeugenwort).49 In other words, the martyr publicly witnesses to Christ and suffers for it. By this definition, Lohmeyer was not a martyr. Neither, then, was a more well-known figure and another contemporary of Lohmeyer’s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Lohmeyer was executed for, it appears, his stand on the independence of the university from the Soviet occupation authority. But if we look at the heart of this stand, we glimpse Lohmeyer’s motives as formed by the gospel as he understood it.50
To be sure, Lohmeyer’s motives were mixed and drew on different sources. Martyrs are rarely if ever unambiguous, even if their lives bear the evangelical shape in part or in whole. They are not individual heroes or geniuses. We are not talking about “monuments of unageing intellect” but of “brittle crazy glass”.51 We have noted that they are “ecclesial persons”, and as such, they stand under the judgement of Christ. Only under the judgement of Christ are they transparent to his glory.52
Take Lohmeyer, in closing, as an instance of this ambiguity. Lohmeyer wrote from prison after his arrest on 16 February 1946. Lohmeyer had married Melie in 1916, and by the time of his imprisonment, his marriage with Melie had long lacked depth and life: their union was desiccated, dried up from Ernst’s devotion to his work, his wartime service, and his “private” indiscretions. Though Ernst and Melie had corresponded frequently during the war-years, their letters had been kindly but not loving, at least in the way Ernst extolled the love of Philippians 1:9ff and 1 Corinthians 13. Lohmeyer’s life had been ambiguous, at best, notwithstanding his contributions to understanding Scripture.
Yet Lohmeyer’s internment led to transformation. According to his biographer: “In cell 19 Lohmeyer ‘came to himself’, as Jesus said of the younger son who abandoned his home and father for a distant land. In ‘coming to himself,’ the son returned to the father to receive what the father ever longed to give.”53 Lohmeyer’s life remained a question until he “came to himself”. His life ultimately fulfilled the promise of his attention to Philippians. Not only would he incarnate Philippians 3:10—the Soviets took his life on September 19, 1946—he would embody an answer to, even exegete in the flesh, Paul’s prayer at Philippians 1:9-11. What he was unable to do in his presence to Melie, and in the freedom he had enjoyed, he found in enforced absence through the medium of the written word. Lohmeyer put it like this in his final letter to Melie:
Through these long years I have often sought God, but my search was only one search among others, not the one and only search. I have sometimes even thought myself to be near God, but I did not feel or find him. How could I have? I have looked in many places and thought to find him where he was not; and at the one place where he was present for me and should be present for me, and where I could have found him, which was in our love, there I no longer found him…
[God] took freedom from me, which until then I had used to try to do everything by my own powers, and [he] compelled me to kneel before his command, which seemed senseless and foolish [to me]. He made me as one fettered, in order to fetter me to himself and to you, and in so doing he gave me the gift of inner freedom from all the mortal burdens of my life. He did all this to me, an innocent victim in the world’s eyes, the martyr of a good cause—and only he and you know that in doing so he was truly just and truly consoling. I am now a prisoner, and yet I have everything I have longed for…. In everything I am free and inwardly certain, no longer because of myself but because of the bond of unity that binds me to God and to you.54
Footnotes
1 See Edwards’ biography on Lohmeyer for a fuller account: J.R. Edwards, Between Swastika and the Sickle: The Life, Disappearance, and Execution of Ernst Lohmeyer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019).
2 See, in general: R. Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Essays on the New Testament’s Christology (Milton Keynes: Authentic Publishers, 2013).
3 R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989), chap. 4.
4 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 75. Terms that bespeak the ironist’s rootlessness include ‘“Weltanschauung,” “perspective,” “dialectic,” “conceptual framework,” “historical epoch,” “language game,” “redescription,” “vocabulary,” and “irony.”
5 “Keiner stirbt für bloße Werte”: M. Heidegger, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes”, in Holzwege, Gesamtaufgabe Bd 5 (Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 102. According to one scholar, Heidegger critiques the Nietzschean idea conveyed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that we posit values, “that is, that valuing is something we do and value is the result of doing it.” Posited values can be just as quickly “unposited”, or in Rorty’s words, redescribed. Posited values therefore lack authority. The scholar goes on in this way: “So, far from giving meaning to our lives, thinking of what is important to us in terms of values shows us that our lives have no intrinsic meaning.” “Shared concerns”, on the other hand, garner our commitment. H.L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Technology, Art, and Politics”, in H.L. Dreyfus and M.A. Wrathall (eds), Background Practices: Essays on the Understanding of Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 177.
6 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 87, 86.
7 Ibid., 80.
8 B. Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 16f.
9 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 86.
10 Ibid., 92-3, 86.
11 Ibid., 84,
12 In fact, Rorty’s commitment to liberalism is not founded on any positive value but only on “a commitment to avoid cruelty ‘as the worst thing we do’”: Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment, 34. “The worst thing [liberals] do”: Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 74, 85.
13 The seriousness talked of here does not exclude joy, and nor does it exclude the “holy fool”. On the latter, see: H. Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, volume 5, The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, B. McNeil and J. Riches (eds); O. Davies, A. Louth, B. McNeil, J. Saward, and R. Williams (trans) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 141-204; R. Williams, “Holy Folly and the Problem of Representing Holiness: Some Literary Perspectives”, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 1, 1 (2018), 3-15.
14 This is inspired by Katherine Sonderegger’s insights. See, in general: K. Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume I (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2015), 505-530; idem, “Holy Scripture as Sacred Ground”, in O. Crisp and F. Sanders (eds), The Task of Dogmatics: Explorations in Theological Method (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 131-143.
15 J. Webster, Domain of the Word (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), viii.
16 As one twentieth-century theologian put it when talking about politics and reality (K. Barth, “Interview von R. Schmalenbach, Deutschschweizer Rundfunk (17.9.1968)”, in E. Busch (ed), Gespräche 1964-1968 (GA IV.28) (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1996), 542):
…“Grace” is only a provisional word. And the last word, that I, as a theologian and finally as a politician, have to say is not a concept [or word] like grace, but a name: Jesus Christ. He is grace, right? And he is the last thing, beyond world and church and even theology. We cannot capture him, but [we] must deal with him.
17 E.g., P.A. Holloway, Philippians: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2017). Holloway also talks about consolation for Paul, albeit in a different way.
18 E. Lohmeyer, Die Briefe an die Philipper, an die Kolosser und an Philemon (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), 27, 28.
19 J.B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (London: Macmillan, 1885), 85.
20 I take emotion to be a “concern-based construal” (R.C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 64ff). The “concern” here is the integrity of the gospel: its progress and realisation in communities. Where we see (“construe”) the integrity of the gospel, we experience joy, or better, participate in joy.
21 As Bryden Black puts it, Paul exhorts the Philippians to “think alike; love alike; [to] be of one soul; [to] be of one mind”: A.B. Black, The Lion, the Dove, & the Lamb: An Exploration into the Nature of the Christian God as Trinity (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 21.
22 G.F. Hawthorne and R.P. Martin, Philippians (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 26f.
23 Lohmeyer becomes effusive as he comments on the verse in this way (Briefe, 32):
Just as love is the greatest among others [in 1 Cor. 13], love here is the beginning, middle and end of the process, and perception has only to assist. In this, love does not alter but remains unchanging and ever the same. Increase alone is possible and satiety never is; this is love’s “never-becoming-tired” that 1 Cor. 13 attests.
24 Lohmeyer, Briefe, 138-142.
25 Cf. C. O’Regan, Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity, Vol. 1: Hegel (Chestnut Ridge: Crossroad, 2014), 78:
…all believing and knowing is tied to praxis, and it is because this is so that the saint can be thought of as the exemplary instantiation of the specifically Christian form of knowing that is always illustrated in action, in Christian practices and forms of life. The ‘correspondence’ achieved by the saint is not simply intellectual. It is the bestowal of all affect and intellect, all sense and motion, the entire time of the embodied self to Christ and through Christ to the triune community.
26 E. Peterson, Apostel and Zeuge Christi: Auslegung des Philipperbriefes (Freiburg: Herder, 1941).
27 E. Peterson, “Zeuge der Wahrheit”, in Theologische Traktate, B. Nichtweiß (ed) (Würzburg: Echter, 1994) 175, 202.
28 Peterson, “Zeuge der Wahrheit”, 98.
29 They are different not least in that Peterson didn’t recognise martyrdom outside the Catholic Church. Peterson is entirely consistent in this: he didn’t recognise baptism outside the Catholic Church, and given his view of the relation between baptism and martyrdom, martyrs could not exist beyond the Church. Later, Vatican II recognised both baptism and martyrdom outside the Catholic Church. See Barbara Nichtweiß’ discussion: Erik Peterson: Neue Sicht auf Leben und Werk (Freiburg: Herder, 1992), 191-3.
30 The martyr bears no comparison to Rorty’s ironist who courageously “faces up” to her entirely unjustified existence. Rorty’s self-creating ironist is a hero. See, for instance: R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 79f, 97. Cf. Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, 188.
31 Peterson, Apostel and Zeuge Christi, 26-7. Cf. Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, 188.
32 J.R. Edwards, “Martyrium: Gesetztes Ziel in Lohmeyers Theologie, erreichtes Ziel in seiner Biographie”, in C. Böttrich (ed.), Ernst Lohmeyer. Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, Greifswalder Theologische Forschungen, Bd 28 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2018), 147.
33 On this point, Peterson drew on Soren Kierkegaard. Oliver O’Donovan makes a similar point too: “A church too determined to be at home in the world will be unprepared for [the martyrdom exacted by civilisation itself when it lifts its arms against God], and so unprepared for mission” (Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 215).
34 Peterson thought in fact that forgetfulness of the martyrs, or specifically what he took to be the Protestant or Jewish line on martyrs, resulted in “overlooking Christ” (Vorbeisehen an Christus): Apostel and Zeuge Christi, i.
35 M. Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics”, in Political Writings, P. Lassman and R. Speirs (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
36 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 75, 80.
37 Apologeticus, L. 13.
38 O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 214.
39 Adorno thought that this “migration” was well and good: “Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the realm of the secular, the profane” (“Reason and Revelation,” in E. Mendieta (ed.), The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, trans. H.W. Pickford (New York: Routledge, 2004), 174. My sympathies lie, instead, with Cyril O’Regan, who refers to the migration in terms of “misremembering” (Anatomy of Misremembering), and with William Desmond, who speaks of “counterfeit doubles” (Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Doubt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)).
40 O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 214.
41 Ibid., 250.
42 T. Baumeister, Die Anfänge der Theologie des Martyriums (Münster: Aschendorff, 1980), 179. Baumeister talks exclusively of Paul’s life (“…beherrschenden Inhalt seines Lebens”, my emphasis) rather than the community’s life.
43 C. Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, Vol. 3, trans. J.D. Ernest (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), 132.
44 M.F. Bird and N.K. Gupta, Philippians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 59.
45 J.H. Hellerman, Reconstructing Honor in Roman Philippi: Carmen Christi as Cursus Pudorum (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 166.
46 See, for instance, the Catholic Church’s two-volume catalogue of witnesses in twentieth century Germany: H. Moll (ed.), Zeugen fur Christus: Das deutsche Martyrologium des 20. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2019).
47 D.H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press, 2009), 170, 217-8.
48 Such common sense is the opposite of Rorty’s liberal irony, for it assumes martyrs help us describe and evaluate our diverse contexts, while Rorty considers our contexts, or final vocabularies, incommensurate and incapable of authoritative judgement, and therefore capable of continual redescription: Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 74. Rorty’s own notion of “common sense” is also at odds with our outline: ibid., 74f.
49 Nichtweiß, Erik Peterson, 194.
50 Edwards, “Martyrium”, 148-9.
51 “Monuments of unageing intellect”: W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43291/sailing-to-byzantium (accessed 9 August 2023). “Brittle crazy glass”: G. Herbert, “The Windows”, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50695/the-windows-56d22df68ff95 (accessed 9 August 2023).
52 Cf. O’Regan, Anatomy of Misremembering, 79: “The saint is an ecclesial person whose aim is to excavate the unrepeatable call or mission that defines them and to which he or she bears witness”. Martyrs, or saints, can make no sense to Rorty, the liberal ironist, on this, as Rorty considers the “point of social organisation” to consist in maximising each individual’s “chance at self-creation” (84).
53 Edwards, Between the Swastika and the Sickle, 275.
54 Ibid., 270-1, 271-2 (trans. Edwards, with some changes).
First Image: “Ernst Lohmeyer” Photographer Unknown
Second Image: By Iulia Mihailov, CC Zero
