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‘Person’ and Identity in Paul’s Thought

In this important volume, Susan Grove Eastman tackles an aspect of Pauline thought that has largely lain dormant for several decades, especially in anglophone scholarship. Her study refocuses attention on this important aspect of Paul’s conceptual world—namely, how Paul conceived human identity and personhood. After the informative introduction entitled ‘The Puzzle of Pauline Anthropology’ (pp. 1–28), the book is arranged into two major parts of three chapters each, followed by a brief conclusion (pp. 185–6). In the first part, a three-way conversation is set up. The dialogue partners are the ancient philosopher Epictetus, recent perspectives on the self primarily through the lens of the work of Shaun Gallagher, and lastly Paul’s discourse on the body. In the first chapter, the slightly later contemporary of Paul, Epictetus, is discussed for the perspectives he offers in his work Enchiridion on human identity, agency and self-perception. The purpose of engaging this dialogue partner is not to claim that Epictetus’ perspectives are necessarily those of Paul, but rather to frame Paul’s thought within the wider worldview of his contemporaries (p. 62). A key aspect that emerges in this chapter and the introduction is the insistence that Paul’s hermeneutics are fundamentally ‘second-person perspective hermeneutics’. That is, in Eastman’s own words, this ‘standpoint is disclosed by the grammar of second-person address more than either first-person, self-referential modes of knowledge or third-person, objectifying and distancing modes of knowledge’ (p. 15). Epictetus is seen as exemplifying first-person and thirdperson perspectives in relation to his understanding of the structure of the person (p. 61). Thus, while there is much that in perennially valuable in Epictetus, and much which illumines Paul’s thought, a key difference is the lack of the relational second-person approach to understanding the human person, which is seen as being a key element in Pauline anthropology. In the next chapter, Gallagher’s work provides important empirical observations—such as the way in which neonates imitate facial gestures from the first minutes after birth. From this Eastman states, ‘at the most elemental level of human development, the body as other-relational is the medium of communication and interaction’ (p. 67). In the third chapter, Eastman notes the ubiquity of ‘body language’ in Paul. However, for Paul, that corporeal existence is conceive in participatory terms, thereby generating a fundamental second-person hermeneutic. This connectedness is predicated upon the notion of embodied existence in a participatory mode (p. 104). The second part of the book provides three detailed studies on key Pauline texts. In turn, these are Romans 7, Philippians 2, and Galatians 2. In relation to Rom 7:14–25, Eastman states that ‘the “I” is “fleshly” and sold under sin, thereby shaped in its totality in relation to that dominating and indwelling power’ (p. 124). Eastman then argues that since the ‘self’ is larger than the individual this implies that individual solutions ‘Person’ and Identity in Paul’s Thought 767517 EXT0010.1177/0014524618767517 research-article2018