Christ Without Adam: Subjectivity and Sexual Difference in the Philosophers’ Paul

The unconscious constantly reveals the “failure” of identity. Because there is no continuity of psychic life, so there is no stability of sexual identity, no position for women (or for men) which is ever simply achieved. … [But this “failure”] is not a moment to be regretted in a process of adaptation, or development into normality, which ideally takes its course. … Instead “failure” is something endlessly repeated and relived moment by moment throughout our individual histories. … [T]here is a resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life.

The Adam-Christ typology thus can and should be harnessed to undercut the potency of positions that efface the typology’s gendered particularities in order to characterize Christ and/or Adam in terms of some putative anthropological universal. In the case of political-philosophical projects like those of Breton, Badiou, and Žižek, this position amounts to reading a representative male figure (Christ) as a paradigmatic “singular universal,” without engaging in any substantive way the problems this raises from a feminist standpoint. Yet some contemporary Christian theologians and biblical scholars also read a kind of universalism into the Adam-Christ typology (with respect to the common condition of all human beings poised between creation and eschaton), but equally sidestep the questions that the typology raises about gendered embodiment.

So for example, in Theology of the Body, John Paul II turns to the Pauline text to argue that “by contrasting Adam and (the risen) Christ—or the first Adam and the last Adam—the Apostle in fact shows in some way the two poles in the mystery of creation and redemption between which man is situated in the cosmos. One could even say that man is ‘set in tension’ between these two poles.”² Elsewhere he specifies, by way of an allusion to Genesis 1:27, that the universal “man” invoked here is intended to encompass both men and women: “the ‘first Adam’—man, male and female—who was created in the state of original innocence … was a sign of the eternal Mystery.”³ But no attention is given to the actual difficulties involved in situating the difference of the female body coherently between the representative male bodies of Adam and Christ. Similarly, the Protestant biblical scholar and theologian Richard Hays frames Pauline ethics as at least in part defined by the typological poles of creation and eschaton (or “new creation”)—and accordingly, Hays treats Adam and Christ as paradigmatic (i.e., having universal implications for theological anthropology).⁴ However, within this framing, sexual difference is nowhere in view.

Therefore, instead of engaging questions of gender and sexuality under the purview of the typology, these Christian thinkers restrict typological reflection on these topics to biblical contexts that pair Adam with Eve rather than with Christ.⁵ Indeed, with a stunning disregard for the way in which the anthropological logic of the Pauline text actually works, John Paul II even redirects the above reference to the “first Adam” as being in some sense both male and female to make a point not primarily about representative inclusivity, but rather about “conjugal union”—that is, the marriage of Adam and Eve at creation. He then uses the primordial couple, in turn, to move the discussion into an entirely different typological orbit, invoking the well-known Ephesians 5 parallel between heterosexual marriage and Christ and the church (“an indissoluble bond analogous to the indissoluble covenant of spouses”).⁶ In this way, the unresolved anthropological conundrums of the Adam-Christ typology are rerouted—by way of the marriage of Adam and Eve—to a thoroughly tidy conclusion about “the sacramentality of the whole heritage of the sacrament of redemption in reference to the entire work of creation and redemption, and all the more so in reference to marriage.”⁷

Accordingly, thinkers such as John Paul II and Hays never wrestle with the vexed question of the typological and anthropological interplay between the three figures—Adam, Eve, Christ—that the Pauline text implicitly sets up. Avoiding the potential “gender trouble” that such a theological endeavor inevitably produces (at least, I would argue, when pursued fully, rigorously, and with intellectual honesty), these positions are therefore able to use the Adam-Eve pair in a seemingly unproblematic way to underwrite binary sexual difference and heteronormativity as the natural, stable, and entirely coherent structural principle of the anthropological order.⁸ Such readings of Pauline typology thus join those of Breton, Badiou, and Žižek in being able to assume, present, and actively reproduce notions of “the human” that are characterized by a counterfeit stability—one that is easily (and too often) harnessed to shut down potential spaces of greater anthropological openness within Christian thought.

In what follows, I aim to explore some of these potential open spaces, spaces that might be called—with as much precision as such a term allows—queer.⁹ But this is not to limit the scope of the discussion to the emerging discipline of queer theology in any tightly circumscribed sense. As Gerard Loughlin argues in his introduction to the polysemy of queer theology as a discipline, all Christian theology, in both its constructive and historical dimensions, “has always been a queer thing.”¹⁰ By this he means multiple things, including (1) “the strangeness of [theology’s] undertaking: to think ‘existence’ in relation to the story of a first century rabbi”; (2) the historical evidence of a tradition in which “queer interests” of one kind or another have proved to be “not marginal … but oddly central”; and (3) the degree to which rigorous theological reflection, at least in some forms, has always worked “to outwit identity.”¹¹ Building especially on this third point, I want to suggest here that a kind of “queerness” has always attended the anthropological operations of the Adam-Christ typology—an unsettled and unsettling remainder never entirely avoided or excluded from the frame of the Christian tradition.

Throughout this book, I have examined the place (or nonplace, as the case may be) of the Adam-Christ typology in the so-called philosophical readings of Paul put forward by Breton, Badiou, and Žižek. Here I have sought to chart a structural alignment between the treatment of the figure of Adam with respect to Pauline typology and the minimizing of sexual difference as a question whose anthropological force might impinge on the putative universality of the Pauline subject. As we have seen, in Breton’s reading, Adam is virtually invisible. In Badiou’s, he is solely the human inventor of death, exhibiting an anemic and attenuated continuity with the figure of Christ—if indeed there is any continuity at all. And finally in Žižek’s, the interval between Adam and Christ is collapsed, thereby effectively erasing the specificity of the former. These varied but related moves, I have argued, produce in all three cases an equivalent result. Adam’s embodied particularity (i.e., masculinity) accentuates Christ’s own masculinity (rather than neutrality) and also raises the question of how to situate Eve within Paul’s typological logic. Thus with Adam gone, the force of sexual difference as an anthropological problem in the Pauline text necessarily recedes.

However, a more fundamental set of constructive questions has undergirded the foregoing inquiry: within the terms of the typological framework that the apostle has bequeathed not only to Christianity but to the history of Western thought, how exactly do human beings identify with these two paradigmatic figures, Adam and Christ? What impact do the bodies of the first and last Adams have on our theological conclusions about what it means to be human, poised between creation and resurrection in irreducibly embodied terms (1 Cor 15:45–49)? How and to what extent is sexual difference represented in the anthropological frame of the Adam-Christ typology? Within this frame, are women—or anyone else whose embodied subjectivity is not straightforwardly “represented” by the male bodies of Adam and Christ—even “human”?

Of the three thinkers examined in this book, only Žižek makes any meaningful space for the notion of both Adam and Christ as representative figures, or as he puts it, “‘corporate persons’ in whom people live.”¹² In contrast to both Breton and Badiou, Žižek recognizes in the Pauline trope the importance of the representative function as it pertains to both Adam and Christ. Yet because his reading at this point relies entirely on the stark contrasts of Romans 6 (“We die with Christ ‘in Adam’ (as Adamesque creatures), and then we begin a new life ‘in Christ’”),¹³ it misses Paul’s important if underdeveloped acknowledgment of the embodied “in-betweenness” that characterizes the current human condition: a complex interplay between continuity and transformation wherein “just as we have borne the image of the human of dust, we will also bear the image of the human of heaven” (1 Cor 15:49, NRSV, translation slightly modified). Instead, as I have argued, Žižek’s idiosyncratic Lacanian-Hegelian reading relentlessly collapses this anthropological interval that the Pauline text leaves open. And insofar as Adam “is” Christ, the corporate identification that really interests Žižek is with Christ alone—Christ, that is, refigured as a paradigmatic “singular universal.”

On the whole, then, Žižek’s turn to the Christian tradition as a conceptual resource is located within a larger political project concerned with a particular kind of identification, one that he terms “solidarity.” Thus in The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek construes Job’s silence before God’s boasting as significant not “because he was crushed by God’s overwhelming presence … but because, in a gesture of silent solidarity, he perceived the divine impotence.”¹⁴ As he goes on to clarify in later work, this solidarity with God’s powerlessness is also a “solidarity with human misery,” and it can therefore be linked to the “seeds of new ‘socialist’ solidarity” that Žižek sanguinely imagines emerging in the urban slums—one of the few sites left, as he sees it, where a Badiou-style truth-event might still materialize, coming to pass in the space populated by “the systemically generated ‘living dead’ of global capitalism.”¹⁵

In theological terms, this solidarity is engendered by the radical subtracting of the subject from the particularities of private life-worlds so as to enter into a public, universal space in which God is, by definition, dead: “what dies on the Cross is precisely the ‘private’ God, the God of our ‘way of life,’ the God who grounds a particular community. The underlying message of Christ’s death is that a ‘public’ God can no longer be a living God: he has to die as a God. … The ‘Holy Spirit’ is thus a ‘public’ God, what remains of God in the public universal space: the radically de-substantialized virtual space of the collective of believers.”¹⁶ The God of private identities is and must be dead (or another option, disturbing in its anti-Jewish implications: he may be aligned with Judaism as “a God of the dead Letter”).¹⁷ What emerges as a kind of resurrection out of this death is the solidarity of the new universal community. Defined by the cut of division that sunders identity-based collectives (“concrete universality is the site of struggle—it brings the sword, not love”), the formation of this community of concrete or singular universality definitively separates out those who subscribe to the truth of the universal from those who do not.¹⁸

This radical subtraction is underwritten, according to Žižek, by Paul—not surprisingly, with reference to Galatians 3:28: “When St. Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, ‘there are no men and women, no Jews and Greeks,’ he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identity, etc., are not a category of truth.”¹⁹ Yet notice the distancing from concepts and questions of embodiment that occurs in this treatment of the Galatians verse. In the portion of the verse as cited, Paul mentions sexual difference and Jewish-Gentile difference. Žižek’s elucidation spectacularly ignores the former. As for the latter, his gloss rewrites it in terms that implicitly incline toward a register of cultural identification (“ethnic roots,” “national identity”) in which corporeal particularities might appear to be increasingly incidental. This represents a subtle but real shift in the verse’s conceptual center of gravity, one that is completely foreign to Paul’s deep concern in Galatians with embodied ways of being in the world (such as, for example, the literal embodied cut of circumcision). To this point, recall the apostle’s impassioned plea to his audience: “My friends, why am I still being persecuted if I am still preaching circumcision. … I wish those who unsettle you would castrate [apokopsontai] themselves!” (Gal 5:12, NRSV).

A less viscerally embodied vision of theopolitical solidarity emerges as the mode of identification that Žižek champions—and that ultimately governs his reading of the Adam-Christ typology and its subjective or anthropological significance. Indeed Žižek’s contempt for so-called identity politics is at least on some level about the ways in which he understands such politics as threatening to fracture this more basic solidarity. Thus his reading of key Pauline texts (not only Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 7:29–31, but also Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15) proceeds as if claiming and attending to difference in theologically robust or politically significant ways will inevitably threaten that solidarity.

Yet here we might turn to the Pauline text itself and note that the deployment of the Adam-Christ typology does in fact bring difference and bodily particularity to the fore (by way of the figure of Adam and the differential interval between Adam and Christ)—but within a theological project that remains deeply committed to some form of “solidarity” for those “in Christ.” As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed out in a now classic aphorism, “People are different from each other”—a deceptively simple observation, but one that has irreducibly complex embodied dimensions. Sedgwick goes on rightly to note, “It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact.”²⁰ With respect to the project of Pauline anthropology, then, might there not be a conceptual tool to be gained (or perhaps forged?) by means of thinking through the ways in which human beings across a spectrum of differences (bodily, psychic, sociocultural) are able to find—or, even more importantly, not to find—themselves within the terms of the apostle’s Adam-Christ typology? Might such an undertaking point toward possibilities for a solidarity that does not demand the renunciation of embodied difference?

In recent work on the precarity, recognizability, and grievability of human life in its various embodied forms, Judith Butler argues that “the ‘frames’ that work to differentiate the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot … not only organize visual experience but also generate specific ontologies of the subject.”²¹ This image of the “frame” is a multivalent one in her analysis. One important function of the metaphor is to serve as a point of condensation for the complex and diffuse operations of power in and through the norms that produce recognizable subjects in historically specific ways.²² With respect to this issue, Butler is especially interested in those lives that never quite fit fully or coherently within the normative schemes that give rise to any particular (and always historically contingent) ontology of the subject: “thus, there are ‘subjects’ who are not quite recognizable as subjects, and there are ‘lives’ that are not quite—or, indeed, are never—recognized as lives. In what sense does life, then, always exceed the normative conditions of its recognizability?”²³ Posed in this way, the question calls attention to the structural inevitability of an excess that characterizes the continuum of human life in its relation to any given set of subject-producing norms. Insofar as this excess must necessarily fail to be incorporated smoothly or easily into the normative framework, the result will be “lives” that can never be recognized as fully human in terms internal to the norms themselves. Yet at the same time—and, indeed, because of this failure of recognition—such lives may carry the potential, at least partially, to interrupt the regime of the norm, their very unrecognizability haunting its anthropological operations from outside and within in ways that could, under certain circumstances, cause that regime to stumble.

Thus Butler maintains, “there is no life and no death without a relation to some frame. Even when life and death take place between, outside, or across the frames by which they are for the most part organized, they still take place, though in ways that call into question the necessity of the mechanisms through which ontological fields are constituted.”²⁴ Her analysis then goes on to exploit more specific senses of the term “frame.” As she rightly notes, a frame can be a false accusation or “set up” whose purpose is to engineer a particular interpretation of a scene. Or it can be a physical means of situating and implicitly offering commentary on a picture. Or it can signify a kind of context that “seeks to contain, convey, and determine what is seen” when a photograph, or a piece of writing, or a narrative about the meaning of a larger political undertaking (such as a war) is reproduced and circulates.²⁵ Butler points out that this third sense of framing always in some sense breaks with itself, insofar as the very iterability that it depends on to accomplish its purposes (e.g., the broader dissemination of a photograph beyond the original circumstances of its production) necessarily involves the introduction of new contexts.²⁶ Her explicit concerns in the matter are decidedly of the present moment: “the digital image circulates outside the confines of Abu Ghraib, or the poetry in Guantánamo is recovered by constitutional lawyers who arrange for its publication throughout the world. The conditions are set for astonishment, outrage, revulsion, admiration, and discovery, depending on how the content is framed by shifting time and place.”²⁷ Consequently, Butler asserts, the frame allows, invites, and indeed may even demand the possibility of its own subversion.

Keeping in view these reflections on the different but interrelated senses, operations, and potential failures of “the frame,” I want to suggest that we might profitably consider the Pauline Adam-Christ typology as a mode of anthropological frame—one that works to shape (and also to limit) the possibilities for how embodied, sexed, and sexualized human beings can be recognized within Christian theological anthropology. This work of framing the human proceeds, as we have seen, with reference to specific persons, Adam and Christ, who function simultaneously as paradigmatic representatives of others and as metonyms for the two poles of creation and eschaton that orient the Pauline soteriological drama. Poised between the first and second Adams, creation and resurrection, embodied human beings may find their theological legibility (and thus their recognition) in relationship to both figures/poles, an interplay of sameness and difference, continuity and transformation.

In this way, it is important to note that Paul’s typology is not quite like Butler’s various examples insofar as it frames not a specific object, event, or discrete phenomenon but rather an interval—that is, a conceptual and temporal space of anthropological possibility. With respect to this interval, Christian thinkers from antiquity forward have endeavored to situate coherently the chaotic complexities of human embodiment, sexual subjectivity, and desire. More specifically, the thinking of this problematic has tended to zero in on the obvious lacuna (at least with respect to gender) in an Adam-Christ paradigm: the female body. Christian reflection on the issue has therefore focused on the problem of how to treat representative female figures such as Eve or the Virgin Mary, figures who have no straightforward or obvious place in the typology’s stubbornly androcentric terms. Accordingly, the difference of the female body has proved, in the history of the tradition, to be the (unacknowledged) point at which the seamless, coherent operation of the Pauline typological/anthropological machine stumbles, thereby calling into question not only the place of feminine difference, but also the theological stability of male bodies, masculinity, and, by extension, the very operation of the machine itself.²⁸

In contrast, then, to our three contemporary philosophers’ various attempts to diminish or reinterpret the typology’s full anthropological significance, primarily by redirecting its claims about Adam, I want instead to keep the interval live and bring the framing work of Paul’s typology to the fore for the purposes of feminist and queer theology. Yet one might reasonably ask, why this direction? Why try to preserve such a problematically androcentric construct as the Adam-Christ typology as an ongoing part of contemporary theological conversation? Why not just retire the trope and seek new resources—scriptural, traditional, experiential—for articulating human embodiment in theological terms? Here I contend that the “Paulinisms” of Breton, Badiou, and Žižek offer a stark object lesson in exactly why the Adam-Christ typology needs to be kept live in all of its particulars within discussions of Christian theological anthropology.

As should by now be clear, these three philosophers’ different strategies for minimizing Adam’s anthropological import—and, with it, the force of the problem that sexual difference poses—in the name of a new universal Pauline subject end up uncritically importing (if often in understated or barely visible ways) substantial components of the androcentric anthropology that the typology supports in ways that require ongoing critical interrogation. But this is not all. The philosophical projects examined in this book are, to be sure, very different from those endeavors within feminist and queer theology that seek to discover new anthropological resources (or straightforwardly recover or rehabilitate old ones). But the latter share potentially hazardous ground with the former when they simply repudiate and attempt to leave behind pivotal sources of thought out of which the historical Christian tradition has been forged. Even given the complexity and heterogeneity that characterize that tradition, some ways of thinking run so deep that when putatively abandoned or moved beyond, they merely go underground—a dynamic wherein they may continue to exert force in ways increasingly difficult to see. I would wager that with respect to questions of sexual difference within theological anthropology, the Adam-Christ typology is one such element. And insofar as it is the messy—but thoroughly historical—process by which the Christian tradition has come to be articulated in all its diversity that has created the very space of possibility for feminist and queer theological critique, such critique ought not to pass over or suppress the tradition’s most deeply problematic historical elements, but rather attend critically and unremittingly to those elements’ internal dynamics and constitutive exclusions.

Butler helpfully articulates a version of this point in a nontheological register: “What happens when a frame breaks with itself is that a taken-for-granted reality is called into question, exposing the orchestrating designs of the authority who sought to control the frame. This suggests that it is not only a question of finding new content, but also of working with received renditions of reality to show how they can and do break with themselves.”²⁹ Here I find Butler’s formulation especially valuable insofar as she acknowledges both the continual need for discovering new material to think with and the necessity of working with received renditions of theological and anthropological reality. The latter undertaking needs to be done not in order to recuperate a construct like Pauline typology, but rather both to render visible (and thus to continue to interrogate) our own constitutive relation to this ancient past and also to explore the anthropological possibilities entailed in the typological frame’s necessary failure, its “break with itself.”

Let me sketch briefly three examples of attempts by Christians in the second and third centuries CE to wrestle with this typological dilemma.³¹ Early Christians made use of two basic strategies in their attempts to situate sexual difference coherently within the Pauline Adam-Christ typology. The first appears in a variety of contexts, including the writings of a proto-orthodox thinker such as Clement of Alexandria and heterodox texts such as the Tripartite Tractate and the Excerpts from Theodotus. This is an approach rooted in a Platonizing stream of thought in early Christianity that we could broadly characterize as monistic—that is, it envisioned the cosmos in all its messy diversity as yearning for a kind of ultimate oneness or eschatological unity. For these early Christian monists, the female body does not fit very well into this way of thinking, functioning as what Daniel Boyarin has aptly called “a site of difference, and thus a threat to univocity.”³² In response, their strategy for solving the problem involves casting the difference of the feminine as a temporary difficulty.

To focus specifically on Clement: the Alexandrian thinker finds a place for “woman” in a Pauline Adam-Christ framework by figuring her as the site of desire, division, and lack—a problematic aberration or difficulty that will be resolved at the eschaton through a unifying collapse of the female into the male. Accordingly, in his Protrepticus, he retells the story of creation in a way that displaces Eve from the narrative, figuring her (in unnamed form) as a kind of hypostasis of lustful, irrational, or otherwise inappropriate desire: “The first human being (ho prōtos) … fell before pleasure (the serpent is an allegory for pleasure) … and was misled by desire (epithymiais).”³³ This correlation of desire and the feminine is a fairly common move in the broader Platonic tradition of this period. It allows Clement to render Eve both present and absent in his creation narrative—present in the sense that “desire” is very much a personified character in the story, filling in the place where the reader would expect Eve, but absent in the sense that desire displaces Eve. This displacement is important for Clement because it allows him to tell the rest of the story (i.e., redemption) in terms that preserve the Pauline representative framework: two paradigmatic humans, Adam and Christ, without any legitimate or ongoing place for Eve. Rather, Eve—as a synecdoche for the difference of the feminine—fits in the story as a short-term anomaly, the solution to which is for the female to be eradicated and transformed into the male at the resurrection.

For my purposes, what is most interesting about this androcentric (and arguably misogynistic) project are the problems that Clement runs into in trying to pull it off. On the one hand, his narrative needs to protect the prototypical human Adam from the infecting stain of the feminine, figured as desire. But on the other hand, he is not able to do so in an entirely satisfactory way, because the desire that plagues Adam in Clement’s creation story cannot be fully externalized or displaced onto Eve. Rather, his conception of desire still needs a subject, and Clement’s retelling carefully avoids any explicit reference to Eve as a subject in her own right. This means that the feminizing desire must in some sense be Adam’s desire—located within him, even as it is projected outward by the story to the site of the (simultaneously present and absent) woman. The result is that Clement works himself into a fascinatingly incoherent position, one in which the stand-alone masculinity of Adam that he tries to protect (and that he sees as fulfilled in Christ) ends up necessarily implicated in the feminized desire that he mobilizes to protect Adam in the first place. Thus Clement ends up arguing both that at the eschaton the female will be transformed into the male and that God will ultimately eradicate both male and female.³⁴ The result, then, is an unavoidable instability in Clement’s placement of sexual difference—not only in the register of the feminine but also that of the masculine.

The second strategy that early Christians used in their attempts to articulate the place of sexual difference in relation to Pauline typology proved to be no less problematic or androcentric—just androcentric in a different way. Representatives of this strategy include Christian thinkers such as the author of the Gospel of Philip, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Tertullian of Carthage who engaged the problem by adding a second (explicitly gendered) level to the Pauline typological framework, wherein not only Adam and Christ but also Eve and Mary take on a paradigmatic or representative function. In this way, the strategy becomes a means of giving the female body its own proper (if always subordinate) place within typology by adding a new typological layer to the Adam-Christ parallel. Here the feminine emerges not as an irregularity in the cosmic order to be erased or eliminated through transformation, but rather as the masculine’s licit and proper (if necessarily subordinate) supplement.

The early Christian thinkers who pursued this strategy did so by turning to the theme of virginity and the different things that it can mean for a body to be virginal. The paradoxical trope of the reproductive female virgin opened possibilities for additional typological connections between Mary as virgin-mother, Eve as virgin in her initial created state, and even the “virgin earth” from which Adam was formed. Turning to Irenaeus as an example, we see that for him, Mary comes to function as something like a co-redemptrix—not in the fully developed sense that some later streams of Christian thinking will posit, but in some nascent way whereby she performs a specific redemptive operation with respect to Eve: “So thus also the knot of Eve’s disobedience received its unloosing through the obedience of Mary.”³⁵ And while this might easily be (and indeed has been) interpreted as a positive theological resource from the standpoint of feminist theology,³⁶ such constructive projects cannot ignore the disconcerting ways that Irenaeus views the procreative and (sexually) penetrable aspects of the female body to be a serious problem, deeply implicated in a realm of sexuality and desire that he envisions being necessarily eradicated at the eschaton. The result is that Irenaeus turns to the unpenetrated, virginal body of Mary as a way of typologically fulfilling (or, in his language, recapitulating) everything that he sees as theologically problematic about the body of Eve, and by extension all female bodies—that is, bodies that are penetrated through sexual intercourse and that procreate, giving birth to children.

Moreover, like Clement, Irenaeus also thinks himself into an analytically awkward corner in which the problem of Pauline typology and sexual difference that he has set out to solve fails to reach a satisfactory and fully coherent resolution. Where the seemingly straightforward and elegant symmetry of Irenaeus’s representative anthropology stumbles is in his scriptural grounding of the connection between Adam and Christ due to their shared birth from “virgins”: Christ from the virgin Mary and Adam from the untilled, not yet rained upon, and therefore unpenetrated “virgin earth” of Genesis 2 (compare Gen 2:5). So he argues, “From where then was the substance of the first-formed? Out of the will of God and out of virgin earth (ex virgine terra): ‘for God did not bring about rain,’ says Scripture, before man had been created, ‘and there was no man to work the earth.’ Therefore out of this earth, while it was still virgin (Igitur ex hac, dum virgo erat adhuc), ‘God took dirt from the earth and formed a man,’ the beginning of humanity.”³⁷

The result is that Adam’s flesh, the flesh that composes all human bodies (male and female), is itself already implicated in the conceptual specifics of the female body, insofar as its origin in the primal “virgin earth” relies on a metaphor of penetration—that is, a virginal body that is specifically female (rather than a sexually generic concept of virginity predicated on a purity attainable in the same way by men and women). Thus some trace of the feminine remains intractably encoded in Irenaeus’s theology of human flesh, emerging as a kind of excess—one that escapes Mary’s typological work in recapitulating and resolving the problematic dimensions of the feminine (i.e., penetrability, procreation) as figured in Eve. In this sense, Irenaeus’s gendered intervention in Pauline typology does not succeed, a breakdown that I elsewhere characterize as “the partial yet necessary failure of a theological economy that attempts to retain sexual difference in the flesh while resolving its distinctives without remainder.”³⁸

Finally (and very briefly), I want to mention a third kind of attempt at a solution to the dilemma of sexually differentiated bodies and the Adam-Christ typology. This one comes from a now-marginalized trajectory of the early Christian tradition in a little-known text from the Nag Hammadi corpus. The treatise is actually untitled but generally referred to as On the Origin of the World. Like the thinkers, texts, and positions just summarized, On the Origin of the World makes reference to the Pauline typology and appropriates many of Paul’s ideas regarding representative human beings. And like Clement of Alexandria, it does so within a broadly Platonizing conceptual framework. Yet surprisingly, the text does not make anthropological moves similar to those discussed in the first strategy above—that is, positing the difference of the feminine as a provisional difficulty that the eschaton will solve. Instead, On the Origin of the World takes another route, retelling Genesis 1–3 in terms of a genealogy of embodiment in which sexual difference is not secondary (as it arguably is, for example, in the Genesis 2 narrative of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib). As an alternative, On the Origin of the World dismisses the rib story as a lying ruse on the part of demonic powers, and offers a counternarrative in which sexual difference is the site of divine materialization in the world—a materialization that takes place differently in Adam’s and Eve’s different bodies. In this way, the character of Eve is not derivative or a figure of lack. Rather, sexual duality is fundamental, grounded in two different creation processes. These are processes that the text values differently, but in a way that grants each one its own ontological integrity.

Out of this reiteration of my previous book’s argument, the point I want to make and then expand upon is the following: the ancient tradition points to the conclusion that there has not been—and, indeed, cannot be—a definitive and fully coherent solution to the problem of situating embodied sexual difference within the Pauline Adam-Christ typology. Marcella Althaus-Reid points to a telling alignment when she notes that “decent theologies struggle for coherence, the coherence that sexual systems also struggle for. Yet, we may ask, what is wrong with being incoherent theologically?”³⁹ And indeed, the witness of the early Christian thinkers just summarized suggests that at least with respect to the entanglement of embodied subjectivity, sexual difference, and the Adam-Christ typology, such incoherence cannot be avoided.

Turning back, then, to a constructive theological register, I want to suggest that this failure to fully resolve the gendered aporias of Paul’s typology is not the kind of failure that needs to be denounced or moved beyond. Rather, it is a species of failure akin to that which Jacqueline Rose discusses psychoanalytically in the opening epigraph of this chapter: “there is no stability of sexual identity, no position for women (or for men) which is ever simply achieved. … [This ‘failure’] is not a moment to be regretted in a process of adaptation, or development into normality. … Instead ‘failure’ is something endlessly repeated and relived moment by moment throughout our individual histories.”⁴⁰ Thus constructive theological anthropology ought not turn away from this necessary failure, but instead intensify and radicalize its force. This is a project that has implications not only for the placement of feminine/female sexual difference (so often construed in androcentric and misogynistic ways by Christian thinkers in the earlier tradition) but for the theological (in)stability of all sexual subject positions.

This trace, then, has a destabilizing effect not merely with respect to the question of femininity, but rather with respect to the comprehensive anthropological aspirations of the system as a whole. To return to Butler’s image of the frame, insofar as the trace of what is excluded from the typological frame works “to call the frame into question,” it shows that “the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn, that something was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible, recognizable. The frame never quite determined precisely what it is we see, think, recognize, and apprehend.”⁴¹ Thinking analogously with Butler on this point, it seems clear that beginning in early Christianity—and extending to the rest of the historical tradition, by way of the conceptual inheritance these early writers bequeathed to later thinkers—the exclusion is felt (if not acknowledged) and reverberates throughout Christian anthropology.

And yet this is a point that we need not rely only on the history of the typology’s uptake in order to glimpse. Here I would like to extend the analysis at hand back into the Pauline text itself—and, more specifically, into that chapter so central to Žižek’s Lacanian-Hegelian reading of Paul: Romans 7:7–25. Stanley Stowers has compellingly shown that in this passage, Paul resorts to the ancient rhetorical device of prosōpopoiia—that is, assuming the identity of either a stock persona or a well-known figure in order to make a speech-in-character.⁴² Yet what persona or identity is being assumed? Commentators have drawn attention to the ways in which the passage may allude to the primal scene of disobedience in Genesis 3, leading to the conclusion (with varying degrees of forcefulness) that Paul is making some reference to the character of Adam.⁴³ However, in an article published in 2004, Austin Busch offers the intriguing suggestion that the seemingly inscrutable (and much-debated) “I” of Romans 7 is not in fact Adam but rather Eve.⁴⁴ Reading a variety of early Jewish and Christian narrative treatments of Eve, Busch concludes that these texts capitalize on the ancient association of passivity and the feminine in order to emphasize both “the passive nature of Eve’s transgression and her responsibility for that transgression. The result is an ambivalent and ultimately inconsistent portrait of Eve, fraught with unresolved tension.”⁴⁵ On Busch’s reading, Paul appropriates this complex heritage of figuring Eve in terms of both activity and passivity and internalizes it, “transforming it into the subject (quite literally …) of his discourse.”⁴⁶ Eve, then, becomes the vehicle for Paul to offer a speech-in-character exploring the paradoxical tensions that attend the split-ness of the self in relationship to sin—a self always characterized in terms of both active perpetration of sin (as concrete infraction) and passive victimization by sin (as hypostasized power).

How convincing is this argument? Busch notes a tendency on the part of commentators to acknowledge the affinities of Romans 7 with Genesis 3 and then to jump immediately to the assumption that the character being invoked is the male Adam rather than his female counterpart.⁴⁷ This is in part due to an unwillingness on the part of many interpreters to consider the possibility that the male apostle could assume a female persona.⁴⁸ But the move is also bolstered by the proximity of another crucial passage in which Adam appears (one already much discussed in this book): Romans 5:12–21. In mounting his argument against this position, Busch observes (rightly) that if one reads Romans 7 in light of Genesis 3, then the unnamed character’s plaintive cry in 7:11 (“sin … deceived me”/hamartia … exēpatēsen me) echoes the words not of Adam but of Eve in Genesis 3:13: “The serpent deceived me (LXX: Ho ophis ēpatēsen me), and I ate.” Here Busch argues that “those prone to see ‘Adamic imagery’ in the passage must also come to terms with the fact that Paul always associates deception in the context of Genesis 3 with Eve, as opposed to Adam, in the extant writings.”⁴⁹ He therefore rests his case that the character Paul has in mind and appropriates as a mouthpiece in Romans 7 is definitively Eve rather than Adam.

Working from this fascinating and original proposal, I want to take Busch’s argument in a somewhat different direction. He argues forcefully that “ultimately, the only legitimate argument for understanding the ‘I’ of Romans 7 in reference to Adam as opposed to Eve is the superficial similarity between Rom 7:5–25 and Rom 5:12–21.”⁵⁰ Busch’s concern here is with Paul’s authorial intent, and the case he makes—while sophisticated and theoretically informed—is in many ways a classically historical-critical argument, insofar as it seeks to unearth Paul’s original intended meaning in the Romans 7 passage. While recognizing the value of this project, my interests move along a different analytical trajectory. Here my concern is less with Paul’s single intended meaning in Romans 7 than with the suggestively equivocal character of the text that he produced—a passage constituted by internal tensions and ambiguities that may in fact escape or exceed the deliberate intentions of the apostle who composed it.

Thus rather than underscoring the illegitimacy of using the Adam-Christ typology in Romans 5 as a hermeneutical lens to interpret the unnamed persona of Romans 7 (with respect to Paul’s original intention), I want to draw attention to the larger anthropological contours of Romans that have rendered this move so plausible historically. I suggest that more is at play here than only a “superficial similarity” between the two passages. Rather, the climax of the Romans 7 text—in which the subject self-characterizes as “wretched anthrōpos that I am” (7:24) and offers this description in the context of an appeal to that other paradigmatic anthrōpos, Jesus Christ (7:25)—would seem to render credible the possibility of interpreting the unnamed speaker typologically as Adam or an Adam-like figure. Indeed, the history of scholarly interpretation that Busch cites testifies to the hermeneutical and anthropological force of the Adam-Christ typology to draw the “I” of Romans 7 into its “Adamic” orbit.

However, at the same time, Busch is absolutely right that the passage’s allusions to a primal fall narrative, when mapped onto the textual specifics of Genesis 2 and 3, would seem to gesture toward an identification with the figure of Eve. Accordingly, I want to assert a somewhat weaker version of his argument, not claiming definitively that Paul has Eve in view in the passage, but rather treating the “I” of Romans 7 as an anthropologically significant moment of textual undecidability. The ambiguity of this figure—alluding enigmatically to the primal scene and invoking Eve’s words rather than Adam’s, yet resolving the conflict with resort to the Pauline two-anthrōpos paradigm (the one wretched anthrōpos rescued by the other “one anthrōpos”; compare Rom 5:15)—points suggestively toward the interplay of Eve’s presence and absence, a gendered shadow haunting the androcentric self-assurance of the Pauline text.

In this way, the anthropological complexities of Romans cannot be fully neutered, as Žižek would have it. Chapter 7 cannot be reduced to an abstract and oddly disembodied engagement with perversion as a philosophical predicament (i.e., the conundrum of a law that generates its own transgression), one that takes place in a register in which sexual difference does not figure. Rather, as in the texts wrestling with Paul’s legacy surveyed above, so too in Romans 5–7, the never-totally-excluded trace of sexual difference troubles the stability of the Pauline typological frame. Eve in her bodily particularity is in no way assimilated as a fully present figure within Romans’s Adam-Christ paradigm, and yet she also cannot quite be entirely disregarded or relegated to total absence, given the allusions to the Genesis narrative and other ambiguities that attend the “I” of Romans 7. What this trace calls into question, then, is nothing less than the anthropological coherence of the system as a whole, and by extension that system’s pretensions to represent adequately and fully a theological space in which to situate a universal human subject. Sexual difference in Romans 5–7, both absent and hauntingly present, renders impossible any full and seamless embodied identification of a universal “I,” forged in the Pauline typological interval, with that typology’s paradigmatic representatives, Adam and Christ.

In conclusion, I return to a comment that Breton makes regarding the Apostle Paul: “let us first ask how Paul himself lives and thinks his faith. He lives and thinks it as movement and affirmation.”⁵¹ While I find myself considerably less optimistic than Breton that such a sentiment does in fact describe the conscious and intentional thrust of the apostle’s thought—especially with respect to the domain of theological anthropology—nonetheless I want to propose that the impossibility that sexual difference poses for Pauline typology opens a space of theological possibility, one that we indeed might characterize in terms of “movement and affirmation.” As Joan Scott has argued in a very different context, gender, understood as “the social and political policing of sexual boundaries,” needs to be read “as an attempt to negotiate the anxieties attached to sexual difference—a difference that is known, but whose meanings and effects are never clear. Gender is the always failed attempt, in particular historical contexts, to fully secure those meanings.”⁵² In this specific sense, then, both the historical Christian tradition’s engagements with the Adam-Christ typology and the contemporary philosophical readings of Paul analyzed in this book can be considered “gendering” projects—insofar as they both attempt (unsuccessfully) to capture, resolve, or put to rest the disruptive signifying potential of the sexually differentiated human body, a potential that always exceeds the tightly scripted boundaries that the typological frame attempts to establish.

The philosophers make this move by proffering readings of Paul and his typology that dispense with or reinterpret Adam, thereby putatively bringing to light—within the space opened up by Christ without Adam—the possibility of a universal subject untroubled by the anxieties of sexual difference. And yet these anxieties endure, even when submerged or hard to see, in ways that throw into question the “universality” of the subjectivities in question. Bringing Adam robustly back into the typological picture reminds us, most basically, that the figure of Christ functions in Paul’s anthropological thought not as a “singular universal” but as an inseparable and organic part of a frame—one that works to set the boundaries of the human with reference to two paradigmatic bodies whose maleness is not incidental. Furthermore, attending to the diverse and complicated ways that various iterations of this anthropological machine remain haunted by “Eve”—that is, by a difference that the system can never fully put to rest—points to the irreducible inadequacy of treating Adam and Christ’s masculinity alone (or with the addition of Eve and Mary’s femininity) as the paradigm for a mode of human identification that is stable, coherent, and all-encompassing, while remaining embodied.

So what then of sexual difference and its ongoing place in Christian theological anthropology? To continue in conversation with the Pauline Adam-Christ typology is to work with reference to a system in which the normative status of “the masculine” is taken for granted and its binary other, “the feminine,” is figured as a problem to be solved—whether that solution entails its refusal, eradication, or subordination. Here Butler’s gloss on Irigaray (and, more specifically, Irigaray’s diagnosis of the phallogocentrism that props up the history of Western thought) seems apt: we could say that with reference specifically to the Pauline typological structure, “sexual difference does not denote a simple opposition, a binary opposition. What it denotes is something like the relationship of a presumed masculine symbolic order to what it must exclude and how that same presumed masculine order requires this excluded feminine to augment and reproduce itself.”⁵³ And yet, to proceed in a way that highlights the system’s own necessary breakdown(s) on terms internal to itself is to throw such a notion of sexual difference into crisis—or, rather, to show that it was always already in crisis.⁵⁴

Acknowledgment of this crisis (which is really a crisis of coherence) does not usher in a space of sexual utopia in which the binary logic of masculinity and femininity is discarded wholesale, a gender-queer version of total and radical newness, à la the Badiouian/Žižekian event. But it does suggest—and even demand—that we wrestle with possibilities for thinking subjectivity and bodily difference otherwise. With respect to this question, Adam Phillips helpfully notes (in a psychoanalytic vein) that “it may be more useful to talk about gradations and blurring rather than contours and outlines when we plot our stories about gender … [keeping] definition on the move, which is where it is anyway.”⁵⁵ My argument here is that contemporary theology’s anthropological formulations need to be imbued with precisely this sense of “definition on the move”—and that the failures of the tradition to resolve the Adam-Christ typology’s aporias coherently can and should function as a persistent theological goad toward that end.⁵⁶ Drucilla Cornell puts well (with respect to feminism more broadly) exactly what I am advocating in the domain of Christian theological anthropology when she points to the need “to symbolize the space in which we keep the future of sexual identifications open, even if through the interpretation of old attachments.”⁵⁷ The gendered subject positions made available (or not available—literally unthinkable and thus unrecognizable) by the terms of the Adam-Christ typology are an inescapable part of the Christian tradition’s historical legacy. But their failures to cohere can be thought through in ways that yield new spaces of anthropological openness.

While the so-called postmodern proliferation of identities both worries and exasperates Badiou and Žižek (and thus they might easily relegate a project seeking the robust validation of gender complexity to just one more exercise in identity politics), I do not see this sort of theological undertaking in these terms. Rather, what is at issue is most fundamentally about the building blocks by which anthropological recognition becomes possible in the first place. And this takes on a special urgency with respect to traditional Christian contexts in which so many are inclined to construe any queer proliferation of sex, gender, and the embodied structures of desire in (at best) self-indulgent or (at worst) sinful and “unnatural” terms. As Butler pointedly notes, such projects as I have in view are driven, at their core, by “a normative aspiration … and it has to do with the ability to live and breathe and move and would no doubt belong somewhere in what is called a philosophy of freedom. The thought of a possible life is only an indulgence for those who already know themselves to be possible. For those who are still looking to become possible, possibility is a necessity.”⁵⁸ These are concerns that, within the context of Christian theological anthropology, are not distinctly modern (or “postmodern”)—nor are they limited in their scope to considerations that we might deem only and immediately “presentist.”

Rather, the messiness and complexity of sexual identity, gender identification, and bodily difference have always exceeded—and continue to exceed—the frame that the Pauline and post-Pauline paradigms provide, as well as the closed form of (necessarily?) binary thinking that undergirds that frame. Accordingly Butler asserts, “The genders I have in mind have been existing for a long time, but they have not been admitted into the terms that govern reality. … Because the norms governing reality have not admitted these forms to be real, we will, of necessity, call them new. But I hope we will laugh knowingly when and if we do.”⁵⁹ Here the bodily experiences of intersexed and transgendered persons would seem clearly to be a crucial entry point into the gender complexity in view. As Gayle Salamon argues, “Genders that find no easy home within the binary system are still animated by difference. Sexual undecidability does not condemn the subject to placelessness, but rather locates difference at the heart of both subjectivity and relation.”⁶⁰ And thinkers within the discipline of queer theology have begun to consider the implications of these nonnormative bodily experiences for Christian theological anthropology.

However, it remains the case that certain versions of the broadly heteronormative Christian theological position discussed at the opening of this chapter may be able to acknowledge, to some degree, the empirical realities of this complexity (i.e., intersexuality and transgenderism)—as well as the lived experiences of persons who inhabit such complexity. Yet they nonetheless relegate the failure to embody idealized binary gender norms fully and perfectly to a symptom of humanity’s fallen state, one that will be put right once and for all at the redemptive resolution of the eschaton.⁶¹ Indeed, while not directly engaging intersexual or transgender issues, Richard Hays’s arguments concerning sexuality—and especially conclusions such as the following: “homosexuality is one among many tragic signs that we are a broken people, alienated from God’s loving purpose”—rely most fundamentally on his relentless emphasis on the gap between lived reality and eventual eschatological redemption.⁶²

Sophisticated versions of this theological position might in principle even accept Butler’s argument that nonnormative gender performances illuminate the ways in which no gender performance can do more than “seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity,” thereby revealing gender to be “a norm that can never be fully internalized” by anyone.⁶³ Yet such positions would necessarily reject Butler’s attendant conclusion that the structural necessity of this failure exposes the inevitable “tenuousness of gender ‘reality,’” even as that “reality” poses as a timeless and original ideal.⁶⁴ Rather, by appeal to a Christian narrative of fall, sin, and eventual deliverance, it apparently becomes possible to follow Butler up to a point, while still looking ahead to a notion of redemption that would eschatologically shore up ideal, stable, and mutually exclusive forms of masculinity and femininity.⁶⁵

It is here that my insistence on interrogating the specific terms of the Adam-Christ typology takes on a particular urgency. Unlike the familiar statements in the Pauline corpus that seem to be straightforwardly “about” the ideals of gender at some particular moment in the salvation-historical narrative (whether the primal creation, everyday life in the Greco-Roman world, or the eventual eschaton), the Adam-Christ typology traverses and encompasses the full span of these various moments: creation, fall, and redemptive eschaton. My point, then, is that the very terms by which the typological frame (inclusive of redemption) seeks to situate sexual subjectivity are not coherent and never were. Thus a simple appeal to the mysteries of an eventual eschatological resolution that is somehow imagined to be coherent fails to produce a theologically viable solution. Rather, this sort of move only ends up short-circuiting or sidestepping the force of the anthropological dilemma posed by Paul’s typology.

The complexity of sexual subjectivity in view (complexity, I argue, that has always attended Christian theological speculations on what it means to be human) is one that the androcentric terms of Paul’s Adam-Christ typology have no capacity or conceptual space to recognize. And such recognition—in the sense of the simple incorporation of difference into the typology—should not be a contemporary theological goal. Rather, following Butler, “the task will be not to assimilate the unspeakable into the domain of speakability in order to house it there, within the existing norms of dominance, but to shatter the confidence of dominance, to show how equivocal its claims to universality are, and, from that equivocation, track the break-up of its regime, an opening towards alternative visions of universality that are wrought from the work of translation itself.”⁶⁶ The Adam-Christ typology (and most especially the particularity of Adam) needs to be kept live in Christian theological anthropology not as a straightforward resource to be reclaimed, but rather as a constant witness to the failure of the typology and its afterlives to resolve embodied difference without remainder. And while the typology cannot itself provide the resources we need to think embodied sexual difference differently, its ongoing critical interrogation contributes to the never entirely finished work of ground-clearing, thereby creating the possibility of—and indeed necessity for—looking to other sites (historical, textual, and conceptual) within the tradition.⁶⁷ By keeping this typological failure in view, then, we glimpse—with a clarity that grows sharper as one delves into both the Pauline text and its later Christian appropriations—that the typology’s implicit vision of stable masculinity and concomitant pretensions to anthropological universality were always a theological counterfeit. Out of this crisis and the projects of critical interrogation it incites, new modes and dimensions of being an embodied subject that have long been present (if often submerged) may become more easily legible to Christian anthropology, engendered in the theological fresh air (still in some complicated sense “Pauline”?) of movement and affirmation.