Professor Roland Boer

© Roland Boer 2007. All rights reserved. Symposia illuminates the central issues and concerns of biblical studies by presenting a series of stories. The model for the stories is the ancient Greek idea of the symposium, a ¿sitting down together for the purpose of drinking¿. In Plato's writings, the symposium becomes a genre of writing with Socrates at its centre, a character who perpetually questions in order to develop the pursuit of knowledge. Some of the most influential figures in the history of biblical studies - Julius Wellhausen, Hermann Gunkel, Martin Noth, Brevard Childs, Norman Gottwald, Phyllis Trible, and the Bible and Culture Collective - become the central characters in these stories. Each aims to voice their central arguments, to highlight and confront the key challenges they see and, of course, to dispute the positions of others

What is the future for the Bible, one of the most important books in the world? In this manifesto, Roland Boer explores the idea that the Bible is an unruly and uncontrollable text that has been colonized by church, synagogue, and state. Powerfully argues that the Bible needs to be rescued from its abuse by the religious and political right Considers the history of revolutionary readings of the Bible, from Gerrard Winstanley to the present Urges a role for the Bible in a new "worldly left": an alliance between the religious and secular left that can promote more progressive readings of the text Concludes by offering a "political myth" from the Bible that condemns oppression, imagines a better society and celebrates the biblical themes of opposition and chaos. © 2007 Roland Boer.

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press. All rights reserved. At a point close to the turn of the millennium, Slavoj ¿i¿ek underwent a "conversion," if not a "reformation"-he began to appreciate the role of Christian theology, especially of a Protestant variety. After a long and convoluted search that gets lost time and again in various cul-de-sacs (ethics, law, and love), in the end he fixes on the Protestant doctrine of grace, albeit with a materialist, political core. In what follows I begin with the challenge that led to ¿i¿ek's "conversion." For one who had held Christianity and Marxism at arm's length, ¿i¿ek has emerged as a proponent of both at the beginning of the new millennium. He has done so, I suggest, in response to the challenge posed to him by Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.1 There Butler points out that psychoanalysis cannot provide the basis for a viable politics, particularly because it will constantly raise the issue of the constitutive exception to any political move, while Laclau picks up on the highly undeveloped status of ¿i¿ek's more recent statements in favor of Marxism. And the criticism bites, so much so that it will lead eventually to his double "conversion," one to Christ and the other to Marx. While the "conversion" to Marx, or rather Lenin, was not possible without the "conversion" to Christ, or rather Paul, and vice versa, it is not quite so balanced. Whereas ¿i¿ek has identified himself openly as a Marxist-Leninist, calling himself a "fighting materialist" like Lenin,2 he does not make the same move for Christianity, although he does venture an occasional "we Christians" or "true Christians." You will not find him sneaking off to a Reformed worship service, although he would probably spend the afternoon arguing about the sermon with the minister over a glass of wine and a cigar. However, a major reason for his turn to Pauline Christianity is that it enables him to get out of the closed circuit of Lacan's psychoanalysis, however fleeting and haphazard that escape might be, and make the move to Lenin. How does¿i¿ek get from Lacan to Lenin? Through the founding figure of Christianity-Paul-a necessary and by no means vanishing mediator who enables the move from one to the other. He did not get quite so far in his initial responses to Butler and Laclau, for he first had to negotiate the insistent challenge from Alain Badiou. Although he will eventually draw the means of his breakout from Badiou's book on Paul, in his initial engagement with Badiou, ¿i¿ek focuses on the challenge Badiou poses for psychoanalysis. That challenge is that psychoanalysis deals, however well, with our everyday world full of quotidian exploitation, political disappointment, and fundamental injustice. In Badiou's terms, this is the Order of Being, while in Lacan's terms it is the intertwining of law and desire- Terms that are, in fact, those of Paul as well. For Badiou, the event named by Paul enables the militant revolutionary movement of which Paul's early Christians are the prime model. Here I focus on ¿i¿ek's response to Badiou, particularly in The Ticklish Subject. He answers Badiou in terms of the constitutive exception: every effort at emancipation, every Cause (¿i¿ek's preferred term for the truth event) has to face up to the constitutive exception, to the underside that both enables the Cause to get under way in the first place and hobbles it every step of the way. This argument renders ¿i¿ek unable to take up a distinct political position, however much he may wish to do so. What also interests me here is the way¿i¿ek neglects other elements of Badiou's work, particularly his discussion of materialist grace, to which ¿i¿ek returns only much later. By materialist grace I mean an imminent, this-worldly grace that retains the focus...

© Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas S. Verenna 2012. All rights reserved. What is the relevance or actuality, as the French like to say, of David Strauss and Bruno Bauer (and for that matter, Ludwig Feuerbach) today? In their own time they caused outrage, were sacked from university posts and denied positions. Outside Germany (Prussia) they were known as part of the corroding ¿German Pestilence¿ that would ruin almost two millennia of facts about the Bible. No less a thinker than Nietzsche made a shipwreck of his faith after reading Strauss. In our own time, especially with the so-called minimalist position in biblical studies, we find a return to many of their concerns. It is as though the implications of the radical work of these nineteenth-century scholars have yet to be realized. This essay concerns itself with three topics. First, it considers the reasons for the theological turn of German philosophy in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Why did all of the major debates concerning reason, republicanism, democracy, the nature of the state, freedom of speech and of the press, the relations of church and state and even economics take place on the territory of the Bible, especially the New Testament Gospels? An exploration of the context in relation to other European centres draws out the reasons for this distinct German turn to theology. I also argue that this was the situation which launched a century-long global domination of biblical criticism by German biblical scholarship.

© 2015. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. We argue that the dialectic of utopia and dystopia enables an alternative, albeit controversial, way for framing debate over the tensions between socialism and capitalism in China. In doing so, we acknowledge but differ from alternative explanations: Socialism in China has simply become an empty veneer over rampant and unbridled capitalism; capitalism in China is of such a different variety that it is hardly capitalism at all; ¿socialism with Chinese characteristics¿ is a prolonged experiment in the New Economic Program. Theoretically, we draw upon Anatoly Lunacharsky, Ernst Bloch, and Fredric Jameson. A significant factor for understanding this dialectic is Bloch¿s idea of the synchronicity of nonsynchronicity. The next step analyzes the permutations of this dialectic in the Chinese situation of the tension between socialism and capitalism. We propose three formulations: the need for economic and political strength in the face of international forces, the use of capitalism to build socialism, and the fostering of the productive forces of capitalism to provide the basis for the full realization of communism. How these variations manifest the dialectic of utopia and dystopia is the burden of our final section, where we seek to move past simplistic oppositions.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011. This essay offers a careful and critical commentary on the deep, complex and conflictual relation between Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer - At personal, professional and political levels. I do so with a particular interest in religion, since Bauer was one of the towering biblical scholars in the Germany of his time (mid-nineteenth century). Bauer was Marx's one- Time teacher, friend and mentor who taught him a course on the book of Isaiah at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1839. Not many years later, Bauer becomes a target for Marx's polemic in The Holy Family and The German Ideology, as well as On the Jewish Question. Why the intense polemic? I argue that the problem with Bauer - for Marx - was that he developed a reasonably radical political position - his later works dealt extensively with politics - Through his work as a biblical critic. Marx sought to close this path off entirely, although he does admit in a telling phrase that Bauer follows the 'detour of theology'. Yet, despite all the polemic, Bauer and Marx kept in touch, the former visiting Marx in London many years later and the latter keeping up a lively interest in Bauer's movements and writings.

Taking up the challenge to develop a new study of the economic patterns in the ancient Near East, including what passes for ancient ¿Israel¿ (the Persian province of Yehud), this article proposes a model of the ¿sacred economy.¿ A study in economic history, it seeks to map out the broad contours of this sacred economy in light of the neglected but crucial economically¿informed scholarship from the Soviet Union on the ancient Near East. The article identifies the key nodes of the sacred economy as the village¿commune, the temple¿city complex, the formation of the despotic state, the tensions between labour and class, and mediations between empire and village commune. It traces the development of the State to the tensions between the village commune and the city¿temple complex. It also argues that the key features of this sacred economy may be described as regimes of allocation and regimes of extraction. The unique combination of these regimes and the tensions between them make up the sacred economy. The underlying logic of the regimes of allocation was to provide a rationale for the allocation of productive units such as land and fertility by means of kinship, the war machine, patron¿client relations and the judiciary. All of this was posed in the language of the sacred, for the deity is the ultimate arbiter of allocation. By contrast, the regimes of extraction undermine the allocatory economic logic by means of a pattern of exploitation in terms of tribute and trade. This article insists upon the necessary centrality of economic analysis in any historiography of the Ancient Near East. © 2007 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Defining Christian Zionism as conservative Christian support for the state of Israel, and an influential political force, especially in the United States, this article outlines four antinomies of such a position. Firstly, although Christian Zionism argues that it is purely theological, that it follows God's will irrespective of any politics, and although mainstream Zionism is resolutely political, we argue that such a separation is impossible. Indeed, mainstream Zionism cannot avoid being influenced by Christian Zionism's political agenda. Secondly, despite the efforts by mainstream Zionism to use Christian Zionism in order to influence US foreign policy in the Middle East, mainstream Zionism is playing with fire, since Christian Zionists wish to convert or annihilate all Jews. Thirdly, Christian Zionism is the ultimate version of anti-Semitism, for it wishes to get rid of Arabs (as hindrances to the Zionist project) and then dispense with Jews. (Both Arabs and Jews are by definition Semites.) Finally, since Christian Zionists are fundamentalist Christians, they must take the Old and New Testaments at their word. However, this position is impossible to hold, and in order to resolve the tension they must resort to the violence of the final conflict, Armageddon.

In beginning the search for an adequate theory of literary production in biblical studies, this article seeks to bring together the theoretical sophistication of psychoanalytic studies of Genesis 1-3 and the historical concerns of other studies. The argument is that Genesis 1-3 may be understood in terms of fantasy, particularly in its five modes of narrative occlusion, the paradox of emergence and loss, intersubjective desire, the inherent transgression and the empty gesture. The schema of fantasy also offers the groundwork for a theory of literary production: it takes as its starting point the idea that the reality that lies 'behind' the text, that seems to inform it, is in fact highly unstable, subject to the unsettling presence of a much deeper, unknown fantasmatic kernel. © 2006 Brill Academic Publishers.

One of the most important contributions to the study of the Hebrew Bible in the last 25 years is the argument for a mode of production unique to early Israel. Variously called the communitarian (Norman Gottwald), household (Carol Meyers), domestic (David Jobling and Ronald Simkins), or familial (Gail Yee), such a mode of production urges a firm basis in the study of political economics or Marxism. However, another feature of these arguments (apart from Simkins) is that such a mode of production was at least comparatively better for women. The concern of this article is to trace such a motif back through the work of biblical scholars to Marshall Sahlins, the anthropologist who first proposed the domestic mode of production, and then to the crucial work of Friedrich Engels, Lewis Henry Morgan, and J.J. Bachofen. What this article finds is that primitive communism has a more durable legacy in biblical studies than may at first appear. © 2005 SAGE Publications.

How might Jacques Lacan and Slavoj' i ek read the Song of Songs? Perversely, I suggest. After determining the appropriateness of these two partners, particularly because of the importance of desire in Lacanian psychoanalysis, I tarry for a time with Lacan and ' i ek in order to identify the main features of Lacan's thought on desire. It turns out that it is intimately connected with repetition, and, by investigating some of the major items of Lacanian theory-fortda, (M)Other, graph of desire, rim, Law, pain, jouissance, desire of desire-the relation between desire and repetition is established. Equipped with this distinctively perverse set of toys, I then read the Song itself in three stages. The triggers of desire are located in the function of edges, rims, Law, pain and the (M)Other. Repetition is investigated in terms of structure, phrases and words, descriptions, and content. Finally I ask the haunting question: che vuoi ? What do you really want? © Koninklijke Brill, Leiden 2000.

How does western Marxism influence the study of the Hebrew Bible? Through the work of scholars such as Norman Gottwald and David Jobling. The influence of both scholars is traced by using a Marxist dialectical method that seeks out contradictions, class conflict, ideology, and mode of production. Gottwald's work is characterized by a series of fruitful contradictions: dispassionate style and passionate content, tributary and communitarian modes of production, capitalism and democratic socialism and historiography and Utopian writing. Jobling has moved from an earlier structuralist phase to a Marxist poststructuralism with a specific focus on liberationist hermeneutics. The basic contradiction is the use of First World critics to articulate a politics that looks outside that context. These problems are symptomatic of the tensions and class conflicts that face biblical critics working within late capitalism.