Reassessing the Significance of Gendered Embodiment in Paul: Beyond Reception-Historical Impositions

Abstract

Planetary entanglement is often tangential to if not totally absent from the Pauline letters. Traditionally, the letters are interpreted as originating from an apostolic author with an eschatological and apocalyptically driven focus, resorting to a Platonic body-soul dichotomy and largely alienated from society and this world and its concerns. However, considering how Pauline rhetoric, especially when read in its socio-historical context, involves and at times even is based on embodiment and gender awareness, shows the Pauline letters in a different light, with strong, if at times covert and assumed, inter-personal, communal, and terrestrial entanglements or intersectionalities. Textual examples from Paul are provided for each of these three intersectionalities to show that reassessment of gendered embodiment in Paul holds promise for theological reflection from biblical perspectives in general and for socially engaged theology in relation to the Anthropocene, in particular. Keywords: Pauline rhetoric, Embodiment, Intersectionalities, Gender, Necropolitics