St. Paul and the Creation of the Individual

I’ve been reading Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (UK: Random House, 2014), where Siedentop notes the role of Paul in the process:

He says that Paul saw Jesus’ crucifixion “as a moral earthquake” (p. 58) and “Paul’s conception of the Christ overturns the assumption on which ancient thinking had hitherto rested, the assumption of natural inequality. Instead, Paul wagers on human equality. It is a wager that turns on transparency, that we can and should see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. A leap of faith in human equality reveals – beneath the historical accumulation of unequal social statuses and roles — the universal availability of a God-given foundation for human actions, the free action of love. That action is what Paul’s vision of the Christ revealed” (p. 60). And “Despite constant setbacks and eventual martyrdom, Paul may be said to have prevailed. For his understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection introduced to the world a new picture of reality. It provides an ontological foundation for ‘the individual’, through the promise that humans have access to the deepest reality as individuals rather than merely as members of a group … For Paul, Christian liberty is open to all humans. Free action, a gift of grace through faith in the Christ, is utterly different from ritual behaviour and the unthinking application of rules. For Paul, to think otherwise is to regress rather than progress in the spirit. This is how Paul turns the abstracting potential of Greek philosophy to new uses. He endows it with an almost ferocious moral universalism. The Greek mind and the Jewish will are joined” (pp. 63-640).

And see the review of Siedentop over at TGC by Jordan Ballor.