Corinthian Rocks

He is the protagonist, one of the most-interpreted and most-fought thinkers of Christianity. Paul the Apostle did not speak from a place of self-assuredness and worldliness, but from the shaky ground of a new beginning, driven by contradictions, as someone asking questions and struggling with language, the first to wrest concepts such as »church« and the »return« of Christ from it. At the interface of Judaism and Hellenism, Paul asked decisive philosophical-theological questions: about the subject, about time and history – and about how God can be put into words.

Christian Lehnert’s essay, an expressive and poetic as well as conceptually sharp interpretation of the famous First Letter to the Corinthians, is an attempt to hear what is expressed in Paul’s text for the very first time from the post-secular present in a biographical reconstruction, through textual work and through personal experience. The book recognises, certainly not to everyone’s liking, Paul as someone who leads beyond the modern experiences of loss of faith and the arbitrariness of a »wellness« Christianity into the open.