At this juncture in history, viewed as either the dusk of modernity or the dawn of its overcoming, questions of faith and reason are continually cast up anew. The questioning of faith and reason raise familiar binaries and oppositions: Is faith for or against, internal or external, before or after, above or below reason? Does faith perfect or overcome, complete or destroy, add or subtract from reason? This essay will pass through two figures representative of the contested field of Thomistic scholarship en route to a discussion of how the French philosopher Alain Badiou might intervene within the contemporary discussions of faith and reason. It will first engage Denys Turner's recent work which could be characterized as a dogmatic faith in reason attempting to repel the dispositional faith which he attributes to Fergus Kerr. These competing conceptions of faith will set the backdrop for a presentation and application of Badiou's understanding of faith as discerning fidelity.

This essay discusses the reading of Paul offered by the contemporary French philosopher, Alain Badiou. Badiou's emphasis on event and unconditioned grace is supported by readings from Galatians, such that his philosophical notion of ‘event’, with its militant and universal effects, may claim real consonance with Paul. However, Paul's strong notions of divine creation from nothing, and of the benevolence of the Christ event, require that God be reinserted into Paul's theology, while Badiou's focus on the resurrection, rather than the cross, misses the social radicalism latent in Paul.

This essay explores the heuristic force of Alain Badiou's theory of ‘truth-processes’ for an understanding of the psycho-social effect of Paul's gospel upon first-century inhabitants of the Roman Empire, both elite and lower class. Badiou's analysis of the ‘situated void’ around which existence is constructed directs attention to figures of the subject as ‘living death’ in the literature of the first century, illuminating the process by which a new, liberated self came forth, in response to Paul's message of the resurrection. An immanent critique of Badiou's singular emphasis upon the resurrection as the Pauline ‘truth-event’ gives rise to an hypothesis regarding Paul's description of his gospel as ‘Christ crucified’ in his later epistles: Paul dared to name the ‘situated void’ around which the existence of slaves was constructed in order to redeem the oppressed, whose identities were submerged in shame, from the annihilating power of the cross.