The Anguish and the Gifts

Movement I — Paul's text

What Paul says: Romans 9:1–5

Paul opens with a declaration made under oath. He calls Christ as his witness and the Holy Spirit as his corroborator: he has great sorrow and unceasing grief in his heart. This is not a man making a rhetorical point. This is a man telling the truth about the weight he carries.

Then he says something extraordinary. He could wish himself accursed, cut off from Christ, for the sake of his brothers, his kinsmen according to the flesh. A man who has everything Christ gives is willing to trade all of it for people who will not receive what was given to them.

Then he lists what was given. He does not analyze the gifts. He does not sort them. He does not rank them. He lists them: the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, and the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Eight gifts. Every one of them real. Every one of them delivered. Every one of them sufficient.

A man in anguish, a list of gifts, and a people who had everything and would not receive it. The grief and the gifts are not two separate topics. They are one. The grief exists because the gifts are real and the people Paul loves refused them. Remove the gifts and there is nothing to grieve. The anguish is proportional to the reality of what was given and not received.

Discussion questions

Movement II — Foucault enters the room

How the world outside this church hears what we just read

Who is Michel Foucault, and why does he belong in this room?

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher and historian who spent his career asking a single question: how do institutions exercise power over people? He examined prisons, hospitals, asylums, schools, and churches, and in every case he found the same pattern: the institution claims to serve the people inside it while simultaneously shaping them, managing them, and making them dependent on the institution for their identity and their understanding of themselves.

His major works include Discipline and Punish (1975), which analyzed how modern societies control behavior not through brute force but through surveillance and normalization; The History of Sexuality (four volumes, 1976–2018), which traced how Western culture, particularly Christianity, created the compulsion to confess one's innermost desires to an authority; and his final lectures at the Collège de France (1979–1984), where he examined how early Christianity invented what he called "pastoral power": the model of the shepherd who cares for each sheep individually, guiding them from birth to death, while requiring them to speak the truth about their inner lives as the price of salvation.

Foucault is not in your congregation's library. He is, however, in the air your children breathe. When someone says "The church just wants to control you," that is Foucault. When someone says "Every institution that claims to love you is really managing you," that is Foucault. When someone says "I am spiritual but not religious because religion is a power structure," that is Foucault. When your daughter sets boundaries with every institution in her life and ends up free and alone, she is living inside a framework Foucault built, whether she has read a word he wrote or not.

How Foucault reads the situation Paul describes

The question is not what Foucault thinks about Paul as such. The question is: given the situation Paul describes in Romans 9:1–5 — a man in anguish, a sovereign God, a list of gifts, a people who refused them — how does Foucault's framework interpret that situation? Three elements of the text draw his attention.

1. Paul's suffering: grief as evidence of the system

In his 1977 essay "Lives of Infamous Men," Foucault examined the lettres de cachet: petitions written by common people to the king of France, begging the sovereign to intervene in their domestic miseries. A wife with an abusive husband. A father with an unruly son. People whose suffering had no voice until they brought it before the one with power.

Foucault observed that for centuries, the sufferings of ordinary people simply did not exist in the historical record. They belonged, in his words, to "billions of existences destined to pass away without a trace." For their voices to survive, a beam of light had to illuminate them — a light coming from elsewhere. That light was the gaze of sovereign power. These lives had to be struck by the lightning of power for them to reach us.

The petitions themselves were not passive records. They were, in his phrase, "traps, weapons, cries, gestures, attitudes, ruses, intrigues for which words were the instruments." The wife who brought her suffering to the king could not even hold the pen. Someone else wrote her misery for her, in a language that was not hers, dressed in the grand ceremonial rhetoric of the royal court. And the moment the king noticed her, the king was in her living room. She wanted rescue. What she got was surveillance.

Now read Paul. He is in anguish over his people. He calls the Holy Spirit as his witness. He frames his grief within the covenant relationship between Israel and God. Foucault's framework reads Paul's suffering as following the same pattern: it becomes real, becomes speakable, becomes historically visible precisely because Paul brings it before the ultimate sovereign authority. The grief is genuine. The entanglement with power is also genuine. You cannot grieve the loss of something unless you first accepted the authority of the one who gave it. Paul's anguish, on this reading, is evidence that the power structure worked.

2. Paul's gifts: every gift is a leash

Paul lists eight gifts: adoption, glory, covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, and the Christ. Foucault's framework reads every one of them as a mechanism of control.

Foucault described how the modern state borrowed from an ancient model — pastoral power — to organize the daily conduct of its population: the metaphor of a shepherd who cares for his flock from birth to death, a concept originating in Hebrew and early Christian cultures. The shepherd claims to guide each individual sheep, to know each one by name, to protect each one from harm. The care is real. The control is also real. You cannot be known by name without being known. You cannot be guided without being governed.

Apply this to Paul's list. "Adoption" is an obligation structure: you are named by a power, and the naming makes you subject to that power. "Covenant" is a contract disguised as relationship. "The giving of the law" is the most direct instrument of control: a comprehensive code governing behavior, diet, sexuality, economics, and worship, reaching into every corner of Israelite life. "The worship" is the institution that reinforces all the other gifts by requiring regular public performance of loyalty. "The promises" are a debt instrument: they bind the recipient to the giver in perpetual expectation.

3. Paul's letter: confession, obedience, and the governed soul

Paul is not weeping alone in a room. He is writing to Rome. He is an apostle exercising his office. He opens with his credentials, invokes the Holy Spirit as witness, and delivers his grief as the first movement of an argument that will run three chapters.

Foucault traced the roots of this dynamic to early Christian monasticism. In his lectures On the Government of the Living (1979–1980) and in the posthumously published Confessions of the Flesh (2018), he argued that Christianity invented a system of "pastoral power" that governed daily life through two joined obligations he called the roots of Western obedience:

The monastic practice that embodied these obligations was exagoreusis: the constant verbalization of every movement of the soul to a spiritual master. Not merely past sins, but present thoughts. Not merely actions taken, but desires entertained, daydreams indulged, shadows flickering at the edge of imagination. Every stirring of the heart had to be confessed, not because the master was wise or virtuous, but because the act of speaking itself was the act of subjection. The monk who verbalized his every thought to the master had sacrificed his own will. That sacrifice, Foucault argued, was the point.

The ancient Stoics had examined their past actions to gain wisdom and self-mastery. Christianity shifted the examination from past actions to present thoughts and desires, creating a surveillance that could never end because thoughts never stop. The examination becomes permanent, the suspicion becomes total, and the subject is produced who is perpetually guilty, perpetually confessing, perpetually dependent on the authority that interprets the confession.

In his final lectures, Foucault contrasted this subjugating form of confessional truth-telling with the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia: frank speech, the courage to tell the truth to power at personal risk. Paul's willingness to be accursed for his kinsmen is, on Foucault's own terms, one of the most extreme acts of parrhesia imaginable. That is where the steelman is strongest, and it is also where it breaks, because Foucault can describe the courage of truth-telling but cannot account for why someone would do it out of love rather than out of a bid for authority.

Discussion questions

Movement III — Where Foucault's reading leads

The steelman: Foucault's best answer and its cost

Foucault's answer to suffering

Foucault does not deny that suffering is real. He never tells you that you are not in pain. What he tells you is that the moment you try to do anything with that pain, you lose it. Name it, and you have used a language that belongs to a power structure. Bring it to a therapist, and you have entered a medical discourse that will categorize you. Bring it to a pastor, and you have entered a pastoral discourse that will manage you. The pain is yours. The meaning never is.

His most direct claim is that pathologizing misery functions as a way for society to resist criticism. By turning the critique inward against the individual's mental health, institutions deflect blame away from their own structural flaws. The system made you hurt. Then the system told you the problem was inside you. The only story the system will let you tell about your pain is "something was wrong with me." If you try to tell a different story — a story that says "something is wrong with the system that broke me" — the institution has no vocabulary for it.

Foucault's three-part answer

Foucault does not offer a cure for suffering because he believes any proposed cure will be infected by the same power relations that produced the suffering. Instead, he offers three practices.

Reject the diagnosis. First, reject the medicalization of unhappiness. The church, the state, the hospital, the school: they built the world that broke you, and then they told you the problem was inside you. Stop accepting their diagnosis.

See through the system. Second, practice critique as a form of freedom. Study how the current systems were built. Understand that they did not have to be this way. Discover that your present reality is an unstable, changeable construction rather than an absolute necessity.

Create yourself. Third, practice the "care of the self." In his later work, Foucault turned to ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and found a model of active self-creation that he offered as an alternative to the Christian examination of conscience:

What does this build?

That refusal is real. The courage behind it is real. The diagnosis it rests on is brilliant. The question is: after the refusal, what gets built?

Nothing. Foucault's framework can critique. It can diagnose. It can expose. It can reveal the wiring behind every institution, every relationship, every claim of love. It can make you the smartest person in the room. It can give you the vocabulary to explain exactly why you are suffering and exactly why every offer of help is compromised. It cannot build a marriage. It cannot build a congregation. It cannot build a friendship that survives betrayal. It cannot build a community that holds together when someone in it is dying. It can tear down every false thing. It cannot put one true thing in its place. The tools are only demolition tools. There is no blueprint. There is no foundation.

And here is the deepest irony of his framework: even the person who believes they are creating themselves freely is still operating within a set of discourses that shape what "freedom" looks like. Foucault saw this. He had no way out of it. He is sitting in that refusal, alone, with no comfort, no promise, no gift he will allow himself to receive, and he calls that freedom.

You see it everywhere. You see it in the people who have torn down every structure and are standing in the clearing wondering why they are so alone. The person who left the church because the church was hypocritical. Fair enough. Then left the marriage because the marriage was confining. Then left the friend group because the friend group had expectations. Every single critique was legitimate. Every demolition made sense at the time. And now that person is sitting in an apartment with a phone full of contacts and no one to call at two in the morning when the darkness comes.

Discussion questions

Synthesis — What Foucault gets and what he misses

Foucault has been given his full hearing. He has not been caricatured. His critique has been allowed to land everywhere it can land. Here is the honest accounting.

That is what Foucault saw when he looked at Christianity: an endless, anxious self-examination driven by suspicion. The Confessional Lutheran church says something neither Foucault nor the anxious Christian he describes can say: you are forgiven. It was settled at the font. The examination is over.

Final discussion questions

Looking ahead

We have heard the postmodern reading of Romans 9:1–5. Foucault gave us his best, and his best leaves us with a brilliant diagnosis and an empty prescription. He can tell you exactly why you are hurting. He cannot make the hurt stop. He can tear down every false thing. He cannot put one true thing in its place.

In the next session, we will bring a second voice into the room: John Calvin and the Reformed tradition. Calvin is not an outsider to the church. He is the insider, the voice within Christianity that claims Paul's text most confidently. We will ask how Calvin reads the same five verses, and we will discover something unexpected: that the internal enemy and the external enemy leave the person in the pew in the same place. One removes the ground. The other hides it. The question remains the same: what does each build?