The apostle Paul offers commonly with gender, embodiment, and wish in his genuine letters, but some of the modern philosophers drawn to his paintings downplay those features of his inspiration. Christ with out Adam is the 1st booklet to envision the position of gender and sexuality within the flip to the apostle Paul in contemporary Continental philosophy. It builds a optimistic notion for embodied Christian theological anthropology in dialog with -- and unlike -- the "Paulinisms" of Stanislas Breton, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj ?i?ek.

Paul's letters bequeathed a very important anthropological aporia to the heritage of Christian proposal, insofar because the apostle sought to situate embodied humans typologically near to Adam and Christ, yet didn't figure out where of sexual distinction inside of this class. for this reason, the gap among Adam and Christ has functioned traditionally as a conceptual and temporal period during which Christian anthropology poses and re-poses theological dilemmas of embodied distinction. This research follows the ways that the appropriations of Paul via Breton, Badiou, and ?i?ek have both sidestepped or collapsed this period, a very important part of their articulations of a common Pauline topic. therefore, sexual distinction fails to materialize of their readings as an issue with any specific strength. opposed to those readings, Dunning asserts the significance of the Pauline Adam--Christ typology, now not as an easy source yet as a witness to a undeniable invaluable failure -- the failure of the Christian culture to unravel embodied distinction with no the rest. This failure, he argues, is positive in that it unearths the instability of sexual distinction, either masculine and female, inside an anthropological paradigm that says to be common but remains to be predicated on male bodies.