Paul's Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

by L.L. Welborn

Taubes, Badiou, Agamben, Žižek, Reinhard, and Santner have found in the Apostle Paul's emphasis on neighbor-love a positive paradigm for politics. By thoroughly reexamining Pauline eschatology, L. L. Welborn suggests that neighbor-love depends upon an orientation toward the messianic event, which Paul describes as the "now time" and which he imagines as "awakening." Welborn compares the Pauline dialectic of awakening to attempts by Hellenistic philosophers to rouse their contemporaries from moral lethargy and to the Marxist idea of class consciousness, emphasizing the apostle's radical spirit and moral relevance.

Genres: Philosophy, Spirituality

152 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2015

Reviews

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this essay, Welborn wades cautiously into the foamy waters of the marxist-left Pauline renaissance in order to make a very specific counterpoint to an assumption about Paul's eschatology which seems to be held by most thinkers in the movement, and by Agamben in particular.

According to Welborn, Agamben fails to appreciate the immediacy in Paul's thought of the kairos: the immediate and eternal moment at which God acts to introduce the Messiah and inaugurate the Kingdom of God as a present reality.

Though Agamben recognizes the nearness of the Kairos in Paul, he never reaches Paul's understanding of the Messianic event as one in which Chronos, the chronological time-concept as the succession of contingent events, is shot through and overtaken by the Kairos, which arrests historical time and suspends the horizon of human action in the Messianic "now-time" [nun kairos].

As much as he insists on the imminence of the event for Paul, Agamben's perspective remains trapped in chronological time. Agamben applies Gustave Guillaume's concept of "operational time" to the Pauline nun kairos. For Guillaume, the mind experiences time in a passive manner, but it can only put forward a positive conception of time in spatial terms. Operational time, then, is the sense of time that is constructed by the mind when it attempts to represent time. It is a mental construct put forward for a purpose. Agamben applies this concept to the nun kairos, stating that "messianic time is the time we need to make time end: the time that is left us." But the constructed nature of operational time means that the representation of time can never "catch up" to the experience of time, as self-consciousness sustains itself by constantly positing chronological time.

According to Welborn, Paul overcomes this chronological trap by conceiving of the nun kairos as a sub-conscious "awakening" (I hesitate to use the term "sub-conscious" because of its narrowly psychological bent, but it is nonetheless the most adequate descriptor I can think of for an immediacy that precedes self-conscious construction). Welborn focuses on what he believes to be a key pericope (I learned that word reading this book; it means an extract from a book) of Paul's writings: Romans 13:11-14:

"Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."

The Greek term for awakening, egerthenai, is used elsewhere in the New Testament to describe the resurrection of the dead.

As it turns out, this language of sleep, awakening, and resurrection, and the notion of one being dead while living, was quite prevalent in first century literature. Seneca's plays are full of characters moving somnambulantly through a nocturnal world, feeling themselves dead and buried already and longing for the refuge of sleep. There was a pervasive sense in the first century Roman world that society was slipping away into unconsciousness. The obvious political context of this collective malaise was the consolidation of autocratic power under the new office of the Principate, and the disappearance of the consciousness-producing ideational combat of factional republican politics behind the comfortable simplicity of a divine-right unitary rulership whose legitimacy was grounded in an unconscious, symbolic, and pseudo-mythological framework.

But though they shared a recognition of the slumbering state of society, Paul and writers like Seneca diverged when it came to articulating the nature and requirements of the needed awakening. Whereas Stoic and Gnostic conceptions posited self-knowledge as the key to liberation, the object of knowledge and awareness for Paul was the Messianic event itself, an event that had already happened. In contrast with the mind/body dualism of Gnosticism, in which knowledge of one's higher self is the means of liberation of mind from the shackles of body, Paul's Messianic event partitions his entire self. Paul's egoistic self has already died, and his new, Christ-self--the resurrected Messiah who lives in Paul in the flesh--lives on in the hope of resurrection.

Awakening, then, consists in recognizing the liberation that has already been afforded to you by the nun kairos of the death and resurrection of Christ, and in partaking in a participatory awareness of this event, in which "the constant projection of thought toward desire is arrested", and "the existence of the believer is enveloped in the Messiah." In this space, neighbor love is possible--love of the other as other--because the basis of communal identity is the self-sacrificial love of Christ.

[Andy Hickman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life, L.L. Welborn
Phenomenal study of Romans 13:8-14.
I made countless bookmarks both in the main text and the footnotes. ****