IF THE IMPRESSION does not deceive, Paul’s letters have acquired a new legibility in recent years. This is the case not only with respect to accessible writings, such as 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, letters determined by concrete situations, but also with respect to Paul’s last and most visionary composition, the epistle to the Romans. That this is so is due not merely to advances in knowledge of the historical context, though these have been considerable, nor to the overcoming of anachronistic frameworks of interpretation imposed during the Reformation, though the new perspectives have been salutary, but to something deeper, something historic, something essential to the crisis of our time, of which Karl Barth already had the intuition. From somewhere, a flash of light has made the characters of Paul’s ancient text legible, and is stirring hope.
The index of this phenomenon is the sudden preoccupation of a group of philosophers (Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Kenneth Reinhard, Eric Santner), none of them Christian, several of them avowed Marxists, with the letters of Paul. Why should secular, indeed irreligious philosophers turn to the apostle Paul and find in him the embodiment of the figure of the “militant,” a truer type than the figure of Lenin installed in the imagination of philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century? Merely to raise this question is to penetrate to the core of the phenomenon of Paul’s present legibility. For these philosophers may be said to be acutely aware of the threat that hangs over the present moment, a danger described variously as a “state of exception” or “biopolitics” by Agamben and as “the absolute sovereignty of capital’s empty universality” by Badiou, but a danger upon whose dehumanizing consequences all are agreed. In a world where political processes are increasingly controlled by capital, and where social relations are mediated by images, there is the danger not only that the masses may become, as they always have become, the tools of the ruling class, but now, more seriously, that human sociality may be alienated from itself by the global triumph of a digital machine capable of manipulating perception and controlling memory through the invincible logic of the integer. The supreme danger is that the residue of the other, the neighbor, upon whose alien reality my own humanity depends, may be fully metabolized by the perpetual motion of capital, which homogenizes all identities. Or, to speak in the language of our tradition, the danger now exists that the Judeo-Christian sense of social obligation embodied in the commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” will be entirely swept away by a resurgence of that structured inequality which was the basis of the political economy of the Roman Empire.
It is the sense of Paul as a contemporary to a perilous moment for humanity that has drawn the philosophers to the apostle and has given his texts their new legibility. Paul wrote his epistle to the Romans at the “midnight” of the first century, the reign of Nero. The sole sovereignty of the successors of Augustus was an ongoing “state of exception” in which politics perished, a new structure of power constituted and reconstituted by the imposition of various degrees of dependent subjecthood and, in the last instance, by terror. The wealth of the emperor and his syndicate depended upon the vigorous exploitation of the resources of the provinces and upon the enslavement of a significant portion of the population—the latter institution maintained by the cruelty of crucifixion. By the age of Nero, spectacle had become an all-encompassing feature of social experience, which not only blurred the boundary between the real and the representational, but threatened the expropriation of human sociality itself. The mass burials uncovered by archaeological excavations outside the gates of Rome are a grisly testimonial to the dehumanization of precisely that segment of the population from which Paul and other evangelists recruited the members of their messianic assemblies. The philosophers who, in a moment of danger, seek to link their present to the apostle’s past have glimpsed in Paul’s messianic faith a spark of hope.
For anyone familiar with this literature and its antecedents, it will already be clear that the hermeneutic which governs the new philosophical readings of Paul is that which Walter Benjamin gave to historical materialists in “On the Concept of History” and in some notes in his unfinished Arcades Project. In contrast to the method of historicism, which seeks, by forgetting the subsequent course of history, to lay hold of the eternal meaning of a work, and in contrast to the popular, liberal assumption that a work is susceptible of a variety of legitimate interpretations, depending upon the interpreter’s perspective, Benjamin proposed that a work—a text such as Romans—contains a temporal index that connects it to a specific epoch, and that it comes forth to full legibility only for a person who is singled out by history at a moment of danger, a perilous moment like the one in which the work was composed. Whether Benjamin’s hermeneutical principle applies to all literature, to every text, I am incompetent to judge. But this hermeneutic seems particularly appropriate to crisis literature, to texts such as Romans and the Gospel of Mark or the Apocalypse of John—works composed, as Benjamin would have it, “in the immediate messianic intensity of the heart.” The new philosophical interpreters of Paul merit our attention because they have exposed themselves to the danger that threatens our world. In that respect, they are the readers for which Romans has been waiting.
Benjamin’s hermeneutic will be presupposed in what follows. Only, of the two moments that this hermeneutic seeks to hold together in constellation, I will place the greater emphasis upon the earlier one—Paul’s own kairos. This is not only because I am a New Testament historian by training, but also, and more importantly, because for all the light that has recently been cast upon Paul’s letters, it does not seem to me that Paul’s kairos has been fully disclosed. Therefore, the image that should be formed when the historian grasps the connection between the perilous moment in which he reads and the one in which Paul wrote remains obscure, has not fully crystalized. And thus, there has not been an explosion of consciousness as a result of the new encounter with Paul, no “now of recognizability,” as Benjamin terms it, or, to employ Paul’s own phrase, no “renewal of the mind” (Rom. 12:2).
I shall argue below that the defect in current philosophical interpretations of Paul is a consequence, in large measure, of the philosopher’s commitment to the project of knowledge, a commitment that Paul did not share, and that, in fact, he vigorously opposed (1 Cor. 1:18–25). In particular, Paul did not believe that the kairos depended upon the self-presence of consciousness. Nor did Paul share the philosopher’s passion for universal truth. Paul’s truth, to the extent that he speaks of one, is a singularity. Crucially, the temporality that Paul posits as a creation of the messianic event stands opposed to every philosophical teleology; there is no room in Paul’s “now time” for the future. I shall argue that Paul’s concept of the “now time” can only be understood when it is located in proximity to Jesus’s proclamation of the nearness of the kingdom of God. Finally, the political activity that Paul’s faith demands has nothing of the passivity to which the philosopher seems resigned. Paul’s fighting spirit seeks to hasten the awakening.
The most certain evidence that Paul’s kairos has not yet been fully disclosed is the absence of two crucial paragraphs of Romans from the discussions of the philosophers. The absence is most notable and most puzzling in Agamben’s commentary and in Badiou’s monograph. Instead of Romans 13:8–14, the attention of philosophers has focused upon an earlier and provisional formulation of Paul’s understanding of messianic time in 1 Corinthians 7:29–31. What is it that blocks access to Paul’s most mature and intense formulation of the law of messianic life and the eschatological faith that empowers that life in Romans 13:8–14? Two obstacles may be clearly identified. First, the pernicious text of Romans 13:1–7, which, according to the traditional interpretation put forth by commentators, enjoins submission to the governing authorities instituted by God. With good reason, some interpreters question whether Romans 13:1–7 is authentically Pauline, and not rather a piece of Hellenistic-Jewish parenesis interpolated at a later date. I will devote scant attention to this problematic text here, choosing rather to expend my constructive energies upon the restoration of the neglected paragraphs of Romans 13:8–14 to the center of our concern. I will be content to have demonstrated that the political ethics demanded by Paul in Romans 13:8–14 is inconsistent with the traditional interpretation of Romans 13:1–7.
A second obstacle is the persistence of interpreters, both philosophical and traditional, in assuming that, to the end of his life, and even in his latest epistles, Paul was waiting for the so-called Second Coming of Jesus. As we shall see, Paul nowhere mentions the parousia in Romans (or in any of his later epistles). Instead, Paul summons believers to an “awakening” by grasping the full implications of a messianic event that had already occurred. I will argue below that Paul’s eschatology underwent significant development from his first epistle (1 Thessalonians) to his last (Romans), and that this development had the character of an intensification: that is, the future hope of Paul’s early years became, in the crucible of his suffering, a present reality. This is a crucial contribution to my dialogue with the philosophers, since even the best of Paul’s philosophical interpreters are captive to the traditional notion that Paul decomposed the messianic event into two times—resurrection and parousia—and that Paul continued to await the Second Coming of Jesus at the end of time. I will argue below that those who are waiting for something to happen, even those who are waiting for the inevitable to happen, remain enthralled by the future, and so never enter with Paul into the “today of salvation.”
In sum, the traditional interpretation of Romans 13:1–7 as a Pauline preachment of submission to the authorities and the conventional assumption that Paul’s eschatology was static and that he continued to await the Second Coming are the two rams whose blood must fill the trench, if the spirit of Paul’s most intense formulation of the demands and conditions of messianic life in Romans 13:8–14 is to rise and speak to us. I would suggest that, if either of these doctrines is sacrosanct, the reader should lay aside my little book and read no further.
Finally, it is my impression that Christians and non-Christians have, for the most part, despaired of our capacity for neighbor-love, especially if the neighbor embodies ethnic or religious differences or is an avowed enemy. So strongly are the populace and its perceptions molded by the hands of capital and its political servants. In this midnight of the twenty-first century, we must hold fast to the memory of Paul, who did not despair of glimpsing in the little groups of mainly oppressed persons who had joined his messianic assemblies the vanguard of the sons and daughters of God, who would awaken and take responsibility for the redemption of the world (Rom. 8:19).