ACCORDING TO PAUL, the possibility of executing the command to love the neighbor arises from an awareness, or recognition, of the kairos (Rom. 13:11). The opening of the paragraph that supplies the eschatological rationale for the love command has presented difficulties to interpreters, because the expression of Paul’s thought is so compressed and pregnant: kai touto eidotes ton kairon, “And this knowing the kairos” (Rom. 13:11a).1 Commentators endeavor to ameliorate the difficulty by supplying a finite verb, such as poieite: “And you should do this, knowing the kairos.”2 Others hypothesize that the expression touto eidotes is a citation formula introducing a baptismal or an Agape hymn, whose title was ho kairos, “The Critical Time,” and whose stanzas are quoted in 13:11–12.3 We should resist these speculative solutions and hold fast to the difficulty of the text as it stands, for this has the advantage of focusing our attention upon the integral relationship between knowledge and the kairos.4 The extreme compression of Paul’s rhetoric, which brings knowledge and the kairos into the closest proximity, suggests that the kairos is not a supramundane reality, which exists “out there,” and arrives out of a divinely ordained future, but a temporal possibility that may be actualized in the moment when it is known, a moment that, as Paul goes on to explain, has the structure of “awakening.”
But what is this kairos through whose straight gate one may enter into the capacity for neighbor-love? And how does Paul understand it? On this point, the commentators are virtually unanimous: to quote the most recent and most authoritative commentary, “The kairos mentioned here is the eschatological time that began with the sending of Christ and includes the expectation of the Messiah’s return.”5 In support of this interpretation, reference is generally made to Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts roughly contemporary with Romans.6 Thus, in the Psalms of Solomon, which preserves the most detailed account of Jewish messianic expectation prior to Paul,7 the “Lord Messiah” (17:32) “will gather a holy people whom he will lead in righteousness” (17:26); “He will judge peoples and nations in the wisdom of his righteousness” (17:29); “He will be compassionate to all the nations (who) reverently (stand) before him” (17:34); “Blessed are the ones born in those days” (17:44).8 In the Testament of Levi, which, in its present form, is a Christian redaction of an older Jewish document,9 the patriarch foretells the coming of a priestly Messiah: “Then the Lord will raise up a new priest to whom all the words of the Lord will be revealed. He will make a judgment of truth upon the earth for many days. And his star will rise in heaven like a king, kindling the light of knowledge as day is illumined by the sun. . . . He will take away all darkness from under heaven, and there shall be peace in all the earth” (18:2–4).10 In the so-called Synoptic Apocalypse preserved in Mark 13,11 the disciples are told: “Then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” (Mark 13:26–27).12 In all of these texts, the scheduled fulfillment of the divine plan is located in the future. In this context, Paul’s mention of the kairos in Romans 13 is taken to be a reference to the return of Christ, in accordance with the expectation of the first generation of Christian converts.13 If interpreters detect any nuance of difference between Romans 13 and the texts cited above, it is only that in Romans 13:11 they sense “a moving on of the eschatological clock,”14 ticking more loudly as the time of Christ’s parousia approaches.
But things are not so simple. There are clear indications that Paul is not referring to a future event, when he speaks of the kairos in Romans 13. As elsewhere in Romans when Paul mentions the messianic time (3:26; 8:18; 11:5), the term kairos is qualified by the temporal marker nun, which focuses attention on the present moment as such, “now.”15 In the third clause of Romans 13:11, the adverb nun is placed in emphatic position to make clear its connection to the aforementioned kairos.16 Thus the “critical time” (kairos) of Romans 13:11 does not refer to a future Judgment Day in which Christians must prove themselves,17 but designates the “time of the now,” in cognizance of which one can fulfill the commandment to love the neighbor.18 Moreover, the further temporal specification in the second clause of Romans 13:11, hōra ēdē (the hour [has come] already), suggests that the kairos intrudes into the present out of the past. The combination hōra ēdē is a colloquial expression found throughout ancient Greek,19 including Matthew 14:15 (hē hōra ēdē parēlthen), meaning “it is now past time” or “the hour is now late.”20 The use of this expression indicates that the kairos has long since arrived. Finally, the point of reference for the comparative egguteron (nearer) in the last clause of Romans 13:11 locates “our salvation” in relationship to a past moment, “when we believed” (hote episteusamen).21 In a manner that remains to be determined, Paul evidently conceives of the kairos as a relationship between the present moment and a definite previous one. Indeed, the presence of an antecedent moment within the kairos belongs to the logic of the image of “awakening” that Paul employs: something is already “there” to be grasped, in the flash of an awakened consciousness. Thus, those interpreters are wrong who contrast Romans 13:11–12 with other Pauline passages, such as 2 Corinthians 5:14–19, where it is clear that the Christ event has already occurred.22 The kairos of Romans 13:11–12 does not refer to an event of the future, whether near or far.
It is the great virtue of the philosophical commentary on Romans by Giorgio Agamben to have decisively rejected the understanding of the Pauline kairos as an apocalyptic event.23 Indeed, Agamben designates as “the most insidious misunderstanding” of the Pauline gospel that which mistakes ho nun kairos for the apocalyptic “end of time.”24 Agamben knows that, for Paul, “the Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened.”25 Yet, Agamben is unable to completely disenthrall himself from the spell of the future. Alluding to 1 Corinthians 7:29, Agamben insists that “what interests the apostle is not the last day, not the instant in which time ends, but the time that contracts itself and begins to end, the time that remains between time and its end.”26 Agamben visualizes the Pauline nun kairos as a brief span at the end of chronological time, a period that begins with Jesus’s resurrection and lasts until the parousia.27 Agamben is rightly concerned that the spatial character of his representation may result in a falsification of the Pauline nun kairos.28 So Agamben has recourse to the concept of “operational time” proposed by the linguist Gustave Guillaume:29 “According to Guillaume, the human mind experiences time, but does not possess the representation of it, and must, in representing it, take recourse to constructions of a spatial order.”30 The mental operation, however quick, in which an image of time is formed is what Guillaume calls “operational time.”31 Applying this concept to the Pauline nun kairos, Agamben proposes the following definition: “messianic time is the time we need to make time end: the time that is left us.”32 Thus, in the end, Agamben’s conception of the structure of messianic time in Paul is rather traditional. Agamben writes: “Paul decomposes the messianic event into two times: resurrection and parousia, the second coming of Jesus at the end of time. Out of this issues the paradoxical tension between an already and a not yet that defines the Pauline conception of salvation.”33
If one asks why the “now” of the Pauline kairos never arrives for Agamben, but is perpetually deferred, two answers present themselves—one superficial, the other more philosophical. First, Agamben circumscribes the kairos within chronological time. Although Agamben allows that “ho nun kairos does not coincide with secular chronological time, nevertheless,” he insists, “it is not outside of chronological time either.”34 Agamben explains: “Messianic time is that part of secular time which undergoes an entirely transformative contraction.”35 What this involves, beyond images of foreshortening (such as “folding” or “furling”), is not clear.36 But as a result of the presence of the messianic event within chronological time, the parousia is “stretched,” in order “to make it graspable.”37 The kairos never arrives for Agamben, because it is bound to the march of the second hand, even if the hour lies so close to the Messiah’s coming that it risks arriving before him.38
Second, and more importantly, Agamben’s commitment to the philosophical project of knowledge as “the self-presence of consciousness” infinitely defers the kairos into a series of instants in which it is, or may be, “graspable.”39 Agamben’s insistence that the “now” of the kairos is defined by the presence or proximity of a subject to itself guarantees that it can never be fully actualized; for, however great the speed of thought, it can “never coincide perfectly with itself, and the self-presence of consciousness consequently always takes on the form of time.”40 Thus, for Agamben, the kairos never arrests chronos, because self-consciousness constantly posits time.41 Agamben’s persistence in a philosophical perspective in which knowledge is reality contrasts with Paul’s antiphilosophical proclamation of the kairos whose knowability as “awakening” cannot be reduced to positive knowledge.42
To summarize, Agamben’s understanding of the Pauline nun kairos falls short of the apostle’s conception in three respects. First, kairos and chronos are not genuinely opposed to each other in Agamben’s philosophical interpretation; rather, “kairos is a contracted and abridged chronos.”43 In Agamben’s lyrical image, “The pearl embedded in the ring of chance is only a small portion of chronos, a time remaining.”44 For Paul, by contrast, the kairos arrests and suspends chronos: its “now” is apart from the law of time (Rom. 3:21); it holds back the march of history toward judgment (Rom. 3:26); it is the birth canal of a new and glorious life (Rom. 8:18). Second, Agamben locates the kairos in a “here” and “now” defined by self-consciousness.45 But the Pauline kairos cannot be reduced to self-consciousness; for Paul, only the Messiah brings the kairos that consummates history (Rom. 11:5–36). Finally, in Agamben, the kairos retains a future orientation: the presence of the kairos “stretches” time toward its parousia.46 But for Paul, the kairos is a relationship between a past event and a potentiality in the present (Rom. 13:11–12). The consequence of these differences should not be underestimated. Because Agamben conceives of the kairos as “a time remaining” within chronos, he embraces the rabbinic apologue “for which the messianic world is not another world, but the secular world itself, with a slight adjustment.”47 This “slight difference” results from having grasped one’s “disjointedness with regard to chronological time.”48 Agamben’s “disjointedness” in time seems quite different from Paul’s image of “awakening.”
Since the philosophers seem to have failed us, I propose to seek an understanding of the Pauline concept of “the now time” by locating Paul’s usage in relation to Jesus’s proclamation of the “nearness” of the kingdom of God. I am led in this direction by remarkable and unexpected echoes of Jesus’s message in Romans 13:11–12.49 In Romans 13:12 Paul proclaims, hē hēmera ēggiken (the day is drawn near).50 Commentators generally recognize that the closest parallel to Paul’s statement is the saying of Jesus attested both in the Gospel of Mark (1:15) and in the Sayings Gospel Q (Luke 10:9, 10): ēggiken hē basileia tou theou (the kingdom of God is drawn near).51 The difference, obviously, is that Jesus speaks of “the kingdom,” whereas Paul refers to “the day.” But in the Markan summary of Jesus’s proclamation, the statement about the nearness of God’s kingdom is the second hemistich of a synonymous parallelism, whose first line reads, peplērōtai ho kairos (the time is fulfilled), supplying another verbal overlap with Paul.52 Most telling is the peculiar comparative egguteron (nearer) in Romans 13:11 describing the proximity of “our salvation”: the term is hapax legomenon in the New Testament and, indeed, is unique in eschatological literature,53 leaving no doubt that it is a Pauline echo of the language of Jesus.
What would it mean to locate the Pauline kairos in proximity to Jesus’s proclamation of the nearness of the kingdom of God? At first, the results for our understanding would appear to be negligible, since scholars of the historical Jesus are famously conflicted about the proper understanding of Jesus’s eschatology.54 At the beginning of the last century, Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer represented the position of apocalyptic eschatology: Jesus thought that the kingdom would arrive in the immediate future; when it did not, he went to Jerusalem in order to compel the kingdom to come.55 C. H. Dodd and his followers represent the position called realized eschatology: Jesus taught that the kingdom had already arrived, and was realizing itself in his words and deeds.56 More recently, scholars such as John Dominic Crossan make a virtue of the seeming contradiction and seize upon the tension: the kingdom of God, they say, lives between the already and the not yet; it is the future will of God in the process of realization; the parables and aphorisms of Jesus are said to be characterized by a certain “tensiveness.”57
But rather than resigning ourselves to this impasse, we should analyze more closely the summaries of Jesus’s proclamation in Mark and Q, for in the reflected light of the Pauline appropriation, these summaries may disclose Jesus’s understanding of the relationship between the kingdom of God and time. I suggest that it is not insignificant that the Markan summary of Jesus’s proclamation takes the form of a synonymous parallelism, in which the second half-line of the verse says much the same thing as the first one, with variations.58 Apart from the question whether this Hebraic form enhances the historical reliability of the saying,59 the form directs our attention to the relationship that holds between the fullness of the kairos and the presence of God’s reign. Translating the verb form peplērōtai so as to capture the full force of the perfect passive,60 the Markan Jesus asserts that “the kairos is filled full”; that is, there is no more place for chronos. Or, to use the language of time rather than space, chronos stands still and has come to a stop; the ceaseless progression of moments through homogeneous, empty time has been arrested. Time is “filled” with the presence of “the now.” Further, the form of the synonymous parallelism implies that the fullness of time coincides with the advent of God’s reign. In the thought of Jesus, as attested by both Mark and Q, the presence of God’s reign manifests itself in the reversal of the intolerable constraints established by human sovereignty over the world: poverty, hunger, sadness, exclusion, violence (Luke 6:20–22).61 Thus, the coming of God’s kingdom is the end of human sovereignty.62
How are we to understand the synonymity of these statements—“the kairos is filled full” and “the kingdom of God is come near”? Here, I have recourse to the theory of enunciation developed by the linguist Émile Benveniste, not in order to clarify the thought of Jesus or Paul, but in order to expose our way of being in time as the root of our predicament. According to Benveniste, the capacity of human language to refer to itself, to its own taking-place, as a pure instance of discourse, goes hand in hand with “time-positing” (chronothesis), which is the origin of our representation of time; because Benveniste takes enunciation to be the foundation of subjectivity, the action of language in consciousness, as it seeks to coincide with itself, takes on the form of time.63 To speak in a nonlinguistic fashion: subjectivity is constituted by the continuous projection of consciousness toward self-presence; this projection creates a continuum that we experience as time; within this continuum, the present is an empty transition. Our being in time takes the form of progression through a homogeneous continuum.64
Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of God blasts open our temporal continuum. Jesus’s announcement that “the kairos is filled full” aims at the arrest of our being in time, the standstill of our ceaseless projection of ourselves. The synonymous parallelism implies that only when a messianic cessation of time occurs does God begin to reign. The reign of God is the end of our time. It is our being shot through with the reality of God’s reign. The paradox is that the end of our time is not the paralysis of our will, but the revolution of our will by the will of God.65 That is to say, the proclamation of the reign of God calls for a decision, a radical change of heart, repentance (Mark 1:15), and a new social order. And because time is filled full, the choice must be made today. And the person who makes this choice chooses at a single stroke the whole of the future.
The similarity of the Jesus-tradition preserved in Mark 1:15 and QLuke 10:9–10 with Romans 13:11–12 suggests that Paul’s concept of the nun kairos presupposes Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of God.66 Thus, for Paul, as for Jesus, the kairos is not an interval before the end of time, but time filled with the presence of the “now”; for Paul, as for Jesus, the kairos is not a transition to the future, but a present in which time stands still; for Paul, as for Jesus, the kairos cannot be deferred, but must be accepted today—“Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2). Paul shares the understanding of the relationship between the kingdom of God and time attributed to Jesus in the tradition. But there is one crucial difference: whereas for Jesus the kairos is entirely present, for Paul the kairos is a relationship of the present to the past. According to Paul, the Messiah has already come, demonstrating “in the now time” God’s righteousness toward the redemption of humanity through his death for the ungodly (Rom. 3:21, 26; 5:6–8), and inaugurating “in the now time” a new creation, glorious and reconciled (Rom. 8:18–25).67 It is not clear that interpreters have yet taken sufficient account of the change in eschatology signified by Paul’s conviction that the Messiah has already come.68 In Romans 13:11–12, Paul attempts to convey the potentiality of the moment in which the past messianic event enters the present through the image of “awakening.”