Lenten Reflection 3b: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 / Messianic Politics iv: Contraction

1 Corinthians 10:1-13
10:1 I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea,
10:2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea,
10:3 and all ate the same spiritual food,
10:4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.
10:5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.
10:6 Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did.
10:7 Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play."
10:8 We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day.
10:9 We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.
10:10 And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.
10:11 These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come.
10:12 So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.
10:13 No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

Comment
Paul establishes a relation between Israel of the Mosaic era and the church of the messianic era by way of a bizarre – but not unprecedented – form of interpretation: a typological interpretation (each occurrence of the word “example” [vv. 6 & 11] is a translation of a form of the Greek typos). Agamben is helpful here because he takes seriously Paul’s method in both its historical and normative aspects. He does not shy away in embarrassment from the method, nor does he allow it to evolve into the, now discredited, medieval mode of allegorical interpretation. What he does is examine this relation in terms of its role in shaping messianic temporality – the theme of his book. “What matters to us here,” he says,

Is not the fact that each event of the past – once it becomes figure [typos] – announces a future event and is fulfilled in it, but is the transformation of time implied by the typological relation. The problem here does not simply concern the biunivocal correspondence that binds typos to antitypos together in an exclusively hermeneutic relationship, according to the paradigm that prevailed in medieval culture; rather, it concerns a tension that clasps together and transforms past and future, typos and antitypos, in a inseparable constellation. The messianic is not just one of the two terms in this typological relation, it is the relation itself. This si the meaning of the Pauline expression “for us, upon whom the ends of the ages [aionon, the olamim] are come to face each other.” The two ends of the olam hazzeh and the olam babba contract into each other without coinciding; this face to face, this
contraction, is messianic time, and nothing else. Once again, for Paul, the messianic is not a third eon situated between two times; but rather, it is a caesura that divides the division between times and introduces a remnant, a zone of undecidablity, in which the past is dislocated into the present and the present is extended into the past. (74)

For Agamben Paul’s method does not negate the initial Israelite experience, it does not co-opt it for Christian purposes. Instead Paul discloses something of the structure of messianic time where the past does not relate to the present and the future according to a linear movement, where one event follows another in a determinate manner, “like the beads on a rosary.” The messianic event – which is for Paul, if not for Agamben, the resurrection of Jesus and the calling into existence of the ekklesia under the power of the Holy Spirit – inaugurates a rupture in the structure of time and renders its relationship to itself and our relationship to it substantially different. Agamben sees this realization in Benjamin’s description of messianic time as a “monstrous abbreviation” (as in the epigraph to this blog). Benjamin’s “now time” (Jetztzeit) and Paul’s “present time” (ho nyn kairos) both name, not a moment that follows chronologically from an earlier moment, but the possibility of past and future forming a “constellation” in an unpredictable, revolutionary moment.