Paul's Metaphysics of Time
Snippets from the Work of L. Ann Jervis
One of the fundamental concerns of A Wild Logos is the metaphysics of Scripture. There are philosophical dimensions of the biblical text, I’m convinced, to which we are blind due to our theological and exegetical prejudices. And I don’t just mean evangelical Protestant or secular assumptions; here we must include postliberal and self-professedly “orthodox” reading habits within catholic Christianity.
So I’m excited whenever someone opens up the riches hidden below the letter, and I’m particularly interested in the Johannine and Pauline theologies of our birth and incorporation into Christ. And I’m interested in the implications of this for how we understand time: the challenging of a linear “logic of sequence” by what a Hegelian and Freudian tradition calls “retroactivity.”
I’ve seen multiple people in recently weeks draw attention to this new and tantalizing release by L. Ann Jervis, Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ.
I’m still in the process of obtaining a copy, but I want to share some tidbits from her work here and elsewhere that I have found arresting.
Her thesis is that existing interpretation of Paul on time have been distorted by one of two prevailing approaches: 1) a “salvation historical” approach, which thinks of Christ’s work in terms of a linear and sequential narrative of God’s covenantal faithfulness to his people, and 2) an “apocalyptic” approach which sees the in-breaking, with Christ, of one age into another. In this view, “Believers are those who live in the overlap of the ages.”
What “Apocalypse” Misses
Here’s how she articulates her alternative in the preface. Against the “apocalyptic” view
“Paul does not think that believers live in the overlap of the ages but instead that they live exclusively in Christ. This recognition has consequences for our understanding of how Paul conceives of believers’ temporality. Being joined to Christ is to live in a temporality entirely distinct from that of the present evil age. I term time in Christ as life-time, and time in the present evil age as death-time. These are not alternative appellations for the old and new age: one is an age and the other a being.”
The time in which believers live is not that of some generic heavenly age, but rather the time which Christ is. And this time is not something we asymptotically approach, always tied in part to another time, but is our only time - and the only genuine time full stop - because it incorporates within itself even the negative things we associate with death “time.” As she adds:
I propose that the apostle does not see [suffering, physical death, and sin] as symptoms of the still unvanquished evil age but as transformed by and fitting with being in Christ.
As Julian would put it, these realities, in Christ, are somehow behovely; someone else might say sublated.
This seems to presupposed a strong union, or identity, between believers and Christ. From one of her articles:
Paul, as mentioned, never claims or intimates that believers are anything other than entirely united with Christ. It may need to be pointed out that union with Christ is not the same as conformity to Christ. Believers become like Christ through an ongoing process that can only take place by recognizing that their habitat is Christ and Christ alone (Phil 3:8–11). That is, Paul does not present union with Christ as incomplete, though conformity to Christ is (Gal 4:19). The apostle does not describe believers as partially in Christ and partially in the present evil age. Believers are entirely in Christ.1
Leaving “Salvation History” Behind
This view presumes that God experiences time, rather than being the negation of time, but not time within the logic of sequence. Against the “salvation historical” view, God’s time, into which we are incorporated, cannot be captured by our linear experience of chronos. From the preface again:
The apostle thinks of God living eventful temporality that produces change, especially between God and God’s creation. God, however, does not live tenses the way humans do, for in God’s temporality the past, present, and future are not discrete or sequential. I then turn to a description of Paul’s two types of time: life-time, which is the only real time, and death-time, which is time shaped by its end.
I hear echoes of Zizioulas’ contrast between bios and zoë, and of Hegelian retroactivity. What’s so exciting is that Jervis’ reading seems to open onto apocatastasis through the Christological revelation of the fact that time as we experience it is illusory.
Through the cross and resurrection, God diminishes God’s foes, leaving as an option their illusory temporality—which leads only to the destruction of life and so time—while announcing that this option will end. God permits God’s foes a limited range of influence, allowing humanity to choose to exist in the illusory dead-end temporality grounded in defeat (what I term death-time); which is in reality non-time. Those who choose this temporality live there and there alone, though in the end this temporal option will be no more, and all will finally be in God.
It’s so fascinating that she is rejoining the speculative interpretation of Maximus etc. through the tools of modern exegesis, in scholarly conversation with people as distant from these patristic assumptions as N.T. Wright.
At one point she even goes so far as to consider the possibility that, since Paul thinks historical time originates with sin, he thought that Adam’s fall coincides with his creation:
It might be argued that Paul is best read as equating the beginning of history, understood as the beginning of time, with the entry of sin and death into the world “through one man” (Rom 5:12). Consequently, when sin and death are annihilated at Christ’s return, this would correspond to the end of history—the end of time. How- ever, that would mean that Paul thought that Adam was not living in time before he was surrounded by sin and death (or that sin and death and Adam all came at once and so Adam never was without sin).2
(She ultimately refuses, at least in this earlier book chapter, to take a position.) But here we would have a contemporary exegete defending the plausibility of Maximus’ most wildly speculative reading of Paul!
Here she echoes in different terms exactly what Jordan Wood argues in chapter 4 of The Whole Mystery of Christ: the unreality of time as we experience it, despite it being in some sense our apparent beginning; the sublation of this time by Christ’s time, becoming no longer an absolute beginning but a posited presupposition of his new beginning; and the eventual abolition of linear and sequential time.
I await my copy of the book to see if she has reached new speculative conclusions about some of the questions she left open in her earlier work.
Jervis, L. Ann. “Christ Doesn’t Fit: Paul Replaces His Two Age Inheritance with Christ.” Interpretation (Richmond) 76, no. 4 (2022): 314–27.
Jervis, L. Ann. “Promise and Purpose in Romans 9:1-13: Toward Understanding Paul's View of Time.” In God and Israel: Providence and Purpose in Romans 9–11. Edited by Todd D. Still. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017: 9-34.