In Paul and Time, we have an important book, one that is sure to provoke many questions, proposals, and counterproposals. Given the way studies of Paul rehash the same topics again and again, the very act of raising a different question or at least reformulating standard questions is refreshing. More than refreshing, it is the life blood of the field. For that we are all very much in Professor Jervis’s debt.

In my response, I will lift up two significant contributions of Paul and Time and then raise a cluster of questions that hover over my reading. 

Part 1. The first contribution, and perhaps the most obvious, is that Ann Jervis has put before us in an unavoidable way the question of time, both Paul’s understanding of it and the ways in which our scholarly discussions represent or perhaps misrepresent Paul regarding time. She quickly settles on two major strands of Pauline interpretation, the salvation-historical and the apocalyptic, by way of exposing and troubling their assumptions about Paul’s view of time.  

Jervis finds both positions troubling to the extent that they assume that Paul has fitted the Christ event into a received understanding. For advocates of salvation history, Christ becomes part of a continuous story of Israel’s history. It is the climax of that history, to be sure, but still it fits within that continuous story. On the apocalyptic side, the Christ event—as Jervis reads the scholarly history—is trimmed to meet a supposed expectation about a new age. That is to say, the assumption is that Paul’s interpretation of the gospel conforms to previous apocalyptic traditions. 

A lot of ground is covered in her discussion of these approaches, yet one point is crucial. Jervis rejects the widely held notion that, for Paul, a new age has already begun in Jesus Christ and that believers live in between the times, between the ages. She notes the absence of the language of new age from Paul’s letters, and she questions the associations scholars make between a new age and such terms as “new creation” and “kingdom.”  

By contrast, Jervis proposes that Paul operates instead with “death-time” and “life-time,” phrases that refer to time both in a quantitative and in a qualitative sense. Death-time is time characterized by finitude; life-time by contrast has both “texture and abundance” (p. 42). Crucially for her argument, these are not overlapping periods of time. Instead, Christ lives life-time, and those who are “in Christ” already live life-time, because they live in him (points to which I’ll return in a moment).

To an extent, as I noted earlier, what Jervis objects to is the notion that Paul must fit the gospel to the pre-cut cloth of Jewish tradition, whether that tradition is salvation-historical or apocalyptic. Here we entirely agree. While I affirm the apocalyptic approach, it is not because I think Paul can be slotted into a pre-cut set of expectations, but precisely because of the advent of Jesus Christ. That is not to deny the importance of historical work, the search for parallels to Paul in Jewish and other contemporaneous texts. What I reject is the assumption that Paul can only have thought what others around him already thought. That is to say, once you are convinced that the Messiah has arrived, many things may be rethought—a point on which I think we agree.

However, I am not troubled by the absence of specifically “new age” terminology in Paul, in part because I agree with Martin de Boer that it is implicit (p. 48). I have in mind not simply Rom 12:2, where nonconformity to “this age” seems to suggest the existence of another, but 1 Thess 4:17, with its assurance that “we will always be with the Lord.” Further, I can well imagine why Paul would not refer directly to the “new age,” since he has experience at Corinth of what happens when some people believe they already live in the new age. (We might profitably recall how Henry Joel Cadbury referred to the problem of “overconversion” in Corinth.) More to the point, Paul would not elaborate on a “new age” for its own sake, as if that were the goal, but precisely for the sake of invoking God’s victory in Jesus Christ.

Part 2. That reference to Christ and life-time leads me to what I see as the second contribution of Jervis’s work, and to me the more important one, which is its emphasis on Christ, what I would refer to as the Christ event, that is, the act of God in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and its consequences. As I read the book, one thing that concerns Jervis is her perception that discussion about two ages has threatened to displace emphasis on Christ. At one point, she writes that “it is Christ himself and not the new age that Paul conceives of as God’s redemptive goal,” that “Christ dominates the apostle’s thinking” (p. 57). To the extent that people talk about a new age without identifying it with Christ, she is right, although I suspect that many who use the phrase intend it as a shorthand for new age inaugurated by the advent, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Still, Jervis is entirely right to object that the guild of Pauline studies frequently understates the centrality of Christ for Paul’s thinking. 

But I do want to pause a moment over some of the statements made here about Christ, statements I find perplexing. Christ lives all times at once; past, present, and future coexist for him, such that his “incarnated past coexists with the exalted Christ’s present” (p. 77). Elsewhere, Jervis contends that “the crucified, risen, and exalted Christ does not engage with the present age but lives liberated from it” (p. 56, emphasis mine). 

I am not sure how these two statements sit alongside one another. The implication seems to be that Christ lives in the present but does not engage with it. But is it the case that this exalted Christ has nothing to do with the present age? What do we make then, of Rom 8:34, which identifies the risen and exalted Christ as interceding (present tense) on “our” behalf? If Christ delivers us from the present evil age (Gal 1:4), is that not an event taking place in the present? And what is to be said of Christ’s present engagement with the human world outside the circle of believers? There is a sense of Christ’s absence that I find troubling, especially when it seems to suggest the non-involvement of Christ in the present. 

For Jervis it is also important that the eschatological telos does not mean change in Christ himself, but only that his exalted life is revealed (p. 88). She writes that “Christ’s day/parousia and his judgment do not change his existence, apart from opening it up” (p. 88). The eschaton is an unveiling but it does not make for change in Christ himself. 

What I struggle to avoid here is the implication that Christ is somehow static, untouched by events in which he is an agent. While I agree, completely, that Paul’s focus is on Christ, or on God and/in/through Christ, the events Paul depicts in 1 Cor 15 convey something as to how Paul thinks Christ is to be understood. That is, while Christ himself may not undergo a change, his agency is involved in the defeat of God’s enemies. Does that action not somehow affect Christ as well? If not, what does that say about him? That line of questioning opens up many complex theological questions, to be sure, questions that take us well beyond the limits of exegesis, to say nothing of the limit assigned for this discussion. But I hope my point is clear: we may agree that Christ is central to Paul’s understanding of time without agreeing on what that says about him in particular.

Part 3.  Probably the most startling feature of Paul and Time is its depiction of the human agent. As Jervis reads the letters, the human who is in Christ lives totally out of Christ’s life-time. If I say that I have several questions here, that will scarcely surprise my friend, given our earlier conversations. 

In keeping with the understanding that those who are in Christ live totally out of him, as I noted earlier, Jervis rejects the notion of an existence between the times. And that rejection has sweeping implications for the relationship between believers and death, on the one hand, and between believers and sin, on the other hand. 

Jervis writes that “death (like sin) has no role to play in the lives of those in union with Christ—not even as that which will liberate them from embodied existence” (p. 101). Christ’s resurrection “has made death so ineffective that dying is merely entry into life in incorruptible bodies” (p. 101). For believers, the destruction of death happens upon union with Christ (p. 129). 

I need to confess a certain visceral reaction to these claims, and I suspect that others will have the same. But it is important to respect Jervis’s decision to set aside her own existential responses and see whether we think the texts support such a view. I myself do not, or at the very least, numerous statements in the letters press against what I take to be a somewhat triumphalistic notion about believers and death. Most important is Rom 6:5, with its future tense assurance about “our” resurrection: “since we have been united in a death like his, we will certainly also be united to his resurrection.” Romans 6:8 repeats, “since we died with Christ, we trust that we will also live with him…” Perhaps more important, when in Rom 8:37–38 Paul parades the list of circumstances or powers that currently threaten “us,” and offers his sweeping reassurance that they will fail, he begins with death. If death is “merely entry into life in incorruptible bodies,” why include it in this list?

Consistent with this understanding of the human and death, Jervis attributes to the believer a high degree of competence with respect to Sin. Drawing from her rejection of the notion of believers as existing in an overlap of times, she contends that for believers the power of Sin has been broken such that believers are able to avoid it. The analogy she uses is of a post-colonial context, in which the “previously enslaved find it challenging to fully claim their free identity” (p. 142). The colonizer has been defeated, but the aftermath of that colonization is that the formerly colonized find their separation and freedom a work in progress (p. 142). Yet she concludes that “believers are entirely capable of keeping defeated Sin in its impotent, excluded position” (p. 144).

Here I do wonder: if sin is so inconsequential in Paul’s understanding of life in Christ, then why does he devote so much space to it in Romans 1–7? Romans 7, whatever else it does, and I would prefer not to unsettle that can of worms just now, shows that Paul perceives sin as a real and present danger in the lives of believers. Also, how is this capacity funded—Jervis gives the impression that sin/sinning is, post-Christ, simply a matter of the individual’s choice or will. But what of Paul’s impassioned claims about the work of the Spirit in Romans 8? There the Spirit is the agent that works in and through believers, so that they are able to please God. In addition, the Spirit intercedes “in our weakness,” a statement that appears to cast believers in a still-vulnerable state.

For Jervis, who downplays Sin and Death as powers, the question of the believer and sin is a question of morality—humans can and should now live in a way that conforms to their new location in life-time. The question of the human and sin is not—perhaps it never was?—a question of cosmology. That is to say, sin is largely (for Jervis) an action or perhaps an attitude, not a power that reigns over human lives. She divides the moral from the cosmological, and I don’t think they can be divided. As I see it, the individual’s actions are, for Paul, consistent with that person’s lord, whether the lord is Sin or Christ. (Again, this is a topic we have discussed several times.)

It may matter that the believer as discussed throughout the book regularly seems to be an individual agent, isolated from community. I am very curious about why this is the case. It is worth noting that, when Paul invokes the notion of being in Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, he does so in order to lift up for the individuals within the ekklēsia their relationship in Christ to one another. So it seems appropriate to ask about the implications for the ekklēsia—does the community as a whole live in life-time—beyond the grasp of sin and death? How does the community function in this understanding of death-time and life-time?

Further, the believer (whether individual or corporate) seems detached from the larger world, yet Paul’s letters reflect a genuine concern for the human world outside the circle of believers. Worship is to be conducted in such a way as to edify the outsider (1 Corinthians 14). Likewise, marriage between believer and unbeliever is to be preserved, if possible (1 Corinthians 7). If the believer lives entirely out of life-time and Christ is not himself engaged with the present, does the believer also have no relationship to the present world? If that is the case, how is it that believers groan along together with all creation? Are they not somehow still located in this world?

And—lastly—that question about the relationship between believers and outsiders prompts me to wonder what place Israel occupies in Jervis’s scenario. Where is Israel qua Israel in this distinction between death-time and life-time? Is Israel simply a bunch of individuals, some of whom are in death-time and others in life-time? My presupposition is that Israel is God’s creation, a unity, presently divided—yet ultimately indivisible. Is Israel confined to death-time? Does Israel live in life-time?  Perhaps this will seem an unfair question—after all, in a single monograph, one cannot address all texts. Still, I would love to hear Jervis’s comments about Israel in relationship to Christ’s “life-time.”  

This is quite a set of questions. It is a testament to the provocative character of Ann Jervis’s work that she has put so many significant issues before us. So, before my time on this panel runs out (it is linear, after all!), let me express again my gratitude for a book that is well worth our reading time and reflection

Introduction

Apocalyptic interpreters of Paul are fond of asking (with J. Louis Martyn) the question “what time is it?” Yet, lurking underneath this question, there is a more troubling one: “what is time?” It’s a question asked in Christian theology at least since Augustine, whose answer was this: “I know well enough what it is provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.”1 It is a brave soul, then, who presses through the confusion to attempt an explanation of this most “entangled enigma.”2 Ann Jervis is one such brave soul, and she has devoted years of work to giving us this expansive and stimulating account of temporality in Paul.

How we understand time affects every almost area of our thinking, and yet rarely do New Testament specialists consider it carefully. In the guild of Pauline studies, we regularly speak about temporal “overlap” or “inaugurated eschatology” or “the presence of the future” but what sense do those phrases make? Isn’t the future which is present simply, well, the present? Questions like these are not new, of course, and Augustine was not the only one to wrestle with them at length, only to leave, like Jacob at Peniel, blessed but limping.

For her part, Ann has grappled with the profound and complex question of time in Paul’s thought, examining the often imprecise language with which his interpreters speak and challenging some commonly assumed temporal frameworks. The resulting thesis has implications not only for how we describe Paul’s eschatology, but also his Christology, soteriology, ethics, and more. It is not for nothing that most of the book’s endorsements, while rightly praising Ann’s scholarship, describe it as “provocative,” and that is certainly the word that came to my mind. On more than one occasion, I found myself saying “that can’t be right, can it?!” but then, feeling some solidarity with Augustine, unable to explain why. And if it is only for giving her readers that wrestling experience, we should all be grateful to Ann.

“Provocative,” however, can be one of those ambiguous reviewer’s words, a polite way of implying disagreement. In this short response I will share a few of the questions Ann’s book has provoked for me, some of them at the heart of her argument, but she will be pleased to hear that I have more to praise than her provocation. 

When people have asked me for a quick take on Ann’s book, I have often said something along the lines of “we agree on the problem, but not quite on the solution.” In this response, then, I want to comment first on the problem of Pauline temporality, as posed by Ann, before asking a couple of questions about her proposed solution.

The problem of the “two age” thesis

A central contribution of this book is to problematize the standard account that Paul operates with an “inaugurated” temporality of “two ages,” a modified version of his inherited Jewish apocalyptic eschatology. Versions of this framework, which goes back at least to Schweitzer, are found in Pauline dictionary entries and introductory textbooks everywhere. I would imagine many of us have at some point tried to explain Paul’s eschatology by scribbling an “overlapping timelines” diagram on a whiteboard or a napkin. This “two-age” consensus is under Jervis’ microscope throughout her book, and it is a welcome examination, for rarely is it interrogated it as rigorously as this.

Though it is expressed in subtly different ways, “two-age eschatology” is a scheme fundamental to many contemporary approaches to Paul, not only those labelled “apocalyptic” but also those which emphasize “salvation history”—and both of these approaches are examined in Ann’s opening chapters. This is a valuable contribution that demonstrates the importance of thinking carefully about Paul’s view of time. Debates about whether Paul’s theology was “salvation-historical” or “apocalyptic” often speak at cross-purposes precisely because they leave unexamined the assumed temporal frameworks. In particular, the nature of “continuity” and “discontinuity,” one of the debate’s neuralgic points, often remains confused because discussion operates without a carefully described and theologically informed account of time. Ann is to be thanked for making us think more carefully about all of this. 

Early on, she makes the following simple, but important, observation concerning these accounts of Paul’s “two age” eschatology: “The problem with this fundamental interpretative assumption is… that Paul does not speak of the new age” (48). She is, I think, essentially correct about this problem. Though Paul writes regularly of the “present age,” the phrase “age to come” does not obviously appear in his letters. Ann’s third chapter offers a useful and fresh analysis of the language he does use: “new creation,” “the kingdom of God,” and “eternal life.” The closest Paul gets to a clear statement of a “two age” eschatology is in 1 Cor 10.11 and (if we accept it as authentic) Eph 1.21, though it is not clear that his usage there is evidence of a “two-age” eschatology, either. Other scholars have noted these things, and I’m one of them, but often we have worked with the assumption that Paul must nevertheless have meant the two ages, or at least something like it.3

In this connection, another important insight that Ann notes in various places, is that scholars of second-temple Jewish thought have challenged the notion that the “two-age” apocalyptic eschatology often assumed as Paul’s “background” is not quite so simply a stable framework in the relevant texts. These scholars have argued that here Pauline scholarship is often guilty of both oversimplification and anachronism. Oversimplification, because careful reading of these texts reveals that they use a range of temporal and eschatological frameworks, including the periodization of history, multiple stages of fulfilment, cyclical patterns of time, the categories of Urzeit and Endzeit, and sometimes combinations within the same text. And anachronism, because it is questionable whether the “two age” scheme is actually found in Paul’s apocalyptic Jewish heritage at all, or whether it is more characteristic of later rabbinic eschatologies. In the footnotes of Pauline commentary one will sometimes find the recognition that the Hebrew phrases עוֹלָם הַבָּא and עוֹלָם הַזֶּה are not really found before 70 CE, but this often seems to be treated as if it were incidental to the claims being made for Paul. Even if there are examples of the idea in the pre-Pauline Jewish texts, it is certainly not the case that we are presented with a stable framework of “consistent eschatology”4 that Paul takes “off the peg” and tailors to his needs. “Jewish apocalyptic eschatology” is more complex than a simple eschatological dualism. For some scholars of second temple Judaism, this account of the supposed “background” to Paul’s eschatology represents not only a lack of nuance but a sign of a worrying trend: caricaturing the Jewish apocalyptic tradition with simplistic dichotomies in order to cast Paul as the heroic theologian who alone transcends them.

Ann is not unaware of this discussion, of course, and notes its significance at various places.5 Nevertheless, this is a book about Paul, and so Ann justifiably prefaces her discussion (on p. 20) by stating that her concern is not to give an account of Jewish apocalyptic thought. Even on such terms, however, I do wonder whether these critiques of our accounts of Paul’s Jewish inheritance have sufficiently impacted the way in which the “two ages” is used as a foil in Ann’s argument, which sometimes speaks unambiguously of “the Jewish apocalyptic idea of the new age” (60) and seems to describe Paul’s temporal language against this background (e.g. on 166).

The proposed solution (1): is it really that different from “the two ages”?

Turning now to Ann’s constructive proposals, my first question concerns what I take to be her central thesis, that Paul does not merely adapt a “two age” conception of time, but contrasts the present age with life in union with Christ. What this means, she argues, is that Paul’s temporal framework involves two “kinds of time,” which she calls “death-time” and “life-time,” and it is the latter which is true of the believer, who participates in Christ’s temporality. “Christ’s cross and resurrection open to humanity the kind of time the exalted Christ lives. Christ lives God’s time in which there is only life. Since this is the case, the apostle conceived of those joined to Christ as living exclusively in one kind of time: life-time.” (168) This is, then, a thoroughly participationist account of Paul’s temporality. 

Throughout the book, Ann is clear that she intends her proposal not simply to be a “Christological adaptation” (de Boer) of the “two age” thesis but something altogether different. Her “death-time” and “life-time” are not, she repeatedly insists, just alternative ways of saying “present age” and “age to come” (xxv, 60, 61, etc.). She indicates the significance of this point by devoting a section in the conclusion to what she calls a “critical foundation” of her argument: “Why Two Kinds of Time Is Not the Same as Two Ages” (165ff.). Yet still I wonder, how is this the case? Apart from the observations about Pauline usage, in what sense does Ann’s proposal represent a fundamentally different approach? Is a pattern of “death-time” versus “life-time” really all that different from the “present age” and the “age to come”?

Ann is clearly sensitive to this question and locates her answer Christologically. “Death-time” and “life-time” are not the same as the “two ages,” she argues, since “one is an age and the other is a being” (xvi, cf. 117). This is helpful, as far as it goes, but I remain unclear about the precise nature of the claim being made. The “being” in question, Jesus Christ, himself lives a kind of temporal life, and it seems to me that this temporality is what is being described, “time in Christ” (Christ’s time, not Christ himself). That this “kind of time” must be thoroughly defined in relation to Christology is a valuable point, but it sometimes feels as if “Christ’s temporality” and Christ himself are treated as interchangeable. In places Ann speaks of Christ as the mode of Christian temporal existence, but elsewhere speaks of a kind of time that she calls “life-time” which is not, strictly speaking, the being of Christ per se but the temporality of Christ. Perhaps Ann means to treat the two as interchangeable? Are Christ and his temporality identical?6  

Even if the answer is yes, my main question remains: why is the book’s subtitle, “life in the temporality of Christ,” not just another way of saying “life in the age to come,” albeit transposed into a Christological key?

That transposition is by no means incidental. As I have said, speaking about temporality in this decisively Christological mode of is a vital contribution to our accounts of time in Paul (and I wonder if one of the reasons Augustine was baffled is that he does not seem to have done this, at least not in Confessions). Ann is completely right, then, to make the revelation of Christ structurally central for our understanding of Paul’s eschatology, rather than working with a temporal framework, gained from elsewhere, that he merely “adapts” or into which he subsequently makes Christ “fit.”7 In this way, Ann seems to share with Barth a conviction that we must not “take as a basis any time concept gained independently of revelation” but that “we must let ourselves be told what time is by revelation itself.”8 Moreover, and again with what seems a Barthian instinct, Ann’s approach helpfully emphasizes the qualitative nature of eschatological life, which is often insufficiently captured by our overlapping timeline frameworks.9

These are all important convictions which run through Ann’s argument, and I find them very helpful indeed. However, it still seems, to me at least, that, despite these valuable qualifications, the proposed alternative account still amounts to another way of saying “age to come.” I’d love to hear more from Ann about why she thinks that’s not the case.

The proposed solution (2): Jervis’ challenge to “already and not yet”

My second main question, a corollary of the first, concerns Ann’s proposed alternative to the “two age” thesis, namely that Paul’s temporal logic does not work with a pattern of “inauguration,” as is often argued, but one of exclusive union with Christ. On Ann’s reading, Paul’s account of life in the temporality of Christ is not accurately described by the phrase “already and not yet.” Ann takes issue with this framework of “inaugurated eschatology,” understanding it to involve a “partial” or “limited” union with Christ (104). By contrast, she argues, Paul’s account of temporality insists that Christians presently live exclusively “in the day.” Here, Ann sees a contrast between her argument and that of some apocalyptic interpreters of Paul, described in this way: “the difference between the already-not yet perspective and my own is my emphasis on the completeness and adequacy of Christ’s present life for believers” (132, contra Beker). Ann seems to consider an “inaugurated” account of Pauline eschatology, even a carefully nuanced one, to be necessarily a “zero-sum game.” To be fully in Christ must mean to be not at all in the present age, and so any affirmation that the Christian lives in this present age must imply some kind of “partial” union with Christ.10 

However, it’s not clear to me that the “inaugurated two ages” account of time involves such zero-sum logic, or necessarily implies the sort of inadequate union Ann seeks to correct, a life lived “partially in Christ” (56). I remain convinced that Paul’s thought involves an eschatological reserve, and that this is important for various reasons, but I do not think this amounts to a “partial union.” Usually, arguments concerning the nature of this “inaugurated” reality of the Christian life involve appeals to some kind of “dialectic” or “both-and” explanation, rather than a zero-sum logic. 

Ann, however, rejects such “both-and” solutions and insists boldly that Paul works with an “either-or”: “Believers do not live in eschatological tension due to the overlap of two ages. Paul does not think that either those in Christ or those who are not live in any sort of overlap. There is no both/and but only either/or.” (133) 

In another context, this is expressed provocatively (!) in her Christology, when she speaks of “the exalted Christ no longer being flesh and blood.” (79) At this point I have concerns which both illustrate the importance of the Christological framing of the question of time and which, I think, place a question-mark over Ann’s insistence on a temporal “either-or.” Among the various implications of Paul’s Christology for his view of time is the affirmation that in becoming human, God in Christ has entered creaturely time, and in raising Jesus from the dead, God has not dissolved creaturely temporal life but has embraced it, gathering flesh and blood into the divine life. Christology does not involve a logic of “either-or.” There is no zero-sum between the human (and therefore temporal) life of Christ and his divine life. So too, then, there is no zero-sum between our creaturely temporal existence in this world and our union with Christ. As Paul puts it in Gal 2.20, “the life I now live in the flesh” is simultaneously life by faith in “Christ who lives in me.”

And yet, the Christian life of union with the exalted Jesus is a life lived under the conditions of a world not yet fully redeemed, as Paul says in various places, but especially in Romans 8. The Christian is one who belongs to the day, exhorted not to be conformed to this age while living under its conditions. This may be an eschatological reserve, but it is not thereby a Christological inadequacy. Rather, it is the temporal equivalent of the simul iustus et peccator.11

An important related concern here is that Ann’s rejection of such a simul in favor of an “either-or” seems, to me at least, to result in an over-realized eschatology, with implications for her account of the Christian life, especially the questions of suffering, death, and sin. These themes are all addressed in Ann’s closing chapter, but in what remains of my time I comment only on the first two of them, and very briefly. (Though I do have questions about her account of sin, too).

Concerning suffering and death, Ann’s argument is that the conditions of the present age cannot be invoked as an explanation, since Paul does not work with an inaugurated two-age framework. Instead, she argued, “the apostle does not see these as symptoms of the still unvanquished evil age but as transformed by and fitting with being in Christ” (xvii). Appealing especially to Romans 8, among other texts, Ann argues that believers’ suffering is always sharing in the suffering of Christ, and is thus never to be understood as a consequence of the oppositional powers of this age (136). Rather, such tribulation is evidence that they live entirely in the life of Christ. Suffering is, to put it simply, “part of life in Christ” (137). To my mind, there seems to be something of a demythologizing instinct at work in Ann’s account of suffering. For all the Christological framing, there is a distinctly anthropological flavor to her argument at this point, and I wonder if this sometimes results in overly realized, existential conclusions.

Certainly, as Rom 8.17 says, “we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” But even in that verse, to which Ann appeals in her argument, there is an implied eschatological reserve. Paul makes this explicit in the very next sentence, declaring that “the sufferings of this present time (τοῦ νῦν καιροῦ) are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed (τὴν μέλλουσαν δόξαν ἀποκαλυφθῆναι) to us” (8.18). Ann understands this νῦν καιρός to be effectively synonymous with Christ’s temporality. For now, however, I remain convinced that this is better understood as the time of union with Christ under the conditions of the present evil age, a time in which creation is subject to the bondage of decay in which it, with us, groans for the fulfilled time of redemption still to come, a glory “about to be revealed,” as Paul puts it. I’d love to hear more from her on why she is unconvinced by this “now and not yet” account of time, suffering and death.

Once again, I want to express my gratitude to Ann for this fine and stimulating book, for the way it has made me think again about my assumptions, and for the invitation to continued conversation that it presents.

It is a privilege to join in this conversation about Ann Jervis’s Paul and Time. A work of technical Pauline exegesis, the book for just that reason is also a work of theology. For it advances claims concerning Paul’s teaching about God, Christ, sin, salvation, eschatology and the Christian life which if true, bear upon the body of Christian doctrine that rests in no small part upon historic and ongoing reception of the apostle’s witness. An amateur exegete at best—and dilettante at worst—my modest contribution here is merely to think theologically about a selection of the book’s claims and themes. 

There are a number of ways one might approach this task. One could, for example, open a lively exchange between the account of “Christ time” advanced here and Karl Barth’s discussion of Jesus as “The Lord of Time” in Church Dogmatics III/2, §47.1, the ambition of which is, like Jervis’s own, to conceive of the Christian life as one enacted “inside” Christ’s unique transcendence and transformation of creaturely time. Jervis herself makes Barth a conversation partner at points in the book, suggesting there might be a fruitful and friendly avenue to explore here. 

However, I want to venture something less obvious, though I hope no less fruitful and friendly for being so. I want to draw Jervis’s arguments into conversation with some rather “old perspectives on Paul” found in the work of Martin Luther as a way of thinking them through. In our limited time today, two themes only will concern us: first, the nature of the believer’s being in Christ and, second, the nature of Christian freedom. 

1/ Life in Christ

The polemical heart of the book is its repudiation of the “overlapping ages” interpretation of Pauline eschatology. “The evidence,” we read, “strongly suggests that Paul conceived of the present aeon and the exalted Christ as two mutually exclusive realities” such that the apostle “positions Christ and those united with Christ in a reality liberated and apart from the present age” (56). The upshot is that Paul simply does not portray believers “as partially in Christ and partially in the present evil age” but rather “entirely in Christ” who is himself nothing less than “God’s redemptive goal” (56–57). As Jervis observes, “Paul understands Christ as an actual being in whom people may live” and casts believers as people “joined to Jesus Messiah” (60). Two things seem important here. First, Christ is not merely an instrument translating people from the old age to the new but is himself the destination of their transit out of Sin and Death. Second, Paul thinks here only in totalities, i.e., of totally determinative environments, and so necessarily excludes any talk of believers being “in part” or “to a degree” or “on a continuum.”  

All of this is redolent of aspects of Luther’s hearing of Paul’s gospel. Like Jervis, Luther’s concern is not the two ages as such but what God has made of the two ages and those entangled in them in Christ: the effect of God’s saving advent in Christ is his sole concern. Whether glossed forensically—as the imputation of Christ’s righteousness—or ontologically—as being in Christ—when seized by grace and placed “in Christ” the believer is totus iustus. To say that Christians are totus iustus is simply to say that they are completely determined by their relationship to Christ who “is their righteousness” (1 Cor 1:30). Luther defines a Christian as one who has received from Christ “all that he is” (i.e., righteousness) in an exchange in which Jesus also takes over from us “all that we are” (i.e., sin).1 For the German reformer, the reality of Christ is “re-creative”: by force of “pronouncement” it constitutes the “entirely new situation” of the believer’s existence, and entirely so. The logic of Luther’s account—whether expressed as imputation or union–admits no thinking by degrees, no description of Christian existence as “more or less,” it has no place for talk of “partial” determinations, or for any process of incremental “movement” between unrighteousness and righteousness, between sin and Christ.2 

Yet Luther’s Christian is not only totus iustus but simul totus iustus et totus peccator. This paradoxical description takes nothing back of what has been said: precisely as “paradox” it continues to disqualify and replace all thinking in parts or by degrees. The believer’s union with Christ is full and total; the lordship of Christ over the believer is real and uncontested. And yet what that union and lordship reveal includes the complete sinfulness of those for whose sake they are enacted and exercised. As Gerhard Forde observes, the simul is “a confession flowing precisely from the unconditional nature of the divine promise, the divine act of justification. . . the divine imputation (cf. Rom 4:1–7) is the creative reality” which by its very fact “unmasks the reality and totality of sin at the same time.”3 The simul does not give expression to the overlap of the ages as an ongoing contest between old and new which would render the believer now more, now less redeemed. Rather, it expresses the illumination of two true and total judgments of God involved in the one act of salvation: the person who is totus iustus in Christ is for just that reason shown also to be totus peccator in se. Is it important and salutary to make explicit this second and implicated confession, important to say and say again that believers are, in the old tongue, “justified sinners,” i.e., completely sinful outwith and apart from Christ, and completely redeemed in Christ? Would there be anything in Jervis’s interpretation of Paul that would preclude what Luther here asserts?

2/ The Matter of Christian Freedom

Perhaps a point at which Luther’s Pauline inspired account of Christian existence might be thought to stand in some real tension with that advanced by Jervis is in the matter of Christian freedom. The theme comes to the fore in Chapter 8 where she treats of “Life in Christ’s Time.” The question of freedom is asked and answered here in intimate connection with an analysis of the problem of Sin and sinning. The key proposition runs: “Union with Christ is freedom from Sin”—understood as a corrupting and death-dealing power effective in “death time from which humans must be liberated—but it does not obliterate the capacity for sinning” on the part of the believer (142).  

Jervis suggests that the Christian life is one engaged in “unlearning” the habits of death-time, and so a process of learning “to see that their identity and actions can be guided by Christ and the spirit” (142). The problem of sin within the Christian life is thus fundamentally different than it was previously: in “death-time” Sin tyrannized the will; in life-time, the will stands unbound with the new capacity and possibility (previously unavailable to it) of obedience to Christ and the Spirit, harassed and hampered now only it seems “by the passions” (141). The new problem of sinning is not the old problem of Sin. Or not quite. Paul’s discourse of the warring of spirit and flesh in the lives of believers is not cosmological (for that battle is over), but moral, i.e., the labour of ethical deliberation, disposition, and self-perception (147). The new problem seems to be that insight lags behind reality. As Jervis explains: “It is rather believers” perceptions of their relationship to Sin and its influence on the flesh that is the problem” (143, italics original). Or more sharply: “When believers sin it is . . . because they give in to the illusory influence of their former enslaver” (147).  

The new and different situation can also be described from the other, positive, side as it were. Whereas once the Christian was captive and enslaved to Sin and so not free to will other than what his or her captor willed, in the new situation of Christ-time things are different. The God who reigns over those united to Christ is no tyrant, and Christians are not “prisoners of God’s triumph” (143). Jervis stresses this point by repeatedly emphasizing that those in Christ are free, i.e., they are free to serve God but also now free not to do so, and so to sin. We read that “those in union with Christ are free to choose the desires of the flesh or the fruit of the Spirit” (155) and that “God does not take away freedom of choice or, for that matter, freedom to be tempted by Satan” (156). The argument about the distinctive quality of Christian freedom culminates when Jervis concludes: “When believers think or act sinfully it is not because they are ruled by Sin or because Sin has a partial hold on them due to the overlap of the ages. It is because they are not acting from their freedom” (146–47).  

Now, in this last claim Jervis intimates a positive concept of freedom: namely, to act “from freedom” is to act without sin, for God, and so righteously. Yet this positive account of Christian freedom as freedom for obedience seems an outlier. For the exposition invests much more heavily in a negative concept of freedom: i.e., of indeterminacy: salvation delivers the believer into a situation where she is free—is able, permitted, capable etc.—to choose without constraint for or against God, and so against or for sin. In view here seems to be something like the restoration of an original, prelapsarian human position and concomitant powers of will conceived as unconstrained choice.

Theologians schooled in the Reformed or Lutheran traditions in particular might raise an eyebrow (if not an alarm) here, thinking it a strange redemption indeed which admits to such a libertarian account of Christian freedom as the freedom to live truly “in Christ” or not. That sin would be an expression of that genuine human freedom for which Christ has set us free (Gal 5:1) rather than firm evidence of its forfeiture or absence is a view one might strain to embrace theologically. That the fruit of the new creation secured by Christ’s victory might be thought a human will competent and capable of readily contradicting its own re-making, repudiating the victory which has made it what it is, and betraying its Lord afresh is, I will admit, a puzzling prospect.

And so, one has questions. Does description of the “ethical battle” of believers to throw off the “illusory influence of their former enslaver” not actually admit the lasting and actual—if in some interesting and important sense ghostly and unreal—power of the latter, namely, the “age ruled by Sin” (147)? If so, is the distinction between Sin and sinning finally so clear? Does Paul really evince an understanding of divine salvation as an act which re-positions the human before the choice of sanctity or sin, i.e., one in which the human being is invited and afforded the possibility of willing the good? Jervis agrees that what Martyn styled the “two-step dance”—in which salvation is set before us by God in order that we might then will and choose it— is certainly not the situation of sinners entrapped within death-time, but has it now become an accurate description of the situation of believers in Christ-time, as they now “may,” “can,” “are capable of” and “have the possibility of” willing the good, but yet are also equally able—in some sense ignorant of their new freedom and /or misdirected by their passions—to will evil, and so to sin?

That Luther could write a three-hundred page tract on The Bondage of the Will suggests he has some ideas on the matter of Christian freedom and sin, and so he does. Luther certainly shares with Jervis an understanding of the captive will under the conditions of sin, contending that “if we are under the god of this world, away from the work and Spirit of the true God, we are help captive to his will as Paul says . . . so that we cannot will anything but what he wills . . . . And this we do readily and willingly, according to the nature of the will.”4 For Luther salvation involves a redemption of this captive will. He describes it in this way: “But when a Stronger One comes who overcomes [our captor] and takes us as His spoil, then through his Spirit we are again slaves and captives—though this is royal freedom—so that we readily will and do what he wills.” It is notable that, like Jervis, Luther too wants to mark and to honor the distinct quality of the will as qualified by salvation, what he calls here the “royal freedom” of captivity to the Spirit. And he goes on to stress that “if God works in us, the will is changed, and being gently breathed upon by the Spirit of God, it again wills and acts from pure willingness and inclination and of its own accord, not from compulsion. . . .”5 God is no tyrant. 

Yet, this “royal freedom” is for Luther positively exhausted in obedience rather than negatively exercised in indeterminate choosing. Indeed, as he famously and graphically puts it:

Thus, the human will is placed between the two like a beast of burden. If God rides it, it wills and goes where God wills . . . . If Satan rides it, it wills and goes where Satan wills; nor can it choose to run to either of the two riders or to seek him out, but the riders themselves contend for the possession and control of it.6

Luther always argued that recourse to libertarian freedom (as Erasmus was wont to do) was but a subtle expression of captivity, namely, an exercise of the sinful solipsism of the ego, the deliberative mode of the self incurvatus in se. For the one freedom I lack is the freedom to will not what I want but what God wants; for even in willing what God wants, if I am possessed of libertarian freedom it is I who ultimately want and will it and so I remain the final and deciding agent of my fate: sicut deus indeed. I worry that the understanding of freedom involved in Jervis’s account of Christian “sinning” here might re-iterate something like this. And I wonder what it might look like if her account of Christian freedom were instead more consistently to reflect the positive and concrete view of freedom expressed in the assertion that in sinning believers “are not acting from their freedom.” Admitting that might, however, seem to entangle the Christian life in a contest against the residual power of Sin and death-time in unwelcome ways. But can a properly and robustly positive account of Christian freedom be developed otherwise?

3/ The Qualification of Death

Finally, and more briefly—Jervis contends that, for Paul, existence “in Christ” and so “in Christ-time” decisively qualifies the meaning of physical death for believers. The believer’s experience of chronological time—including our inescapable finitude—is fully “environed” within “Christ-time” as a reality “from which death’s power has been exorcised” (75, 74). It is as those who “live the time of the exalted Christ” that believers die. One needs on such account to distinguish, as it were, between “Death” and “death.” 

It is interesting in connection to recall that Luther addresses this theme in a famous sermon on Rom 6:3–11 from his 1544 Church Postil.7 The view he expounds there comports closely with what I take to be Jervis” own account. Luther’s premise is that per Paul “By his death Christ has destroyed our sin and death; therefore, we share in his resurrection and life” (§31). Paul considers the finite end of the Christian life to be “a planting unto life” since “being redeemed, by the resurrection, from death and sin, we shall live eternally” (§14). For faith, Luther says, “that dreadful death which is called in the Scriptures the second death is taken away from the Christian through Christ and is swallowed up in his life. In place of it there is left a miniature death, a death in which the bitterness is covered up” (§25); what remains is but a “little” or merely “outward and physical death” (§§ 20–22). In sum, bound to Christ in faith and so a partaker of his life, the spirit of the believer “does not consider [death] to be death; it knows no such thing as death. It knows that it is freed from sin and that where there is no sin there is no death — life only” (§28). The reformer’s account of Paul’s teaching on this score and his own deflationary account of das Todlein—the trifling death of the body that we must undergo at the end of our days—seems very congenial with Jervis’s own reading. I wonder if she might find it so? Does it matter if Luther’s thinking on this score is funded by the logic of the simul?8

Concluding Remarks

I hope that these few comments and questions of mine tell of my deep appreciation for the way in which Jervis’s study dares to revisit fundamental questions in Paul’s theology and thereby dares also to broach vital questions of Christian doctrine. The seriousness of the book and of its subject matter cannot be denied; neither can its generative provocation. These reflections hope only to stir a conversation which might move us a little toward a better understanding of her achievement here, precisely so that we can confront its challenge and benefit from its provocation most fully.