“As not”

Giorgio Agamben offers an intriguing discussion of the Pauline concept of calling in his The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans . For Paul, calling is always linked with the arrival of the messianic age in Jesus. But this does not, contra Weber, imply an indifference to worldly situations, conditions, and stations. Nor, contra what Agamben characterizes as the Lutheran tradition, does it mean simply obedience to the demands of whatever profession or vocation one occupies.

Messianic calling, he argues, is contentless in itself. Anyone in any station of life can respond to the Messianic call, and continues in that station of life without changing the form. But the call of the Messiah more fundamentally revokes al vocation: “The messianic vocation is the revocation of all vocation” (23). Once called by the Messiah, one no longer possesses or owns property or identity. All are to be used. The form is unchanged, but the condition is undermined: “It revokes the factical condition and undermines it without altering its form” (24).

1 Corinthians 7 is the central passage, since there Paul urges the Corinthians to remain in the calling in which they have been called. But they are to carry out the form of their vocation “as not”: Have wives “as not” having wives, weep “as not” weeping, buy “as not” possessing. “To be messianic,” Agamben concludes, “to live in the Messiah, signifies the expropriation of each and every juridical-factical property . . . under the form of the as not ” (26). This doesn’t mean the assumption of a new identity, since even the identity is cancelled by the “as not”: I died, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. That is the statement of one in the grip of messianic vocation.

In all this, Agamben is, if I can put it this way, formally right and materially wrong. He’s right that Paul’s doctrine of vocation doesn’t give a divine imprimatur to whatever social order might pre-exist the gospel. Agamben is right that the one doctrine of vocation that doesn’t match Paul’s is the one adopted by much of the church: “you should work, obey, and not question your given place in society” (33). I like his formula that “messianic vocation is a revocation of all vocation.”

But then what? People have to get up in the morning and do something. Christian have jobs, and Jesus doesn’t require His disciples to give them up. The “as not” cannot simply leave the form unchanged; if there is a community of the called, an ekklesia , then the “as not” has to take some social form. Without this, Agamben’s solution doesn’t seem to diverge all that far from the position he criticizes: People heed the messianic call, the external ordering of society stays the same, but it is animated by – what? – a new spirit? How is that new?

When someone is called by Jesus as a businessman, he should buy and sell “as not,” not as producer, seller, owner, and money-maker, but as the servant of Jesus who “uses” his vocation as one called to the kingdom. His profession/job is revoked as a defining orientation of his life or identity; he is a new creation in which Jesus lives. That revocation is to be followed by a transformation in which the vocation formed by his messianic vocation.