Paul's Summons to Messianic Life by L. L. Welborn

Author:L. L. Welborn [Welborn, L. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL051000, RELIGION / Philosophy, REL015000, RELIGION / Christianity / History
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

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CODA

WHERE DOES IT stand today with Paul’s summons to awakening? In my view, past eras instance several movements that are more than sporadic tremors of awakening: the monastic movement led by Francis of Assisi,1 the struggle for social justice led by Martin Luther King.2 Yet, for several decades now, a profound sleep has descended over most of the world because of the triumph of global capitalism. In a discourse that Giorgio Agamben delivered in March 2009 in Notre Dame Cathedral in the presence of the Bishop of Paris and other high-ranking clerics, he charged the church catholic with having forgotten its messianic calling.3 Agamben asks: “Will the Church finally grasp the historical occasion and recover its messianic vocation?”4 Then, Agamben warned: “If it does not, the risk is clear enough: it will be swept away by the disaster menacing every government and every institution on earth.”5 If I could name the danger that hangs over our present moment in late capitalism, it would be that the Judeo-Christian sense of social obligation embodied in the command to “love your neighbor” will be entirely obliterated by a resurgence of that structured inequality, with all its attendant cruelties, which was the basis of the political economy of the Roman Empire.6

At this dark moment, more than ever, we should recall that, according to Paul, the awakening occurs punctually, at the moment when night has advanced to its furthest point, when especially deep darkness holds sway just before the dawn (Rom. 13:12).

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