Tuesday Tome - The Church and the Kingdom

Originally presented as an address to the congregation of Notre Dame in 2009, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's The Church and the Kingdom is a challenge for the church to consider its identity and being in relationship with its messianic hope. My thanks to Jordan Peacock for introducing me to Agamben and recommending this provocative little book.

"The time of the messiah cannot designate a chronological period or duration but, instead, must represent nothing less than a qualitative change in how time is experienced. For this reason it is inconceivable to speak of a chronological delay in this context as though one were speaking of a train being delayed. Because there is not place in messianic time for a fixed and final habitation, there is no time for delay." pp. 4-5

"Living in this time, experiencing this time, is thus not something that the Church can choose, or choose not, to do. It is only in this time that there is a Church at all.

"Where do we find such an experience of time in today's Church? That is the question that I have come, here and now, to pose to the Church of Christ sojourning in Paris. An evocation of final things, of ultimate things, has so completely disappeared from the statements of the Church that it has been said, not without irony, that the Roman Church has closed its eschatological window. And it is with more bitter irony still that a French theologian has remarked that, 'Christ announced the coming of the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church.' This is a disquieting declaration, but one which merits reflection." pp. 26-27

"...The church can be a living institution only on the condition that it maintains an immediate relation to its end. And –– a point which we would do well not to forget –– according to Christian theology there is only one legal institution which knows neither interruption nore end: hell. The model of contemporary politics––which pretends to an infinite economy of the world––is thus truly infernal. And if the Church curtails its original relation with the paroikia, it cannot be lose itself in time." p.41