Abstract
L. Ann Jervis is to be commended for presenting in just 200 pages a remarkably fresh approach to the question of Paul and time by putting the conceptions of time in ‘salvation history’ and ‘apocalyptic’ under the critical spotlight and by setting out her ideas on ‘death-time’ and ‘life-time’. The term ‘salvation history’ was introduced in 1841 by J.C.K. von Hofmann (p. 1) but has roots going back to the Latin fathers such as Tertullian (p. 3); the emphasis on ‘apocalyptic’, on the other hand, is a more recent development, being introduced by Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer at the beginning of the twentieth century. As well as discussing the advocates of these approaches in Pauline scholarship (e.g. Cullmann, Dunn, and Wright on the former, Käsemann, Martyn, Beker, and Gaventa on the latter) Jervis briefly outlines views on time of some key theologians, philosophers, and scientists in the introduction (pp. xxiii-xxxiv) and again at the beginning of chapter 4 (pp. 61-64), including figures such as Aristotle, Augustine, Newton, Kant, Einstein, McTaggert, Heidegger, and Barth. Her intention is that ‘articulating some of the puzzles and presumptions in thinking about time may elucidate our own assumptions’ (p. xxxiii). It is from there that she goes on to put forward her own view of Paul and time in terms of ‘life-time’ (i.e. ‘eternal life’), which does not end, and ‘death time’, the time associated with the rule of sin, which does end; however the distinction between the two is primarily qualitative rather than quantitative. ‘Paul thinks that believers have experienced two types of time: one ruled by death, for which they have been liberated, and one of life, from which death has been expelled’ (p. 73). These two types of time are not the same as ‘two ages’, categories favoured by ‘apocalyptic’ interpretations (pp. 165-68); further Christians ‘live not in a mixture or overlap of two ages but in the one time of the risen and exalted Jesus Christ’ (p. 74). So the believers’ capacity to sin is not the result of ‘overlapping ages’ (p. 142); rather it is their ‘perceptions of their relationship to Sin and its influence on the flesh that is the problem’ (p. 143) as is made clear in Rom 8.3-6.
Jervis has put her finger on crucial aspects of Paul’s understanding of time, rightly relating this to his view of the union of believers with Christ, which entails a temporal as well as a spatial location (p. 118). Much of her exegesis I find convincing. Although she does allow for some development in Paul’s thinking (e.g. p. 115), I wonder whether Paul’s view of Christ and time is more untidy than she allows. To give one example, it is difficult to deny the role of ‘salvation history’ in Romans 11.11-32 (Paul would appear to present both a horizontal salvation historical dimension and a vertical existential dimension) and there are reasons for believing Rom 11.26 speaks of Christ’s parousia (contrast p. 128). But I think Jervis is right to focus on the time-dimension that really matters, namely Christ-time in which believers participate.