As many of Agamben’s arguments do, this hinges on a distinction in Greek, and a distinction in temporality, or how we experience time. The church is supposed to dwell on earth as an exile or a sojourner—captured in the Greek verb paroikein, as in ho chronos tês paroikias, or “the time of sojourning” of 1 Peter 1:17. This sort of sojourning is the proper stance in which to welcome the coming (parousia) of Christ, the Messiah. But from its properly “parochial” (from paroikia) stance, the church has settled into a different dwelling, that of a citizen of a city, state, kingdom, or empire—captured in the Greek verb katoikein. Katoikia is the temporality of institutions and civilizations that put a premium on perpetuity: “we are here to last.” The “bitter irony” is that sojourning, or paroikia, should be the one and only vocation of the church: “It is only in this time [of paroikia and parousia, the sojourn of the foreigner and the coming of the Messiah] that there is a Church at all.”⁵ Strictly speaking, then, as soon as the church has settled into katoikia, it ceases to be the church, although it may continue to go by that name. If, as Loisy put it, “what arrived was the Church,” Agamben invites us to wonder whether or not the church ever arrived but insists that, even so, it has since departed. The question he puts to the “church,” then, is whether it will recover its vocation as the church. The disquieting but strangely pious provocation Agamben poses to the bishop of Paris is whether the “church” will ever become the church, whether the church will ever arrive, or rather return.

The call for the church to recover its messianic vocation, then, was a call to help it shift its temporality, to sojourn where it had chosen to dwell, to help the church once again heed its own calling, or perhaps to heed it for the first time. If the parousia of the Messiah is available to us only if we change our relationship to time, I thought, then perhaps the priesthood could be understood as a ministry of time, obedience to a different temporality. Perhaps the call to ordained ministry was a call to help the “church” become the church, to help transform it from the inside, to be a priest of the tent rather than the temple, in something like an insurgent ecclesiology, in which the resistance and transformation would revolve around our relationship to time.

Intrigued by this provocation, I read more widely, and deeply, and discovered that this insurgent ecclesiology was tethered to a bleak political diagnosis. Agamben’s ambivalence toward the church is mirrored in his ambivalence to the kingdom. “Church” and “kingdom” each have two divergent referents. On the one hand, the messianic kingdom is that which Jesus proclaimed—not, according to Agamben, as if it were some future event frustratingly deferred, but rather the latent possibility of an inbreaking in every moment. Walter Benjamin is his muse here, who wrote of such a realizable (perhaps also realized) eschatology, “every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters.”⁶ On the other hand, in another of Agamben’s works, The Kingdom and the Glory, the kingdom does not name this messianic moment, but rather one half of the monstrous, modern machine of government. Like many, Agamben has a very bleak view of contemporary world politics. We are all caught in a “providential machine,” whose underbelly is a “global civil war” well underway in much of the world. This machine is constituted by a global, sovereign center, what Agamben here calls the “Kingdom,” surrounded by a “Government” of enforcers. The distinction between “kingdom” and “government” is captured by what the twentieth-century political philosopher Carl Schmitt calls the “notorious formula”: le roi regne, mais il ne gouverne pas, “The King reigns but does not govern.”⁷ In other words, the sovereign center exists precisely so as to be a vacuum, a void or “empty throne” that requires encircling phalanxes of governors, bureaucrats, messengers, and enforcers to mask its fundamental impotence. These exist not only to govern the masses but to glorify the hole at the center of it all. Agamben sees contemporary politics as essentially an endless and acephalous administration.

There is something vaguely compelling about this political diagnosis, but it was never what most intrigued me about Agamben. The originality of The Kingdom and the Glory consists not in this diagnosis (which is very much derivative of Michel Foucault), but in his claim that the modern rupture between “kingdom” and “government” can be traced back to classical Trinitarian theology. For Agamben, the early Christian debates about the relationship between God the Father and the Son anticipate this “providential machine.” Much of the first half of the book is given over to an extended genealogy, a survey of how Christians understood oikonomia, both God’s economy ad intra (among the three persons of the Triune God) and God’s economy ad extra (God’s providential relationship to creation, principally in the incarnation). Frustrated by modern theologians’ efforts to tackle these topics separately, Agamben insists that there is only one divine economy in classical Trinitarian theology, that in both ad intra and ad extra we see the same structure: God the Father retreats from messy interaction with the world in favor of an impotent sovereignty, ceding his place to the Son or Word, who creates and saves, establishes and governs.

Marshalling an impressive array of ancient sources from the Greek and Latin fathers of the church, Agamben buries the reader in an overwhelming deposit of learning. The result is rather numbing, even for me, who has a fair amount of experience reading these source texts. If the reader maintains vigilance, however, and tries to follow Agamben’s narrative closely, the thread of the argument begins to disintegrate. On nearly every page is a forced or tendentious interpretation, an important omission or elision.

Critchley stands apart from Agamben for having faith in the politics of resistance. He has sharp words not only for Agamben, but also for his contemporaries Alain Badiou and especially Slavoj Žižek, for indulging in what he regards as paralytic political defeatism. He shares Agamben’s bleak outlook on contemporary world politics: liberal democracy is a self-deluding crust, thinly protecting the plutocratic elite from the reality of the plight of everyone else, at home and abroad. But what is needed is not to wait on the great revolutionary gesture, as Žižek would have us do, but rather “the creation of interstitial distance within the state and the cultivation of forms of cooperation and mutuality”—in other words, a kind of anarchic communitarianism.¹⁸

Two strands of Christianity contribute to Critchley’s imagination of what these new “forms of cooperation and mutuality” might be. The first goes under the name of “mystical anarchism”: Critchley has a romantic fondness for the self-annihilating ethics of Marguerite Porete, the twelfth-century Beguine who was burned at the stake for heresy on the basis of her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls. For Critchley, Porete’s “auto-theism,” or deification through annihilation of the self, holds out hope for “the creation of new forms of life at a distance from the order of the state,” the “possibility for a life of cooperation and solidarity with others.” The second strand is Paul’s fragile communities of faith, what he calls “a politics of the remnant, where the off-cuttings of humanity are the basis for a new political articulation.”¹⁹ Again, just as with Agamben, Critchley regards the danger of both Porete’s mystical anarchism and Paul’s radical politics of faith (as opposed to law) to be “a politics of secession,” a form of political association that does not stand in critical tension with the state but pretends to exempt itself entirely.

Agamben seems keen to avoid the secessionist temptation, at least when he speaks in front of bishops. He concludes The Church and the Kingdom by speaking of two opposing forces of history: of the first, what he calls “Law” or “State” (that is, the partnership between “Kingdom” and “Government”), he is certainly critical, here but especially elsewhere; the second, the messianism of church and kingdom (in the first and proper sense), is precisely what he wishes to recover. Whereas in most of his other books, the former force is figured as the prison incarcerating the second, the law that chokes out life, here he rather surprisingly recommends a “dialectical tension” between the two, insisting that such a tension “is the only way that a community can form and last.” “This tension . . . seems today to have disappeared”: the ellipse with two foci has collapsed into a circle with a single center, leaving a “hypertrophy of the law.”²⁰ We have been rendering only unto Caesar because there is no longer any way to render unto God.

But this concluding recommendation of a dialectical tension between church and state hardly seems the radical revolutionary gesture of secession Critchley warns us of. Rather, it appears as a conciliatory call for the return of the church: only a church that sojourns rather than dwells can stand up to the force of the state. In Paul’s logic, the church’s “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). This leaves us with the pious conclusion, however, that our political salvation lies squarely in the hands of the church: the parousia depends on paroikia. Without the church, we cannot but suffer under the “hypertrophy of the law.”

What strikes me most about The Church and the Kingdom, then, is not only its conciliatory tone, or even its unexpected piety, but rather how deeply Roman Catholic it is. Ironically, Critchley claims that in forwarding a radically antinomian faith, Agamben is carrying on the Protestant project of Luther, Harnack, and Heidegger. But Agamben seems to have none of Critchley’s enthusiasm for what we might call “cellular” Christianity: small, “interstitial” forms of religious association that might somehow successfully resist the state. On the contrary, he addresses the church in Paris, although it could equally well be in Rome: only this church, the very “church” that has settled into katoikia, can recover its messianic vocation of paroikia and save us. It is almost as if Agamben believes in apostolic succession and the throne of Peter: only the church that first had the messianic vocation could then lose it. But whether the church that arrives (or perhaps returns), emerging from within the “church,” will bear any resemblance to that present placeholder is a question left open, as open as the question of whether the parousia of the Messiah will bear any resemblance to Jesus of Nazareth.

I suppose, in retrospect, Agamben helped reawaken my call to ordained ministry because he articulated an aspiration to help birth the church from within the “church,” to resist the “kingdom” by learning how to prepare for the kingdom. It helped me make sense of my own calling, and that of many dear friends who had devoted their lives to the church. I too wanted to embark on a ministry of time, to explore temporalities other than dwelling in empire, or its late modern descendent, consumer capitalism.

But then why have I stepped away from ordination, and even more, from the faith? There’s no single answer to that question, of course, but once again my only sense of an answer hinges on time and temporality. There is much in Agamben’s account of messianic time that still resonates deeply with my sense of what the gospel is about: how to sojourn rather than dwell, and the freedom of uselessness and inoperativity. I suppose, if I am honest with myself, I have shed—like scales from my eyes—the dialectics of church and kingdom that have framed these temporal possibilities. And I have grown impatient with what I perceive as the limited temporality on offer in Agamben’s messianic vocation, in which there are two, or maybe three, kinds of time. According to him, there is 1) chronological time—the time we live in “before” the Messiah; there is 2) eternity—the end of time, “after” the return of the Messiah; and there is 3) messianic time—“the time that remains” (the title of perhaps Agamben’s most famous book), the time we live in now, the time it takes for time to come to an end.

In The Time That Remains, Agamben renders these as A, B, C (or A, C, and B, as I have laid them out) and offers different diagrams for explaining their relationship.²¹ In The Church and the Kingdom, he says of messianic time that it “is not the end of time but the time of the end. What is messianic is not the end of time but the relation of every moment, every kairos, to the end of time and to eternity . . . the time that remains between time and its end”; “what is at issue is a time that pulses and moves within chronological time, that transforms chronological time from within.”²² That’s it: there’s time and eternity, and the time that remains in which every moment in time can somehow relate to eternity. No doubt someone will tell me that I have misunderstood Agamben’s messianism, and perhaps I have. But I am left wanting precisely more pulse, more movement, more transformation than this tripartite temporality offers.

These temporal options now strike me as limited by an all-too-human frame. In this frame, we imagine ourselves part of a narrative history, unfolding in time, in which we humans are at the center, led along by a God, and his Messiah, who are also disturbingly human in their outline; that the significance of this narrative lies somehow in its culmination, its end, and perhaps our own; and maybe, maybe, that the end of this narrative can somehow be experienced as it is still running its course, that the end can break into the time that remains. I want more options from whatever it is we call time, and I think that time can accommodate that request—indeed, that time eagerly waits on us, as it were, offering us much more, a much wider array of temporality. I don’t presume to know what that “more” is yet, never mind how to put it in words. But I have glimpsed it, just, and not through human history, or by imagining its end. But rather, in recent years, by tarrying with what is not human, what is more than human and all around us.

I realize now that I have not only left the “church,” but perhaps also the church (if it was ever here), and I have even given up on waiting on the messianic kingdom of the now. It is almost as if that Easter morning in Jerusalem was a harbinger of a resurrection I misunderstood then, and also for years after. Yes, I was fleeing the walls of the “church” and its limited teaching about time, fleeing for my life—for life, including my own. But not, as I came to think with Agamben’s help, so as to be able to enter it again, and help it learn to sojourn rather than dwell, be a tent rather than a temple. Rather, I was fleeing the walls of the “church” so as to seek new teachers of time and temporality. There, I found myself, in the garden, basking in the morning sun, feet resting on ancient stones, addressed by late spring flowers and the soil that held them. I was amid what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry celebrated as Terre des hommes: terre, “earth,” amid what his English translator rendered as “wind, sand, and stars.” I am now more drawn to the language and rhythms of wind, sand, and stars than those of messianism. These are my new teachers of time. And like Saint-Exupéry, who in addition to being a writer was also a pilot, I want to explore.

Charles M. Stang, Professor of Early Christian Thought and the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, focuses on the development of asceticism, monasticism, and mysticism in Eastern Christianity. His most recent book is Our Divine Double (Harvard University Press, 2016).