Abstract
Dark times can generate crippling despair all too easily. Resources for resistance to despair and for the discovery and articulation of hope are not always readily apparent. This essay considers Paul’s account of his own immersion in such a situation: An ‘affliction’ that left him ‘unbearably crushed’, ‘despairing of life itself’ (2 Cor 1:9), and under a ‘sentence of death’ (2 Cor 1:10). Making a speculative proposal about the nature of Paul’s experience, the essay goes on to argue that Paul identified two fundamental resources for hope. The first is a conviction about an eschatological act that undoes the sentence of death and effects the possibility of rescue or deliverance. The second is a form of human solidarity that generates potential reorientation to the reality of ‘rescue’. While the essay explores these ideas within the terms and framework of Paul’s rhetoric in 2 Corinthians, it will do so with one clear eye on the potential resources that Pauline theology offers those who live in inexplicably dark times today, not least by considering the potential resources for political optimism.
Highlights
Dark times are produced politically but experienced individually
Times is explicitly a collection of essays about ‘persons—how they lived their lives, how they moved in the world, and how they were affected by historical time.’1 as Katherine Arens makes clear, the essays in that collection address, and provide constructive proposals for, the politics of a particular historical time
By including an opening and foundational essay on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing at the start of the collection, Arendt treats someone from a different generation ‘as though he were a contemporary.’3 This is to suggest an enduring potential for dark times and resistance to them, extending through history and time, across culture, political arrangements and circumstances: ‘[d]ark times . . . are not new, they are no rarity in history’
Summary
Dark times are produced politically but experienced individually. Each portrait provides the reader with glimpses of the possibilities for hope, for ‘singing, even in dark times’, through a clear-eyed account of one person’s experience of the darkness and witness to light. In this essay I consider an even earlier autobiographical account of ‘dark times’, the product, no doubt, of a set of hard to reconstruct political and social circumstances but experienced existentially and individually as a threat to life. I attempt to convey the sense of genuine despair that such an experience can produce, and I try to identify the precise location of the possibilities for hope in dark times that are at play in the brief narrative account of the experience which is preserved for us in Corinthians 1:8–11. The person is Paul of Tarsus, apostle to pagans.
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