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(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
In The Time That Remains Giorgio Agamben presents a new interpretation of an old term: ... [klësis] ("vocation" or "calling"; in German, Beruf ?t Berufung).1 It is a highly charged word. Already of central importance in Paul, it becomes a prominent political concept in Martin Luther and Max Weber.2 And ... is not just any term of political theology; more than other terms, it is pregnant with the tension between two spaces (church vs. world) and temporalities (eternal vs. temporal) that have been at the crux of Christian theology since its inception. Luther ultimately reinterprets ... in the sense of a spiritualization of worldly activity, and Weber, of course, begins his history of capitalism in Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) with Luther and his ostensibly "secularized" concept of vocation. Commenting on Weber's interventions in the discussion of the relationship between profession and calling, Agamben arrives at a new determination: not only about Paul but also implicitly about the history of "secularization"3 and the relationship of theology and politics.4
In this essay I confront the interventions of Luther, Weber, and Agamben to render comprehensible their politicizations and, in the cases of Weber and Agamben, their historicizations of essential theologoumena. In this sense, the purpose of the following exposition is twofold: to present the history and (re)interpretation of the Pauline notion of ... and to deal with its political function and functionality, theological and "secularized."
While other Pauline concepts (like that of authority in Rom. 13) are not irrelevant in this context, I focus here on the history and function of the term .... I am concerned not with a broadly conceived analysis of the origin of political-theological questions but with the position of a seemingly marginal concept. To understand the ambiguity that the term already has in Paul, I begin with an analysis of its original context, on the basis of which I then situate the interventions of Luther, Weber, and Agamben.
The Corinthian Difference That Does and Does Not Make a Difference
The passage, to which Luther as well as Weber and Agamben refer, is 1 Corinthians 7:17-24. 1 quote it here in its entirety and, to...