Welborn's Capital and Kingsnorth's Machine

I read L.L. Welborn’s Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life recently, and I was immediately struck by its stark clarity of purpose in its engagement with the modern secular philosophical renewal of interest in the apostle to the nations. Welborn commends philosophers like Giorgio Agamben (author of the remarkable The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans) for their efforts to read the Pauline text in a way that bears ethical fruit, but critiques the error they share with their exegetical counterparts: they have failed to allow St. Paul his deeply radical reorganization of life around the resurrected messiah and concomitant call to a rejection of the structures of the present evil age.

In the present evil age that messianic time would suffuse, nothing so clearly demonstrates the cowardice of the modern church and its members to grapple with this aspect of Paul as what Welborn calls “the absolute sovereignty of capital’s empty universality”.¹ Capital, the dominant force in our age, makes itself by its dominance the great adversary of the church and her messiah. Indeed, the dominant force in any age by necessity runs afoul of the totalizing quality of messianic time; in our age, capital and the messiah compete with one another for nothing less than everything.

To my mind, capital as Welborn describes it naturally undergirds what Paul Kingsnorth has lately and to great effect called “the Machine”, “a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control, and ambition”.² Submission to the Machine offers a particular class of people dominance; only it must come at the cost of all other people, every place, connection with the past, and most starkly and destructively, prayer.

One whom capital has supremely empowered has no need of others or to consult or (heaven forfend) to submit to any power beyond himself. Like the rich fool of Jesus’s parable (Luke 12:13–21), he has secured his own atomized future using the lives and labor of the instrumentalized other as collateral.

Back to Welborn, who has penned a punchy sentence to express what happens to such a man:

“The supreme danger is that the residue of the other, the neighbor upon whose alien reality my own humanity depends, may be fully metabolized by the perpetual motion of capital, which homogenizes all identities”.³

In other words, the one in whom capital has concentrated its power (a power, by the way, it does not convey but ironically exercises using the possessor as an instrument)⁴ renders the one who was once his neighbor inhuman by the reduction of his hours and his skills to mere monetary value. He surrenders that unfortunate man to the Machine that would subsume him; paradoxically, in doing such violence to his neighbor, though, he does the same to himself.