Why must the decisive event of history — the passion of Christ and the redemption of humanity — take the form of a trial? Why must Jesus deal with the law and contend with Pilate — the vicar of Caesar — in a struggle that he ultimately does not seem to bring to a conclusion? (57)

The problem of being able to make decisions without an eschaton is Modernity’s permanent state of crisis without the prospect of a resolution. Without the galvanizing Day of Judgement, how is a society able to do anything other than fall into an incessant indecisiveness that must “keep on deciding” without criteria for deciding?

Agamben’s critique of Modernity’s permanent state of crisis draws attention to our underlying assumptions about time. It is a failure of an institutional Christianity that has managed to untether itself from its origins in an apocalyptic eschatology. Without human salvation as an organizing force for social decision making, we are left with the “insolubility implicit in the collision between two worlds, between Jesus and Pilate.” This insolubility is embedded in “two key ideas of modernity: that history is a ‘process’ or ‘trial’ [processo] and that this process or trial, insofar as it does not conclude in a judgment, is in a state of permanent crisis” (57).

Without the sense of an eschaton, judicial reasoning takes center stage as its own end. All that our judicial system can do is drive itself toward judgments, but those judgments are completely based on procedural demands that have nothing but decisions as their own goal. There is no other goal than to make a decision because there is no outside, no eternal values, that would orient the act of judgment. Agamben captures this conundrum in the figure of Pilate who is indecisive but must decide. Yet his decision does not take the form of a judgment. Agamben stresses this at length: “The judgment at which Pilate officiates [celebra] is not, however, properly a judgment” (31). The trial of Jesus renders no judgment, no pronouncement of guilt. It only concludes as a “handing over” to the Sanhedrin. The confrontation of the eternal (salvation and redemption) with the historical (law and time) cannot be reconciled in the trial of Jesus that is not actually a trial. It follows no discernible order of Roman law.

We see in this work Agamben’s predilection for undecidable temporalities. Agamben is relentless in holding to temporality as his mode of analysis. Therefore, when he writes “For this reason his [Jesus’] testimony is paradoxical: he must testify in this world that his kingdom is not from this world — not that he is here a simple human being but elsewhere is a God,” he is drawing attention to how time is always out of joint, mixed, and undecidable. To contrast in with here and elsewhere is to seek to avoid hard oppositions that would pit one mode of being against another. Rather, he wants to emphasize paradoxes that have their own temporalities rather than emphasizing collisions between wholly different ways of living. In this sense, he sees Pilate as simultaneously a “Historical character and theological persona”:

juridical trial and eschatological crisis coincide without remainder and only in this coincidence, only in their “falling together” do they find their truth. (35)

The challenge is to reintroduce an apocalyptic eschaton — and end of time for humanity — that allows the orientation of the law and religion to salvation. As humanity stares in the face of an overheating planet and other seemingly intractable crises, finding some way for this “falling together” that is the undecidable decisive truth of human destiny is imperative. “The trial of Jesus is thus not a trial but something that remains for us to define for which it is likely that we will not manage to find a name” (49).