The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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History Theology - Eschatology: Legend of the White Cowl

“When did destiny become manifest?” asks Ernest Lee Tuveson in his classic Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Midway Reprint Series).  He answers the earliest formulations of the apocalyptic American millennialism arises in the 1760s, best exemplified by the poems and sermons of Timothy Dwight.

At the end of his discussion, Tuveson (pp. 134-6) makes a revealing comparison of the American sense of destiny with the Russian legend of the white cowl. According to the legend, Constantine made and gave a white cowl to Pope Sylvester, which was passed on to the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054.  When a later Pope demanded the return of the cowl, Pope Sylvester appeared in a dream to the Patriarch and told him to send it to Novgorod, to the land that “will be called Radiant Russia, which, by the Grace of God, will be glorified with blessings” and will eventually “become more honorable than the two Romes which preceded it.”  This legend of a translatio imperii is the “cornerstone of Russian national ideology,” and Tuveson thinks it bears comparison with the notion that America is the purified version of Britain, since Britain, “although the pioneer of the Reformation, . . . failed to fulfill its task.”

Similar as the two ideologies are, they produce very different nationalisms and national missions:

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Philosophy Theology - Eschatology: Kantian eschatology

One reads Bultmann on eschatology and thinks, How Kantian!

Then one thinks: Or is it the other way round?  Is Bultmann a Kantianization of Christian eschatology, or is Kant a philosophical riff on Lutheran or Pietist eschatology?

One reads Bultmann on history and eschatology and hears Derrida whispering in the background.

Then one thinks: Or is it the other way round?  Is deconstruction just an heretical eschatology?

Theology - Eschatology: Beginnings and ends

Maximus the Confessor (Ambiguum 7) understands very clearly that the difference between Greek (or Origenist) and Christian thought is the difference between beginnings and ends, between a protologically-weighted ontology and an eschatologically-weighted one.  He defends a “participation in a goodness that is yet to come” and refutes “one that existed once and was corrupted.”

He doesn’t think an original “henad” is possible or rational.  If beings originally were at rest in God, or in Being, they have nothing to move them.  Movement is driven by desire, desire by what is desirable, and things come to rest only when they have reached the destination toward which desire moves them, that is, only when they have reached the ultimately desirable.  As he says, “If God can be abandoned once for the sake of experiencing something different, then there is nothing to prevent this from happening again and again.”

If the rational intellects clung to God at the beginning and then left, that implies that God is not the beautiful.  His argument is:

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Theology - Eschatology Theology - Trinity: Pomo Cappadocians

Anatolios is careful not to claim that Nyssa is “fashionably postmodern,” but by characterizing Eunomius’s viewpoint as “logocentric” he acknowledges some “irresistible, if fragmentary parallels” between Nyssa and postmodern sensibilities about the signifying of signs.

For Eunomius, the signifier “Unbegotten” “really makes present the divine essence.”  Gregory responds by denying that we can gain “such a simple, commanding grasp of an essence,” whether we are seeking to know God or other people or ourselves: “the act of knowing is not an act of comprehension in the sense of enclosing a reality with teh pwoers of the mind.”

In place of Zeno’s notion that comprehension is “a hand closed tightly over an object that it grasps,” Gregory proposes more mobile, temoporal, dynamic: “knowing for Gregory is more dynamically conceived as ‘approaching’ or ‘traveling’ in the path projected by the object of knowledge. . . . Gregory’s crucial metaphor for knowing is ‘journey.’” Abraham is the model knower, whose quest leads him “upward from sensible things to the divine infinity.”

I don’t like the “upward mobility” image, but the notion of knowledge as a journey is exactly right, especially insofar as it privileges the knowledge that comes at the destination, i.e., insofar as it is an eschatological epistemology.  (Like – I can’t help saying – Derrida’s!)

Politics Theology - Christology Theology - Eschatology: Politics of Advent

My musings on the political import of Advent at the First Things site this morning: http://www.firstthings.com/

Theology - Christology Theology - Eschatology: Jenson on Apocalytic

Wow.  Robert Jenson knows how to write a review.  In the latest Pro Ecclesia, he presents his “three complaints” against Nathan Kerr’s Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Theopolitical Visions), which he describes as “important,” “rich” and “profound.”  His first complaint is stylistic: “If there is a way to lay out a sentence so as to hide its import, [Kerr] often finds it.”  Ouch, and wow again.

Kerr’s book takes aim at historicism, not only because it cannot account for itself (any teleology that gives meaning to history as a whole “has to be imported . . . from some ahistorical grasp of truth or purpose,” as Jenson puts it) but also because it robs Christ’s advent of its “sheer eruptive contingency” that “without mediation crosses the run of events and reconfigures history just thereby” (Jenson’s summary again).

Kerr tests Barth, Hauerwas, and Yoder, and finds all insufficiently apocalyptic.  Jenson again: “To satisfy Kerr, the ‘singular’ event of the life of Jesus must be able to reconfigure history independently also of any fixed set of churchly practices.”  It’s not enough to make the story of Jesus and the church the master story, as Hauerwas does; Jesus destabilizes and interrupted all fixity even in the church’s history.  Kerr’s church “exists only as ‘mission,’ that is, as sheer encounter between the powers that now rule ‘real history’ and Christians’ destabilizing ‘doxology’ of Christ’s ever-intrusive advent.”

Which brings up Jenson’s other two complaints.

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Politics Theology - Eschatology: Radical Augustine

RA Markus points out in his classic study Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine that in Augustine’s view “what prevented the Christian from being at home in his world was not that he had an alternative home in the Church, but his faith in the transformation of the world through Christ’s victory over sin and death and his hope in the final sharing of this victory in his kingdom.”  The church is not a counter-polis, but a people with a counter-hope.  This makes the church radically open; the Christian’s sense of identity and difference from the world does not depend on erecting impenetrable boundaries between church and world.

At the same time, “It should be clear . . . that ‘political Augustinianism’ is, of its nature, politically radical.  It is bound to be unremittingly critical of all and any human arrangements, any actual and even any imaginable forms of social order.  Seen in eschatological perspective, there can be no existing or possible society in which there is nothing to criticise,” including, of course, the church.

Theology - Eschatology: Whose Temple?

In his contribution to In the Shadow of Empire: Reclaiming the Bible as a History of Faithful Resistance, Richard Horsley notes that “the temple-state had been set up in Jerusalem in the sixth century by the Persian imperial regime,” and that through the Roman period the Jerusalem temple-state was “a key institution in the imperial order.”  That certainly has some historical basis: Herod, who built or refurbished the temple, was a Roman client, and the Romans had plenty of allies among the priestly elites.  Horsley takes this to mean that Jesus’ demonstration in the temple was not just an pre-enactment of the coming judgment on the Jews but a “challenge to the Roman imperial order.”

This helps to cut through the Jerusalem v. Rome debate about the Olivet Discourse and the book of Revelation, especially when it is placed next to James Jordan’s arguments concerning the imperial oikoumene set up in the exilic and post-exilic periods.  Horsley’s suggestion gives historical grounding to the suggestion that what happens in AD 70 is not merely the destruction of the temple but the end of the entire Israel-among-the-nations structure that began with Babylon.  Because the temple is not only the key symbol of Judaism, but the key symbol of Judaism’s alliance with Rome, its destruction is the epicenter of the earthquake that shakes down the post-exilic world.

Theology - Creation Theology - Eschatology: Nature/Supernature

Verhey has a nice discussion of the nature/supernatural distinction that locates the difference in eschatology.  He points out, for starters, that “the regularities of the world we name as ‘natural laws” are not regularities of a self-contained machine but rather then ways God ordinarily works.  As God acted freely and purposefully in creating the world, bringing things into existence and endowing them with causal powers of their own, so God acts freely and purposefully in sustaining the creation, sustaining things and their powers of causation, concurring in their existence and in the exercise of their own powers, their fertile free otherness.”  Nicely said.

He also notes the differences that have arisen over the centuries in the understanding of the nature/supernatural distinction.

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Theology - Christology Theology - Eschatology: Ascension where?

Douglas Farrow is making a career out of the ascension.  Not a bad thing to make a career of.  In his freshly published sequel to Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology, entitled simply Ascension Theology, Farrow defends the bodily ascension of the Risen Jesus of Nazareth as an essential doctrine of orthodoxy, against both ancient (Origen) and modern (Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel) doubters.

Along the way, Farrow insists that, if the ascension is bodily, and if Jesus ascends with all His creaturehood intact, then the ascension must be to a place: “It in the resurrection Jesus is already transfigured and transformed . . . in the ascension he is also translated or relocated.  That is, he is taken up and placed by God he properly belongs, just as God once took Adam and put him in Eden.”  But where is said place?  The answer must be “stubbornly independent of any merely natural cosmology or anthropology,” but must just as stubbornly resist the Origenist temptation to mentalize and psychologize.

Where then?  Farrow suggests that eschatology answers: “the entry of which we are speaking does not entail admission to an already existing place but the creation of a new one.  . . . it entails the creation of a new time and place and mode of life, and that not ex nihilo . . . but ex vetere.”  It is “not somewhere in this world” nor “an ‘outside’ to which one escapes.”  Rather, “it exists by virtue of the transformation of reconstitution of this world in the Spirit.”  This “time and place which Jesus occupies are those in which, and by way of which, God’s sovereign act of recreation is extended through him to all times and places.”

Theology - Eschatology: What we shall be

Existence precedes essence: the Philosophy 101 slogan of existentialists.

Protests from traditional philosophers: No, essence precedes existence.

Creationists say both and neither.

Essence precedes existence: God decreed what or who everything is before it is.  Justification confers a status/essence, and is a pledge of what we will become.

Yet, existence precedes essence: We are becoming what we are.

We are what we are in God; our “essence” is in Him, and in Him we exist and move and have being.

And He is Alpha and Omega.

Politics Theology - Eschatology: Hopeful politics

John Milbank ends his stimulating and confounding opening essay in Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology with this: “any hopeful political project requires a sense that we inhabit a cosmos in which the realization of good and of justice might be at least a possibility.  But that means, first of all, that we must consider the good to be more than a human illusion but rather in some sense an ultimate reality, ontologically subsisting before evil, both human and natural, including the natural negativities of death and suffering. It means also that we must believe, beyond gnosticism, that the good is in some measure able to be embodied within human time, and this means that human life must somehow bear within its biological spark (which itself must logically be prior to death, which is sheer negation) also a pneumatological spark that links it to undying goodness and justice and that enables it in the end entirely to root out those base passions ‘of the flesh’ (according to Paul) that are concerned only with survival self-satisfaction, erotic possession of, and military triumph over, others.”

That is: There is no hopeful politics without God, without the soul, without resurrection.  Which is to say: No hopeful politics without Christ.

Theology - Eschatology: Already

If hope is directed to things that we don’t yet see or possess (and it necessarily is, Hebrews 11), how can what we also already possess what we hope for?

There are a number of ways to answer that question, but Segundo Galilea puts it nicely in his Spirituality of Hope: “The project of this hope into the present generates confidence in God.  The theological tradition called it confidence in the providence of God: God will provide us in the present with everything we need to reach the future promise. . . . The future promise is inseparable from the earthly path toward it.  Hope is loved as a waiting for what has not yet arrived, and as confidence that God gives us every day everything necessary for the wait, in such a way that the wait is anticipated step by step.”

Theology - Eschatology: Learning to Read

Frank Smith (Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms) says that authors teach children to read: “Not just any authors, but the authors of the stories that children love to read, that children often know by heart before they begin to read the story.  This prior knowledge or strong expectation of how the story will develop is the key to learning to read.”

So, begin with eschatology.

Theology - Eschatology: Eschatology to protology

John Paul II points out that Jesus encourages us to penetrate past the boundary of the fall to the state of innocence: In the beginning it was not so.  How can we do this?

John Paul II suggests that the “redemption of the body” gives us this access.  If it were not for the redemption of the body, we’d be hopelessly caught in the historical state of humanity in sin, incapable of reclaiming innocence.

Eschatology offers access to protology.

Theology - Eschatology: Future

Robert Jenson writes, “In that an eternity is always some union of past and future, every possible eternity will be of one of two broad kinds:  a Persistence of the Beginning, or an Anticipation of the End.  Moreover, essential time is future time.  It is because we face a future that we experience ourselves as temporal beings; if there were only the past, which remains forever as it is, we would be timeless.  The eternity in which all persists as it was is therefore the cancellation of time; the eternity in which all is open to transformation is the success of time itself.”

The new heavens and new earth are the latter kind of future, an openness to transformation without end.

Theology - Eschatology: The Long View

I am a postmillennial, and postmils like to speculate about the long view.  What is the church and world going to be like after another several millennia of evangelism, baptism, teaching, discipline, Eucharistic merriment?  My answers to that tend to be:

1) The state of things, over time and in time, will be recognizably as the prophets predict: Zion will be raised as the chief of the mountains, nations will beat tanks into tractors, chemical weapons into fertilizers (napalm – a sign of millennial bliss?), peoples from the four corners will be eager to hear the instruction of Jesus, and will live by it.

Yet, some qualifications are in order, so my other answers to the question, “what will the church and world look like in a thousand years?” are

2) Who knows? We can’t determine this with the infantile categories we’ve got now.  We’re only beginning to understand Scripture, or the world.

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Theology - Eschatology: Intrinsicism to Extrinicism

In a couple earlier posts, I’ve commented on the “intrinsicism” in Athanasius.  One additional point: Rather than seeing intrinstic/extrinsic as metaphysical opposites, Athanasius’ sees the question in a redemptive-historical, eschatological framework.  Extrinsicism is the order of the old, intrinsicism, because of the incarnation, is the order of the new.

That seems to work: Under the old, God was veiled, “incarnate” in a temple; He wrote on objectified tablets of stone.  In the new, He comes to look us in the face, incarnate in flesh, and writes on tablets of the human heart with the ink of the Spirit.

What happens to the order of sacraments in that case?  One might rush on to pietist inwardism.  That would be a mistake: The Son comes in the flesh; intrinsicism is not an evacuation of flesh, but a transformation of flesh from the inside.  Augustine was right.  The new sacraments are fewer and simpler, also more efficacious.

Theology - Eschatology: Origin and destiny

It’s common sense that origin determines destiny.  That which is born of flesh is flesh, and remains so; that which is born of earth returns to the earth.

This is the common sense that the gospel subverts.  Men originated from earth are remade after the image of the heavenly man; flesh dies and rises as Spirit.  Or, what is equally astonishing: We are given a second origin, a new birth from God.

Which means: The gospel subverts any social order founded on the privilege and primacy of the well-born, any rigidly hereditary economic system that locks people in the caste in which they began.

In the gospel, the cliche is literally true: The sky’s the limit.

Theology - Eschatology: Judaizing

Athanasius regularly compares the Arians to Jews and Judaizers.  This is not merely name-calling.  The obvious comparison is that both Jews and Arians deny that Jesus is the eternal Son.

But something more subtle is going on here too, perhaps: If the Son is not eternal and equal to the Father, then the incarnation was no real incarnation, no real appearance of God.  If that’s true, then God has not appeared, not made Himself tangible and visible in the world.  And if that’s true, what exactly is the difference between Israel and the church, old and new?

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