So, taking our cue from those two surveys, we will address these two questions, with an emphasis on the second—that is, on the theological significance ascribed to apocalyptic. Conceding that this is something of a simplification, and in recognition of the adjectival quality of “apocalyptic,” we will group the theological proposals under four headings: apocalyptic eschatology, apocalyptic cosmology, apocalyptic soteriology, and apocalyptic epistemology.[7]
In each case, after outlining the various theological proposals under the heading, we will reflect on the historical and literary question, asking to what extent the apocalyptic reading of Paul relies upon reading the apocalypses. In relation to both questions, we have been offered a binary analysis (apocalyptic studied as genre/theological concept; Apocalyptic A/Apocalyptic B), but in both cases, we will find that a more complex picture emerges.
Apocalyptic Eschatology
Admittedly, not much clarity is achieved by attaching an ambiguous adjective to a disputed noun, but here, our focus falls on how apocalyptic relates to time and history.
On the one hand, apocalyptic has been used to assert the futurity of God’s redemptive action. In this sense, Beker sets apocalyptic in polemical contrast to eschatology, concerned that the latter term has become “multivalent and chaotic” in the hands of modern theologians. More specifically, he is troubled by neo-orthodoxy (which has “collapsed eschatology into Christology”), C. H. Dodd’s realized eschatology, and Bultmann’s existentialism. Against this, Beker asserts “apocalyptic”: “Paul’s gospel is formulated within the basic components of apocalyptic. To be sure, Jewish apocalyptic undergoes a profound modification in Paul, but this does not affect the intensity of its expectation.”[8] Those modifications involve the relative absence of literary motifs common in apocalypses and the softening of apocalyptic’s historical dualism,[9] but for Beker, because the intense expectation remains, Paul’s apocalyptic credentials are in order. In this respect, and self-consciously so, Beker follows Käsemann, who expressed similar misgivings about the multivalency of “eschatology” and hoped his use of the term apocalyptic “to denote the expectation of an imminent Parousia” would introduce clarity—not least to his dispute with Bultmann.[10]
On the other hand, there are those for whom apocalyptic eschatology looks back rather than forward. Martyn, for example, notes Käsemann and Beker’s interest in the future and their consequent difficulty with Galatians, and so proposes to “begin with a certain amount of ignorance as to the definition of apocalyptic,” preferring to allow Galatians to offer one.[11] What emerges for Martyn is an emphasis on the coming of Christ as “the cosmic apocalyptic event. There was a ‘before,’ and there is now an ‘after.’”[12] We will have more to say about the significance of that event for Martyn later. Already, though, we can see that Congdon’s bifurcation of apocalyptic readings holds where this temporal aspect is in view. When using the term apocalyptic in relation to time, Käsemann and Beker think of the future; Martyn, like Bultmann and Barth, looks back.
In addition to the basic tense of apocalyptic (past, not future), we should note that, for Martyn, it is also a disruptive, punctiliar event. He shares with Käsemann (already the binary typologies are breaking down!) a deep suspicion of salvation-history, although he expresses himself more strongly: Galatians, for example, “can be read as revealing a conscious avoidance of—if not an attack on—the continuum of salvation history.”[13] Indeed, an interest in salvation history is characteristic of Paul’s opponents.[14]
As for the relation between these theological assertions and the apocalypses, we can note, first, that Beker’s direct engagement with apocalyptic literature is scant, relying instead on the analyses of Koch and Vielhauer.[15] In response to criticism on that score, he believes those objections “could have been muted if I had frankly emphasized the polemical thrust of my usage as directed to the systematic theologians of our time.”[16] That he can rely on Koch and Vielhauer for summaries of apocalyptic thought—which Beker further distils down to “(1) historical dualism; (2) universal cosmic expectation; and (3) the imminent end of the world”[17]—shows that even some of those whom Sturm lists as focusing on apocalyptic as a genre attempt to derive theological positions from literary forms. Of those who have, eschatology has long been considered integral to the theological vision, in part because apocalyptic was regularly thought to derive from prophecy and to be distinguished from it by an alternative and more pessimistic or radical eschatology.[18]
Like Beker, Martyn makes little appeal to the apocalypses themselves, but, in part, this is because the view that apocalypses are fundamentally eschatological in character and hold to a radical doctrine of the two ages is such a commonplace one. With reference to the latter, we have already seen that Beker argues the division of the two ages is not as sharp in Paul as in the apocalypses, softened from both sides by a sense of God’s fulfillment of ancient promises, on the one hand, and the inauguration of the eschatological age, on the other. Martyn will not allow at least the first of those in Paul, but both are agreed that the Jewish parallels exhibit a strong division of the ages. This is another point, however, where there is some noteworthy dissent: it might first be asked whether the two-age scheme is not a basic Jewish conviction rather than a distinctive of apocalyptic literature. Furthermore, some have questioned how sharply Jewish apocalyptic itself divides the ages, given its well-documented interest in historical sequences, and even some parallels to Paul’s overlapping now and not-yet tension.[19]
Apocalyptic Cosmology
At least in the case of Käsemann, apocalyptic is theologically bi-vocational. It restrains an overly-inaugurated eschatology, but it also denies an overly-individualized soteriology, moving the locus of God’s action away from the existential encounter of the individual to the cosmic battleground between the Creator and his creatures.[20] It is thus both “Nein” and “not yet.” The effect is to insist that salvation is played out on a larger stage. The apocalyptic question is, “To whom does the world belong?,”[21] and God’s righteousness relates to the reassertion of his creative rights. In Käsemann, a secondary effect is to place more actors upon this stage. Humanity’s life “is from the beginning a stake in the confrontation between God and the principalities of this world.”[22] This thought is left rather vague, however; the powers chiefly become a way of expressing the reality of evil at a supra-individual level, which is an understandable impulse, given his context. More fundamentally, for Käsemann, as for Bultmann, the drama revolves around the contest between God and his creatures: “The Judge always comes upon the scene in conflict with human illusion. Illusion is any state which attacks the lordship of the Creator by forgetting one’s creatureliness.”[23]
This is worth highlighting because many other apocalyptic readings of Paul make this expanded cosmological cast central to apocalyptic. Prior to Käsemann, Schweitzer had relished announcing that “the natural world is, in the eschatological view, characterised not only by its transience, but by the fact that demons and angels exercise power in it.”[24] And Wrede had argued similarly before him, discussing the human plight with reference to “dark and evil powers. The chief of these are the ‘flesh,’ sin, the Law, and death,” but in addition, “the picture is supplemented by a view taken from a particular standpoint. Paul believes that mankind is under the sway of mighty spirits, demons, and angelic powers.”[25]
Beyond Käsemann, Beker takes up this theme: sin and death, along with divine wrath and the law, are “ontological powers” and “major apocalyptic forces.”[26] For Martyn, the distinctive contrast between Paul and his opponents is that where they perceive a two-actor drama (God and human beings), Paul discerns three actors (God, human beings, and “supra-human powers other than God”), and this discernment constitutes Paul’s apocalyptic insight.[27] More generally, Martyn argues that “Paul’s view of wrong and right is thoroughly apocalyptic, in the sense that on the landscape of wrong and right there are, in addition to God and human beings,
powerful actors that stand opposed to God and that enslave human beings.”[28] We could go on, but in all likelihood, the centrality of cosmological powers to the apocalyptic readings is sufficiently well-known that we need not. Perhaps more helpful is to highlight a number of issues to which it is worth being alert. First, despite some appeal back to Wrede and Schweitzer, the demonological element has largely fallen away from these contemporary readings.[29] Second, it is frequently stated that the powers of sin, death, the law, and the flesh are “ontological powers,” “quasi-beings,” “ontological metaphors”—in some way, more-than-personifications. It is not always clear what that means. There is greater clarity, however, concerning their usefulness within Paul’s theology conceived apocalyptically.
For example, in de Boer’s view, Paul is engaged in a polemical mythologizing program, opposing a more optimistic account of anthropology and moral agency: “Paul’s cosmological appraisal of death, and sin, functions to exclude the Law’s observance as the source of justification, righteousness, or eternal life.”[30] Likewise, for Beverley Gaventa, these dramatis personae are “attempts to convey what Paul sees as the deep captivity of human beings, their inability to free themselves.”[31] Thus, it appears that the apocalyptic reading is substantially a statement about moral agency, and this will be borne out when we outline what we will call apocalyptic soteriology.
Before we turn to that, however, we ought to note that on this point, there is far greater concern to engage with the apocalypses. In several studies, de Boer seeks to distinguish two streams of Jewish apocalyptic (another binary analysis!), namely, forensic Jewish apocalyptic eschatology (FJAE) and cosmological Jewish apocalyptic eschatology (CJAE).[32] In FJAE, characterized by 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra, the human plight is traced back to Adam and Eve, but the Torah is an adequate tool by which to subdue sin and inherit life in the age to come, whereas CJAE, found in “relatively pure form” in “The Book of the Watchers” (1 Enoch 1–36),[33] emphasizes human captivity to powers that requires divine intervention. For de Boer, Paul combines the perspectives, but is fundamentally attempting to help his churches identify with CJAE. When Martyn takes up de Boer’s typology, however, he radicalizes it a little further—Paul is purely an exponent of CJAE, while his opponents belong to FJAE with their belief that “by one’s own decision,” one can receive salvation.[34]
Two results of de Boer’s work are worth noting at this stage. First, in the eyes of several apocalyptic readers of Paul, he has offered an adequate response to accusations that “apocalyptic” has drifted too far away from the genre whose name it bears.[35] Second, the question of soteriological and moral agency is brought to the fore.
Apocalyptic Soteriology
We begin by picking up a quotation from Martyn:
Since humans are fundamentally slaves, the drama in which wrong is set right does not begin with action on their part. It begins with God’s militant action against all the powers that hold human beings in bondage. Thus, that action of God, instead of consisting at its center of a call for the slaves to repent and seek forgiveness, proves to be the deed by which God frees human beings.[36]
Several themes emerge here. To continue with the question of agency first, Martyn is clear that Paul’s account of the human situation demands that God makes the first move. Salvation is unconditional and this too can be identified as the heart of apocalyptic, as Douglas Campbell proposes: “the term ‘apocalyptic’ emphasizes the dramatic, reconstitutive and fundamentally unconditional nature of the acts of which these narratives speak.”[37] In addition, we might add, as Campbell often does, apocalyptic comes to imply a participatory aspect to those acts of salvation. Indeed, his preferred alternate terminology to “apocalyptic” is pneumatologically participatory martyrological eschatology (PPME). While the adjectives proliferate, this is useful in that it signals the way Campbell has positioned “apocalyptic” within the interpretive tradition that descends from Deissmann and Schweitzer, via Sanders’s “participatory eschatology.”[38] He has also thereby positioned it over against “justification by faith,” traditionally understood.
Third, and relatedly, there is, in Martyn’s expression, an orientation away from categories of repentance and forgiveness toward the language of liberation, and this is a key feature of apocalyptic soteriology. To the mind of many apocalyptic interpreters, any forensic understanding of salvation implies a conditional soteriology— an impossibility, once the apocalyptic depth of the human plight has been grasped. It also wrongly implies a soteriological system in which God’s hostility must be overcome, rather than one in which God benevolently makes the first move. Wrede expresses the preferred thought well: “God does not appear before man as judge at all, he shows himself rather as giver.”[39]
In all this, it is striking how many other theological concepts (Christus Victor, “interchange,” “participation,” etc.) are interwoven into the apocalyptic reading of Paul, and sometimes, baptized in its name. Whereas, in reference to our first two headings, the apocalyptic reading sets itself against salvation-historical enthusiasts and distinguishes itself by an interest in cosmological forces; on this question of soteriology, it often makes common cause against a Lutheran reading.[40]
In relation to the apocalypses, the main proposal is that Paul is adopting and adapting the motif of cosmic conflict that is found in those texts—a proposal that meets with widespread approval. N. T. Wright, for example, thinks that if a reference to a cosmic struggle with powers and principalities is how we define apocalyptic, then “Paul would be, in this sense, an irreducibly ‘apocalyptic’ figure.”[41]
However, things are not quite so simple, given the way apocalyptic readers of Paul deploy the language of cosmic warfare and redefine those powers and principalities in such diverse ways. For example, the military character of God’s intervention was there in Käsemann, and he is credited for recovering the motif by Martyn.[42] However, the theme is less prominent than many suppose, and in Käsemann’s analysis, God is principally taking action against creaturely pretension, as we have seen. This is loosely connected to the apocalypses (remember: at least one of his apocalyptic questions treats the earth as a contested battle ground), but he makes little reference to the literary background. For de Boer, we recall, the solution to humanity’s plight found in CJAE is the divine invasion to rout the hostile powers that hold humanity captive. Since Paul has, in some sense, relocated the plight away from demonic powers toward the forces of sin and death, they become the focus of God’s intervention. The result for de Boer is that participation with Christ is the daughter of apocalyptic: “Crucifixion of the old Adam with Christ constitutes Paul’s soteriological adaptation and application of the cosmological-apocalyptic motif of God’s eschato-logical destruction of the cosmic powers that have come to reign over the world.”[43] Martyn also makes much of warfare language, but largely to emphasize a disjunctive note (God invades from outside), which Wright, for one, would not countenance calling “apocalyptic.”[44] The result is that one must ask what is the reality expressed in military metaphor before one can begin to decide whether Jewish apocalypses might lend their support.
Apocalyptic Epistemology
In the previous section, I argued that apocalyptic soteriology (despite some of these metaphorical flourishes) often boils down to a participatory account of Paul’s gospel that is more widely subscribed to. With the question of apocalyptic epistemology, however, we return to a clearly distinctive element, and one that is prominent in the work of Martyn and Campbell, especially. Indeed, this also can be treated as the kernel of the apocalyptic reading. Campbell again: “I would argue for an apocalyptic account of Paul’s theology, defining that descriptor suitably (i.e., with fairly strict reference to the theological epistemology enunciated in relation to Paul by Martyn).”[45] What is common to both is the view that Christology is crucial for epistemology; this is exegetically grounded in 2 Cor. 5:16 and theologically required by the apocalyptic account of the human plight—the ensla
vement to powers precludes the possibility of rational thought or true perception.[46] This basic assumption is then developed in distinct ways that merit separate comment.
For Martyn, the epistemological reliance of Christology serves, in part, to underscore the point about agency. Epistemological and moral faculties are incapacitated outside the sphere of Christ and the Spirit, but with their arrival, the Christian community is newly addressable and reconstituted as a moral agent.[47]
Beyond that, Martyn’s epistemology focuses more upon what the Christ event reveals. For Martyn, the human plight centers on the construction of an enslaving religious cosmos, the key moment for which is the arrival of the Sinaitic Law, introducing a “Law/Not Law” distinction and dividing the sacred from the profane: “the binary religious categorization of human beings is the fundamental identity of the curse pronounced by the Law.”[48] The result is both social division and religious delusion—the “thought that, provided with a good religious foundation for a good religious ladder, the human being can ascend from the wrong to the right.”[49] For Paul, salvation comes definitively from the other direction—it is God’s invasive movement into the world and its unconditional character that shatters the religious cosmos, declaring its old antinomies defunct. Thus, “crucifixion with Christ means the death of the cosmos of religion, the cosmos in which all human beings live.”[50] Likewise, Christian baptism signifies “the loss of the world of religious differentiation, the world, that is, that had as one of its fundamental elements the antimony of the Law/the Not-Law.”[51] Accordingly, salvation is accomplished less by participation in the death and resurrection of Christ, and more in the event of being confronted with the message of the cross, which generates an “epistemological crisis.”[52]
Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination Page 4