For Campbell, the significance of apocalyptic (=Christocentric) epistemology lies chiefly in its methodological implications. This is revealed in the morphing acronym, which represents the view that Paul (and Campbell) opposes. In The Quest for Paul’s Gospel, the target was JF, “Justification by Faith”; that became JT, “Justification Theory,” in The Deliverance of God in order to allow for an apocalyptic re-reading of the phrase δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ and to focus energies on a contractual theory that misread Paul. This remains a burden of his work, but the latest acronym, FT,[53] has clarified the central target: Forward Theory, that is, a prospective, foundationalist, plight-to-solution hermeneutic rather than a retrospective and Christocentric approach.
Campbell also adapts Martyn’s insight to begin speaking of apocalyptic politics. Here, the nature of God’s intervention in Christ—liberative, unconditional, non-retributive—proves generative, as does the thought that God has subverted and turned upside down the world’s cherished values and institutions. Which is to say, a Lutheran insight, of all things, seems to be making a comeback— namely, the theologia crucis.[54]
On that bombshell, we conclude the survey of the theological emphases that trade under the name “apocalyptic.” There is the undeniable feeling, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase, of “the drunkenness of things being various,” but I hope the above will facilitate a more nuanced and sober engagement with this multifaceted tradition.
It only remains to note that on this last point of apocalyptic epistemology, it might appear as though the apocalyptic reading of Paul has finally come home to the apocalyptic genre, given the fact that revelation has often been thought central to the latter. Indeed, this is Sturm’s proposal for bringing together the literary and theological strands of research, for he sees a rapprochement brewing in Christopher Rowland’s emphasis on the disclosure of secrets as a central motif in the apocalypses, on the one hand, and Martyn’s emphasis on epistemology, on the other. Might it be as simple as noting that apokalypsis means “revelation”?
Well, it is certainly true that Rowland has been influential, drawing attention to the motif of the revelation of mysteries.[55] And it is certainly a feature of the works of Martyn and de Boer that they draw attention to the use of ἀποκαλύπτω and its cognates in Galatians.[56] However, things are once again more complicated than they appear, and for a number of reasons. First, the extent to which the apocalypses can be held together around the theme of revelation is disputed. Collins, for example, grants that Rowland has brought a helpful corrective, but warns against essentialist definitions that focus on revelation or that exclude eschatology.[57]
Second, the closer one stays with the trope of the revealing of heavenly realities by angelic beings, the further one moves away from the usual Pauline apocalyptic texts (Galatians, Romans 5–8). For example, although Rowland makes reference to Gal. 1:12 and 1:16, the bulk of his discussion is taken up with 2 Cor. 12:2–4 and references to revealed mysteries (i.e., the use of μυστήριον language).[58] If, alternatively, one concentrates on Paul’s language of revelation more generally, then the connection to the apocalyptic genre becomes more tenuous,[59] and texts such as Rom. 1:17–18 will loom larger than they usually do in apocalyptic accounts of Paul.[60]
Third, it is worth being aware that the language of revelation/apokalypsis is pressed into the service of very diverse readings of Paul. Wright, for example, expounds Rom. 1:17 in an attempt to defuse the antithesis between salvation-historical and apocalyptic readings of Paul, detecting a reference to the covenant faithfulness of God revealed and fulfilled in unexpected ways.[61] By contrast, both Martyn and de Boer interpret Paul’s use of apokalypsis language to speak of something more than a revelation of unseen realities and emphasize it to sharpen the apocalyptic edge. In Martyn’s view, the term “emphasizes once again that God’s good news is fundamentally apocalyptic in the sense of being the event of God’s stepping powerfully on the scene from beyond.”[62] De Boer’s survey of apokalypsis language in Paul notes that it can refer to the Parousia and to “the disclosure of divine mysteries through the Spirit,” but it also functions “as a reference to God’s cataclysmic invasion of the world in Christ.”[63] It seems, then, that the use of these terms in Paul is most often seized upon, not as opportunity to draw nearer to the apocalypses, but rather, to shore up a theological reading of Paul.
Indeed, in closing, there is decreasing interest in using the term “apocalyptic” to make any historical or literary claim; instead, it is being used to signal an autobiographical or theological lineage. For example, though she once expressed concern that the term “obscures at least as much as it clarifies” when applied to historical matters,[64] Beverley Gaventa now sees it as a matter of necessity to use it, but simply as a point of intellectual honesty, signaling a debt to Käsemann, Beker, and Martyn.[65] Campbell goes further, arguing that “the only use I can see for such a phrase is to communicate ‘in-house’ information within Pauline debates quickly—where one stands roughly in interpretive terms, and who one reads (and the use of the word ‘apocalyptic’ usually denotes a strong link with either Käsemann or Martyn).”[66] If this chapter has done its work, then perhaps we wonder how quickly and effectively that information is communicated, given the great many theological concepts in play; but perhaps at least the apocalyptic landscape seems a little less chaotic now.
* * *
For examples of the former, see e.g., Walter Lowe, “Why We Need Apocalyptic,” SJT 63, no. 1 (2010): 41–53; Philip G. Ziegler, “Eschatological Dogmatics—To What End?,” in Eschatologie/Eschatology: The Sixth Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium: Eschatology in Old Testament, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, eds. H.-J Eckstein, C. Landmesser, and H. Lichtenberger (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 348–59; Theodore W. Jennings Jr., “Apocalyptic and Contemporary Theology,” Quarterly Review 4, no. 3 (1984): 54–68. For an example of the latter, see esp. Thomas Francis Glasson, “What Is Apocalyptic?,” NTS 27, no. 1 (1980): 98–105, for whom apocalyptic “is a useless word which no one can define and which produces nothing but confusion and acres of verbiage” (105). In his review of Martyn’s Galatians commentary, Graham Stanton calls for a moratorium on the use of the term “apocalyptic,” bemoaning that it is “sprinkled like confetti over nearly every page” (“Review of Galatians by J. Louis Martyn,” JTS 51, no. 1 [2000]: 264–70, at 268). See also, at greater length but with equal exasperation, R. Barry Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul: Paul’s Interpreters and the Rhetoric of Criticism, JSNTSup 127 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1996). ↵
Richard E. Sturm, “Defining the Word ‘Apocalyptic’: A Problem for Biblical Criticism,” in Apocalyptic and the New Testament : Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, eds. Joel Marcus and Marian L. Soards, JSNTSup 24 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1989), 17–48. ↵
Ibid., 37. Matlock rightly wonders whether Sturm is less interested in defining apocalyptic than he is in attaching it to Paul. At least at this stage in the argument, Sturm is content to say that the theological approach to apocalyptic draws Paul into its orbit, and, for that reason, “this second approach to apocalyptic is invaluable.” ↵
David Congdon, “Eschatologizing Apocalyptic: An Assessment of the Conversation on Pauline Apocalyptic,” in Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn, eds. Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harinck (Eugene: Cascade, 2012), 118–36. ↵
Martinus C. de Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5, JSNTSup 22 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988), 7. ↵
Douglas Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2003), 16. ↵
It is worth noting at the outset that many of these are sometimes identified as the apocalyptic characteristic, even though most proponents of an apocalyptic Paul will, in different proportions, draw from more than one of these, and some authors identify several aspects as definitive in different contexts. ↵
J. Christiaan
Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1980), 145. ↵
Beker speaks of the Christ-event as “proleptic,” and embraces Cullman’s D-Day/V-Day analogy approvingly. He also increasingly develops a sense that apocalyptic speaks to a salvation-historical tension: a “tragic tension between faithfulness to Torah and its apparent futility . . . fed by his faith in the faithfulness of the God of Israel and his ultimate self-vindication” (Paul the Apostle, 136.). As early as the preface to the paperback edition of Paul the Apostle, Beker argues that apocalyptic motifs of historical dualism, universal cosmic expectation, and the imminent end of the world “are actually anchored in the even-more-central motif of the faithfulness of God” (Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought, 1st paperback ed. [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984], xv). ↵
Ernst Käsemann, “On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic,” in New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague (London: SCM, 1969), 108–37, at 109n1. ↵
J. Louis, Martyn, “Apocalyptic Antinomies,” in Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 111–23, at 113. ↵
Ibid., 121 (emphasis original). Or, in answer to the central question of Galatians: “What time is it?” Paul answers: “It is the time after the apocalypse of the faith of Christ (3:23–25), the time of things being set right by that faith” (ibid., 122). ↵
Idem, Galatians, AB (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 179. ↵
Martyn represents a high-point of antipathy toward salvation-history. His successors are happier to affirm a degree of continuity, albeit within certain parameters. ↵
Beker, Paul the Apostle, 135–36. ↵
Beker, Paul the Apostle (paperback ed.), xiv. ↵
Beker, Paul the Apostle, 136. ↵
Note, for example, the place of eschatology in the influential definition offered by John J. Collins in “Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979): 1–20, at 9; for a dissenting voice, see Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 23–48. ↵
See, respectively, Carol Ann Newsom, “The Past as Revelation: History in Apocalyptic Literature,” Quarterly Review 4, no. 3 (1984): 40–53; Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “Overlapping Ages at Qumran and in Pauline Theology,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls and Pauline Literature, STDJ 102, ed. Jean-Sébastien Rey (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 309–26. N. T. Wright has also attempted to introduce some much-needed clarity to the whole discussion of “dualisms” in The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God vol. 1 (London: SPCK, 1992), 252–56. ↵
Apocalyptic also serves an historical purpose in Käsemann, providing an alternative to a theory of Gnostic origins for Paul’s theology. This multivalency exasperates many. See, i.e., David V. Way, The Lordship of Christ: Ernst Käsemann’s Interpretation of Paul’s Theology, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 175; Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul, 235. Moule complains of “the use of ‘eschatological’ and even ‘apocalyptic’ in such wide senses as to threaten to debase linguistic currency” (“Review of Commentary on Romans by Ernst Käsemann,” JTS 32, no. 2 [1981]: 498–502, at 501). ↵
Käsemann, “Primitive Christian Apocalyptic,” 135, cf. idem, “On Paul’s Anthropology,” in Perspectives on Paul, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM, 1971), 1–31, at 25. ↵
Käsemann, “Primitive Christian Apocalyptic,” 136. Idem, “On Paul’s Anthropology,” 26. ↵
Idem, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey William Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 58. Accordingly, God’s righteousness represents “God’s victory amid the opposition of the world. By it, all human self-righteousness and insubordination come to destruction” (New Testament Questions of Today, 181). ↵
Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (London: A&C Black, 1931), 57. ↵
William Wrede, Paul, trans. Edward Lummis (London: P. Green, 1908), 92. Of course, Schweitzer and Wrede hardly spoke of apocalyptic, but they are cited regularly enough as forerunners. ↵
Beker, Paul the Apostle, 145. ↵
J. Louis Martyn, “Epilogue: An Essay in Pauline Meta-Ethics,” in Divine and Human Agency in Paul and His Cultural Environment, eds. John M. G. Barclay and Simon J. Gathercole, LNTS 335 (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 173–83, at 178. In the context of that essay, Martyn states that he “uses the term ‘apocalyptic’ for the most part to refer to this three-actor drama” (178n12). ↵
J. Louis Martyn, “Apocalyptic Rectification,” in Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 87–88, at 87. ↵
Campbell, for example, considers Wrede’s work on Paul to be an “astonishingly deft” and “exquisitely balanced” account of the same soteriological model he advances, but makes nothing is this aspect of Wrede’s account (The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009], 177–78; the discussion of Wrede covers 177–83). ↵
The Defeat of Death, 179. Cf. “Paul’s Mythologising Program in Romans 5-8,” in Apocalyptic Paul, ed. Beverly Roberts Gaventa (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 1–20. ↵
Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “The Rhetoric of Violence and the God of Peace in Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” in Paul, John, and Apocalyptic Eschatology: Studies in Honour of Martinus C. de Boer, NovTSup 149, eds. Jan Krans et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 73. ↵
For de Boer’s analysis, see the summary in The Defeat of Death, 83–91. Similar accounts can be found in idem, “Paul and Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in Apocalyptic and the New Testament : Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, 172–80; idem, “Paul and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism Volume 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, ed. John J. Collins (London: Continuum, 2000), 357–66. ↵
de Boer, The Defeat of Death, 85 (original emphasis). ↵
J. Louis Martyn, “Glossary,” in Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 298–301, at 299. For some discussion of de Boer’s typology, see David A. Shaw, “Apocalyptic and Covenant: Perspectives on Paul or Antinomies at War?,” JSNT 36, no. 2 (2013): 155–71. See now also John Anthony Dunne, “Suffering and Covenantal Hope in Galatians: A Critique of the ‘Apocalyptic Reading’ and its Proponents,” SJT 68, no. 1 (2015): 1–15. ↵
See, e.g., Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville: John Knox, 2007), 83. ↵
Martyn, “Apocalyptic Rectification,” 87. Cf. de Boer for whom “apocalyptic eschatology . . . has little to do with a decision human beings must make, but everything to do with a decision God has already made on their behalf” (“Paul, Theologian of God’s Apocalypse,” Int. 56, no. 1 [2002]: 21–33, at 33). ↵
The Deliverance of God, 756. ↵
Campbell explicitly highlights the connections in The Quest for Paul’s Gospel: A Suggested Strategy (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 39. ↵
Wrede, Paul, 131. Given these emphases, one can see why Luther especially serves as a foil, and why Käsemann’s apocalyptic status is disputed; for all of Käsemann’s talk of apocalyptic powers, Campbell is right to highlight the enduring centrality of justification by faith and forensic categories in his thought, viewing him someone who “attempted to modify the JF [i.e., Justification by faith] model in an apocalyptic direction, rather than as someone who shifted to an entirely new paradigm” (The Quest for Paul’s Gospel, 38n16). ↵
This tendency has demanded and produced a fascinating range of arguments concerning the flow of Romans 1–8 as apocalyptic interpreters seek to push beyond Schweitzer’s puzzlement at the relationship between chapters 1–4 and 5–8. ↵
N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God vol. 4 (London: SPCK, 2013), 1:451. ↵
J. Louis Martyn, “A Personal Word about Ernst Käsemann,” in Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With
and Beyond J. Louis Martyn, eds. Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harinck (Eugene: Cascade, 2012), xiii–xv, at xv. ↵
Defeat of Death, 177. This has echoes of Schweitzer for whom mysticism is “nothing other than the eschatological concept of redemption looked at from within” (Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, 112). It might appear as though apocalyptic readers of Paul are the ones adapting apocalyptic language of conflict to describe what Paul speaks of in other, less militaristic language. On the contrary, Beverley Gaventa has forcefully argued that military language is more pervasive in Paul than commonly appreciated. See especially, “Neither Height nor Depth: Discerning the Cosmology of Romans,” SJT 64, no. 3 (2011): 265–78, at 269–73. ↵
Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination Page 5