Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination

by Ben C Blackwell

  Kaler, Flora Tells a Story, 182. ↵

  Importantly, the “revelation” is not of (the most high) God or Christ, who are both absent from the whole of this text. Rather, it is a revelation of cosmological realities. ↵

  Cf. Michael Kaler, “Pauline ‘Powers and Authorities’ at Nag Hammadi,” Archaeus XI–XII (2007–2008): 37–59. ↵

  Though the child figure could be interpreted as Christ, as in other Gnostic texts and traditions (e.g., see Apocryphon of John 2.1–15; Hippolytus, Elenchos 6.42.2), the interpretation of the child as the Spirit in the text itself makes this unlikely. ↵

  Kaler, Flora Tells a Story, 192. ↵

  When John Collins (Apocalyptic Imagination, 7) describes the elements that occur in Jewish apocalyptic texts, judgment or destruction of the wicked is the only element that occurs in all the texts he mentions. ↵

  Pheme Perkins, “Apocalypse of Adam: The Genre and Function of a Gnostic Apocalypse,” CBQ 39, no. 3 (1977): 382–95. ↵

  Kaler, Flora Tells a Story, 150–63. ↵

  Ibid., 155–56, cf. 170. ↵

  See the “Key to the Numeration of the Acts of Paul” provided by Jeremy Barrier, The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary, WUNT 2/270 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), xvii–xx. Schneemelcher’s translation, which I follow, only has 11 chapters because the other three chapters are fragmentary: Wilhelm Schneemelcher, “The Acts of Paul,” New Testament Apocrypha, Rev. ed., Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed.; trans. Robert McL. Wilson (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 2003 [1992]), 2:237–65. ↵

  Schneemelcher, “The Acts of Paul,” 2:216, 230–31. ↵

  There is debate about the date of composition, but based upon external witnesses and the manuscripts the proposed date of editing/writing is mid-to-late second century. ↵

  See Andrew Gregory, “The Acts of Paul and the Legacy of Paul,” in Paul and the Second Century: The Legacy of Paul’s Life, Letters, and Teaching, eds. M. Bird and J. Dodson; LNTS 412 (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 169–89, at 172–74. ↵

  See P. Lalleman, “The Resurrection in the Acts of Paul,” in The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, ed. J. Bremmer (Kampen: Pharos, 1996), 126–41. ↵

  White (Remembering Paul, 121–34) critiques 3 Corinthians for rejecting Paul’s real meaning in 1 Corinthians 15. Besides the incongruity with White’s overall proposal to get beyond “who got Paul right,” one could argue that 3 Corinthians is likely closer to Paul’s meaning than the gnostic opponents. Even if we concede that Paul intended the resurrection to be understood in a pneuma-material way (so White), one could argue that the sarx-material reading of 3 Corinthians would still be closer to Paul’s theology than a gnostic immaterialist reading which 3 Corinthians is opposing. ↵

  See John Barclay’s essay in this volume (chapter 15). In particular, Barclay is right that the challenge of singleness is not merely the renunciation of pleasure, but also destabilizes the fabric of society that is built upon children who will provide a form of immortality and economic output. ↵

  Ann Graham Brock’s comparison with the Acts of Peter shows the distinctly subversive stance of the Acts of Paul toward social convention, and especially, civic accommodation: “Political Authority and Cultural Accommodation: Social Diversity in the Acts of Paul and the Acts of Peter,” in The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, F. Bovon, A. G. Brock, and C. Matthews, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1999), 145–69. ↵

  Accordingly, APaul functions as what Portier-Young calls discursive resistance, asserting God’s supremacy over Nero (and, by extension, the Roman empire) by asserting the success of Christ’s kingdom over against all kingdoms and by foretelling Nero’s future judgment for his abuse of power. Anathea Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). See also, John Goodrich’s essay in this volume (chapter 16). ↵

  In that way, the APaul follows a reading strategy similar to that of Richard Hays, which is retrospective but framed in continuity with the past. See the Introduction essay in this volume. ↵

  Koschorke, “Paulus in den Nag-Hammadi-Texten,” 203. ↵

  Cf. Gal. 1:8–9. ↵

  While noting the differences, Harrison perhaps makes the distinction between Paul and the Apocalypse too strong: James R. Harrison, “In the Quest of the Third Heaven: Paul and His Apocalyptic Imitators,” VC 58, no. 1 (2004): 24–55. ↵

  Regarding the retrospective–prospective distinction, we should note that, in some sense, all Christian texts will likely have some element of a retrospective point of view. That is, if they were fully prospective, they would be indistinguishable from other Jewish texts. Also, given the nature of the Christ-event as arising through the surprising means of death and resurrection and as causing a new form of reality (even if it is in continuity with what has been promised before). Accordingly, the revelation of God in Christ cannot help but create some form of a new perspective on the nature of prior narratives and expectations. At the same time, no story is fully retrospective in the sense that issues of plight were absolutely restated, as if people did not understand or even know of death and evil powers before. By speaking of prospective and retrospective we are working with a spectrum, in which both terms contain elements of continuity and discontinuity. ↵

  Some would definitely question Irenaeus’s credentials as an apocalyptic theologian, but if he were considered a witness in this debate, he would definitely represent a prospective (seeing Christ as a climax of OT promises) reading. See, e.g., my “The Covenant of Promise: Abraham in Irenaeus,” in Irenaeus and Paul, eds. T. Still and D. Willhite (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). For a discussion of other apocalyptic elements, such as visionary experiences, see my “Paul and Irenaeus,” in Paul and the Second Century: The Legacy of Paul’s Life, Letters, and Teaching, eds. M. Bird and J. Dodson, LNTS 412 (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 190–206, at 194–95. ↵

  See J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 33A (New York and London: Doubleday, 1997), 34. See also Douglas Campbell’s essay in this volume (chapter 4). ↵

  E.g., Martyn, Galatians, 356. ↵

  Martyn, Galatians, 34. ↵

  10

  Some Remarks on Apocalyptic in Modern Christian Theology

  Philip G. Ziegler

  “The end is beginning, signifies the apocalyptic tone.”[1]

  “We are living in apocalyptic times without an apocalyptic faith and theology.”[2]

  Introduction—Apocalyptic as Theological Problem and Prospect

  When the intractable presence of New Testament apocalyptic was rediscovered around the start of the twentieth century, it was acknowledged to be at once an historical fact and a theological impossibility. The parousiac Jesus and his adventist Kingdom of God, the agonistic dualism of “the ages” and its imminent catastrophic final resolution, the mythic cosmic imaginings and martial metaphysics of salvation—while all of this was, no doubt, the very stuff of primitive Christian faith and witness, it was also now, as Feuerbach had earlier said of Christianity as such, “nothing more than a fixed idea, in flagrant contradiction with our fire and life assurance companies, our railroads and steam-carriages, our picture and sculpture galleries, our military and industrial schools, our theatres and scientific museums.”[3] Contemporary theology found itself simply at a loss as regards biblical apocalyptic: such ancient forms of thought—being “an excrescence . . . rank and wild” properly “left behind in the gothic nursery of the human imagination”[4]—are simply uninhabitable by us moderns; their concepts and idioms are a thoroughly devalued currency with no purchase in or upon the present.[5] “Eschatology in the strict sense, with all its apocalyptic features,” it was agreed, “has long ago passed out of our view of the world.”[6] For these reasons, original eschatological density and contemporary dogmatic credibility stood in strictly inverse proportion to one another.[7]

  The start of our own twenty-first century has brought with it the s
uggestion that the relation between the original eschatological density of the New Testament witness and contemporary credibility of Christian dogmatics can and must be fundamentally reset. In view is a new kind of “apocalyptic theology” that overturns the high modern view of apocalyptic as a merely antiquarian curiosity while, at the same time, repudiating the weaponized eschatologies of soothsaying doomsday calendarists, often popularly associated with “apocalyp-ticism.”

  So it is that convocating mainline seminarians may now be instructed that they must appropriate an apocalyptic “attitude” and “movement of mind,” because their ministry and the churches they will serve “can never make do or be legitimate . . . without the themes of the radical sovereignty of God and the exercise of that sovereignty through the cross and resurrection of [God’s] royal agent, Jesus Christ.”[8] And academic theologians are openly advised that they “should press forward to a robust recovery of apocalyptic teaching and preaching” precisely because such is “pressed upon us by the character of the New Testament witnesses themselves” in texts that deliver a gospel that is “apocalyptic to the core.”[9] Indeed, it has been suggested that we need apocalyptic as a “pertinent, perhaps essential” contemporary discourse if we are to rise to meet the theological challenges of the present day.[10] Over the course of a century, something decisive has shifted in our discernment of the proper relation between biblical apocalyptic and contemporary Christian dogmatics.

  Essential to any telling of the story of this reversal of sensibility is the emerging conviction that the apocalyptic idiom of the New Testament is itself an indispensable theological vocabulary and is recognizable as such for all its strangeness.[11] This is to say that it represents an originary theological discourse with which Christians described the world—and we in it—with relentless formative reference to the sovereign God of the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ. The recovery of apocalyptic in theology begins when we discern that this disquieting evangelical idiom is not merely an historic fixture of early Christian witness, but also, something that can and must, in some sense, be recovered as a permanent feature of Christian faith and theology so long as we are about the business of the gospel. The force of Käsemann’s famous dictum about apocalyptic being the “mother of Christian theology” is at least to suggest that “apocalyptic narrative and apocalyptic expectation are integral to the logic of the gospel” itself, and so, indispensable to any theological reflection keyed to it.[12] One might say that in Easter’s wake, among the tongues that came upon an early church in receipt of the Spirit was the language of Christian apocalyptic, and that it is a tongue theologians may still learn to speak and to interpret.

  From among the many things that can and should be done to further elucidate these claims and to fill out the wider theological context within which the “apocalyptic turn” in contemporary theology might be understood, in what follows, I undertake only two. First, I address the question of the place of the figure of Karl Barth, paying particular attention to the important, yet somewhat ambivalent, role played by his work in recent apocalyptic theological reflection. Second, and in a different mode, I present a series of six tersely annotated dogmatic theses. The aim of these theses is to signal concisely why apocalyptic might be considered both essential and relevant for the doing of contemporary theology, as well as something of what might be at stake in the ongoing business of appropriating New Testament—and in particular Pauline—apocalyptic impulses.

  Karl Barth—Pioneering Pauline Apocalyptic?

  “Paul is the proper name for a ferment in the history of Christianity.”[13]

  The emerging apocalyptic sensibility in theology with which we are concerned is one inspired by a fresh hearing of the evangelical witness of Paul. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the name of Karl Barth is often encountered in the work of its advocates. For Barth’s early theology, as crystallized around the second edition of the Romans commentary, was marked by a volatile conspiracy of themes, which together fill out the meaning of the Krisis that Paul’s gospel represents: the radical priority of divine agency in salvation, the uncompromisingly “vertical” or transcendent nature of God’s action, the real evangelical power of God—a theme taken up from the Blumhardts—the inviolate particularity of the incarnation, and the sharp contrast between the old upon which God’s grace and Spirit fall, and the new thing brought into being thereby.[14] Barth swept all these themes up into the meaning of the term “eschatology” as it appears in his famous declaration that “if Christianity be not altogether eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever with Christ.”[15] It often pointed out that the dialectical logic of Barth’s early eschatology is more Platonic than not, exercising a merely negative relation between a timeless eternity and temporal reality.[16] Yet, it is also true that under the formative weight of Paul’s own concepts, categories, and arguments, Barth was steadily driven to recast his eschatology in the form of a christological objectivism that offered an arguably “apocalyptic supplement” to received Protestant accounts of the gospel of salvation.[17]

  In taking inspiration, in particular, from the Pauline scholarship of Ernst Käsemann and J. Louis Martyn, contemporary apocalyptic theology draws upon two thinkers who themselves admit Barth’s notable influence. Käsemann did not need Barth to introduce him to Paul’s apocalyptic gospel of course. Yet, by his own admission, the German exegete devoured Barth’s writings “ravenously” during a formative period.[18] As David Way explains, Barth’s hermeneutical program announced in the prefaces to his Romans were “of the greatest importance for the formation of Käsemann’s views of the task of interpretation,” cementing his conviction that Paul be read in light of his controlling subject matter—namely, God in his coming.[19] Käsemann did draw upon Barth at various individual points in his reading of Paul’s letter; but Barth’s influence was most significant in relation to two comprehensive concerns central to Käsemann’s exegetical theology—namely, the Lordship of Christ and the “theological appropriation of Paul’s eschatology.”[20] Like Barth’s, Käsemann’s reading of Paul is funded by an acknowledgement that the Apostle, his vocation, his communities, and his witness to the gospel, all “exist from the very first within the eschatological parameter”—a parameter which is identical with Christ’s salutary reign unto God.[21]

  Influenced in turn by Käsemann, Martyn’s path-breaking Pauline scholarship also manifests what Bruce McCormack has styled “a self-conscious affinity” with the theological vision Barth displays in the second edition of his Romans commentary.[22] McCormack goes on to argue that for Martyn and his “school”—“those who read Paul as an ‘apocalyptic theologian’ these days”—Barth’s commentary is “regarded not as a (largely) defensible piece of exegesis but as opening up an approach for understanding Paul which they too embrace.”[23] There is little enough direct discussion of Barth in Martyn’s own writing, though he does comment to readers of his Galatians commentary that we do well to remember that “Barth was an exegete as well as a systematic theologian” who consistently argued—rightly in Martyn’s judgment—that Paul’s soteriology only conceives of its “problem” retrospectively, considering “Adam in the light of Christ, sin in the light of grace, and so on.”[24] It is also possible, I would suggest, that Martyn discerned a true echo of Paul’s radical gospel of the turning of the ages in the work of his Union Theological Seminary colleague, Paul Lehmann, who recommended Barth be embraced as a “theologian of permanent revolution”—a practitioner not of culturally reactive but rather “Archimedean theology”—for whom the gospel persistently unsettles all received truths of our present age, being ever “a hinge” and never “a door.”[25] Certainly, Barth’s vigorous registration of the “menace and the promise of the Kingdom of God” comports with Martyn’s reading of the disruptive advent of a reconciliation that is also, at once, God’s own self-revelation.[26] Be that as it may, McCormack’s considered view is that Martyn’s vision of a pattern of “cosmological apocalyptic eschatology” (i
n Martin de Boer’s phrase) captures and characterizes Barth’s early reading of Paul very well; however, he also argues that Barth’s later, decidedly forensic account of salvation rendered in the fourth volume of the Church Dogmatics, corrects his early reading and amounts to a better reading of Paul. Implied is a judgment that apocalyptic readings of Paul of the sort advanced by Martyn might share certain theological weaknesses ingredient in Barth’s 1922 presentation of the Apostle, and in fact, fare much better as interpretations of Barth on Paul, than they do as renderings of Paul as such.[27]

  But what of the invocation of Barth in the work of those who are continuing to develop “apocalyptic theology” at present? Walter Lowe’s programmatic essays look to Barth as a uniquely generative source. Lowe argues that Barth’s Römerbrief—a work that “throbs with an apocalyptic urgency,” alert to the perpetual crises of the age—instantiates a distinctively Christian postmodern turn, communicating a vision of “apocalyptic postmodernism” whose prospects have not yet been fully explored, let alone realized.[28] This vision conceives of history with decisive reference to God’s gracious and sovereign delimiting, overreaching and determining of all things in and by the scandalous particularity of his eschatological coming in Christ. Christian theology begins from a recognition of this divine seizure of reality, and it must register in its tasks, tone, and tempo that the God of the gospel is “closing in.”[29] In this, it resists the quintessential move of modern rationality to contextualize, historicize, and so, relativize and domesticate all things, the apocalyptic gospel included. Lowe suggests that pursuit of an “unqualified apocalyptic” posture in theology turns the tables on modernity: