Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination
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Christian theology proceeds upon the quite different premise that we ourselves have been contextualized; and not just conceptually, but actually. It is we who have been inscribed. It may be that, whatever else it does, apocalyptic stands as a primary means by which scripture effects or announces such inscription.[30]
To the question, “Why we need apocalyptic?,” Lowe replies that a Christian theology fit for purpose needs, first and foremost, to recover precisely this recognition of being contextualized by a comprehending divine reality that “presses in upon us”; apocalyptic is a scriptural idiom uniquely qualified to deliver this, to impress that we are at once utterly chastened and kept “appropriately off balance” by the gospel while also entrusted to the fact that we are “suspended within the event of Jesus Christ” and that that is enough.[31] As he explicates this vision, Lowe not only looks to Barth’s Römerbrief, but also, to his Church Dogmatics, finding there a developed “eschatological realism” which sees nothing less than the fullness of God himself apocalypsed upon the world in Jesus Christ, the full “secondary objectivity . . . of God’s ownmost reality—without loss, without diminution.”[32]
Nate Kerr’s widely discussed study, Christ, History and Apocalyptic, also opens its engagement with Barth with a reading of the second edition of his Romans commentary.[33] Barth’s theology emerges here as an anti-ideological project, set firmly and expressly against theology’s historicist captivity and funded by a recovery of the radical apocalyptic crisis which the gospel is. Kerr goes on to argue that Barth deploys the grammar of apocalyptic discourse—emphasizing as it does the interruptive, alien, extrinsic, miraculous, unconditioned, and negative character of divine activity upon the world—in the service of species of “metaphysical idealism” whose necessary counterpart is a “nihilistic description of bare ‘historicity’ such as we find it in Troeltsch” that evacuates the very reality of history as such.[34] Kerr’s contention is that the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth himself falls victim to this project, leaving Barth bereft of any means for imagining how divine revelation can actually reach and transform us “in our historicity.”[35]
Yet this critical assessment of Barth’s early apocalyptic theology gives way to a somewhat more positive evaluation of his later treatment of history within the christological doctrine of the Church Dogmatics. Following Harink and Mangina, Kerr lifts out the “still-discernible apocalyptic ‘logic’” of Barth’s later theology in which the particular historicity of Jesus Christ comes to serve as a critical ingredient in specifying the mode of God’s eschatological action.[36] The transcendence of the interruptive Word of God is now specified in terms of its gracious priority and singularity: revelation is never a predicate of history, but history is made a predicate of revelation—as Barth puts it—precisely where and when the lordship of Christ is effectively realized in the midst of the creation and for its sake. Yet, Kerr remains convinced that the metaphysical investments which structure and shape Barth’s mature (at this point) thinking still ultimately efface the genuine contingency Christ’s history, and thus abstract his person and work from “the hard core of real history, the tragic contradictions and intricate complexities of history’s broken pathways.” Kerr’s own project presses beyond Barth, looking to repair this shortcoming in pursuit of what he calls an “apocalyptic historicism” ambitious to do better justice to the claim that “Christ is made to be Lord precisely in the flux and contingency of history, and that it is through such flux and contingency that we are made to be ‘contemporaneous’ with him.”[37]
As with Lowe, so with Kerr’s account, Barth figures as a theologian who crucially inaugurates an apocalyptic “turn” in Christian theology, and then, significantly develops its contours. But Kerr, in particular, adjudges Barth’s work in this regard to be incomplete, tethered to certain defining features of the intellectual milieu in which it was forged as well as categories and forms inherited from the longer theological tradition which serve to frustrate its fuller advance. In both readings, however, Barth stands as a critical pivot, pathbreaker, and pioneer of apocalyptic theology, discerning and displaying—even if not fully realizing—the revolutionary theological promise of a fresh hearing of Paul’s eschatological gospel. Barth’s tempestuous early work has pride of place in both these accounts; nevertheless, they also espy important developments of the apocalyptic sensibility in Barth’s later dogmatic theology. Indeed, as Doug Harink summarizes,
Perhaps the most remarkable imprint of Pauline logic on Barth’s theology . . . is surely to be discerned in the very structure of the Church Dogmatics. The entire project begins with the “apocalypse,” that is, with the doctrine of revelation which is determined from beginning to end by the world-dissolving and world-constituting event of God’s advent in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This apocalypse epistemologically precedes and in turn determines everything that Barth will go on to say about the knowledge of God, the reality of God, the election of God, and the command of God. . . . [And he] will not treat the doctrine of creation and humanity apart from God’s apocalypse in Jesus Christ, for we do not finally know their true shape and destiny apart from that revelation.[38]
Robert Jenson has suggested that “modernity’s great theological project was to suppress apocalyptic, and to make messianism into guru-worship.”[39] Barth’s comprehensive and bracing recollection that the “Gospel is the power of God . . . the ‘miraculous warfare’ (Luther)” which God wages so that the old world might be “dissolved and overthrown by the victory of Christ,” repudiated precisely this ambition of modern theology.[40] In so doing, it seeded a century of theology in which eschatology moved from the obscure margins in toward the center of the theological endeavor. We have good reason to see contemporary efforts to win through to a form of Christian theology, that is, particularly alert to and shaped by Paul’s apocalyptic gospel as a late fruit of that particular sowing.
Some Theses on Apocalyptic in Contemporary Theology
I now turn to set out a series of dogmatic theses concerning apocalyptic and contemporary theology. My aim is to suggest that the focus, form, and substance of Christian theology itself are all at issue in the effort to re-appropriate the fundamental impulses of Pauline apocalyptic into the heart of our practice of theology.
(1) A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will discern in that distinctive and difficult idiom a discourse uniquely adequate both to announce the full scope, depth, and radicality of the Gospel of God, as well as to bespeak the actual and manifest contradictions of that Gospel by the times in which we live.
To hear the apocalyptic gospel is to be confronted with the claim that the work of salvation is the work of remaking the world as such, a work of cosmic scope, metaphysical depth, and universal human concern. It is a work performed by God himself in acts of sovereign and adventitious grace that “tear down and build up,” which “kill and make alive.” The apocalyptic idiom strains to articulate the gratuity of divine sovereignty and the sovereignty of divine grace. Where and when God so acts—as manifest in singular concentration in the life and death of Jesus Christ—the invasion of sovereign love and mercy is met with open and covert opposition whose outworking threatens to belie the gospel itself. And lived faith knows all too well the experience of the manifold contradiction of the gospel. An “apocalyptic theology” keyed to the paradox of the divine victory on the cross furnishes categories “that match the realities of the present” by which faith may grasp and endure this agonistic “time between the times.”[41] Thinking in this way leads, as Barth says, “straight to the place where light and darkness are locked in a grueling but victorious struggle . . . into the kingdom of grace, into Christ, where life in its entirely becomes complicated and gets call into question, but is, nonetheless, filled with promise.”[42]
(2) A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will turn upon a vigorous account of divine revelation in Jesus Christ as the unsurpass
able eschatological act of redemption; its talk of God will be thus be marked by an intense Christological concentration.
To hear the apocalyptic gospel is to have one’s attention riveted to the events of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection as the hinge upon which the “ages turn.” The concrete outworking of the vocation of the Son sent “in the fullness of time,” these events are confessed to be the very parousia of God come low to save. Created, arrested, and summoned by sovereign grace, faith acknowledges, and so, knows God in and through this salutary “apocalypse of the Son” (Gal 1:16). In Christ, we are met by a revelation that acquaints us with the “dunamis, the meaning and power of the living God who is creating a new world.”[43] The concrete form, specific intention, and particular ends of this effective self-disclosure of God in Christ provide apocalyptic theology with a positive “pleromatic space” of knowledge and substantive ethical orientation.[44] This is because “the situation between God and the world has been altered in such a fundamental and absolute way that our being in Christ radically governs the attitude we take toward life.”[45]
(3) A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will acknowledge and stress the unexpected, new, and disjunctive character of the divine work of salvation that comes upon the world of sin in and through Christ. As a consequence, in its account of the Christian life, faith, and hope, it will make much of the ensuing evangelical “dualisms.”
To hear the apocalyptic gospel is to register the advent of a salvation accomplished at “the end of the law” and “apart from the law,” a salvation consisting in a “new covenant” which overreaches the distinction between pagan and Jew, a salvation whose outworking by way of juridical murder in the flesh of a marginal Jewish criminal can, by any previous measure, be only a scandalous folly. An apocalyptic theology will hold Christian faith and thought hard by such claims, demanding that it register the unexpected and disjunctive newness of the good news, i.e., the newness of the new creation; the newness of the new and second Adam; the newness of the new covenant. It also demands that Christian faith and thought own the radical character of salvation expressed in the apocalyptic tropes of death and resurrection, the ending of the old age and the onset of the new, of the defeat of the “god of this age” by the God who is God, of a new and second creation, of a world “turned upside down” in which all things are to be “made new”—these are not images of mere repair, development, or incremental improvement within a broadly continuous situation. The content of Jesus’ teaching, as much as Paul’s testimony, bespeaks a salvation whose advent involves an unanticipated divine action that marks a radical break with what has gone before, its overturning, its revolution, its displacement. As Carl Braaten observes, “the apocalyptic God approaches history with oppositional power, in order that through crisis and conflict the existing reality may give way to a counter-reality” such that theology must reckon with “the eschatological otherness of a God who makes himself manifest first of all as the power of contradiction, of criticism, in crisis on the cross, and not in smooth continuity as the consummator and converging center of a continuing creation.”[46] Correspondingly, an apocalyptic theology will insist on the standing importance of the new “dualisms”—e.g., Flesh and Spirit—that the gospel enjoins as “militant antinomies born of apocalypse.”[47]
(4) A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will be lead to account for salvation as a “three agent drama” of divine redemption in which human beings are rescued from captivity to the anti-God powers of sin, death, and the devil. To do so is, it will wager, a discerning realist gesture of notable explanatory power.
To hear the apocalyptic gospel is to be driven to an account of salvation whose fundamental form is “creative negation” of the present age, whose consequence is deliverance and whose substance is an exchange of lordships. Such redemption from Sin represents a comprehensive account of salvation able to encompass other soteriological motifs such as atonement, guilt, and forgiveness of sins. Apocalyptic theology will advocate for “the revolution of Life against the powers of death that surround it, the powers in which we ourselves are caught.”[48] Faith in the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ warrants hope for a divinely wrought “future which negates the life-negating power of death.”[49] This apocalyptic theological idiom may be adjudged uniquely adequate to discerning the realities of our age. Is anything less fantastical to us than the autonomous, rationally transparent self of bourgeois modernity? A soteriological discourse that speaks of our captivity, complicity, and gracious liberation into the hands of another genuine and genuinely philanthropic Lord, is one able to illumine how it is that we are, in fact, played by powers, structures, and systems of all kinds (political, technological, etc.), subjected to effective discursive and disciplinary regimes (which, having been conjured by us as the outworking of sin, now prosecute us with a kind of “downward causation” all their own), and moved by unfathomable drives and obscure impulses, both psychological and social—all this as so many modes of repudiation of God’s grace and freedom. Apocalyptic categories might be thought of as crucial tools of faith’s historiography—or, if you rather, faith’s bifocals—i.e., categories by which we give voice to a spiritual discernment of “what is going on” in what is taking place.[50]
(5) A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will acknowledge that it is the world and not the church which is the object of divine salvation. It will thus conceive of the church as a provisional pilgrim community created by the effective announcement of the Gospel for the sake of the world. Both individually and corporately, the Christian life is chiefly to be understood as discipleship.
To hear the apocalyptic gospel is to see the cosmic scope of divine salvation in the recovery, liberation, and transformation of the whole of creation. It is in the service of the salvation of this world that the Christian community is an ecclesia militans. “Once we have become conscious of the Life in life, we can no longer bear living in the land of death, in an existence whose forms cause us most painfully to miss the meaning of life.”[51] The congregation will ever be active and forthright in its public witness and service to attest the Life that is coming to the world and to seek to see God’s reign justified, even now, before the world. Such discipleship involves an enactment of radical Christian freedom and love that actively denies and resists the false lordship of sin and death in open and courageous testimony to the truth of the lordship of Christ, even now in this or that place. Such a life of faith has Christ’s own present exercise of his royal office and the ongoing empowerment of the Spirit as its basis, its media, and its hope. As Barth explains, those who hear the apocalyptic gospel “are not disinterested observers. We are moved by God. We do know God. The history of God is happening in us and toward us. The last word . . . our ‘given’ is the advancing rule of God.”[52] All this could well be styled as a distinctively Christian witness, worship, and service, whose imagination is not unaffected by the “socially aggressive and politically aggravating” apocalyptic concepts and images in which the gospel comes to us from the first.[53]
(6) A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will adopt a posture of prayerful expectation of an imminent future in which God will act decisively to vindicate publicly the victory of Life and Love over Sin and Death. The ordering of its tasks and concentration of its energies will befit the critical self-reflection of a community that prays, “Let grace come and let this world pass away.”[54]
To hear the apocalyptic gospel is to receive the theological vocation as a call to serve the mission and service of the pilgrim church in the time that remains. In this, theology will cultivate Christian unease with the present world by calling to mind the advent of the Kingdom, lamenting its present contradiction, discerning and calling out its contemporary parables where they are to be found, and suspending all faith and hope from the knowledge of the God of Jesus Christ.[
55] Apocalyptic theology will be a non-speculative, concrete, and practical form of knowing, committed to the work of discerning the signs of the times by Scripture and Spirit. It will itself be a militant discourse, always on the verge of proclamation, offering at most a kind of urgent and sufficient traveling instruction for pilgrims, and as such, will be impatient with more contemplative theological postures. Its primary service will always be to serve the clarification of the Christian witness to the present salutary agency of the crucified and risen One to whom faith owes allegiance and obedience.
Yet, one might ask at just this point whether such “apocalyptic theology” is possible at all, or whether, by its own accounting, there is really no time for such an undertaking. Does the very existence of the intellectual, institutional, and personal “space” to pursue such theology belie its seriousness and reality?[56] Or, is the writing of such theology a part of the faithful business of “waiting in action” required of Christians and their congregations in this time? If it is the latter, then theologians must labor under no illusions about the entirely transitory character of their work of fragile, mortal wisdom. For, if the apocalyptic hearing of the gospel is a true one, then in common with the Christian community—and indeed, with everything that is—the horizon of all theological endeavor lies,