Undeception

In response to my last post in which I complained about not having an easy way of annotating my changes in views over the years I’ve been writing this blog, Nick B. asked a very reasonable question that, in answering, will provide an immediate (though temporary) solution. He asked me to mention a few subjects about which I’ve most dramatically changed my mind over the life of this blog. Here are the ones which spring to mind.

Early on I argued very strongly for full preterist eschatology; in fact, I think the desire to explore and disuss that subject was a big reason for starting to blog in the first place. Now, though I still have certain sympathies with this view (especially its implications for the Christian life), most of my earlier articles were, as is typical for people who like to talk eschatology, waaaay too proof-text-oriented. Even though I was no inerrantist, I trusted any and every biblical text about eschatology (including some that weren’t about that but I thought they were) and believed that preterism tied them all together with no discord: I had to run roughshod over the meaning of texts to make it all into a neat little system, despite other contemporary posts in which I warned people about doing that very thing. Rather embarrassing, really. To top it all off, something so fundamental to the subject as my understanding of how biblical prophecy worked has changed unrecognizably — which leads me to a current problem:  I haven’t written much that delivers my nascent opinion on that topic. Note to self…

Related to this, one of the more subtle yet profound changes in my thinking: although I had long since come to rethink my opinions on the OT’s historiographical bona fides, I maintained the presumption that the NT was more often than not “innocent until proven guilty.” In essence, aside from some familiarity with the Synoptic Problem, I had little to no familiarity with contemporary NT historical criticism. So I am sure I quoted NT passages in all kinds of posts without enough of a recognition of those sorts of issues. The breakout Bibliology and hermeneutics series that got the attention of a large cross-section of the biblioblogosphere for the first time expressed ideas about the nature of the Bible that seemed radical at the time, even to me, but my attempts to read through it now are punctuated by frequent facepalms.

Two areas that went unexamined far too long in my journey were atonement theology and the nature of the work of Christ, which of course are now of massive interest to me. I simply do not know what sort of nonsense I might have unknowingly spouted before I began to explore those issues.

So what about you? In which areas have you changed the most dramatically?

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 8: “Jesus Was Wrong” (part 2)

As a preterist with a fully “realized eschatology”, I had no trouble with most of the discussion in the first part of my chapter 8 summary. Where I began having a problem was in Stark’s insistence that “Each apocalyptic community had their peculiarities, but the end result was the same–the restoration of Israel and the judgment of the nations” (p. 168). Even that isn’t a problem unless you accept Stark’s contention that “the restoration of Israel” means exactly what it sounded like to the first century audience: the ascendancy of Israel as a political force, headed up under a triumphant Messiah in David’s model that would free the nation from Rome. Stark focused on much more than that in this chapter, but it’s that contention that will drive the discussion in this post.

We’re always told that the expectation that the Messiah would set up a physical kingdom based in Jerusalem and free Israel from Roman rule was a misunderstanding the disciples had until the resurrection, when the light bulb finally came on; it’s never intimated that they believed this because Jesus himself had believed this, and that this belief fueled the faith of the Jesus Movement all the way until the destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus himself is always thought of as knowing the full story, trying to get through to his nationalist followers with little success. I think there is textual support for this, but one cannot exclude the possibility of post hoc, hindsight clarity put in Jesus’ mouth, although this was just as likely to be honest speculation, to the effect of, “Surely the Messiah understood it all correctly, and we just didn’t understand.”

The sayings that even most secular scholarship agrees were spoken by Jesus lead to the conclusion that he believed that the national misfortunes of Israel were drawing to a close, that the foreign powers and their unrighteous Jewish collaborators were going to be punished, and that he, the Messiah, would bring this all about. Thus Stark believes that Jesus’ prophecies sound a lot like the vision of the future held by most dispensationalist futurists: Jesus physically coming back to reign, with physical Jerusalem a place of eschatological interest.

Most preterists will dislike this interpretation and insist that a spiritual revolution, heralded as it was by the physical destruction of Jerusalem c. 70 AD/CE, was always in mind. What evidence does Stark cite against this view?

Stark spends a considerable portion of this chapter responding to many of N.T. Wright’s popular teachings on eschatology, which are basically preteristic. The target of Jesus’ oracles is a crucial aspect of disagreement between Stark and Wright, with the latter affirming the view that Jesus was referring to a spiritual kingdom alone.

We preterists pride ourselves on having a leg up on our literalist brothers and sisters in that we recognize the eschatological idioms within the Olivet Discourse as having been carried over from earlier prophecies in which the promised events (the moon turning to blood, the Lord’s coming on the clouds, etc.) did not happen literally. Stark agrees that this language is from the Old Testament prophets, but essentially asserts that preterists don’t take it far enough: if, as preterists forcefully contend, Jesus prophesied using the language of the Old Testament prophetic tradition and if his audience recognized it as such, then his audience also had no reason to think that Jesus was using that well pedigreed prophetic diction somehow divorced from the greater context and traditions behind those idioms.

Specifically, the source texts for many of Jesus’ apocalyptic language are Isaiah 13-14, Joel 2, and Ezekiel 32, and they all use those prophetic metaphors such as stars falling from the sky to describe God’s judgment. But, Stark argues, the key is that in each case the recipient of the judgment was a foreign power of oppression. A holistic liberation was expected from Messiah, yet in the preterist system, it is apostate Jerusalem – the home team – which is the sole target of Jesus’ prophecies, as indicated by the predictions about the destruction of the temple. For Stark, it is manifestly clear what Jesus was saying: that God would use Rome to sack the holy city in judgment of the shortcomings of His own covenant people, but that, as described again and again in the Old Testament prophets, God would then turn around and send judgment upon His own instrument of judgment — in this case the Roman Empire.

Wright’s reading of Zechariah 14, Stark notes, is essentially a summary of his view of the events described in the Olivet Discourse: “Yahweh calls down the wrath of the Gentiles against Jerusalem; Jerusalem is attacked and destroyed; Yahweh is made king and glorified as Jerusalem is punished for its sins” (p. 194). But this is not the whole story.

This passage hardly supports Wright’s interpretation of Mark 13, and it hardly reflects the events of 70 CE. It does, however unfortunately, reflect very much what Jesus of Nazareth predicted would take place at that time. In both Zechariah 14 and Mark 13, Yahweh punishes Jerusalem with foreign armies, before immediately turning around and punishing the Gentiles that were used to punish Jerusalem. In both oracles, after the judgment of the nations, a new age of unfathomable glory ensues. In neither case were the oracles fulfilled. (p. 195)

As evidence that the Jerusalem religious machine and not the foreign oppressor was the target of Jesus’ prophecies, Wright has argued that Jesus’ counsel to flee Jerusalem in Mark 13 was an allusion to the situation of the refugees from Babylon in Jeremiah 50.6,28. But in Jeremiah why are they told to flee Babylon? “Because,” answers Stark, “Yahweh is coming to take vengeance on Babylon for destroying his temple–precisely what Rome would do to Jerusalem in 70 CE. If anything in Mark 13 echoes these verses in Jeremiah 50,” Stark continues, “it would not be the instruction to flee but the proclamation of doom against Rome as repayment for the desecration of the temple” (p. 193). Rejecting Wright’s correlation of Jeremiah 50.28 to Mark 13, Stark sees Jesus’ instruction to flee to the mountains following the Romans’ desecration of the temple as an allusion to the Maccabees’ flight to the mountains to regroup and await reinforcements for a military invasion after the original “desolating sacrilege” by Antiochus Epiphanes. Only this time, they would be led down from the mountains by the returning Messiah.

Like most other preterists, Wright sees the desolation of the temple as the liberation and vindication of faithful Israel, yet Stark contends that God’s vindication was envisaged as being made necessary because of the desolation, reading the Gospels’ anticipation of the desolation as foreboding, not as a positive, glorious hope. The final battle, the Day of the Lord, would come when God swiftly responded to the local judgment on unfaithful Jews using the Romans with a global judgment upon the Romans.

Stark also takes issue with Wright’s understanding of the timing of the events prophesied by Jesus. For instance, for all the “time statements” that preterists rightfully bring out in support of a first century fulfilment, there is something of a forgotten or at least misplaced “time statement”: although Wright equates the judgment on Jerusalem with a symbolic “coming of the Son of Man”, the coming of the Son of Man was said in Mark 13.24/Matt 24.29 to occur “after the suffering of those days” — that is, following the sacking of Jerusalem. The destruction of Jerusalem could not itself be the coming; the divine vindication/retaliation is pictured as coming in response to the events that required vindication/retaliation, namely the Roman decimation of God’s holy city. Thus when Jesus warns his disciples not to follow any others claiming “I am he,” he is teling them that “they are not to follow after those messianic hopefuls who claim to have a divine commission to wage war on Rome. Yet note that not one of the gospels denies such a war is to be waged” (p. 179, emphasis original). Another observation that I found particularly impressive in setting up Stark’s picture of an inevitable Jesus/Rome clash was this:

Apart from being theologically “liberal,” belief in the resurrection [i.e., of the dead = an afterlife] was also politically explosive, for the same reason that contemporary extremist Islamic belief in the resurrection is politically explosive. Belief in the resurrection freed one up to walk a dangerous path of hard-line opposition to Rome and to the puppet temple regime in Jerusalem. (p. 167)

Jesus would have been considered a walking time bomb. This helps explain Rome’s participation in the Jews’ plan to eliminate him.

The applicability of the judgment is another important subject of Stark’s critique of Wright. Preterists contend that the scope of the judgment of Jerusalem was local in implementation but global in significance. All language implying worldwide activity is conceived of as spiritual in nature. Stark is singularly unconvinced, and contends that the predicted judgment was described unmistakably worldwide in physical scope: judgment was to fall on “all who dwell on the face of the earth” (Lk 21.35); Matt 24.30 says that “all the tribes of the earth” would mourn. Preterists will counter that universal language is used in the Old Testament to describe non-universal events, but I don’t think they’re considering that those prophecies’ targets were world empires and, absent a knowledge of the Far East, Africa, or the Americas, the scope was probably conceived of as truly universal even then. Taking into account the argument that the opponent of the last battle prophesied by Jesus was the nation responsible for desecrating the holy city, Stark is convinced that “…what Jesus means is dreadfully clear: Rome’s time is up…The worldwide mourning of the tribes indicates in no uncertain terms that this is a picture of the final judgment” (p. 182). Partial preterists such as Wright are more scandalized by this interpretation than full preterists, who would agree that this was the “final judgment”, resurrection of the dead included, only that it was somehow invisibly and universally appropriated from that localized event.

Stark notes Jesus’ response in Acts 1.7-8 to the disciples asking him if he was going to “restore the kingdom to Israel” at that time:

He does not deny that he intends to deliver Israel from Rome. He simply declines to tell them when. Pentecost is therefore presented by Luke as the empowerment of the disciples to prepare the world for the Messiah’s coming to restore the kingdom to Israel. (p. 203-204, emphasis original)

Having addressed the prophecies attributed directly to Jesus, Stark turns to what are considered the earliest extant Christian writings, the epistles of Paul. As with Jesus, much of Paul’s teaching came out of his conviction about an already-not-yet realization of the end times, a partial overlapping of the coming world order onto the current one. From counseling people not to marry until the end came (1 Cor 7.36), to teaching that “social norms were topsy-turvy in light of the imminent reconstitution of the cosmos” (p. 202; 1 Cor 7.26, 29-31), to stressing the urgency of the Christian mission because they were over halfway to the eschaton since Jesus’ time (Rom 13.11), Paul and the other early Christians were clearly of the opinion that the new day was about to dawn. Once again, for the countless proofs of early Christians’ expectations of imminency, read the book (or search my site — I’m pretty sure I’ve got a lot of the “time statements” cataloged somewhere on here!).

Stark asserts that Paul too envisaged the coming Kingdom of God as the end of Roman political domination. Citing several scholars, he avers that when Paul in 1 Thess 5.3 speaks of people immediately before the eschaton obliviously repeating “peace and security” (Gk. ειρηνη και ασφαλεια), Paul is consciously alluding to one of Rome’s official state slogans, Pax et Securitas, from Augustus’ propaganda campaignl; Paul was declaring the days of Pax Romana at an end when Christ returned. Stark also infers from Romans 12.14-21 that Paul’s counsel to the Christians in Rome to bless their persecutors and await God’s vengeance on them is an indication that he at least believed the “end of the age” to mean a shakeup of power in Rome and not merely in Jerusalem.

From here Stark notes the response to what might be called “the Great Disappointment of 70″ as documented within the New Testament itself. The late, pseudepigraphical 2 Peter (which he discusses in a footnote) abandons the imminency expectation altogether, reversing the old apocalyptic argument that swift deliverance was a sign of God’s justice and arguing instead that God’s waiting was a sign of His compassion, in order that He might save more people. Like Stark, I find this an unhelpful solution, since delay only allows more to perish in the interim. Another response is evident in the Fourth Gospel, also written some time after the Great Disappointment, which in its abandonment of an earthly kingdom for a spiritual kingdom (e.g. John 18.36) and near exclusion of apocalyptic elements has become the standard Christian understanding, although many futurists still hold out hope for a future millennial kingdom on earth as well.

As for points of weakness in Stark’s argumentation in this chapter, I noticed that Stark does not address why Matthew and Luke/Acts at least, if written after 70 CE as scholarship generally supposes, do not do more to reframe the picture of redemption in a form better conforming to the deflation of expectations as the authors of the Fourth Gospel and 2 Peter did. To the contrary, Luke in particular seems at pains to identify the Olivet Discourse as relating to the siege of Jerusalem, when “Jerusalem is surrounded by armies.” If nothing else, Stark’s interpretation strikes me as an argument for an earlier dating of Luke than is often supposed. If he has anticipated this response, as I suppose he has, I wish he had included it.

There are a number of ways of dealing with all of this information. It is at least possible that Jesus was speaking subversively about the Romans, as any liberation theologian (like Stark) could appreciate; that he appealed to Messianic expectation by speaking in terms of militaristic triumph over the empire while quietly subverting this by teaching love for one’s enemy and the inversion of least/greatest; that his disciples truly did just “miss it”. Of course, how exactly the “redemption” promised in Luke 21.28 happened as a result of Jerusalem’s defeat in any imminent sense is of course a difficult question. Yet at least it is hard to dispute that the Christian principle of inversion, the ideal of voluntary servanthood and love of one’s persecutors, when it has infiltrated hearts and minds, is indeed one of the greatest possible enemies of empire.

Perhaps, alternatively, Jesus himself wasn’t fully aware of the spiritual implementation of his oracle against Rome, and that in Jesus’ prophecies we’re seeing yet another of the “human faces” of God. I’m open to the idea of Jesus “growing into” his mission, such as is argued by those who see the Syro-Phoenician woman incident as the moment in which Jesus realized that his ministry applied to more than just the Jews, so I can stomach the possibility of his own understanding of the nature of the kingdom developing over time, and even of its being crystallized in incomplete form by his untimely death.

I don’t know that scholars do them justice when they speak of “millenarians” and “apocalyptic prophets” in such broad terms as though there were a school that taught “How to Be a Charlatan” as a vocation. Can we really boil Jesus or those other men down into a category and say that each of them, based on several overlapping thematic factors (described by Koch and Allison), were merely “dime a dozen”, “run of the mill” end time hacks, individual distinctives admitted but notwithstanding? Was Jesus an “apocalyptic prophet” any more than I am, ontologically or existentially, a “blogger”? I wonder if we would be less scandalized if we thought of Jesus as a teacher and moral philosopher who happened to have Jewish apocalyptic leanings and interests, even preoccupations, which understandably got more attention when so many of his prophecies seemed to come true (earthquakes, wars, famines, the temple’s destruction within 40 years, etc.; as Stark admits, “nine out of ten ain’t bad”). I’m merely saying that even if we allow Jesus to be mistaken in some of his apocalyptic expectations, we needn’t draw the conclusion that he should be dismissed as merely a “failed apocalyptic prophet”, or that he was not someone who said things that God wanted humanity to hear. After all, it’s not his doomsday prophecies that have shown the potential to change the world, which any self-respecting Messiah would want to do above all else.

Another point of criticism: Stark mostly dismisses in a footnote reference to Allison’s Jesus of Nazareth the possibility that Jesus prophesied a spiritual kingdom signified through some real world events (like the destruction in 70 CE) and that it was the New Testament writers who misunderstood it. Although various comments littered throughout the chapter obliquely challenged that contention, I think that perhaps it deserved a bit more dedicated commentary than he gave it. If Allison conclusively demonstrated the folly of this supposition as Stark implies, it would have been invaluable to summarize it in full text.

At very least, I’d say that Stark has convinced me that the Gospels (by and large) and the Epistles (by and large) teach that Jesus’ imminent return would be about more than just the vindication of Christians as implemented through the destruction of Jerusalem. So as I see it, eschatological systems as understood by most preterists and futurists alike that refuse the idea that Jesus was wrong can only thrive either upon distortion of the text or a claim that the NT authors got Jesus wrong — neither of which are compatible with inerrancy.

If indeed the New Testament is correct that Jesus prophesied Israel’s restoration as a nation and Rome’s demise, then he was wrong, at very least about the timing. Stark’s answer to this? He is sympathetic to the concerns Christians will have about Jesus being viewed as merely a “failed apocalyptic prophet”. In the conclusion of this chapter, he responds, essentially, with “wait for chapter 10″! Sounds like a great way to make people skip the chapter that comes in between this chapter and that one! (Don’t worry; I won’t.)

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 8: “Jesus Was Wrong” (part 1)

I am a full-on, unapologetic non-inerrantist, and I was before reading this book. I have long maintained that the Bible is made up of the opinions and frequently faulty understandings of its human authors rather than divinely revealed and guaranteed dispensations of truth. I have not only been heretofore untroubled by Thom Stark’s exposure of the Bible’s factual and ethical shortcomings, as a lifelong lover of the Bible, I have actually relished the information as revealing its true nature.

But that was the Old Testament. In chapter 8, Stark comes calling on the New Testament. And in spite of myself, I find it rather uncomfortable.

Was Jesus wrong? Not just ignorant about the day or the hour of his return; not even just mistaken about what the smallest of all the seeds of the earth was, or whether Moses wrote the Torah, or the historicity of Noah’s flood. In this chapter, Stark dares us to consider that Jesus may have been wrong about a very important aspect of his mission. Stark takes on virtually all the different eschatological viewpoints, and even for those without firm commitments, this will be tough stuff for virtually anyone who calls Jesus Lord. C.S. Lewis famously called Matthew 24.35 “the most embarrassing verse in the Bible,” and while Stark might point us to other passages perhaps better qualified for that distinction, he would surely agree that Lewis was speaking from a more accurate understanding of the New Testament’s eschatology than most modern Christian eschatology junkies!

Chapter 6 and this chapter are the two longest in the book, differing in a scant three pages’ length. But because this one was much heavier for me and for many of my readers, I have decided to take more than one post to unpack his discussion. This post will deal more with backgrounding the issues, while the next will pick up where it got really sticky for me as a somewhat nuanced preterist.

The first argument, with which I was actually quite familiar already, is that Jesus’ style and message resembled those of the first century Jewish apocalyptic prophets (following Sanders, etc.), several of whom we know from Josephus and other sources. Stark explains the origin of the apocalyptic genre as second temple era theodicy. The ancient prophets had blamed their national misfortunes on Israel’s sinfulness, and had prescribed repentance as the cure. Well, Israel did repent, but to little effect: they returned from captivity, but despite their redoubled devotion remained political nobodies under the thumb of the Greeks and then the Romans for centuries. This called for a change of explanation: originally it was God punishing them, but now it was God’s enemies who were persecuting them. So, the philosophers came up with a reasonable solution: these enemies would get theirs in the end, even as the faithful were awarded. This was essentially a return to the dualistic cosmology left behind with the rise of monotheism and the denial of other spiritual powers. Here is where the familiar Satan comes into the picture as the archenemy of God; here also began the belief in the resurrection of the dead.

But here’s the thing: within the apocalyptic mindset, the expectation of an afterlife and a final judgment vindicated God for allowing unwarranted adversity only if “the end that justified the means [were] conceived of as imminent. Yahweh’s righteousness was expected to be displayed in the fact that he could not suffer the suffering of his people for very long” (p. 164).

A belief in the imminency of the eschaton was a foundational tenet of second temple Judaism’s apocalyptic movements. It was a belief shared by the followers of Jesus, for the very good reason that the various “time statements” of Jesus throughout the Gospels affirmed it in no uncertain terms: “Surely I say unto you, this generation shall not pass…”; “Some of you standing here will not taste death until…” etc., etc. But this was by no means the only affinity between the Jesus Movement and other Jewish apocalyptic groups. Stark cites a long list of assumptions and beliefs from Klaus Koch and Dale Allison, which all point to the conclusion that Jesus, if the Synoptics are to be trusted, was firmly a part of a much larger “millenarian” tradition, distinctions aside.

Stark supplies full text from the Synoptics that show exactly what Jesus predicted about the future. Interestingly, in addition to the standard-fare expectation of tribulation before the end, Stark states that one of the main distinctives of Jesus teaching in the Gospels was anticipation that the Messiah himself should suffer before ultimate victory. Another distinctive emphasis of Jesus, though not exclusive to him (e.g. the Qumran community), was that of a “realized eschatology” — the idea that aspects of the future world order could be realized even within this current world world order. This whole section reads like a primer to preterism, showing how Jesus unequivocally prophesied his return in glory and the judgment of the nations as within his disciples’ lifetime. Old news for me. I won’t summarize his arguments here, but if you think Jesus’ prophecies could be wrangled into introducing a two-thousand-year-and-counting gap between his disciples’ lifetime and the end times, you’ll want to read this chapter.

On a cue from Philip Harland, I found this remarkable passage showing an example of the perception that some pagans entertained of mid-second century Christians. It’s not pretty:

[Cynics and Christians] divide and upset the household, and bring into collision those inside with each other, and tell them the worst ways to manage their household. They never say, find, or do anything socially productive. They do not participate in panegyrics (festal assemblies), nor worship the gods, nor help govern the cities, nor comfort the sorrowing, nor make reconciliation with those of opposing persuasions, nor arouse the young – or anyone else for that matter – to the affairs of the world.

–Aelius Aristides in The Defense of the Four, as cited by Frances Margaret Young in The theology of the pastoral letters, p. 17.

This was written by an orator who is associated mostly with Asia Minor but who was certainly well travelled. It’s difficult to say how widely his observations applied to Christian communities throughout the world at the time, or whether he was taking just a few bad apples and making gross overgeneralizations. I point it out because 1) much of what Aristides described then seems to correspond to various visible factions of Christianity today and because 2) to the consternation of a wide range of critics both ancient and modern, those commonalities are probably indicative of what a significant constituency of the early church thought was proper.

First of all, the upending of cultural norms for household management seems to be a part of very early Christian behavior. Galatians, a book whose Pauline authorship is virtually uncontested, famously dismissed fundamental social and cultural distinctions between male/female and slave/free. Granted, he might well have been referring specifically to those classes’ equality in standing before God rather than calling for a social revolution, but the tendency is certainly to extend theological outlooks beyond into broader ramifications, and whether or not Paul intended it it appears that this is exactly what happened. Early secular testimony like that of Celsus (as quoted in Origen) shows that Christians were sometimes characterized as giving undue deference to “stupid women”; Harland notes that there was apparently a tradition of attributing somewhat more egalitarian positions to Paul (e.g. The Acts of Paul and Thecla) than have been associated with him in recent years. It is sometimes argued that the emphasis upon maintaining social norms involving gender that we see in the (probably late, pseudo-)Pauline epistles of Ephesians and the Pastorals look for all the world like they were intended to “stop the bleeding” caused by the inevitable exploitation of Paul’s teachings on Christian liberty that would indeed cause much upheaval if not moderated. Christian feminism has left a very bad taste in my mouth, but the more I learn, the more I begin to realize that there is a very strong, very early tradition challenging the male hierarchical pattern that won out by the time of the ecumenical councils.

It also occurs to me that for the most part, those whom Aristides is criticizing seem to be following the advice of the NT in regard to involvement in society. The ubiquitous NT teaching to abstain from the world to remain pure for the returning Christ would naturally lead them, as it does many in the Left Behind crowd now, to avoid entanglement with “the affairs of the world”. If the end of the world had been around the corner, why should they have bothered “arousing their young” to do anything of lasting significance? It’s interesting to watch these eschatological expectations disappear in the following centuries as Christians came to terms with the fact that the apocalypse was not so imminent and as a resolve to make the best of this world grew until the medieval understanding of Christian mission modeled upon Augustine’s The City of God developed. Yet in the last couple centuries imminent apocalypticism has returned and, not coincidentally, its proponents are reading Scripture at face value like those whom Aristides is criticizing — with the grossly obvious oversight that part and parcel of superficial interpretations of Scripture are the manifold statements of imminency that are impossible to square with a gap of two millennia between the NT and us. This appropriation of first century expectations to our immediate future leads many to retreat from engaging society in a useful way for the reason that it’s pointless to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic. Most evangelicals have little patience for subtle, long-term forms of influence, preferring if anything to utilize the strong arm of the state to enforce their ideals and heavy-handed moralism in their forays into the arts, ostensibly in the effort to show the returning Christ that they’ve been busy and have remained out of defiling contact with the world.

To my mind the most damning way in which the modern church resembles the Christians from whom Aristides drew his generalizations is in his pronouncement that they did not “comfort the sorrowing, nor make reconciliation with those of opposing persuasions…” Here again, I suspect that most of this can be laid at the feet of an imminent eschatology. Jesus’ light rebuke, “The poor you will always have with you,” was surely not intended to imply, “You won’t have a chance to remedy poverty before I come back, so don’t bother trying,” but rather “There’ll be plenty of time to fulfill your righteous concern for social justice after I’m gone in a few weeks.” Despite Paul’s many admonishments that believers should strive to live peaceably with all people, there was enough backbiting and indifference toward keeping up good relationships that it apparently struck Aristides as characteristic of Christians in general. I can imagine that if you thought your mission was to hunker down until the bomb exploded and took out all the infidels, you’d expect that exercising the faith was more about maintaining purity of mind, and hence beliefs, than it was about counteracting the defective aspects of society.

Now, my guess is that Aristides’ various indictments listed above were of stereotypes that didn’t apply to any one group of Christians; for instance, I imagine that the more eschatologically minded were not the ones pushing the social structure envelope. But it is nonetheless intriguing to consider  how and why the church then might have looked like the church now.

As I have asked before, so I ask again: how much do evangelicals really want the modern church to look like the early church? Are we aware of how much we already do?

A reader wrote in recently and asked some really good questions about my eschatology, which I have described on this blog as preteristic. Preterism is the belief that all (or most) of the eschatological expectations of the writers of Scripture were directed at the events culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish temple.

My position has evolved significantly since I’ve been writing on the subject, the earliest relevant posts dating back a few years. In the intervening time, key aspects of my theology have changed. Particularly, I have become more convinced of the Scripture’s organic nature and origin and have thus rejected inerrancy as an unfair expectation. As a result I have also grown increasingly distrustful of tidy theological schemata composed of verses here and there from this chapter and that book that find some way to incorporate every verse that appears to contradict the main contention, no matter how contrived the resolution may be. But because I continue to regard it as a relatively coherent system as systems go, preterism has so far escaped close scrutiny in light of my revised bibliology (at least on the blog), but in recent months I’ve been increasingly aware that it is indeed due a revisiting.

You’ll find that most every preterist is firmly committed to inerrancy and as a rule will actually appeal to inerrancy as proof that the time statements necessitate first century fulfillment of NT prophecy (“Were Peter and Paul wrong about when Jesus would return? Certainly not!”). Replying to the email really gave me a chance to reassess what I believe about preterism since letting go of expectations of inerrancy.

In this post, and particularly with my limited knowledge, I can’t adequately describe or engage biblical and historical criticism’s treatment of the eschatology found in the Gospels, which I believe stand as the foundation for New Testament eschatology. I can accept many conclusions of biblical criticism (even the Jesus Seminar), but I don’t at all buy the widespread rejection of Jesus’ apocalyptic sayings, e.g. in Mark 13, Matthew 24, as inauthentic. As far as I know, there is little doubt that the apostles and early Christians were convinced of an imminent eschaton, and this makes the most sense if we accept the testimony of all four Gospels that Jesus himself expected this. I am quite comfortable (admittedly as a non-expert) saying that at least some of these passages satisfy the hard reading criterion for authenticity: why record your prophet prophesying something that didn’t happen? Even supposing that Luke’s identification of Jesus’ subject as the time when Jerusalem would be “surrounded by armies” (21.20) was an attempt to salvage a failed prophecy, you still have to motivate why he’d leave the account in at all unless there was an unignorable tradition that the core of them, necessarily including the time statements, were authentically Jesus’ teachings and perhaps even characteristic of his ministry.

Then once you’ve got such imminent eschatology coming from the mouth of Jesus, you’ve got to put him in his own Hebraic context. When we do this, I’m convinced we must recognize that his apocalyptic language referred to something besides the end of the world as we know it (i.e. the physical cosmos). I think no small part of the problem results from critics not taking the ancient tradition of Hebrew prophetic diction into account and hence, much like the “Left Behind” crowd (and indeed, most Christians throughout history since at least the late first century), falling into the trap of over-literalizing the apocalyptic. The prophets of Israel in OT times prophesied “day of the Lord” after “day of the Lord”, each coming and going without the stars dissolving or physical returns of God on the clouds despite use of exactly this imagery; this is a particularly cogent argument if the critics are right that the accurate prophecies were actually composed post hoc, since the writers would hardly have expected anyone to believe those things to have happened in the past. Indeed, Israel seems never to have really had a concept of an end of the world or consummation of history: God simply settled the account and history moved on. It was precisely this sort of reckoning, a localized judgment, that Christ taught in his eschatology. The parable of the tenants (Matthew 21.33-46), for instance, sees the return of the landlord as a punishment of those whom he had left stewards of His property, clearly referring to the religious leaders in charge of the care of God’s people Israel.

Now, localized though it was envisaged, the promised event was nonetheless of much wider scope and significance than the one city upon which judgment was wrought in AD 70. This is because it marked a clear transition to a new, more refined expression of the relationship of God and humanity modeled upon Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross. Jesus’ statement that God would mete out judgment in the person of the Christ was a claim of access to God’s authority implicit in both the original metaphor in Daniel and in Christ’s self-identification as the Son of Man.

One of the newer developments in my own thinking is that, unlike most preterists, I recognize the very real possibility of a tension between the teachings of Christ and the understanding of the writers of the epistles and Revelation regarding what the Day of the Lord would look like. The original expectation presented by Christ, clear enough in the Gospels, seems to have been given wider application by later writers of the NT (especially pseudo-Peter and the author of Revelation), from whom I think I detect more literalized beliefs about what Christ’s return and judgment would look like on the stage of history. It appears to me (most preterists would deny this) that there may have been some misunderstanding and overextension of the judgment to visibly encompass more of the world than it actually would, fueling furious missionary movements that covered the Empire in decades’ time. There was also the widespread supposition that it would be at that time that Sheol, the place of the dead in which all of humanity slept awaiting judgment, was emptied (the Resurrection of the Dead), followed by the judgment of all those alive at the time. From this the early Christians had the notion that the whole living world had to have a chance to repent before Christ returned to judge it (e.g. Acts 17.30-31); but if this evangelization before the judgment was as important as they obviously thought it was, I hate it for the Chinese, the Australian aborigines, and those in America at the time whom the message never quite reached!

I think whatever misunderstanding of eschatology the Christians entertained is attributable to a recognition of the epochal importance of the passing away of an old world into a new, spoken of in OT terms of a new heavens and new earth but interpreted outside that context in a Greco-Roman world. Indeed, I suspect that some of the later NT writers’ apocalypticism and the early church’s futurism came from a misapprehension of some of the old Jewish apocalyptic language of Jesus that was directed toward the Jewish leaders who would have (or at least should have) recognized its OT color, whereas others not reared in Judaism might have not known how literal to take it.

One thing I was asked was why the fall of Jerusalem would have been significant enough to justify such breathless anticipation. It’s actually pretty simple: for all practical purposes, it was the end of Judaism. After the dismantling of the center of the Jewish cultus, the temple, and the diasphora that caused Jews to lose trace of their genealogies, Judaism as prescribed in Torah disappeared and was replaced with an essentially different system. Christianity was originally seen by Paul and most other believers as the fulfillment of Judaism, not as a competitor to Judaism, but since this opinion was not shared by the religious leaders of Judaism who resented Christian claims and used their political power to persecute Christians, Christians themselves increasingly grew anxious to be vindicated by God in a tangible sense. For this reason I believe that the scope and applicability of this particular Day of the Lord was indeed universal: it was the definitive episode in which the ethno-centric Jewish cultus by which YHWH was introduced to the world was displaced (or at least profoundly revised) by inclusive Christianity.

So if there’s no consummation of history in the future, what about our judgment? While I entertain serious doubts about the so-called General Resurrection, I believe this at least: Christ will hold every individual accountable. All the speculation – even by the authors of Scripture – about how and when notwithstanding, the clear unequivocal testimony is that God is judge, and seeing no statements in any NT eschatology that predict another Day of the Lord judgment (much less an impending end of the world), I conclude that God will judge us all individually, in His own time rather than in some end-of-time, get-in-line courtroom.

This was quite a mouthful, and I didn’t go into a whole lot really, but this was useful to me as a starting place.

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Further reading from a preterist perspective:

The best book I can recommend that you buy is the recently revised version of Behind the Veil of Moses by Brian Martin. It is an expansive explanation of preterism, taking into account most applicable Scriptures. He really explains the hermeneutics required for understanding eschatology and Scripture in general (audience relevance etc.) quite well.

My own opinions on the dating and references of Revelation are admittedly underdeveloped, but suffice it to say that I’d much prefer to take my eschatology from what we can recover of Jesus’ views than from that problematic book! However, if you’d like a preterist “walkthrough” of Revelation, I’d recommend The Parousia by James Stuart Russell. Russell and this book are chiefly responsible for modern interest in preterism. I should note that it was written in 1878 and so some of the style is a little stilted, but I still find it eminently readable and fascinating. It can be read online or downloaded for free.

Even the most conservative varieties of preterism trouble many evangelical believers on the grounds that the ancient church already viewed the apocalypse as incomplete and awaiting a yet future consummation. Many acknowledge a first century referent for most of Jesus’ prophecies but still await a universal final judgment and the Resurrection of the Dead in our future; however, they have precious little textual support for breaking up a clearly single, imminent eschatological expectation into segments spanning millennia, depending solely on church tradition and the problem that even the later first century church expected a final judgment consummation of history. My blog has frequently addressed concerns with dissenting from the expectations of church tradition, most recently here, and I offer what I find to be a completely sufficient explanation above for why Jesus’ statements were misconstrued within the first century.

Today Joel Watts posted a quote from one of the Early Church Fathers on the subject of the Eucharist (a.k.a. the Lord’s Supper or Communion):

For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that Jesus took bread, and when He had given thanks, said, “This do ye in remembrance of Me, this is My body;” and that, after the same manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, He said, “This is My blood;” and gave it to them alone. [Emphasis all Steve's]

This wasn’t post-Nicea, folks. The doctrine of transubstantiation, or Real Presence, which teaches that the bread and wine literally become Christ’s body and blood upon the blessing from the Church leader, goes way back.  The above quote was from Justin Martyr in his First Apology (ch. 66), written about 155. When looking at the Early Church Fathers, we don’t get a whole lot earlier than Justin Martyr. Interestingly, wider context shows that his main point wasn’t even that the elements became Christ’s body and blood — that was a given — but that the Church leadership was entrusted with the administration of the sacrament. And it’s clear that Justin is under the impression that this teaching was handed down by the Apostles, so at very least it well predates 155.

I’m not taking a position on whether he was right or wrong here, but that this was an exceptionally early witness to a doctrine that many “orthodox” Protestants who highly depend upon “historic, orthodox Christianity” nevertheless reject (this was not true of Martin Luther, who insisted on a literal interpretation of “Hoc est corpus meam,” meaning “This is my body.”). These same orthodoxy-loving Protestants characteristically dismiss out of hand all kinds of perfectly compelling textual, historical, and scientific evidence that contradicts what they regard as the teaching of “historic Christianity”.

From my experience, dissenting from another Christian’s belief on the grounds that it has somehow departed ways with “historic Christianity” is simply the most convenient way of ignoring that belief without having to address it honestly. Granted, not all beliefs warrant the same level of scrutiny before being put on the back shelf or dismissed; I certainly wouldn’t expect everyone to personally debunk every shady conspiracy theory, fantastic claim, or alternative explanation with transparently misguided motivations. But many other beliefs deserve to be examined and not simply ignored, particularly when they’re held by other well-intentioned, critical thinking believers. Letting the question of whether a point of view is right or wrong be answered solely by an appeal to ”orthodoxy” is not critical thinking: it’s blind faith that an intellectually honest lover of truth should not allow to be kept under lock and key to exempt it from analysis and authentication.

John Walton points out that often in the Ancient Near East, a temple dedication ceremony would take place over seven days’ time; for six days, the temple would be furnished and the priests would take up their posts, and finally on the seventh day the deity would come in to take residence and begin to exercise his/her authority. Walton argues that when the Hebrews heard the priests read the creation week of Genesis 1 to them, they would probably not have taken it (primarily, anyway) as a treatise on history or a scientific origins account but as a comosgony framed in terms of an analogy with the construction and resulting importance of the temple as God’s headquarters for the universe. Walton refers to Genesis 1 as a “temple text”: it is a literary form of analogy to the establishment of the sanctuary. His “rest” was not about sleep, but about settling in at the control booth and taking command of the cosmos He had set in place. Six days you shall work, rest on the Sabbath. In fact (and this is not from Walton), that’s why the Sabbath was not made for man, but man for the Sabbath: it became a day of doing nothing (even healing!), when, as Jesus demonstrated with the healing of the man with the withered hand, it was intended to be a day of doing the Lord’s work, a day set aside to remember God’s intention for the heavens and the earth (the implementation of His purposes).

Remember Isaiah 66.1: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house that you build for me?” Like the word “rest” in Genesis 1, this word commonly translated footstool may sound like it’s describing a simple Laz-E-Boy scenario. But as most commentators recognize, the footstool language should conjure the image of the posture of the victorious ANE king with his foot on the neck of the defeated foe. It’s the picture of a king exercising authority and dominion. A king in this position could “rest” in the confidence that he was in control of the situation, but his kingly responsibilites were by no means complete. Footstool in passages like Isaiah 66.1 and Psalm 110.1 refers to those who have been subjugated; it is after this “rest” of conquest has been undertaken that the king’s reign over all his subjects is realized. Recall that Isaiah 66.1 is only a few verses after the passage in chapter 65 in which Isaiah describes the establishment of a new heavens and a new earth, which is the same setting as Genesis 1. Compare Ps 110.1: “The LORD said to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet,’ ” which was quoted multiple times in the NT (Lu 20.43; Ac 2.35; Heb 1.13; 10.13). What Isaiah was envisioning in chapters 65 and 66 was a new order, a new throne and footstool; this time those forcibly subjugated would be those who had been nullifying God’s purpose for His house. Beginning with the “earth is my footstool” verse, Isaiah goes on to list God’s grievances against those whose right standing with God implied by their adherence to the Law was being contradicted by their character, because they weren’t honoring God with their actions.

The early Christians thought of themselves as the new temple being built up (e.g. Ep 2.20); if they recalled their ANE past, they would have anticipated their “dedication” after their completion and furnishing. This completion would be realized in the initialization of God’s full reign through Christ, which Christ would conduct by putting his enemies under his feet (1 Cor 15.24-27), the most obvious of which were of the same cloth as the “enemies” seen in Isaiah 66, the practitioners of the Mosaic covenant whose lips honored God but whose hearts were far from Him.

This post unintentionally got into eschatology, but my main point was that Genesis 1 is a description of God’s ordering of the cosmos in the familiar terms of the house of the Lord. Not an historical account of the creation of the physical universe, it is a carefully sculpted literary expression using the familiar terms of the covenant intended to bear witness to God’s preeminence over all creation.