This is part six in an ongoing series of chapter summaries of N.T. Wright’ book, Paul in a Fresh Perspective. Today we conclude the section of the book on structures and tackle eschatology in chapter 7:Reimagining God's Future
Wright begins by recapping the reasons we
end up with eschatology as the third plank of Paul’s theology. Namely that
eschatology is the question that demands to be answered by the other two planks
of monotheism and election. “If there is one God, and if this God is the God of
Israel, then - granted the present state of the world, and of Israel - this God
must act in the future to put things to rights.” (p. 130) But this is not just
about the future of the world - of God’s good creation - this is the future of
God himself. Wright argues that because this eschatological vision of Paul’s is
built around Messiah and Spirit, that God has bound himself up in this
forthcoming reconciliation of all things.
This eschatology, of course, begins with
the established pattern of Jewish eschatology. Paul is not inventing something
new here, he is reimagining something that for him has always been. Traditional
Jewish eschatology is fundamentally about God reversing the story of Genesis 3
and undoing the damage of the fall. The means by which the Jews expected YHWH
to do this was through the routing of pagan religions, their idols and their
worshippers. It was a view that YHWH would take up his quarrel over and against
the pagan world and deal a decisive victory blow that would finally set the
world to right and elevate his chosen people. But even Israel’s own prophets
were not always so optimistic about Israel’s role in the forthcoming “day of
the Lord.” (p. 131)
The prophet Amos for example, turned the
lens of anti pagan sentiment in Jewish prophecy and turned it back on Israel
itself. The chosen people, he declared, are not innocent in this matter and the
day of the Lord will be a terrifying day for Israel - a day of darkness and not
light. Even after the exile, when Israel (Judah) had served their punishment
and been restored to the land, there was still the paradox of understanding
that although Israel had been redeemed, she had not been redeemed yet. There
was a painful awareness among the prophets that although the Temple was
restored and worship had resumed, that YHWH had not returned to dwell in that
place. (p. 132) Wright contends that this resulted in an understanding of
extended exile, despite geographic return to the land that they were still
cut-off in some way from the presence of God. Wright sees that Paul and his
contemporaries looked at this much the same way - that the continuing pagan oppression
of the chosen people constituted an ongoing reminder that things are still not
as they ought to be, and that the real exile will not end until God’s Messiah
comes to once and for all set things to rights. The point that Wright is trying
to make in all of this is that the arrival of Messiah was not expected to be a
“bolt from the blue,” something that would surprise all who were patiently
waiting for him, but rather it was seen as the natural next event in the
ongoing story of Israel and creation. The people were waiting for his arrival
precisely because the saw the writing on the wall and understood the
eschatological context. They saw themselves on the edge of history and were
anxious to see YHWH write the next chapter with the climax of Messiah. (p. 134)
The people of God were looking for the story of Exodus to play out again in
their generation - for God to lead them out of captivity and into a restored
kingdom complete with God’s reappearance in the Temple.
When Wright starts to reveal how Paul has
“reimagined” this Jewish eschatological formula he finally tips his hat to his
inaugurated eschatology position which he will now explain for the remainder of
the chapter. For Wright, “[i]naugurated eschatology, framed, explained and
given depth by the reworking of monotheism and election, is one of the most
central and characteristic notes of Paul’s whole theology. The still-future
events of which he frequently speaks are themselves reworkings of the same
Jewish expectations. And the creative tension between the two, between what has
already happened in the Messiah and what is still to happen at the ultimate
end, is where we must locate some of his most characteristic themes.” (p. 136)
The main thrust of what Wright sees as
Paul’s redefinition of Jewish eschatology through Messiah is that “what Israel
expected God to do for all his people at the end of time, God has done for the
Messiah in the middle of time.” (p. 136) As Paul says in Corinthians 15, the Messiah is the first
fruits of our resurrection and this has implications for the arrival of the
Kingdom of God as well. Wright admits that Paul is light on kingdom language in
his writings but he pushes back against the assertion that it is absent from
his writings. for Wright, Paul’s brevity on the topic should be seen not as a
disdain for the idea, but as a sign that he takes the concept for granted. (p.
137) Paul references the Kingdom of God as a future reality in 1 Corinthians
6:9, as a present reality in Romans 14:17 and as both present and future in his
fullest explanation in 1 Corinthians 15. This already/not yet tension is one
that Paul fully embraces in his writing and one that is central to his
eschatology redefined around the Messiah. Wright then goes onto rehash some of
what he’s already said a few times about Paul’s eschatology being grounded in a
new exodus paradigm modelled after Deuteronomy 30 before he dives headlong into
the controversy that has garnered him possibly the most criticism from evangelical
Christians. The return of Christ.
Wright has been accused by many over the
years of being someone who either outright denies the second coming, or who
significantly neuters the doctrine so as to make it almost unrecognizable.
[Truly, even in the C&MA where Wright’s masterpiece (my words - but I think
they are apt) Surprised By Hope is required reading for the ordination track,
ordinands are warned not to take the requirement of this book as an endorsement
of Wright’s controversial eschatology. I personally fail to see what is so
controversial about it myself, as I think it lines up with a historical
understanding of God’s plan for new creation and merely eschews many of the
unsavoury doctrines of dispensational premillenialism that began to first appear
on the scene in the 19th century. But enough commentary, back to summary.]
Wright denies these allegations outright and spends the next section of the
chapter mounting a defence for his doctrine of ‘inaugurated eschatology’. He
begins where many of his critics focus their complaints, with Wright’s denial
of the rapture. Wright’s main point is fourfold: 1.)That the “Day of the Lord”
described in Daniel is, for Paul, redefined around the Messiah; 2.)that Paul
does not use parousia in the way that many people think of it; 3.)that we
misunderstand the meaning of God’s judgment; and 4.)that the goal and purpose
of Christ’s return is not destruction but renewal.
With regards to the "Day of the Lord,”
Wright makes the point, consistent with his general argument about Paul’s
theology and worldview, that “for Paul ‘the Day of the Lord’ by no means
denoted the end of the world. Just as in Amos or Jeremiah the really appalling
thing about the ‘Day of YHWH’ was that there would be another day after it…so
in Paul the ‘Day of the Lord’ is clearly something which might well happen
during the lifetimes of himself and his readers.” (p. 141-2) The point that
Wright is arguing is that Paul’s theology and understanding of the narrative of
what god was doing didn’t allow for the ‘Day of the Lord’ to be the end of
days. He more than likely had a day of judgment akin to (and Wright
hypothesizes that this is the actual event) the destruction of Jerusalem and
the temple during the year of four emperors in AD 70. This makes Wright at least
a partial preterist, but it does not make him wrong.
Next Wright revisits his earlier arguments
about parousia which I summarized in posts 3 and 4 in this series. In short,
parousia for Wright refers not to “coming” as it is often translated, but “presence”
as opposed to “absence.” Wright makes this argument on the basis of the
imperial usage of the word, noting that this was not a word from the sacred
vocabulary and that Paul intentionally borrowed from the language of the empire
to make his point. Logic should follow then that he wanted us to understand the
word in the context that he took it from. Paul is drawing a contrast between
the parousia of Jesus and the parousia of Caesar. The fuller understanding of
parousia unlocks the mystery of 1 Thessalonians 4 and our meeting him in the
air, by expelling the way a city would go out and meet their future king as he
approached his city, his realm and escorted him toward it. This imagery is of
us joining with Christ in a second triumphal entry of sorts, re-enacting the
events of Palm Sunday with a very different result. When you combine that with
the fact that Paul speaks of us as citizens of Heaven means “despite many
misreadings, not that we will in the end go off to heaven, but that the one who
is presently in heaven will come back and transform the earth, where we have
lived as a colonial outpost of heaven waiting for that day.” (p. 143)
When speaking of judgment Wright insists
that for Paul, judgment was not only a future event, but an event that would be
in accordance with the entirety of a life led. What is important for Wright in
this area is that Paul was unapologetically Jewish in his application of this
doctrine. That judgment was not in the here an now as many Pagans saw it to be,
but was an event that happened after all had been completed.
And when speaking of renewal it is
important to note (as many Christians seem ignorant on this front) that God’s
plan is not in any way to destroy the world - or even to replace it with a new
one, but rather Paul is consistently preaching and teaching about
reconciliation and renewal. The act of making old things new. God, through
Messiah, is taking the old matter of the cosmos and applying the power of
resurrection to it to make it new and glorious and incorruptible. (p. 144)
Shifting gears to the eschatological
implications of Paul’s doctrine of the Spirit, Wright makes the argument that
the Spirit serves as the down payment of what is to come in God’s future. That
the presence of the Spirit in the live of the believer acts as a seal
(Ephesians 1) declaring that the person is “already a part of God’s new ago and
his renewed people, part of that inaugurated-eschatological family who have
been delivered from the present evil age — and, as such, you are ‘not under the
Torah’.” (p. 146-7) This, Wright adamantly claims, is where so much debate on
the ‘new perspective’ gets stuck. Paul is not simply saying that Christianity
is a religion of grace while Judaism is a religion of law, nor is he saying
that since Paul found salvation in Christ so therefore it was not available in
Judaism, rather for Paul:
“The
preaching of the gospel was the means whereby the Spirit worked in the hearts
and minds of both Jews and Gentiles not just to give them a new religious experience, not even just to
bring them salvation, but to make them the people in whom the new age, the Age
to Come of Jewish eschatological expectation, had come to birth.” (p. 147)
This is why Christian ethics is so much
more than keeping law, it is about living in a new world. Living life under the
rules and realities of the Kingdom to come rather than the world we know! This
is the exciting reality of Paul’s reimagined eschatology; that we are not just
the bearers of God’s glorious promise of new creation, but in Christ and filled
with the Spirit we are the agents of God’s good work in this world that is
being reborn - being remade according to the good and perfect will of it’s
creator. This is the good news Paul preaches and this is what Wright is trying
to uncover.
In the next chapter Wright will make his
final applications of the theology he has spent the last seven chapters laying
out. Check back in a few days for the final summary.
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