Understanding Eschatology (2)

        I have taken a lesson from the emphases of economists like Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek and applied it to the study of eschatology.  I have deliberately chosen to focus my attention on the individual rather than on the collective.  I have turned from macro-eschatology (God's plan for the nations and the world) to micro-eschatology (God's plan for individual people), not only because it is, in my view, a more profitable study, one more suitable for a theological pilgrimage, but because it is a subject upon which Scripture is more clear and accessible.  Young theologians, I am convinced, would be better served if they sought to master the Bible's teachings on personal destiny rather than global destiny.  And, with regard to micro-eschatology, nature is a far better model than is a bus schedule.

     When Paul, for example, explains the coming resurrection to the Corinthians, he resorts to agricultural imagery, to seeds planted in the ground now and to the coming harvest.  What is planted (or buried) a material body is harvested (or resurrected) a spiritual one.  Jesus does the same.  When He teaches micro-eschatology, He also employs natural, or agricultural, images, such as farmers at work separating sheep from goats and wheat from chaff.  Even when He addresses Himself to macro-eschatology, nature images predominate, as when He introduces lessons drawn from fig trees or from the atmospheric conditions that precede a storm.

     In that sense, because nature is a fertile source of images and analogies, it can be a useful means of prophetic pedagogy.  It also can help to decipher some of the more puzzling micro-eschatological phenomena in Scripture.  One such puzzling detail concerning which nature can be an aid actually occurs at least three times in the New Testament:  why Mary could not recognize the resurrected Jesus while standing at His empty tomb; why the disciples, fishing from their boat, could not recognize the resurrected Jesus, beckoning them from the nearby shore; and why the disciples on the road to Emmaus could not recognize the resurrected Jesus, the very man about whom they were speaking and to whom they spoke.

     Imagine, if you will, a caterpillar and a butterfly, one crawling, the other perched, upon the same twig.  Even had he a mind able to do so, the caterpillar would not recognize in his winged companion the same friend with whom he used to share a tasty leaf.  The transformation wrought in the cocoon would have masked his friend's true identity.  Nor would the caterpillar recognize in his companion his own destiny, even though it stood before his very eyes in all its Monarch splendor.  But something in the way that butterfly moved, or something in the way it nibbled at its food in the bright sunlight would stir the caterpillar deeply, would make his heart burn within him.  It would awaken the memory of twigs he'd travelled and leaves he'd tasted in the past, and of those with whom he'd shared summer days.  The welcome and revered image of his old friend's homely, wormlike countenance would cross his mind, and for an instant, for one brief but electric moment, charged with expectation and softened by nostalgia, he would catch a glimpse of both past and future, and he would understand.

     But moments of such transcending significance and insight are rare.  Only the keen-sighted or the visionary among us can see the seed that once was in the rose that now is.  In the oak trees towering above them they can see the destiny of humble acorns lying in the dirt.  They see in the green stalks of corn that sway in the breezes of a warm August morning, while they stand in an Indiana cornfield that fills their vision on every side all the way to the horizon, the very same kernels they buried in the earth just months before.  And if, like the caterpillar, they are blessed with a moment of insight, they will see their own destiny.  They will learn what graveyards really are:  not long lines of weathered headstones standing as silent testimonials to broken dreams or to separation without remedy, but  rows and rows of planted seeds, await­ing the harvest of the last day.  They will understand that what is harvested far ex­ceeds that which they laid in the ground.  They will see that caterpillar and butterfly, acorn and oak, kernel and stalk, bulb and tulip, and egg and rooster, are merely two stages in the development of the same life.  They will see that the transformation wrought in the unseen darkness behind the veil of death is so magnificent that what they themselves will become is hardly recognizable in what they now are.

     But they have a clue:  they know that they shall be like Christ.  And they know that some have actually seen the resurrected Jesus and have left behind an account of that amazing sight.  Then, the next time they read the inspired description of the awesome Christ in John's vision, they will understand why even Jesus' best friends did not recognize Him at first.  And they will catch a glimpse, at the same time, of their own Monarch destiny.

     And what will that world be like?                                 

     I don't know.  But I imagine it will be as startlingly and breathtakingly different from the one we now enjoy as the one we now enjoy is from the dark wetness of the womb we once inhabited, or as the brilliant blue skies and fresh warm breezes in which the violets now bloom are different from the dirt and darkness of the flower bed from which they arose.

Understanding Eschatology (1)

      Not long after my conversion, I was given, in rapid succession, J. Dwight Pentecost's Things to Come, Salem Kirban's 666, and Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth, which I dutifully read cover-to-cover.  Had I not been given C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity earlier, I would have acquired, at the very outset, a radically distorted view of Christian life and thought.

     Except for one, my well-meaning spiritual mentors served to nourish only a taste for the sensational, not my new hunger for God and godliness.  While even now I appreciate their zeal and their good intentions, I realize, in a way I did not (indeed could not) realize then, that their conception of Christian nurture and of eschatology were truncated and stifling.  They apparently had never learned, and therefore could not impart to me, that eschatology is no beginner's subject.  I know now that it is not.  I sympathize, for example, with the Protestant reformers' re­luctance to address Biblical texts like John's Apocalypse -- a book upon which even Calvin himself refused to write a commentary and which both Luther and Zwingli (and St. Jerome before them) rejected as non-canonical.

     Evangelical theologians typically pursue their study of eschatology under one of two controlling images:  they see it as analogous either to a railroad timetable or else to nature and to natural processes.  While I (and the New Testament) generally prefer the latter, the books I was given to read focused almost entirely upon the former.  Nor is the choice insignificant.  Very much depends upon the controlling images we employ.  As a timetable devotee I was reading Matthew 24 and Revelation 6 as if they were tomorrow's newspaper headlines and reading the New York Times as if it were a biblical commentary by F. F. Bruce or B. F. Westcott.

     Only later did I learn the hard and humbling lesson that virtually every generation in Christian history thought of itself as the last, and that in every instance they were wrong.  How could I escape their fate?

     Only later did I discover the changing face of Antichrist and the many different names from history that well-informed theologians had assigned him -- Pope Julius, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, and John Kennedy among them.  Either those theologians were flatly mistaken or else the Evil One is very much like George Burns in the movie Oh God!:  he can do any face, any voice.

     Only later did I question (and then disavow) the facile identifications I had made between biblical motifs and texts, on the one hand, and current events, on the other.  On what demonstrable basis, after all, did I so blithely assume that the political entity produced by United Nations fiat in the late 1940s was the very same entity as that created by God when He called Abram out of Ur millennia earlier, or that was crushed and dispersed by foreign powers in 70 A.D.?  As Russell Kirk observed in a different context, “The twentieth-century democracy of Israel, with its secular parties and western parliamentary structure, bears no resemblance to the Kingdom or to post-exilic theocracy.”  Don't get me wrong -- I don't oppose the modern state of Israel.  It is our best friend in that deeply troubled corner of the world, and we ought to support it vigorously and consistently.  But eschatology has nothing to do with it.

     I had overlooked the cryptic, almost cynical, nature of the answers given by Jesus to any question posed to Him about the timing of the eschaton.  He told his questioners that the end would come when people were engrossed in buying and selling, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage; and his listeners (not to mention some of his modern evangelical readers) seemed to act as if they had actually been told something.  He would tell them that the end would come when there were earthquakes, wars, and rumors of wars -- a not too helpful reply given that in the 2,000 years since He spoke only 44 have been free of military combat of some sort, on the one hand, and that during those war-laden years we have witnessed thousands upon thousands of earthquakes.  The language of theophany, I was slow to learn, is picturesque, not perspicuous.  At other times Jesus became far less oblique:  He told his questioners that “the kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed” (Luke 17: 20).  But they seemed not to get his point.  At least once, He flatly told his listeners that He simply did not know (Matt. 24: 36).  Only the Father knows the time, Jesus told them, and concerning it the Father has said precisely nothing.

     Timetables, in other words, are out.  Global eschatology remains what it always has been, a mystery. 

“The resurrection of the body; and life everlasting." (part 2)

What the Scripture normally calls "eternal life," the creed calls "life everlasting."  Neither term means longevity of life, but a special quality of life, namely the life that comes from intimate knowledge of God and communion with Him.  According to Scripture, eternal life entails knowing and abiding in God (1 John 5: 20), which is why Scripture also says that eternal life is not something merely for the distant future.  It can be possessed and experienced right now, right here.  Eternal life is a knowledge, a relationship.  The One Whom we know and to Whom we relate is God.  In Peter's words, eternal life is our participation in God's own divine nature (2 Peter 1: 4), which means that we shall be like God, not in the foolish and sinful way attempted by Adam and Eve, but by the redeeming grace of God in Christ, the one into whose image and character we are ultimately transformed (Rom. 8: 29).

         Eternal life is not the same as mere endless existence, though such notions are included within it.  Nor does eternal life mean, as some commentators say it means, life "outside space and time" or "the absence of time."  Because eternal life entails resurrection of the body, because having a body implies a spatial context, and because space and time seem intimately and inextricably intertwined, eternal life cannot be timeless or spaceless life.  Eternal life is our life with Him Who is Life (John 11: 25), Light (1 John 1: 5), and Love (1 John 4: 8).  It is a life which death cannot end.  Quite the contrary; it is a life which in some ways death actually begins.  And as our resurrection is found solely in Christ, so also is our eternal life:  "God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son" (1 John 5: 11).

         Careful contemplation of the creed's teaching on this point is immensely practical and provides a much-needed spiritual therapy.  By contemplating the conditions of perfect beatitude that await us and the joy and satisfaction that arise from being precisely what our all-wise Creator intended us to be, we learn more effectively how to wean ourselves from the unprofitable attachments our fallen hearts too quickly make to evil.  Only in the face of infinite joy and godly bliss do we learn not to toy with the meager and shallow pleasures of sin, which can only hurt us.

         Eternal life is the final chapter of the world's great saga, a saga written by the hand of God, the Lord of History.  That chapter brings the end of sorrow, pain, evil and doubt.  Eternal life is God's final word to us -- not death, not annihilation, but life -- life eternal.  That is the creed's final word to us as well.  Where the creed leaves off, the life to come is just beginning.  Epilogue is but prologue after all.