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Re: The 'rapture' in its literary and historical setting
When precisely was the ‘event within history’ to which you refer, Andrew - the parousia when ‘Caesar was displaced’, and how did anybody know that this event had taken place? We could with greater validity be talking about the death of Jesus on the cross - Colossians 2:15, except that the language of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 doesn’t fit, which moves it forward to an as yet unaccomplished event. The more you seek to prove your case, the less convinced I am that there is any historical evidence for it on the terms with which you describe it. Without historical evidence, it lacks credibility. A credible faith needs more credible evidence.
Re: The 'rapture' in its literary and historical setting
To be honest, I don’t understand your problem. During the period experienced and anticipated by the New Testament, both for Israel and for the early church Caesar was king (‘We have no king but Caesar’: John 19:15) and Rome was the oppressor of the people of God. Jesus won a victory over this supreme enemy of the people of God (your reference to Col. 2:15 is apposite), but this victory became a concrete historical reality over the coming decades and centuries as communities of his followers pursued the same narrow path of faithful suffering. In the end those communities emerged from under the hegemony of the ruling paganism as the ideology of Roman imperialism, with the divinized emperor at its pinnacle, collapsed. The oppressor of the people was overcome. How is this not historical?
But I would also stress that biblical interpretation is not bound to take account of what actually happened. Paul did not know exactly how things would work out. That’s why he creates his narrative of hope out of Old Testament material. What he needed to do was communicate his prophetic assurance that the principalities and powers would not overcome the church, that God would eventually ‘judge’ the enemy of his people, and so on. The point was that in the not too distant future (you can’t keep ignoring the pervasive stress on imminence) the church would be delivered from Rome in much the same way that Israel was delivered from the Babylonians or from Antiochus Epiphanes.
Judgment on Babylon did not happen exactly or literally as it is described in Isaiah, but in the end this enemy of Israel was defeated by the Medes (cf. Is. 13:17) - God’s judgment was executed as Isaiah had prophesied. The same language is used in Revelation (cf. Is. 21:9; Rev. 18:2) to describe the destruction of the oppressor of the church. As in Isaiah, the political event or transformation is interpreted through the symbolic language of prophecy as an act of divine judgment. The prophetic or apocalyptic language places the people of God at the centre of directly relevant historical developments.
The suffering of Jesus and the collapse of the Roman Empire
Andrew
In the end those communities emerged from under the hegemony of the ruling paganism as the ideology of Roman imperialism, with the divinized emperor at its pinnacle, collapsed. The oppressor of the people was overcome. How is this not historical?
As I said in my earliier comment, this comes down to a claim that it took 1500 years for the faithful suffering of Jesus and his followers to cause the collapse of the Roman Empire (in the East- only 470 years for it to happen in the West. )
Nothing I have read about the history of the Roman Empire supports the idea that it collapsed because of the faithful suffering of Jesus and his followers. In an earlier comment you said this idea is not a fanciful one and that there is evidence to support it,. I would be interested to know what the evidence is.
Paul
Re: The suffering of Jesus and the collapse of the Roman Empire
Paul, the issue is the collapse of Roman imperialism insofar as it opposed and threatened the extinction of the church and the suppression of the gospel - that is, insofar as it could be identified, in Daniel’s symbology, with the beast which made war against the saints of the Most High. I also made the point above that it is a mistake to look with hindsight for exact historical correspondences. Prophetic language doesn’t work in that way. We have to ask how the future looked from the point of view of the New Testament and how they used the Old Testament to construct a narrative of hope for communities facing hostility.
On the second point, my argument is not particularly that the Roman empire collapsed because of the faithful suffering of Jesus and his followers. The enemy of the church collapsed because it came under divine judgment, just as Babylon and Antiochus Epiphanes had done before. In political terms the collapse can be attributed to internal and external causes, but that doesn’t make it any less a matter of divine judgment. But the people of God survived the eschatological crisis by its willingness to endure suffering in the hope of eventual vindication and victory. There are two different issues here.
Having said that, Rodney Stark argues in The Rise of Christianity that the self-sacrificing compassion of Christians during periods of plague was a very significant factor in the Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the western world, not least because it highlighted the moral bankruptcy of paganism.
Re: The suffering of Jesus and the collapse of the Roman Empire
Andrew
“it is a mistake to look with hindsight for exact historical correspondences”
Well, yes- but I cannot see any historical correspondences
“On the second point, my argument is not particularly that the Roman empire collapsed because of the faithful suffering of Jesus and his followers. The enemy of the church collapsed because it came under divine judgment, just as Babylon and Antiochus Epiphanes had done before. In political terms the collapse can be attributed to internal and external causes, but that doesn’t make it any less a matter of divine judgment. But the people of God survived the eschatological crisis by its willingness to endure suffering in the hope of eventual vindication and victory. There are two different issues here.”
I really struggle to follow your thought here.
You suggest that we can make pronouncements about God’s intervention in the world quite independently of what historiography would say. That is, historians could adduce a set of causes for the collapse of Rome which constitute a complete and convincing explanation but we could still say their explanation is not the real explanation: the real explanation is God’s judgement on Rome.
The trouble with this approach is that, in denying the relevance of what historians regard as causes, any set of facts can be used to validate the claim that God has exercised judgement.
The broader debate that has been taking place on OST concerns (if I understand it correctly) finding the right balance between treating the New Testament writings as a repository of timeless truths on the one hand and as a unique and unrepeatable set of events in the onward march of history on the other. I struggle to keep up with this discussion (having so far read only a bit of your book) and so I make no comment on the scriptural issues.
However I do have a comment about the portrayal of God as one who intervenes in earthly affairs to strike down Rome because the Roman emperor purports to divine. If God can intervene in earthly affairs to do this why could he not intervene in the Holocaust or the 2005 tsunami or the religious wars in Europe, or the current carnage in Iraq etc etc?
The fact that God does not do so leads me to think that he cannot be understood as a God of earthly power. I am not thereby suggesting that belief in God is a matter of private devotion- only that it does not lead to changes in the world that are in any way clear or straightforward.
In saying this I am particularly influenced by Simone Weil.
Paul
Re: The 'rapture' in its literary and historical setting
“To be honest, I don’t understand your problem.” Well, yes, I think a lot of people probably wonder what my problem is, though many are too polite to say so.
This response comes after some reflection by Paul, Daniel and others, but I have a very simple observation. The ‘coming of the Son of Man’ in Matthew 24 was, in the first place, a very visible event, with all the preceding signs being very clearly fulfilled in the 1st century. The event was the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70.
So when we speak of another 1st century (or whenever) ‘coming of the Son of Man’ in judgement on Rome, we naturally expect a similar, observable judgement. But for this, we seek in vain. I think the argument is getting very stretched if we now say there did not need to be any outward sign of judgement at all, or any date at which we could say Rome has now fallen.
It seems to me specious to argue that there did not need to be any evidence for judgement on Rome apart from the church’s survival (which is better attributed to other factors), when there is ample evidence for every other major NT event prophetically associated with Jesus - ie his death, resurrection, ascension, outpoured Spirit.
Which leads me to the view that it is these which should be the mainstay of theological interpretation, rather than an event which happened invisibly and never seemed to have any outward fulfilment.
Re: The 'rapture' in its literary and historical setting
The story of the Son of man as it is told by Daniel encompasses 1) judgment on disloyal and rebellious Israel; 2) the suffering of the righteous against whom the pagan ruler makes war; 3) and the defeat and destruction of the pagan oppressor. Jesus only really makes use of (and places himself at the centre of) the first two parts of this story: judgment on Jerusalem and the suffering of his followers as they proclaim the good news of God’s salvation first in Israel and then in the Greek-Roman world. Paul and John, from a stand-point in the midst of pagan society, also conceive of the third part of the story: the defeat of the pagan power that opposed the church. That pagan power was Rome, represented supremely by the emperor. That ideology collapsed in the fourth century. To my mind that is a clear enough historical fulfilment of the New Testament conviction that Rome would not triumph over the church.
I’m re-reading Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom at the moment. The following statement captures both the ambiguities and ironies of the transition to Christendom following centuries of Roman persecution and the pervasive sense of triumph:
My argument is simply that this specific ‘observable’, historical and enormously important ‘triumph’ is prefigured in the New Testament in the motif of the coming of the Son of man to be vindicated over his enemies and in the passages that speak of judgment on the pagan oppressor. The fact that Christendom became as oppressive as Rome is beyond the purview of the New Testament.
Re: The 'rapture' in its literary and historical setting
As far as I know, this is the first time you have associated Constantine’s tolerance and subsequent institution of Christianity as the state religion with ‘the coming of the Son of Man’ in judgement on Rome?
The reception of this development was mixed - especially when bishops who had apostasised during the Diocletian persecutions were accepted back into senior positions. This formed the essence of the Donatist dispute.
Rome dressed itself up in Christian clothing, but the pagan savagery of Rome was the wolf beneath the sheep’s clothing. Very apposite to Revelation, I would think.
Re: The 'rapture' in its literary and historical setting
Yes, I’ve hesitated to make an explicit connection, partly because of the ironies in the Christianization of Rome / imperialization of Christianity, and partly because exegetically we do not have to suppose that the New Testament foresaw Constantine as such. Now I would be inclined to understand the whole lengthy and complex Christendom period as a flawed but inevitable experiment in the reshaping of the new creation according the imperial template. Arguably, in this respect Christendom was more true to the biblical narrative than the dissenting and reformist movements that opposed it. Another irony! The problem was, of course, that Christendom operated on the basis of power rather than grace.
Re: The 'rapture' in its literary and historical setting
Paul,
Your questions about the mode of ‘divine intervention’ are, I think, very important. When we speak of, for example, the destruction of Jerusalem as manifesting ‘the wrath of God’, we don’t mean that the wrath of God is its causal antecedant (or at least it’s not what I would mean if I said it), at least not in a mechanistic sense. Rather, we (I?) mean that God’s order, to a meaningful extent, reflects his ordering, and that therefore to break covenant with him, to go ‘against the grain’ of the universe, invites disaster. That disaster breaks in, usually, through standard historical means. There needs to be no denial of regular historical causes to attribute something to ‘the wrath of God’.
Our mental image when we say ‘wrath’ must not fall into easy caricatures (like when we talk about penal substitutionary atonement as ‘child abuse’), but rather we must imagine what the NT authors imagined as they looked to the future and foresaw (or looked to the past and remembered) the inevitable outcome of flagrant rebellion against God (expressed as pride, violence, or any other denial of God’s good and just order). ‘Wrath’ is an anthropomorphism, but we must be careful not to think of God in too human terms.
Perhaps others will have better ways of expressing this thought than I…
Cheers,
-Daniel-
'wrath'
I just found the same thought, expressed in better words, by our friend NT Wright (here):
” But in our contemporary world, and even in the churches, the voice of prophecy has become silent, or merely silly. Some have suggested that the foot-and-mouth epidemic is God’s punishment for specific sins; an ultra-Protestant sect declared it was because the Queen visited the Pope not long ago; a sensitive soul wrote to me to say it was because of blasphemy in a particular movie. The trouble is that caricatures like that make us shy away from facing the fact that we humans are called to be stewards of God’s creation and that when we fail, as we obviously have been failing for quite some time (with half the world hungry and the other half over-fed), it isn’t the case that God is sitting upstairs a long way away deciding to zap us with some arbitrary punishment, but that, as with Israel in Isaiah’s and Jesus’ day, we will reap the consequences of our own selfish and arrogant choices, and that when we do this is not something other than the sorrowful wrath of our loving God. If we are to do joined-up thinking in our political life - and the present crisis has shown how far we still have to go on that front - it is vital and urgent that part of the joining-up is the theological dimension of all reality.”
Re: 'wrath'
Daniel
It seems to me that what NT Wright says is just a paraphrase of the view that we receive earthly punishment for our sins- a view that permeates the Old Testament.
But as we know, terrible things often happen to the innocent and the evil often go their graves untroubled: this was Job’s protest.
I gag when I read something like this:
“we will reap the consequences of our own selfish and arrogant choices, and that when we do this is not something other than the sorrowful wrath of our loving God”
I am reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night”. What selfish and arrogant choices had the Jews of Europe made to warrant the Holocaust? How can you possibly describe the ovens of Auschwitz as “the sorrowful wrath of our loving God”?
This makes God into a monster.
Paul
Re: 'wrath'
Paul, I very much appreciate the problem. I think the answer will lie partly in developing a responsible prophetic discernment, which seems to me to be the thrust of the quote from Wright. There is surely the general biblical point that human suffering in whatever form is a consequence of a primal rebellion against God. But that theological premise does not allow us to read every particular hardship or horror as a direct consequence of personal sin. Jesus also resists that interpretation in John 9. Nor does it preclude compassion for those who suffer.
Equally, however, the fact that Job’s friends were wrong in interpreting his suffering as judgment for some sin he had committed does mean that suffering is never - in theological terms - a consequence of sin. Many voices in Israel in the second temple period interpreted its state of oppression as a consequence of previous rebellion against YHWH. When Jesus foretells great ‘tribulation’ for Israel in the coming years, he clearly regards it as a consequence of the nation’s refusal to take the narrow path leading to life. But this is to be understood within the particular eschatological narrative. It is not a general existential argument about sin and suffering.
To my mind the notion of divine judgment is too central to the thought of the New Testament to be dismissed. We have to find some way of taking it seriously without, as Daniel says, constructing a grotesque caricature of God. Injustice and suffering are part and parcel of collective (ie. political) human experience. They must somehow be integrated into our theology, not excluded out of some sense of moral distaste.
Does God intervene in earthly affairs?
Andrew
The idea that responsibly developed prophetic discernment would determine which suffering is the consequence of sin and which is not, does not really solve the core problem. This is that, if it is true that God intervenes in earthly affairs to render judgement, then we must necessarily ask why He does not also intervene to stop the horrors which occur everywhere in human history- whether the result of man’s inhumanity to man or the consequences of natural catastrophe.
If you or I fail to render assistance to a child in a car accident we would be reviled as morally derelict. The charge against God would be much stronger if he could have stopped the Holocaust and did not.
You point out that “the notion of divine judgment is too central to the thought of the New Testament to be dismissed. We have to find some way of taking it seriously without, as Daniel says, constructing a grotesque caricature of God”.
I do not deny the importance of divine judgement. What I do say is that if God’s judgement is rendered in this world then it turns him into a heartless monster.
Your reading of scripture is (I think) that the divine judgement pronounced by Jesus is of a piece with Jahweh’s judgement on errant Israel, Babylon etc. In both cases the intervention is in earthly affairs.
As I said in an earlier comment, this is radically at odds with my understanding of the gospel as revealing a God who refuses to, and perhaps cannot, exercise political power. This, it seems to me, is a major discontinuity between the New and the Old Testaments.
Does Jesus during his earthly ministry anywhere use divine powers to bring down earthly punishment on sinners or to destroy the Godless Romans? Obviously he does not- I cannot think of any of his miracles which touch on earthly power structures at all. More, he deliberately renounces the use of his power for such purposes. He is content that divine judgement should be passed somewhere else than on earth:
“Your Father in heaven causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matt 5.21ff)”
I am not sure whether my view of this difference between the New and Old Testament will stand up to systematic analysis. But I am sure that if God is conceived of as intervening in earthly affairs then it is very difficult to interpret him as a God of love.
Paul
Rome and Christendom
Andrew, if a critical realist epistemology asks us to be transported back and look forward (rather than merely looking backward), does it really matter how ‘literally’ Paul and John’s visions are fulfilled?
There’s an obvious sense in which, yes, if the Spirit was on them, we’d expect there to be some correlation between what happened and what they imagined/foresaw looking to the future. However, if it’s in the very nature of prophecy to be, to an extent, indeterministic, could we not say that the ‘fulfillment’ of Paul and John’s vision is ‘up for grabs’?
So, if we take this narrative approach seriously, our question is: what story are we going to tell about the imperialization of Christianity? Could I not, in a prophetic spirit, announce that this was a stroke of Satanic brilliance, that Satan (the accuser of the people of God) saw his downfall and pre-emptively corrupted the agent of his downfall, lest he be permanently destroyed? How firm are the walls to this narrative?
For the sake of the narrative you see Paul and John (the NT writers) constructing, you look for a ‘fulfillment’ as early as possible. Paul (Hartigan) and Peter (Wilkinson) sense a disconnect from historical reality: the ‘Israel of God’ survived, but at what price? Could one not say that Satan in fact got the best of the Church (this is their theological judgment about Christendom under Constantine), and that the narrative has been thrown off track? God’s Kingdom failed to burst on the world as effectively as had been anticipated—should we then formulate new hopes? Or should we stick to the old story, hoping for a bigger and better fulfillment?
In other words, what’s the best story? The story that makes the most sense, both of the past and of the present (as well as the future, of course)?
Re: Rome and Christendom
I wouldn’t say ‘up for grabs’. It does seem to be the case that biblical prophecy is intrinsically recyclable. So the ‘Son of man’ narrative could perhaps be re-used in localized situations in which the church is again oppressed and persecuted and awaits vindication. But I would hesitate to claim that these further applications of the motif are somehow contained in or intended by the original usage. I just don’t think that biblical prophecy is that ‘clever’ or sophisticated.
If the church in China, say, constructs for itself a narrative of hope out of these biblical texts, I would say from the perspective of a critical-realist hermeneutic that this is not so much a fulfilment of the biblical motifs as a new prophetically inspired insight articulated through the language of scripture. In that way we do not need to compromise the historical integrity of the original vision. The story of the Son of man in the New Testament, to my mind, has a specific narrative-historical application, but it can be re-applied paradigmatically or analogically to express hope in later situations.
Your suggestion that the imperialization of Christianity was a satanic strategem to safeguard his influence is intriguing, but we would need to be careful how we classify it. I don’t see how we could call it exegesis. Would a retrospective interpretation count as ‘prophecy’? Perhaps we need other categories of discourse to encompass more creative, playful, imaginative and not necessarily ‘true’ readings of the story about the people of God.
You could say that Satan got the best of the church, but that seems to me to contradict a consistent theme in the New Testament which says that with the coming of the kingdom of God Satan or the principalities and powers is defeated. Perhaps this needs to be nuanced somewhat. Does the ‘binding’ of Satan mean that he is completely powerless?
Alternatively we could argue that our attempts to construct a ‘new creation’ people of God are always going to suffer from the flaws inherent in the historical context. Christendom sought to base a renewed humanity on the imperial model because it was ready to hand, had a certain inevitability given the role of Constantine, and in some sense at least appeared to give a proper place to the lordship of Christ exalted to the right hand of the Father. For all sorts of reasons that paradigm has collapsed and we are groping around for a new template for the new creational existence of the church.