Creation and eschaton

Here is a tension at the heart of the Christian message: God is both the Creator of all that is, and therefore the one who establishes the natural order of things; and the Redeemer, who intervenes decisively in history to bring about the greatest revolution in the order of things that there has ever been or will be.  In terms of theology, it's the tension between the doctrine of creation and eschatology, the doctrine of the end.  In terms of the canon of Scripture, it's the tension between the book of Proverbs, with its stack of 'sanctified common sense' (and yes, I know that's not really what Proverbs is, but as a whole it nonetheless represents the 'order' end of the tension) and Galatians, with its power to burst through every established order with the revolutionary news of the gospel.

It is of course vital to maintain both sides of the tension.  God is the Creator; what is created is good.  Life, society, culture: although all bearing the marks of the fall, all stem ultimately from God and in some way bear witness to his goodness.  The stance of the Christian towards all this stuff can never be purely rejection.  On the other hand, the eschaton has come.  The old age is passing away.  If anyone is in Christ - new creation!  Dead to the world, alive to God in Christ.

A tension to be maintained, but not a symmetry.  The new really does overcome the old.  The good gives way to the better.  The end to which Christians look forward is not just a restoration of creation, not merely creation regained.  It is a wholly new thing, this resurrection life, even though the old life is its good seed.

So we must maintain the goodness of the divinely-established order of things, whilst looking ahead to and living in anticipation of the wholly new.  Practically, that means, for example, that the natural family is upheld as good, but is relativised in importance by the emergence of the family of faith.  (As a polemical aside, this is one point where I think those who hold to infant baptism have gone wrong; too much emphasis on the created natural family order, and not enough recognition that the family of God is defined by faith and not descent.  It is no coincidence that many of the Reformed theologians who advocate infant baptism also tend towards a heavy emphasis on the creational end of the tension).  Similarly, respect for political authorities or systems despite living with, and within, the revolution which will ultimately bring them all to an end when they are brought to kiss the Son; obedience for the Lord's sake, but not because they have any ultimate authority in themselves.  The ability to use and enjoy aspects of culture, whilst recognising that in the end all this will pass through the flames before coming to new life in the heavenly Jerusalem.

Advent makes Christmas

This comes with the usual qualifiers: you don't have to celebrate Christmas, and you don't have to observe Advent.  For various reasons, I think both are useful things to do.  But I'm happy that I can observe the season to the Lord, and you can abstain from observing to the Lord, and all will be well.  What I'm really talking about here is the concepts, or the realities, represented by Christmas and Advent - though I confess I don't know of any better way to keep them in the mind than the liturgical observances.  Anyway...

The Christmas story is constantly exposed to two great dangers.  On the one hand, there is the danger that it might be reduced to mere myth.  For those of us raised in Western culture, even in its post-Christian guise, the story is extremely familiar, and we were mostly exposed to it as children.  Thanks to the phenomenon of the nativity play, or the school carol service, the Christmas story has taken on a childish feel; all little donkey and no crying he makes.  Throw in some fantastical elements - angelic choirs, virgin birth - and you've got a myth.  A story of enduring significance, of deep meaning, perhaps even in a sense of great truth - but ultimately not challenging.  Not challenging because myths arise out of human experience, and can at the end of the day very easily be cashed out as something very human.  The Christmas myth tells us that, in a way, God dwells with all of us; the Christmas myth expresses the hope of universal brotherhood and peace on earth.  Annually we tell ourselves the story to remind ourselves of these deep realities.  We can live with the myth, even be enriched by it.

On the other hand, there is the danger that the Christmas story might become for us mere history.  This is more of a danger for those of us who take the biblical accounts seriously, who claim in some sense to 'believe' the Christmas story.  In a culture which largely reads the Christmas story through the lens of myth, we feel the need to stand up and say 'no, this really happened'.  There was an actual baby, real shepherds, wise men (not kings, it doesn't say they were kings!) with tangible gifts.  At the end of the day, I think this approach also strips the Christmas story of its challenge.  The birth of Jesus becomes simply one thing - albeit a fairly remarkable thing - alongside all the other things whic have happened.  We mark it every year by asserting its historicity, quibbling over any legendary elements that might have crept in over the long years of re-telling, establishing the core of 'what really happened'.  But it's still just a thing that happened, in the past.  Past occurrences don't confront or challenge me.  Of course events in history may have shaped the present world, but they are themselves trapped, back there and then.  We can live in the knowledge of this history, perhaps informed and enlightened by it.

The emphasis of the Advent season is not, despite popular perception, on counting down to Christmas.  It's actually about waiting for something more significant than an annual celebration: it's about waiting for Jesus.  Advent reminds us that he is coming, and that the one who is coming is the one who previously came.  It puts us in an eschatological frame of mind.  That is to say, we're thinking about ultimate things, the end, the final judgement, the redemption and restoration of creation.  And it turns out that is the best frame of mind to approach Christmas, because according to the New Testament the incarnation of the Word of God is not merely myth - a universal truth of humanity - or merely history - an important event in the series of world events; rather, the Christmas story is the story of the end of the ages.  It is a genuinely new thing, the first really new thing there has been since the creation of the world, not contingent on anything that has gone before, not arising out of the human condition or out of human history.  It is eschatology through and through.

And that is challenging, because it means that Christmas calls us, as we consider the baby who came, to also look to the horizon and see the King who is coming.  It tells us that the world is changed, whether we can see it or not, and that we are called to live in the tension of the salvation that is fully accomplished but not universally seen, the now and the not yet.  It confronts us with the fact that the child in the manger is our contemporary, that he is now on the throne of the universe.  He is not merely a factor in our being as human, or a factor in our history as a race, but he is the factor in our present being, the One who determines who we are and what our world is about.  He is the Lord.

The old and the new and the church

We must first remember the general truth that when the New Testament speaks of Jesus Christ and His community it really speaks of the goal (and therefore of the origin and beginning) of all earthly things.  Jesus Christ and His community is not an additional promise given to men.  The existence and history of Israel with Yahweh was a promise.  The reality of Jesus Christ and His community does not continue this history.  It is not a further stage in actualisation of the divine will and plan and election which are the purpose of creation.  It concludes the process.  It is the complete fulfilment of the promise.  It is the goal and end of all the ways of God.  It is the eschatological reality.

Thus Karl Barth (in CD III/2, 301).  This passage takes place in a section examining the nature of humanity, and particularly the mystery of marriage, the meaning of which is revealed only through Christ.  (As an aside, it's hard, knowing what we know, to read Barth's profound and deeply moving treatment of marriage as a sign of the gospel.)  But I didn't particularly want to write about that; just to draw out one phrase.

The reality of Jesus Christ and His community does not continue this history.

This got me thinking about one of the things I struggle with in some Reformed thinking, which is the massive emphasis on continuity between the OT and the NT.  To me, it misses something which Barth grasps here.  The history of Israel is a prophetic history, a history which is fulfilled in Christ.  (Barth discusses the significance of the ongoing existence of historical Israel outside the church elsewhere).  But the church is not just another form of Israel, looking back just as Israel looked forward.  The church is an eschatological reality - indeed, "it is the eschatological reality".

This matters.  The change wrought by the presence of Christ is nothing short of the fulfilment of all God's purposes for the world.  All that remains is for the world to come to see this, and to enter in to the enjoyment of it (or not).  The discontinuity between Israel and the church is nothing less than the discontinuity between the old creation and the new.  The church is not just a community of people living in faith and hope and expectation, though of course it is that too; the church as its existence is founded in the reality of Jesus Christ is the new world.  Everything is accomplished, because Christ is not a prophet but the fulfilment of all prophecy - "someone in whom everything is not fulfilled would not be Jesus Christ".

I'd want to qualify that the church is only this eschatological reality indirectly, in its grounding in Christ and not in its own internal being.  That means the reality can be seen only by faith.  And yet the life of the church - and the church only has life in so far as its life is given by the Spirit through its union with Christ - is to stand for, to symbolise, to make visible to those given eyes to see, the eschatological reality that the old world has passed and away, and behold, everything is made new.

History doesn't just trot on.  The Incarnation wasn't a blip in an otherwise unaffected history.  The death of Christ was the end of the world.  The resurrection of Christ was the new creation.

Nothing's the same any more.

Revelation and Advent

Some thoughts on the topic of revelation, disconnected because they are still forming in my brain:

1.  In the NT, revelation is substantially an eschatological concept.  In the Pastorals, the appearing of Jesus is a technical term for his return (1 Tim 6:14, 2 Tim 4:8, Titus 2:13 etc.); this echoes other Pauline (2 Thess 1:17) and Petrine (1 Pet 4:13) passages about Christ being revealed at the end.  Fundamentally, revelation is a thing belonging to the new age which is not yet consummated.  Therefore, the revelation of God is an especially appropriate subject for meditation in advent, and looking forward to seeing God is at the heart of advent devotion.  1 Peter 1:8 captures the theme - we have not seen him, but we love him, and therefore we wait to see him.

2.  Revelation is an eschatological concept even when applied to the ministry of Jesus.  The end of John's gospel captures this, when it talks about Jesus resurrection appearances (e.g. John 21:1).  However, the concept is present earlier in the gospel narratives, especially at the transfiguration, which is a preview of the resurrection appearances.  When we talk about Jesus revealing God, are we talking about the eschatological light - the glory of the God-man in the coming age - breaking into this age?  Even those who saw Jesus did not necessarily encounter this sort of revelation, but many who did not physically see him have encountered it.

3.  Revelation, then, is not a static thing.  It is not something which is always there, but it is something which breaks through.  It is the new story which starts in the middle of the old story.

4.  Because revelation is the story of Jesus, it is right that our advent meditations look backward as well as forward.  The light has begun to shine, the story has begun to be told.  It makes sense that advent terminates in Christmas, every year asking the question: will we see him this year?  But also knowing that whether we do or not, we can see him in the apostolic testimony to his life, death, and resurrection.

5.  Jesus is uniquely revelatory, because he is the new story and the light in himself.  For something to break through - for a light to shine in darkness - it has to come from without.  God stepping in to creation would be - is - a new story in the midst of the old and a bright light in the darkness.  This is about incarnation.  It will not do to begin our understanding of revelation anywhere else.  If there is light anywhere else, it is because it comes from this source; if the old story starts to show some hope and some glory, it has been invested with it by the new.

Not left as orphans

Sometimes my mind wanders, and I start to wonder exactly what it must have been like on the Saturday after Jesus was crucified.  Some pretty weird stuff had accompanied his death.  I imagine many people in the vicinity of Jerusalem were a bit shaken up.  But for Jesus' disciples, there must have been devastating sadness: their Master has been taken away (as had been predicted of him, if only they could have seen it).  No wonder that when Jesus appeared on the Sunday they disbelieved for joy.  But again, this is only what he had told them.  His resurrection showed that he had gone victoriously through death and had returned to proclaim his triumph - first of all to the disciples, but through them to the whole world.

Jesus came back to us.

I also sometimes wonder what it must have been like after Jesus ascended into heaven.  I wonder whether some of the disciples weren't tempted to question whether perhaps everything would just go back to being the way it was.  Perhaps the death and resurrection of Jesus were important events, but not world changing events.  Maybe they had some sort of deep significance, but they were ultimately one off things that could not be expected to have an effect on the whole of their own lives, let alone the lives of people who were geographically and historically distant.  Then Pentecost came.  The Spirit was poured out.  The resurrection of Jesus was not a distant event; it was here, now, changing everything.  We are still essentially in that situation - in need of the Spirit to come to us, to make it all not only true but real.  And as we wait, he comes, and we rise up.

Jesus comes back to us.

And of course, the story is running on towards it conclusion.  There is a slow train coming, up and round the bend.  Even as the Holy Spirit makes Jesus present to us now, we feel all the more acutely his absence.  As we gather in his name to worship, we see more clearly all the opposing names that are still raised against him.  As we rejoice in what he has done to liberate us, we experience more deeply the grief of the ongoing slavery in the world.  As we are thankful for our salvation, we acknowledge again and again our ongoing sin.  But we know that it will come to an end.

Jesus will come back to us.

Waiting for Jesus

So much of the story of the Bible is about waiting for Jesus, in different ways and with different intensity.

Think about Abraham's wait for a son who would be heir to the promise; the prolongation of that wait, to the point where natural generation was more or less impossible, surely points to the long wait for The Son who was to come.  Consider Israel's wait in Egypt, praying for deliverance, and the raising up of a deliverer who is both within and without Israel; surely a type of Christ.  To be honest, think of the whole history of Israel, the whole story of the Old Testament, which is so powerfully summarised at the end of Psalm 130:  I wait for the Lord.  And of course, when Jesus comes, we see that the history of Israel had its meaning in that waiting, and that in so far as it was characterised by that waiting it was also the history of the world.

It is interesting that the New Testament also has a lot of waiting for Jesus.  It becomes the central prayer of the church - Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.  But even before that, there is the waiting for Pentecost, when Jesus comes to his people in his Spirit.  Always waiting for Jesus.

A couple of things about that:

1.  How is waiting for Jesus different from waiting for Godot?  In other words, doesn't the constant waiting tempt us to think that perhaps we are waiting in vain, for someone who isn't coming?  Well, of course we are tempted to think just like that.  But the key difference is that we know for whom we are waiting, and we have not offered him "a vague supplication" with no certain expectation of fulfilment.  The Crucified One is the Coming One, and vice versa, and we look to him for the restoration of all things because he himself is the restoration of all things, as demonstrated in his resurrection.

2.  What do we do in the meantime?  Obviously, we wait, and watch, and pray.  We long for his appearing.  But we also announce the Coming to anyone who will listen, because we know that it is not only us waiting.  The whole creation waits.  I take it that this includes all human beings, in so far as they are created, which is to say in so far as they are not utterly given over to the nothingness that is sin.  (And of course they are not utterly given over, for it is not given to them to destroy themselves).  Like Israel, we wait with knowledge in a world of ignorance; like Israel, we wait representatively for all the world.

Future Prospects and Present Purity

I don't know of anywhere in Scripture that expresses the Christian hope more beautifully than 1 John 3:2 - "Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is".  This is the Christian's personal eschatology.  A few comments on it...

1.  It is hope, because although it is already ours ("we are God's children now") we do not yet see it ("...has not yet appeared").  We live for the future, because our present status is something that we will only enjoy and experience in the future.

2.  The Christian hope is entirely wrapped up in Christ.  To see Christ is at the heart of it.  That is why "the sky, not the grave, is our goal".

3.  To see Christ truly is a transformative experience.  We see this to some extent in the present life ("we all with unveiled faces...") but ultimately, when we see him - when faith becomes sight - then we will be like him.

It's worth noting the next verse.  "And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure".  If we expect this transformation in the future, if we hope to see him and be like him then, we should seek to be like him now.  To me, this makes good sense.  It is where we are going that decides the direction we strike out in.  If this is where I'm going - toward purity, toward Christ - then it makes sense to make today a step in the right direction.

Who I will be defines who I am, much more than who I was ever could.

Reasons to teach eschatology

'Eschatology' is just everything to do with the end - whether it's personal eschatology (what happens to me in the end?) or cosmic eschatology (where is the universe headed?) - and I think we downplay it more than we should.  Here are a few reasons why I think it is important that eschatology play more of a role in our teaching.

1.  If we don't teach people eschatology, someone else will.  I suspect that one of the reasons we don't talk about the end very much is because we don't want to be one of those loons who is always banging on about the end of the world.  However, to counteract an overemphasis by largely neglecting the subject is unlikely to work! I've met several people who have been won over to dispensationalist views just because nobody else ever gave them a framework within which they could think these issues through, or a way of interpreting Revelation that seemed to take the book seriously.  If we don't want people to pick up bad eschatology, we need to teach them good stuff.

2.  If we don't teach eschatology, people will be disappointed with the Christian life.  One corollary of our neglect of eschatology is that Christians don't understand hope, and don't understand that the best bits of the Christian life - sinlessness, seeing Jesus, freedom from suffering - are all in the future.  That means that we expect more out of this life than we are really promised, and that leads to disappointment.  Proper eschatology keeps us oriented to the future, with a hope and expectation that will not be disappointed.

3.  If we don't teach eschatology, people don't understand how to relate to the world.  What is a Christian approach to ecology?  How should I think about culture?  How much emphasis should we place on poverty relief and development (and which of those should be prioritised)?  All of these questions need a healthy eschatology to get a good answer.

I'm sure there are more...