Militant Grace

The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology

Philip G. Ziegler

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780801098536
• eBook ISBN: 9781493413164
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This clear and comprehensive introduction to apocalyptic theology demonstrates the significance of apocalyptic readings of the New Testament for systematic theology and highlights the ethical implications of the apocalyptic turn in biblical and theological studies. Written by a leading theologian and proponent of apocalyptic theology, this primer explores the impact of important recent Pauline scholarship on contemporary theology and argues for a renewed understanding of key Christian doctrines, including sin, grace, revelation, redemption, and the Christian life.

Part 1: The Shape and Sources of an Apocalyptic Theology

1
An Eschatological Dogmatics of the Gospel of Grace

Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living One.

I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever

and I have the keys of Death and of Hades.

—Revelation 1:17–18

The present day ought to be the best of times for eschatological theology. Since the early years of the twentieth century, generations of theologians have struggled in various ways to “do full justice to the distinctive priority given to the eschatological future in primitive Christian eschatology.”1 And during the decades since Klaus Koch declared that we moderns are “baffled by apocalyptic,”2 scholars have endeavored to explain it to us at length. The fruits of such efforts are by now conveniently distilled into encyclopedias and comprehensive handbooks.3 Further, at hand we have the substantive legacies of Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Gerhard Sauter, and others whose labor since the 1960s has been to shift eschatology from being merely one dogmatic locus among others to being instead the decisive register in which all theological loci are set. There have been important impulses from the “theology of hope,” from thinking of “revelation as history,” and from receiving the “future as promise,” as well as a honing of the valuable technical concepts of prolepsis (effective anticipation of the future in the present), adventus (arrival of the future), and novum (sheer, unanticipated novelty) that attend them. These impulses have in no small measure contributed to bringing us to wherever it is that we currently are theologically.4 The enterprise of eschatological dogmatics may never have been as well capitalized as it is now.

And yet, at precisely this same juncture, there are other, strongly countervailing trends afoot in Christian theology, trends that aim to draw a closing parenthesis around the era of eschatological dogmatics. As the lead editorial of a major English-language theology journal has suggested firmly, “It is time to give eschatology a rest, a time-out.”5 Eschatological dogmatics, it is said, is rendered untenable by postmodern criticism of hegemonic master narratives; it is corroded by our despair of any progressive interpretation of history; and it is fatally undermined by the scientific view of the entropic nature of the cosmos.6 Furthermore, a thoroughgoing historicism has recently reemerged as a serious program in contemporary theology, and it is as allergic to the eschatological as were its precursors. In English-language theology, it involves a vigorous “cultural turn” in which theology is to be understood, says Dutch thinker Mieke Bal, as “a specialization within the domain of cultural analysis that focuses . . . on those areas of present-day culture where the religious elements from the past survive and hence ‘live.’”7 While its intellectual mainsprings, including American neopragmatism and variants of postliberalism, are not altogether identical with those driving the current Troeltsch revival in Europe, the aspirations and form are similar.8 Both these theological movements are historicist all the way down, operating on the assumption that in theology, as in all other discourses, there is “nothing but history.”

American theologian William Dean gave definitive articulation to the challenge of this new historicism:

What would it mean if theology were to treat the event of history as that beyond which there was no recourse—and to treat the creatures of history as in new ways crucially powerful in shaping history—and to do that because all trans-historical imports, even the abiding reality of the modernists, have been embargoed? The interpretive imagination is utterly historical; it reinterprets nothing other than history; and it, and it alone, in human and nonhuman creatures, creates history. It is historical communication about historical communication, creative of historical communication. Might this imagination give to theology a somewhat different meaning?9

Indeed it might. Such historicism insists that theology exhausts its mandate in the practice of cultural analysis and criticism, being distinguished from other such efforts only by its concern with those tracts of human culture called “religious” or “similar cultural configurations that give meaning and direction to human existence.” As such, it must be disciplined away from any misguided “pretensions of timeless truth” and immunized against “the assumption that in theology humans traffic with some nonhistorical realm.”10

Of course, a previous explosion of eschatological dogmatics in the early twentieth century itself occurred on the playground of a self-consciously historicist theology. And now, as then, proponents of the latter complain that eschatological theology “severs the knot which centuries, with good reason, have tied”11—as Troeltsch once put it—unwinding the muddle of daily religious life with its complicated social and cultural entanglements and accommodations that constitute Christianity as an actual historical phenomenon.12 Eschatological dogmatics, it is said, threatens to forget that while “the radical slaying of the ‘the old man’ corresponded to the birth of ‘the new man,’” this new human being has “to work out his relationships to the ‘world.’”13 For the historicists, then, the very possibility of an intelligible Christianity trades on the essential continuity of the human person across this moment, and on the determinative priority given in Christianity’s theological self-understanding to the history of the accommodation and mediation between faith and world, indeed of faith by and to world. The slaying and making alive, the death of the old and the birth of the new, the aeonic work of God to save, which constitutes so central a part of the scriptural portrait of Christian faith—all this can only be taken to describe modulations within an order of things finally left undisturbed, a collection of dramatic tropes for “naming and symbolizing what we take to be of significance in existence” in an “outsideless” world that, for all its flux, is ever essentially just one damn thing after another.14 If they were taken in any other sense, eschatological categories would simply have to be adjudged category mistakes, since on this view everything is and must be firmly knotted into the horizontal weave of human culture without remainder.15

Now, an eschatological dogmatics will inevitably press hard on precisely this neuralgic point, resisting historicism’s seeming evacuation of genuine transcendence. Here in this first chapter I explore one particular example of such resistance, that offered by the work of American Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde († 2005). Forde’s theology is a bold defense of the transcendent radicality of divine grace. It discerns that the prospects for an eschatological dogmatics turn on whether the historicist knot can be persuasively cut at precisely the point Troeltsch himself identified: in the account of salvation being accomplished in Christ. For should we finally be forced to admit that salvation “can signify nothing other than the gradual emergence of the fruits of the higher life,” then closing time will truly have come to the bureau of eschatology, and the world will be left—falsely—to suffer under the chilling laws of its own aimless contingency.16

Justification and the Turning of the Ages

While other theologians have certainly noted the eschatological valences of a radically evangelical account of justification,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Shape and Sources of an Apocalyptic Theology
• Part 2: Christ, Spirit, and Salvation in an Apocalyptic Key
• Part 3: Living Faithfully at the Turn of the Ages
• Bibliography
• Scripture and Ancient Writings Index
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover