Christian Understandings of the Future

The Historical Trajectory

Amy Frykholm

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781451484571
• eBook ISBN: 9781506418926
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Throughout the two-thousand-year span of Christian history, believers in Jesus have sought to articulate their faith and their understanding of how God works in the world. How do we, as we examine the vast and varied output of those who came before us, understand the unity and the diversity of their thinking? How do we make sense of our own thought in light of theirs? The Christian Understandings series offers to help. In this crisp and engaging volume Amy Frykholm offers a tour through more than two millennia of Christian thought on the future. Starting with the contexts of the Hebrew Bible and moving forward, Frykholm outlines the enduring fascination believers have had with future events and the myriad ways they have articulated their beliefs about what the future holds. From the imperial contexts of the book of Revelation to the end times prophecy of Harold Camping, Frykholm presents a thoughtful and insightful tour.

2

Historical Developments

6

Martyrs: Early Christianity

If you have fallen in with some who are called Christians, but who . . . venture to blaspheme the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; who say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven; do not imagine that they are Christians.

—Justin Martyr

At the beginning of the second century ce, an intellectual young man, born to a pagan family in Judea, was on a search for truth. Justin (later known as Justin Martyr, 100–c. 165) studied Stoicism, Pythagorianism, and Platonism. He found the answers that philosophy gave him in his search unsatisfying. He felt that nothing that he studied gave him a complete enough picture of the relationship between the human being and God or a way to understand what God desired from the life of a human being. Justin wrote that one day, during a time in his life when he wished “to be filled with great quietness,” he was walking in a field near the sea shore. There he met an old man. Something about this man intrigued him, and when they began to speak, the old man inquired whether philosophy had brought Justin happiness. Happiness, Justin told him, wasn’t the point of philosophy, but truth. The old man told Justin that philosophy was futile. Philosophy was an attempt by humans to reason their way toward God. But revelation was the work of God Godself, a means to open the way toward God. The most compelling way for God to speak to humankind, the man told Justin, was through the prophets. Justin later explained what he learned that day in his Dialogue with Trypho:

There existed, long before this time, certain men more ancient than all those who are esteemed philosophers, both righteous and beloved by God, who spoke by the Divine Spirit, and foretold events which would take place, and which are now taking place. They are called prophets. These alone both saw and announced the truth to men, neither reverencing nor fearing any man, not influenced by a desire for glory, but speaking those things alone which they saw and which they heard, being filled with the Holy Spirit. Their writings are still extant, and he who has read them is very much helped in his knowledge of the beginning and end of things, and of those matters which the philosopher ought to know, provided he has believed them.^[1]

This experience “kindled a flame” in Justin’s soul, especially the possibility that God might reveal himself to humankind through the prophets, and that the “beginning and end of things” might be known in this way. He became a Christian and gathered around himself a small group of students. He taught and debated Christianity with many dialogue partners, pagan and Jewish as well as other Christians.

Justin’s Christianity was risky in the Roman Empire of the second century. At the end of his life, he was denounced after a debate with a Cynic philosopher, put on trial with six of his students, and beheaded. Justin’s martyrdom cemented his status among Christians, and his understanding of Christian life and teaching became central to those who carried his faith forward.

Justin Martyr and the Disputed Millennium

Christianity’s grasp of the future was one aspect of the faith that appealed to Justin. He believed profoundly in the visionary and revelatory nature of Christianity, and he is the first Christian writer to refer to the Revelation of John. Justin believed that John, the writer of Revelation, was an apostle, and in his Dialogues, he gave this version of Revelation 20: “And further, a man among us named John, one of the apostles of Christ, prophesied in a revelation made to him that they who have believed our Christ will spend a thousand years in Jerusalem and that afterwards the universal, and in one word, eternal resurrection of all at once, will take place, and also the judgment.”^[2]

Justin Martyr admitted that among Christians there were different schools of thought, and he himself was not always consistent. He wrote that he and many others “who are right-minded Christians on all points” were “assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead and a thousand years in Jerusalem,” but there were others “who are Christians of pure and pious mind” who did not acknowledge the thousand-year earthly reign of Christ in Jerusalem.^[3]

Justin’s interpretation of Revelation has been called chiliasm. The word comes from the Greek word for “thousand,” and it refers directly to Rev 20:4, in which Christ defeats Satan, and Satan is thrown into a pit for a thousand years. This verse was combined with Jewish messianic eschatology to create a place in Christian schemata for a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth before the last judgment.

For Justin, chiliasm was not a test of Christian orthodoxy. It was an interpretive choice, and his own views may have shifted over time.^[4] Chiliasm has a mixed history in Christianity. In a report that is attributed to a testimony of Jude’s grandsons (and thus to Jesus’s grandnephews), the two men were called before the emperor to give account of their faith in Christ. They were asked about the coming of Christ’s kingdom and specifically whether it would be earthly or heavenly. An answer that Christ’s kingdom was earthly might be threat-ening to the emperor or other worldly powers. According to written reports from a much later time, they replied that it would be “heavenly and angelic, and it would be at the end of the world, when he would come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and to reward every man according to his deeds.”^[5] This report, the authenticity of which cannot be verified, suggests that there were Christians very close to Christ who did not anticipate a millennium. They saw Christ’s reign as heavenly and coming at the end of time.^[6]

The difference between a heavenly reign and an earthly kingdom could orient followers of Christ on earth differently. Both lived in expectation of God’s future intervention. But one anticipated a change in earthly conditions, and the other expected an “end” that would transcend earthly time. One appeared to have more immediate consequences for those in power. A competing ruler was a threat. One hovering at the unknown “end of time” was less so.

Resurrection of the Flesh

Justin Martyr’s point about the “assurance” of the resurrection of the dead was, in his mind, a greater test of true belief. In his Dialogues, he wrote that those who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead do not deserve to be called Christians. Furthermore, he argued, in a rhetorical shift that distinguished him from Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, there will be a “resurrection of the flesh” instead of a resurrection of the dead or a resurrection of the body. In Justin’s writing, we have for the first time the two words “flesh” and “resurrection” put together in the same phrase.^[7] We saw how Paul very carefully chose the word “body” and distinguished it from “flesh,” arguing for a unity of the body and soul in a person that somehow transcended flesh. This is a difficult position for people of the modern age to accept—that there is a body that is in some sense physical but not fleshly. But the difficulty for Justin was different. He argued that Christianity demands that the flesh itself be resurrected. The stuff of which we are made now, in this life, is the stuff that will rise from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus in the flesh made it so.

Justin appeared to have two motivations for making this emphasis in the language of resurrection. He was arguing against people who took Paul to mean that the body that would be raised would be a spiritual—that is, a non-physical—body. Instead of the transformation of the body that Paul claimed, they believed in something more like immortality of the soul, already a common pagan belief. This switch to a spiritual body blurred the distinction between Christian and pagan and gave power to the gnostics, a group of Christians who interpreted the Gospel very differently from those like Justin who claimed to be orthodox Christians. For example, gnostic Christians frequently argued that Christ did not actually become a physical human being. He merely appeared in human form and walked the earth as if he were human. Thus he did not actually die and was not actually resurrected.^[8] In contrast to this unearthly view of Jesus, Justin emphasized the flesh of Jesus and also the flesh of his followers who will be resurrected.

The second motivation was a growing concern with the importance of material continuity in resurrection. This was a concern that would be expressed more and more forcefully over the next hundred years. The body that was resurrected, early Christians insisted, had to be exactly the same body as the one that died. Every particle of that body had to have new life. If a martyr’s body was scattered or burned, God would have to gather up every bit of that body, every piece of ash and bone, and restore it whole.^[9] One reason that early Christians made an issue of this is that pagans frequently accused Christians of cannibal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Christian Futures: An Introduction
• For Further Reading
• Origins
• Historical Developments
• Contemporary Challenges
• Glossary of Terms
• Index