A Peaceable Hope

Contesting Violent Eschatology in New Testament Narratives

David J Neville

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780801048517
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441240156
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In the New Testament texts, there is significant tension between Jesus's nonviolent mission and message and the apparent violence attributed to God and God's agents at the anticipated end. David Neville challenges the ready association between New Testament eschatology and retributive vengeance on christological and canonical grounds. He explores the narrative sections of the New Testament--the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation--with a view to developing a peaceable, as opposed to retributive, understanding of New Testament eschatology. Neville shows that for every narrative text in the New Testament that anticipates a vehement eschatology, another promotes a largely peaceable eschatology. This work furthers the growing discussion of violence and the doctrine of the atonement.

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Nonretaliation or Vengeance?

Protesting Matthew’s Violent Eschatology

In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus pronounces a blessing on peacemakers (5:9), commands nonretaliation alongside love for enemies no less than neighbors (5:38–48), and conducts his mission nonviolently. As a series of end-time judgment texts makes clear, however, Matthew envisages that, as the coming Son of humanity, Jesus will return as a violent avenger. This apparent incongruity leads John Riches to ask, “Is the judgment which Jesus will bring inconsistent with the ethic which he teaches?”[34] This perplexing portrait of Jesus as a proponent of nonretaliation who nevertheless anticipates eschatological vengeance puts those who take their moral bearings from Jesus in a profound predicament. How does one resolve the moral tension caused by this deep-seated discrepancy within Matthew’s Gospel?

In The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Richard Hays concludes his discussion of Matthew’s eschatology with a subsection titled “Eschatology as Ethical Warrant.” His remarks bring the ethical quandary associated with Matthew’s eschatology into sharp relief:

In Matthew, eschatology becomes a powerful warrant for moral behavior. The motivation for obedience to God is repeatedly grounded in the rewards and punishments that await everyone at the final judgment. . . . This is nowhere more evident than in Matthew 24:37–25:46, where he appends to the Markan apocalyptic discourse five units of additional material stressing in various ways the necessity of being prepared for the coming of the Son of Man. . . . The aim of such stories is to instill godly fear in the hearers and to motivate them to do the will of God while they still have opportunity, before the judgment comes upon them.

It would not be correct to say that these stories provide only warrants for obedience to God; they also define significant ethical norms having to do primarily with just and merciful treatment of others and with responsible use of property. . . . The parable of the sheep and the goats, with its powerful portrayal of care for the needy as the basic criterion for God’s eschatological judgment of human deeds, has had a powerful impact on the church’s imagination; the story reinforces Matthew’s earlier emphasis on mercy as the hallmark of the kingdom of God.[35]

In response to Hays, three points may be made as an overture to this chapter. First, Hays correctly recognizes that “in Matthew, eschatology becomes a powerful warrant for moral behavior.” But the moral “warrant” he identifies within Matthew’s Gospel is ethically problematic. Promises of reward and threat of punishment are not the best means to a mature, well-integrated morality.[36] Second, for Hays, the parables of judgment in Matthew 24–25 provide not only warrants for obedience to the will of God but also “define significant ethical norms,” including just and merciful conduct toward others. This may be so, but what Hays does not detect—or at least acknowledge—is the ultimate validation of violence inherent in the retribution intrinsic to Matthew’s eschatology. After all, what greater warrant for violence could there be than divine vengeance?[37] And third, there can be no doubt that the scenario of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31–46 has had a “powerful impact on the church’s imagination,” perhaps best exemplified in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. I am less confident than Hays, however, that this scenario “reinforces Matthew’s earlier emphasis on mercy as the hallmark of the kingdom of God.” Certainly that is not all it reinforces, as Michelangelo’s picture attests.

To be fair to Hays, his discussion of Matthew’s “eschatology as ethical warrant” occurs within the first part of his work, concerned with New Testament texts at the descriptive or exegetical level. Yet one searches in vain within the remaining parts of his book—concerned with the synthetic, hermeneutical, and pragmatic tasks associated with New Testament ethics—for further discussion of the relation between eschatological vengeance and ethics. Discussing the synthetic task, Hays is adamant that tensions between New Testament writings be allowed to stand. But he seems to have tuned out certain tensions within individual writings, most notably the disturbing discrepancy between Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as a teacher of nonretaliation and Matthew’s own violently retributive eschatology. Later, within Hays’s discussion of the pragmatic task, his treatment of “Violence in Defense of Justice” (chap. 14) naturally concentrates on Matthew 5:38–48; in the second section of this chapter, he stresses how uniformly the New Testament as a whole disavows violence for Christians. But the issue of eschatological vengeance, its role within the same Gospel as one finds the Sermon on the Mount, and its repercussions for moral vision—Hays passes over these in silence.

In this respect, Hays is not alone. Within a major work of New Testament theology intended to restore the theme of peace to a central place, Willard Swartley concentrates on the Sermon on the Mount in his chapter “Matthew: Emmanuel, Power for Peacemaking.”[38] Although he considers the question of consistency between Jesus’s nonviolent ethic and his vitriolic invective against the Pharisees, he does not address the tension between the nonviolent teaching and example of Jesus and his foreseen role in executing eschatological vengeance, except to comment in a footnote: “Some apocalyptic scenes (13:41–42; 24:27–31) are consummation-judgments that belong to the divine prerogative. They do not provide warrant for the moral practices of Jesus’ disciples.”[39] Whether or not divine eschatological vengeance provides legitimate sanction for human conduct, to anticipate divine violence as the means to realize the reign of God in its fullness is corrosive for moral vision and imagination. The moral problem of eschatological vengeance is therefore too pressing to be ignored, as recognized by the Matthean scholar Russell Pregeant, who is both alert to the problem and willing to grapple with it. “The question,” he observes, “is whether and how we can reconcile the nonviolent teachings and deeds of Matthew’s Jesus with his announcement of the eschatological violence that God will eventually bring not simply on the wicked but [also] on those who have rejected Jesus.”[40]

A Matthean Muddle?

Readers with more than a passing acquaintance with the four biblical Gospels are aware that each is concerned to recount the story of Jesus so as to provoke, promote, and preserve faith in him as God’s agent of redemption and, in Matthew’s case, “resTorahtion.”[41] It is also well understood that each Gospel writer made the Jesus story his own by emphasizing certain features and by minimizing or even omitting others. Indeed, as early as Irenaeus of Lyons, toward the end of the second century CE, when the symbols associated with the four living creatures derived from Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4 were allocated to the Gospels, it was understood that each evangelist had distinctive theological emphases.[42]

Depending on the sequence of the four Gospels in early codex collections, the allocation of the four symbols varied, especially with respect to the Gospels of Mark and John. According to the so-called Western or Old Latin order—Matthew, John, Luke, Mark—the lion represents John’s Gospel, and the eagle represents Mark’s. But according to the Eastern or Greek (and now canonical) order, the lion represents Mark’s Gospel and the eagle John’s. In most witnesses the symbol of a person was allocated to Matthew’s Gospel, and the symbol of an ox to Luke’s. By the time of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, or “Common version” (ca. 400 CE), the standard pattern was set: Matthew, represented by a person; Mark, a lion; Luke, an ox; and John, an eagle.[43] Nevertheless, Augustine dissented, and his dissent reflected a concern to discriminate meaningfully between the theological emphases of the respective Gospels. In his view, Matthew’s Gospel was best represented by the lion, reflecting an emphasis on the regal human nature of Christ; Luke was best represented by the ox, reflecting a concern with the sacerdotal human nature of Christ; Mark was best represented by the person, reflecting an interest in the humanity of Christ; and John was best represented by the eagle, reflecting an emphasis on the divinity of Christ.[44]

Whether one agrees with the majority of patristic writers or with Augustine on which symbol best represents Matthew’s Gospel, the point remains that Matthew’s portrait of “Jesus Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1) is distinctive. Among his typical emphases are the following features, each organically related to his christological focus:

1. the fulfillment of Scripture in the story of Jesus
2. Jesus’s teaching as fulfillment, not annulment, of Torah and the prophets, hence Christian continuity with Jewish Scripture
3. an emphasis on moral “righteousness,” understood as obedience to the will of God expressed in Torah and interpreted by Jesus
4. the Christian assembly (Matthew is the only evangelist to use the term ekklēsia)
5. imminent eschatological expectation (Matthew is the only Gospel writer to use the term parousia)
6. judgment, or positive and negative recompense[45]

To a significant extent, the final two themes coalesce in Matthew’s Gospel. The expected parousia (arrival) is a time of retributive judgment.

The theme of end-time judgment is widely shared among Jewish and early Christian writers. Paul, the “apostle of grace,” affirmed eschatological judgment on the basis of human conduct (see Rom. 2:5–11; 2 Cor. 5:10). In his view, rectification by grace does not preclude judgment of human works.[46] In this respect, Paul and Matthew were of a mind, since Matthew clearly envisaged that those in the church no less than those without would one day answer to the Judge of all. Behind this perspective is the conviction that the God responsible for creating the world is, for that reason, the rightful Judge of the world.[47]

That Matthew looked forward to end-time judgment is not, in itself, ethically problematic. What is problematic is the depiction of divine judgment that Matthew apparently anticipated. As a number of parabolic texts and their interpretations make clear, his end-time expectation is characterized by the threat of divinely authorized retributive violence for those ultimately determined to be unrighteous, wicked, or evil. This eschatological stance is ethically problematic because divine vengeance comprises an ultimate validation of violence. This is not simply a disturbing curiosity in the history of Jewish-Christian thought. As Günther Bornkamm once observed, “No other Gospel is so shaped by the thought of the Church as Matthew’s, so constructed for use by the Church; for this reason it has exercised, as no other, a normative influence in the later Church.”[48] If for no other reason, the reality that violent eschatology is an integral part of the deeply ingrained moral legacy of this brilliant but baffling Jewish-Christian scribe (Matt. 13:52) must be recognized and addressed—theologically, morally, and pastorally.

In many respects the influence of Matthew’s Gospel is cause for celebration. Think, for example, of the moral vision articulated in the Sermon on the Mount, in which Matthew portrays Jesus as the authoritative interpreter of Jewish tradition, indeed, as one who fulfills or brings to completion Torah and the prophets (5:17). In the section devoted to Jesus’s teaching as the fulfillment of Torah (5:17–48), three of the six so-called “antitheses” relate directly to the prohibition of violence against fellow human beings.[49] The first intensifies the prohibition against homicide so that it prohibits anger, the fifth undoes the principle of (restrained) retaliation by advocating nonretaliation, and the sixth enjoins love of enemies as opposed to loving neighbors, whether kinfolk or resident aliens, but hating enemies.[50] Even the remaining three can be understood as prohibitions against violence either to one’s marriage partner, in the sense of violating sexual fidelity, or to linguistic integrity. Moreover, this distillation of Torah-fulfilled culminates with the injunction to emulate the indiscriminate “perfection” of God, who makes the sun rise on both the good and evil alike and who showers rain on both the just and the unjust (5:45–48).[51]

The moral vision of Jesus, as presented in the Beatitudes and Antitheses of Matthew 5, is widely recognized as an ethical high-water mark, even among those who regard it as an impossible ideal. “The ethical character of this Gospel is its outstanding feature,” asserts Gerd Theissen, largely on the basis of Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.[52] As Dale Allison points out, however, Matthew’s Gospel is a reservoir of mixed messages.[53] Even within the confines of chapter 5, one detects discomfiting elements. For example, one can accept that someone must be least in the kingdom of heaven (5:19), but the terms of entry into that kingdom are strict (5:20), and several infractions seem to lead inexorably to the smoldering fires of Gehenna. As envisaged by Matthew, discipleship is not for the weak-willed or fainthearted. This is borne out by the complex of sayings that conclude the Sermon on the Mount, the force of which is aptly summed up by Gerhard Barth: “What matters is the doing of God’s will; this is all that is enquired about at the judgment; the commandments are the conditions of entrance into the kingdom of God, which the disciples are required to fulfil.”[54] But the discrepancy between eschatological vengeance and Jesus’s own teaching on nonretaliation and nonviolent conduct is nowhere better illustrated than in parables attributed to Jesus that feature divinely authorized retributive violence.

Eschatological Vengeance in Matthew’s Parables

The tension within Matthew’s Gospel between Jesus’s peaceful moral vision and eschatological vengeance is helpfully explored in Barbara Reid’s study “Violent Endings in Matthew’s Parables and Christian Nonviolence.”[55] Reid not only recognizes but also seeks to resolve the tension between the moral guidance of Jesus in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and the image of God (or God’s agents) ultimately dealing vengefully with various kinds of persons in several Matthean parables. First, Reid surveys references to various forms of violence in Matthew’s Gospel. Then she describes how Jesus and his disciples are portrayed as victims of violence, but in this section she also devotes space to the enigmatic sayings in Matthew 11:12 (about the reign of heaven suffering violence) and 10:34–36 (“I came not to bring peace but a sword”). In her third and longest section, Reid discusses responses to violence described by Matthew, with particular reference to Jesus’s teaching on nonretaliation and love for enemies in 5:38–48. In a brief fourth section, she explores eight Matthean parables that feature eschatological vengeance. In a penultimate section, Reid evaluates four possible solutions to the moral tension inherent in Matthew’s Gospel. Finally, she identifies theological and hermeneutical questions arising from her discussion. Here I revisit Reid’s discussion of Matthew’s parables featuring end-time vengeance for the purpose of both confirming and building upon her fundamental insight that the violent endings to some of Matthew’s parables are not only in tension with other aspects of Jesus’s moral guidance but also provoke profound interpretive challenges.

The eight parables discussed briefly by Reid are the twin parables of the tares and the dragnet (Matt. 13:24–30, 40–43, 49–50), the parable of an unforgiving slave (18:23–35), the parable of tenants in a vineyard (21:33–44), the parable of a wedding banquet (22:1–14), the parable of a waiting slave (24:45–51), and the two parables of the talents and final judgment (25:14–46). Of these eight parables, four are unique to Matthew (tares, dragnet, unforgiving slave, final judgment).[56] The four other parables have parallels or partial parallels in Luke’s Gospel, but only one, tenants in the vineyard, is found in all three Synoptic Gospels. The picture that emerges from these parables in Matthew’s Gospel is that those determined to be wicked, unresponsive, or irresponsible will ultimately experience the full force of divine retributive violence.

Beginning with the parables unique to Matthew’s Gospel, the twin parables of the tares and dragnet are found in the collection of parables relating to the reign of heaven in Matthew 13.[57] The first point to notice about the parable of the tares is that it is one of only two parables within the collection of parables in this chapter to receive an interpretation; the other is the parable of the sower, as it is named in 13:18. Moreover, the parable of the tares is the only one about which the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Studies in Peace and Scripture Series Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Gospels according to Matthew and Mark
• Part 2: The Lukan Literature
• Part 3: Johannine Trajectories
• Concluding Reflections
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Back Cover