Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology

With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn

Davis, Harink

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270090
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Ernst Kasemann famously claimed that apocalyptic is the mother of Christian theology. J. Louis Martyn's radical interpretation of the overarching significance of apocalyptic in Paul's theology has pushed Kasemann's claim further and deeper. Still, despite the recognition that apocalyptic is at the core of New Testament and Pauline theology, modern theology has often dismissed, domesticated, or demythologized early Christian apocalyptic. A renewed interest in taking apocalyptic seriously is one of the most exciting developments in recent theology. The essays in this volume, taking their point of departure from the work of Martyn (and Kasemann), wrestle critically with the promise (and possible peril) of the apocalyptic transformation of Christian theology. With original contributions from established scholars (including Beverly Gaventa, Stanley Hauerwas, Robert Jenson, Walter Lowe, Joseph Mangina, Christopher Morse, and Fleming Rutledge) as well as younger voices, this volume makes a substantial contribution to the discussion of apocalyptic and theology today. A unique feature of the book is a personal reflection on Ernst Kasemann by J. Louis Martyn himself.

part one

Apocalyptic and the Nature of Theology

1

A God Nearer to Us Than We Are to Ourselves

Walter J. Lowe

Exhortatory Preface

The poverty of theism is reflected in its imposition of a subject-object framework upon theology. On this straitened view, revelation consists of (i) God providing information or inspiration that (ii) awakens latent (God-given) potentialities, e.g. decision, that (iii) complete the relationship. The apocalyptic news J. Louis Martyn discerns in Paul commands our attention because it is at once far richer than this tradition and more orthodox.

The crucial insight is that revelation in Jesus Christ is not a machination God performs at some remove, withholding God’s full Godhood as it were. Rather God’s invasion is the inbreaking of God’s very Being. This Event changes everything—it changes our world, our very cosmos. Yet at the same time we are remarkably constrained as to what we know about how God has wrought this new creation. The world may seem unaffected.

Thus we know little of the “how” (i.e., the economy, the inner workings) of the God-world relationship, pace atonement theory. Rather, the gospel’s attention is firmly fixed upon the “That” of God’s triumphal invasion, the good news that it has happened. Christianity is the glad announcement of this “That,” which (to strain language) is “the That” because it is the breaking into history of God’s very Being—the act of Actuality itself. Actuality trumps possibility (Bonhoeffer); it trumps human potentiality. To reveal = “to apocalypse”: it requires no human completing.

Hence our present state of glad unknowing, which is glad because it has been freed from enslavement to religion, to self-obsession, to some putative “point of contact” (Anknüpfungspunkt) between God and the human self. Contra the ideology of our times, Christ is not “in us.” Rather we—all of humankind (go figure)—are now “living into” (and resisting) the new “how” of God’s relation to the world. We are learning willy-nilly that the Being of all beings is now their being-in-Christ.

“A God nearer to us than we are to ourselves.” This haunting phrase has been with me for many years; so many, in fact, that I am no longer certain where I first came upon it. My best guess is the work of Karl Rahner. Certainly it is consonant with Rahner’s formative conviction that when Christ does come, he comes not as a stranger. No doubt as many attest, the Christ of doctrine may seem alien to the familiar Jesus of Scripture; and no doubt, as the Gospels themselves attest, when Christ came we knew him not. But our not knowing Christ does not alter the fact that Christ comes as one who knows us from within. The somewhat disorienting notion of “a God nearer to us than we are to ourselves” helps us imagine how this might be so. A God who could get that close to us might be experienced as “invasive,” in Martyn’s apt term; and yet there would be a fit with the “givens” of the human condition. It is this interaction of invasion and fit—a relation deeper than our self-awareness, deeper than human “immanence” itself—that the present essay wishes to explore.

William Placher has traced the “domestication of transcendence” in late medieval and modern Western history.1 In the language of this essay, that eclipse occurred at the hands of a “scholasticism,” Protestant as well as Catholic, that sought by means of an obtuse monism-cum-dualism to “comprehend” (etymologically, to “grasp together”) God’s revelation. If it is true that “to reveal” is “to apocalypse,”2 and if apocalyptic betokens God’s freedom, then the scholastic project is exposed as an effort to map, to grasp-together, the ungraspable. Otherwise stated, theistic scholasticism is possessed by a false apologetic. It wants to argue that in order to explain or understand the world, you need to include God. It wants to show that other worldviews fail because they lack, they do not include, the crucial theistic ingredient. It is an argument for including (i.e., enclosing) God. But what would this mean, to “include” God? It would mean placing God within some larger explanatory context. It would mean contextualizing God.

In contrast, the present essay, and perhaps the present volume, contends that, Christianly understood, the crucial task is rather to understand oneself as being contextualized by God.

Martin Buber: “The World Is Twofold”

While the language of “being contextualized” may be novel, the notion it represents is not. In describing the I-Thou relationship, Martin Buber raised to awareness what we already know about being contextualized.

Let us return to the common predilection for placing experience within a subject-object framework. In Buber’s judgment this predilection has the effect of extending the realm of the I-It. If the world is but an assemblage of subjects and objects, the richness of human existence is lost. One is reduced to speaking in terms of subjective feelings and objective facts. Resisting such a prospect, Buber’s calm, descriptive account of the elusive I-Thou offers something extraordinary, a vision of transcendence firmly rooted in everyday life.

Already with his opening words, Buber places us beyond the exclusive rule of the subject-object framework. Within that framework, subject and object are generally taken to be fundamental entities, each existing in its own right. They may enter into a relationship, the one entity affecting the other in some manner, but the relationship is commonly regarded as a secondary matter. Buber turns this assumption on its head. Recalling Genesis and the Gospel of John, he writes: “In the beginning is the relation.”3 Accordingly, I and Thou does not begin with two distinct terms—not even “I” and “Thou” (or “I” and “You”)—which he might then seek, through piety and ingenuity, to relate. Rather he begins with the word pairs I-You and I-It, and even before that he begins with the opening sentence, “The world is twofold for [us] in accordance with [our] twofold attitude.”4 The world is twofold for us, and irreducibly, inescapably so. Buber’s insight establishes a firm point of reference for our subsequent reflections.

“But surely,” one may respond, “the I-It and the I-Thou have at least one thing in common. They are forms of experience. They are both to be understood within the great, inclusive context of human experience.” After all, isn’t that where subject and object come into contact—in experience? Isn’t all of science built on experimentation, which is experience made rigorous? And in the meaningful events that most illumine our lives, do we not speak of “peak experiences”? And for theology throughout the modern period, conservative as well as liberal, is there any court of appeal more determinative than one or another form of “depth experience”?

This suggestion seems innocent enough, but Buber, with uncharacteristic vehemence, rejects it out of hand. One reason is Buber’s belief that an all-encompassing appeal leads to monism. A further is his belief that the term “experience” propels the discussion in one direction, namely that of the I-It. What experiences afford us “is only a world that consists of It and It and It, of He and He and She and She and It.”5 One senses from Buber’s tone that this is not a minor issue. He continues:

All this is not changed by adding “inner” experiences to the “external” ones, in line with the non-eternal distinction that is born of mankind’s craving to take the edge off the mystery of death. Inner things among external things, things among things! ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• A Personal Word about Ernst Käsemann
• Introduction: The Challenge of Apocalyptic to Modern Theology
• Part One: Apocalyptic and the Nature of Theology
• Part Two: Apocalyptic and Christian Doctrines
• Part Three: Apocalyptic and the Church’s Witness
• Bibliography