{"id":74459,"date":"2018-05-07T00:11:30","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T05:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/?p=74459"},"modified":"2018-04-29T16:19:41","modified_gmt":"2018-04-29T21:19:41","slug":"apocalyptic-becomes-apocalyptic-theology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2018\/05\/07\/apocalyptic-becomes-apocalyptic-theology\/","title":{"rendered":"Apocalyptic Becomes “Apocalyptic” Theology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

To the casual observer one of truly odd features of late 20th and early 21st Century New Testament studies is that historical Jesus scholars (of the Jesus Seminar mode \u2014 Crossan, Funk, Borg) rejected apocalyptic as the context for explaining Jesus while some Pauline scholars (of the J. Louis Martyn mode \u2014 Martyn, Beker, K\u00e4semann, Gaventa, Campbell) think apocalyptic is the context for explaining Paul. From the non-apocalyptic Jesus to the apocalyptic Paul. Another oddity: scholarship since J. Weiss, A. Schweitzer, and others up through folks like Dale Allison, have all thought Jesus was apocalyptic and not so much Paul. They may have thought the apocalyptic Jesus was irrelevant to moderns but they thought Jesus was absorbed in apocalypticism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Theologians often pick up biblical scholarship and \u201ctheologize.\u201d Combine Karl Barth (or the early Barth) and the apocalyptic Paul and you get a theologian like Philip Ziegler, and his new book,\u00a0Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s skip an important issue: Is \u201capocalyptic\u201d in apocalyptic Paul and in the apocalyptic turn based on Jewish apocalypses and Jewish apocalyptic or not? N.T. Wright, for one, has made a pretty good case for calling into question the way apocalyptic Paul folks have used the term.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s not skip, nor dwell on, another feature: the apocalyptic Paul and apocalyptic theologians have made this an either-or fight. Either apocalyptic or new perspective? Either apocalyptic or the old-new issues? It\u2019s a false dichotomy for so many, including John Barclay who embraces many elements of old and new and apocalyptic. In addition, there are distinct features of the apocalyptic folks that are also found in NT Wright under categories like eschatology and apocalyptic.<\/p>\n

At some point the claim that everything is new, or that it shatters everything prior to the revelation of God in Christ, etc, becomes so new it can\u2019t make sense, so new that it sounds (if you\u2019ll forgive me this one criticism) like the golden tablets of Joseph Smith), so new \u201cMessiah\u201d is divorced from the Story of Israel, and so new the discontinuity crushes the continuity that alone makes sense of what \u201cnew\u201d means.<\/p>\n

But I want to take a healthy look at Ziegler\u2019s new book and sketch what he has to say. He goes to Beverly Gaventa to define apocalyptic gospel:<\/p>\n

As Gaventa concisely puts it, \u201cPaul\u2019s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world\u2019s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God\u2019s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death). This means that the Gospel is first, last, and always about God\u2019s powerful and gracious initiative.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ziegler states it for himself:<\/p>\n

To pursue an \u201capocalyptic turn\u201d in Christian dogmatics is thus simply to learn anew what it means to \u201cnever boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world,\u201d as Paul wrote (Gal. 6:14). The effort, in short, is to do theology in a manner both shaken and disciplined by the \u201celemental interruption of the continuity of life\u201d that the gospel is and brings about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I came of age reading Ladd and Ridderbos; I see nothing in these two quotations that I did not see in their salvation historical approach to New Testament theology. I don\u2019t see why old, new and apocalyptic \u2014 not to ignore participatory theology in Michael Gorman \u2014 can\u2019t find far more common ground than disagreement. The battle in the coming decade ought to be for finding where we can agree.<\/p>\n

Ziegler opens with a chapter that contrasts (radically) historicism (of the Troeltschian mode, but do folks adhere to that today? does he not have others in mind?) with apocalyptic theology. Historicism is \u201callergic to the eschatological\u201d and in it there \u201cis nothing but history\u201d and that \u201ctheology exhausts its mandate in the practice of cultural analysis and criticism.\u201d That\u2019s nothing but a radical contrast. At the end of the chp he says historicism is \u201can intellectually sophisticated mode of unbelief.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, an eschatological dogmatics will inevitably press hard on precisely th\u2029is neuralgic point, resisting historicism\u2019s seeming evacuation of genuine transcendence. \u2026 For should we finally be forced to admit that salvation \u201ccan signify nothing other than the gradual emergence of the fruits of the higher life,\u201d then closing time will truly have come to the bureau of eschatology, and the world will be left\u2014falsely\u2014to suffer under the chilling laws of its own aimless contingency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is all this about Troeltsch? No examples are given.<\/p>\n

He finds an ally of his apocalyptic theology in the radical Lutheran theologian, Gerhard Forde. Terms like radical, catastrophic, death vs. life, radical discontinuity, radical break, neo-genesis, but perhaps \u201csalvation by catastrophe\u201d is his singular expression.<\/p>\n

Apocalyptic theology is a struggle for transcendence in theological reflection, it is about ends \u2014 finality, grace is an ontology and not just eschatology, and monergism.<\/p>\n

Ziegler\u2019s contention is that this new apocalyptic theology must be embraced. But\u2026<\/p>\n

In view is a new kind of \u201capocalyptic theology\u201d that overturns the high modern view of apocalyptic as a merely antiquarian curiosity while, at the same time, repudiating the weaponized eschatologies of soothsaying doomsday calendarists, often associated with popular varieties of \u201capocalypticism.\u201d [Left Behind stuff]<\/p>\n

This new sensibility is evident when graduating mainline seminarians are instructed that they must appropriate an apocalyptic \u201cattitude\u201d and \u201cmovement of mind,\u201d because their ministry and the churches they will serve \u201ccan never make do or be legitimate . . . without the themes of the radical sovereignty of God and the exercise of that sovereignty through the cross and resurrection of [God\u2019s] royal agent, Jesus Christ.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus, re-enter apocalyptic as a theology of grace and gospel.<\/p>\n

It represents an originary theological discourse with which Christians have described the world, and we in it, with relentless formative reference to the sovereign God of the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ziegler rightly shows the significance of Karl Barth to this new kind of apocalyptic theology. How so?<\/p>\n

For Barth\u2019s early theology, as crystallized around the second edition of the Romans commentary, was marked by a volatile conjunction of themes that together fill out the meaning of the Krisis (the radical crisis) that Paul\u2019s gospel represents: the radical priority of divine agency in salvation, the uncompromisingly \u201cvertical\u201d or transcendent nature of God\u2019s action, the real evangelical power of God\u2014a theme taken up from the Blumhardts\u2014the inviolate particularity of the incarnation, and the sharp contrast between the old on which God\u2019s grace and Spirit fall, and the new thing brought into being thereby.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of this is what Barth meant by \u201ceschatology.\u201d Barth is clearly influential in deep ways on K\u00e4semann and J. Louis Martyn, and then on all the apocalyptic theologians mentioned above. Martyn\u2019s big influence was retrospectively rethinking everything in light of the death and resurrection. In this approach, at times \u2014 too often \u2014 Jesus is turned into an event (cross, resurrection) and personhood, incarnation, etc., are diminished or ignored. McCormack contends this approach has the weaknesses of the early Barth vs. the later forensic Barth. Ziegler presses on to Walter Lowe, Nate Kerr (critical) and Douglas Harink \u2014 who appropriates Barth into an apocalyptic framework.<\/p>\n

So Ziegler proposes the following six theses on apocalyptic theology:<\/p>\n

1. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will discern in that distinctive and difficult idiom a discourse uniquely adequate both to announce the full scope, depth, and radicality of the gospel of God, and to bespeak the actual and manifest contradiction of that gospel by the actuality of the times in which we live.<\/p>\n

2. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will turn on a vigorous account of divine revelation in Jesus Christ as the unsurpassable eschatological act of redemption; its talk of God and treatment of all other doctrines will thus be marked by an intense christological concentration.<\/p>\n

3. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will stress the unexpected, new, and disjunctive character of the divine work of salvation that comes on the world of sin in and through Christ. As a consequence, in its account of the Christian life, faith, and hope, it will make much of the ensuing evangelical \u201cdualisms.\u2019<\/p>\n

4. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will provide an account of salvation as a \u201cthree-agent drama\u201d of divine redemption in which human beings are rescued from captivity to the anti-God powers of sin, death, and the devil. In addition to looking to honor the biblical witness, this is also, it is wagered, an astute and realistic gesture of notable explanatory power.<\/p>\n

5. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will acknowledge that it is the world and not the church that is the ultimate object of divine salvation. It will thus conceive of the church as a creation of the Word, a provisional and pilgrim community gathered, upheld, and sent to testify in word and deed to the gospel for the sake of the world. Both individually and corporately, the Christian life is chiefly to be understood as militant discipleship in evangelical freed\u2029om.<\/p>\n

6. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will adopt a posture of prayerful expectation of an imminent future in which God will act decisively and publicly to vindicate the victory of Life and Love over Sin and Death. The ordering of its tasks and concentration of its energies will befit the critical self-reflection of a community that prays, \u201cLet grace come and let this world pass away.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To the casual observer one of truly odd features of late 20th and early 21st Century New Testament studies is that historical Jesus scholars (of the Jesus Seminar mode \u2014 Crossan, Funk, Borg) rejected apocalyptic as the context for explaining Jesus while some Pauline scholars (of the J. Louis Martyn mode \u2014 Martyn, Beker, K\u00e4semann, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nApocalyptic Becomes "Apocalyptic" Theology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"To the casual observer one of truly odd features of late 20th and early 21st Century New Testament studies is that historical Jesus scholars (of the Jesus\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2018\/05\/07\/apocalyptic-becomes-apocalyptic-theology\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Apocalyptic Becomes "Apocalyptic" Theology\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"To the casual observer one of truly odd features of late 20th and early 21st Century New Testament studies is that historical Jesus scholars (of the Jesus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2018\/05\/07\/apocalyptic-becomes-apocalyptic-theology\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-05-07T05:11:30+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-04-29T21:19:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/files\/2018\/05\/Screen-Shot-2018-04-29-at-3.30.52-PM-230x300.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Scot McKnight\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Scot McKnight\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2018\/05\/07\/apocalyptic-becomes-apocalyptic-theology\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2018\/05\/07\/apocalyptic-becomes-apocalyptic-theology\/\",\"name\":\"Apocalyptic Becomes \\\"Apocalyptic\\\" Theology\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2018-05-07T05:11:30+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-04-29T21:19:41+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/#\/schema\/person\/5919e847c58ffe6efb5899fb61797252\"},\"description\":\"To the casual observer one of truly odd features of late 20th and early 21st Century New Testament studies is that historical Jesus scholars (of the Jesus\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2018\/05\/07\/apocalyptic-becomes-apocalyptic-theology\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2018\/05\/07\/apocalyptic-becomes-apocalyptic-theology\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2018\/05\/07\/apocalyptic-becomes-apocalyptic-theology\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Apocalyptic Becomes “Apocalyptic” Theology\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/\",\"name\":\"Jesus Creed\",\"description\":\"Scot McKnight on Jesus and orthodox faith in the 21st century\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/#\/schema\/person\/5919e847c58ffe6efb5899fb61797252\",\"name\":\"Scot McKnight\",\"description\":\"Scot McKnight is a recognized authority on the New Testament, early Christianity, and the historical Jesus. 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