World Without End

Where it all started....

Today marks the 1 year anniverary of PostmodernEschatology.com. I want to post the first two posts today, because I think the really grounded the ideas that I wanted to start writing about.

What is this blog?

So why would someone start a blog about postmodern eschatology?  Is this a ploy for a book deal, or a really demented church plant?  Why would anyone want to spend this much time thinking about the end of the world?

Those are all questions that I rolled around in my head for a few months while contemplating devoting a substantial piece of time of my life to thinking about Eschatology.  After some urging from a few trusted friends and a professor allowing me to use this site for class credit I decided tgo for it.

My hope for this space is to direct and provide a place for conversation regarding how our faith interacts daily with what believe regarding the end of the world.  I think that our views on the end will affect how we view the rest of our faith.  Jesus preached an eschatological message, that of the envisioned kingdom. 

I do think that the greater scope of Christianity (not just 20th Century Evangelicalism) offers a critique against rampant apocalypticism, especially that which has become so popular in the last few decades.  I once had a friend ask me a question during a teaching time, "Chad, whats the end of the world going to be like?"  This wasn't a probing question looking for a heavy theological message, but a question directed out of the need for hope.  As Christians, we have an Eschatalogical hope that is about the fulfillment of the entire created order.

This man named Jesus of Nazareth spoke of hope.  His message was directed to those who had lost hope, and to a religious structure that was misdirected and man made.  That model can be placed at many other points of time in the history of humanity, and it will also be one of the key places that I will use to direct what will hopefully be a communal look at the end of all things.

So we will end things with the Gloria Patri, a great statement grounded in Christian Eschatology.

Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit:
As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall ever be, world without end.

What is Eschatology?

Why the big word Chad?  I agree, eschatology is one of the words that gets thrown around that the average person really doesn’t understand.  Academically, it has a pretty wide focus of meaning; such as “end times”, “Kingdom of Heaven”, “judgment”, rebirth”, etc..etc...

Lets have a formal definition.  This one is from the IVP Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms:

eschaton, eschatology (consistent [thoroughgoing], realized, inaugurated). Derived from the Greek term meaning “last,” eschaton refers to the ultimate climax or end of history wherein Christ returns to earth to establish his eternal kingdom of righteousness and justice among all nations. Eschatology, then, is the theological study that seeks to understand the ultimate direction or purpose of history as it moves toward the future, both from an individual perspective (What happens when a person dies?) and from a corporate perspective (Where is history going, and how will it end?).

Ok, that's big and fancy, but good idea of what Eschatology is.  I would define it this way:

Eschatology is the people of God thinking about the action of Past,Present and Future time wrapped around Gods final purpose.

As Christians we confess our belief in an end, “We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come” (from the Nicene Creed).  Eschatology is us thinking about what we confess, and some complex ideas inside of that.  What does life look like after death?  What does the Bible teach us about heaven?  What does tradition teach us about death and heaven, and how might we recognize the classic teachers of the Church and what they have said about the end?

Overall, the greater history of Christianity defines eschatology in a light that many haven’t (except in a vindictive way) through most of the 20th century.  Eschatology is about expectation and hope, not participating in modernity and its story of hopelessness and despair. 

We have hope towards all of the eternal promises that have been given to the Church. 

We have hope in regard to what God will do to this world.....

We have hope towards a life that is both fully absent of pain, but has full knowledge of the Godhead.

The average person has to think about eschatology, because it informs the way that we undergird almost everything we think about God.  It is part of our life with God and how we share our life with others.  We need to remember Eschaton and not Apocalypse is our primary view of how God will put finality on this world.

But this isn’t just theological snobbery...

 

Black Hole Sun: Pop Eschatology in the mid 90's

I was born in 1980, and the years of 1992-1996 were highly influential for me.  I think the dramatic social influence of grunge music is just now being understood by the generation that cut its Rock and Roll teeth on the genre. My friends Tom Fuerst and Eric Crisp and I have had several conversations on how our worldview was influenced and this music shaped how we felt we belonged socially.

Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" (1994) was one of these tremendous shapers. In doing some research I found that the lyrics really served as an artistic picture and the apocalyptic music video was conceptualized by the director.  While Cornell and the rest of Soundgarden might have passed it off, a marginalized youth culture in the middle of the conservative south took this as part of the alternative youth canon.

I remember having conversations with my friends about the video.  Remember that we were all raised on a steady diet of southern religious fear, the end of the Cold War and Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. The idyllic community in the video served as the culture that we didn't feel we fit in with.  Part of the interesting construction of our religious background, we simply interpreted the supposed judgement as relating to Christian Canon while recognizing the difference between us and popular culture represented in the video.  In the end, we would all just be burned away.

I came across this video today on the internet and it brought back a flood of memories.  I wish that I still had contact and memories of some of the deeper conversations I remember having 15 years ago. In the end, this took me back in time to a place that really formed me. This video is a good example of the dramatic inner belief that something has to happen, that destruction must come, and that life on earth is numbered; it doesn't matter if it comes from a religious or a non religious person.  It can be taken as fact, or just another entry into the pop cultural pantheon of the last 50 years.

Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be

 

Christians and their fear of the End

I was doing some research reading this week and stumbled upon a great thought by Wolfhart Pannenberg, one of the 20th centuries leading thinkers in theology.

Since secularism produces meaninglessness, the human person suffers from the lack of meaning. There is a need, then, for the Christian message, perhaps more urgently so than in other periods of human history. But the message can reach its addressee only if the prejudices of secularism against Christianity can be overcome.

This applies especially to the Christian eschatological hope for a life beyond death.  This hope is sharply opposed to the emphatic worldliness of our secular culture. It is under suspicion of escapism, as if it would cheat people out of the fulfillment on their lives on this earth.  Gratitude for this life is an essential part of the Christian belief in the creation of this world by God.

from The Last Things: Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Eschatology

How often have we secretly feared the eschaton because we felt like we still had life to live? This isn't just an issue for those outside the church, it is a reality in the church as well.  Our future life, which we were waiting to fulfill, has been created (in our minds) as an alternative to the reign of God. Part of our answering secular culture and their eschatology is to understand, hope for and believe that the eternal reign of God will be the answer to this world and her woes. It won't answer them by fire and judgement, but by the holiness of God and the acts of Jesus Christ. Inside of the the encompassing act of "end" judgement will have its place, but the greater need is for a redeemed creation, made entirely whole in Jesus Christ.  Mission and eschatology are intertwined in times like these.

The ill-fitting eschatology of the 20th century has gotten us in this situation.  This is the only juncture in the history of Christian theology where our view of the end has allowed us to actually be scared of Jesus.

Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be

Revealed Glory: unmasking apocalypse

Lately I have been thinking and reading about the “aim of scripture.”  Not the point behind scripture, but the overall view of what it tells us.  The aim takes in the entire book, from Genesis to Revelation, and inside of the idea we are consistently looking at scripture to explain itself through scripture.

That sounds kinda complicated....doesn’t it?

What this means is that the places that are really confusing should be interpreted in light of the whole text.  This isn’t just jumping around the Bible and trying to find something similar (this is pretty dangerous actually), but instead working out a view and reading of the Bible as the overarching story of God in this world.

I am writing a paper right now that of why the aim of scripture is important, directed at how the early Church Fathers had to use scripture in defense against the gnostics...who were particularly good at sculpting scripture to say what they wanted it to say. This practice didn’t die in the 3rd century. To them, the aim of scripture and the act of a right reading, is what defined what was Christian and what wasn't.

In books like Revelation, the aim of scripture become extremely important, because many people will separate Revelation from the greater sense of the biblical text, especially the New Testament.  For a book that is considered part of the community of John (G.of John, 1-3 John and Revelation), these fantastical interpretations really pull it out of the greater characteristics of it’s literary family.

The best place to start off this idea is the word apocalypse (in greek Ἀποκάλυψις).  At the beginning the book is identified as an apocalypse of Jesus (Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ) given to John (Rev 1:1).  Often, we think of apocalypse as a word describing a dramatic and violent ending.  A simply lexical study will prove this false.  The BDAG gives us a major definition as follows

1. Making Fully Known
a. of the revelation of truth (Romans 16:25, Eph 1:7), a light of revelation to the gentiles (lk 2:32)
b. of revelations of particular kinds, through visions etc..(Gal 1:12, Rev 1:1, 2 Cor 2:1), the secret was made known by revelations (Eph 3:3, 2 Cor 12:7)
c. of the disclosure of secrets belonging to the last days (1 Pt 4:13)

2. As part of the book title-

So we see that apocalypse, defined as revealing, has meanings listed higher than the one that we usually ascribe to it (c). But even the references behind c gives us a picture.

1Pet. 4:13 But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.

Even in the supposed “doom and gloom” definition, we see a distinct idea of the term Ἀποκάλυψις through the witness of scripture (also see 1 Pet 1:7, 13, 1 Cor 1:7, 2 Th 1:7) . Even in 1st Peter’s usage, we don’t see a cataclysmic reading, but the idea that the glory of Jesus will be revealed.  So it is in the defining of the “glory being revealed” that a view of the end is formed, not a view of destruction.  In the finality of our knowledge of Christ, our adoption will be revealed in its full sense of power.  This revelation is part of our inheritance as part of the family of God.

Yes, the vision given to John is a revealing message.  The first word of the book is heavily loaded, instantly painting a picture across scripture of the glory of God being revealed...and many of the references are specifically directed to his people.  How will we handle this knowledge placed to us?  In Revelation we don’t read the theological treatise of Paul regarding the exalted Christ, but we see him living as the risen Lord Jesus.  This is BIG knowledge.   I also do not want to discount judgement, because it is going to happen, but it should be placed in the proper context.  Allowing judgement to be the defining theme of Revelation as well as defining the word apocalypse simply isn’t a good use of scripture. 

So how do Christians understand Revelation to be about God and His glory incarnated in the Son of Jesus Christ?  That is the contemporary question that exists within Revelation today.  Just as the 7 churches struggled with distinguishing themselves from the world, we today have the same call. By us better understanding Jesus Christ we better interpret our place in this world. We are what we worship!!!

Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be

End Times Roundup 11.2.10

1. Gospel Urgency or Eschatological Fad?
John Yeats writes an interesting post with the Southern Baptist Conventions fascination between missiology and Matthew 24:14.  How does our mission outreach as Christians prime Heaven for the Eschaton?  This is a good look at conservative eschatology. Spend 5 minutes and read about what we weren't taught.

3. Eschatology
Mike Kimel writes a very interesting treatment of a secular political eschatology and predictions.  I like to this because I think it is important to see how the religious pattern of predictions and even the idea of "the end" being a cataclysmic event has seeped into society as a whole.

4. Evangelical Anxieites #5- The End of the World.
The late and great Michael Spencer wrote this a few years ago, and the folks that run internetmonk.com have reposted it.  This is one of the better conservative evangelical approaches to the reasoning behind having good Eschatology. I cannot think of the limitations of this post.

3 Reasons the Church should understand the Zombie Apocalypse

In anticipation of last nights premiere of AMC's "The Walking Dead" I tweeted about zombies most of the weekend.  I thought that this might turn off some of my more theological subscribers that felt my fascination wasn't serious enough, but my excitement overran any worries (it was worse at my other twitter handle @chaddbrooks, because I was involved in several conversations about the McRib being back).  I have a two fold approach to the way I handle eschatology, and one of them is involving myself playfully.  A big part of this is my interest in popular culture and the way that they view any sort of apocalyptic situation.

What I want to do today is offer 3 reasons the church should understand the entire genre of the zombie apocalypse.

1.  The Zombie Movie as Social Criticism:
This is one of the lesser known themes behind many entries into the zombie corpus, but is the guiding principle of the modern zombie.  George Romero (the director of Night of the Living Dead and the zombie Grandfather) generally started the idea of zombie stories/movies being a form of social critique.

What directors and writers in this genre have done is to take multiple angles in story telling to point out flaws and injustices in our society.  At other times, they use the response of the survivors to point towards the depths of human animistic action.  Night of the Living Dead explores both power relations as well as the tumultuous events of the late 1960's. Other zombie films critically present the idea that as humans we have dehumanized ourselves through an aggressive pattern of capitalism.  Finally, last years Zombieland explored narcissism and the need for community from the perspective of a ragtag group of survivors on a quest to visit a theme park in the midst of the zombie apocalypse.

As Christians, zombie movies provide an interesting glimpse into the way that secular culture views itself prophetically.

2. Zombies provide a hermeneutic for understanding culture:
A good friend at my church has an interesting way of looking at Christian life currently as residing inside the zombie apocalypse.  This provides a framework of understanding the Christan life as a pilgrim people, living in a foreign world.  My Pastor ran with this theme in a blog post this weekend about Leadership in the Zombie Apocalypse.

I wrote a sermon a few years ago about the Sacraments and Zombies; how the idea of being undead provides a way for us to encourage devotion and formation towards God. If anything, the idea that popular culture is fascinated with Zombies, the situation (due to their nature as social critique) allows us to engage inside of it and at the same level. 

This isn't taking advantage and hijacking something for the kitsch factor (like a Lord of the Rings bible study), but realizing that the zombie apocalypse is a figurative playground in which we can call things out, provide contrast and deal with subliminal issues.

3. Zombies as punishment:
In last nights "The Walking Dead" premiere, there was a scene where the main character looked inside an abandoned house and found two corpses that appeared to be an assisted and an unassisted suicide.  On the wall, scrawled in blood, was the phrase "God Save Us'.  In many zombie movies and stories, there is the idea that the disease/virus is the result of divine judgement and the survivors either recognizing or at least mentioning it.  Inside of this judgement, man is allowed to completely consume himself. It is as though God as stepped away, pulled the incarnation out of the world and taken away prevenient grace.

The desires of materialism, lust, power, food, and many other things are what disintegrate society and turn us into consumptive monsters that have reached the ultimate of sins. In our final grasp, we begin to literally feed on each other, and the remaining few metaphorically understand the ills of society and run from being consumed by them.

This gives the Church a dramatic look into how society is satirically looking at what it believes deep down.  I think that the popularity of these films is Western Culture's hidden admission of these sins.  Christian leaders should be realizing what and how popular culture is analyzing open and willing sins, and the genre of Zombie films provide this confession.

Glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be