World Without End

Christian Time and the End of Times

I took this picture earlier in the year of my favorite prayer shack at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Ky.  Famous as the monastery of Thomas Merton, I can completely lose track of time during my retreats there.  This particular Rosary Hut is my favorite place to forget about things and concentrate on prayer. I leave behind the time that often rules me and enter into the liminal space of eternal time.

In my studies on the book of Revelation, I am coming to the growing conviction that the book is less about a linear dating of a dramatic close of life and instead that it is a narrative of Christians living inside the world.  How we further identify our own dwelling place, either in the city of God or in Babylon, Revelation speaks to the timeless breadth of the Church. 

I have been surveying what others think about this idea and I have found some very interesting thoughts.  In the book Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching: Reuniting New Testament Interpretation and Proclamation,Stanley P. Saunders writes a chapter titled Revelation and Resistance: Narrative and Worship in John's Apocalypse. Saunders quickly sums his reading of Revelation in this quote;

Revelation was created for oral performance amid the eucharistic gatherings of the early Christians.

Saunders trots this out by dealing with the linear structure of the way that we assume narrative generally takes place, and explains it as only making sense inside a non-linear "imaginative participation".  I have also been listening to lectures by Thomas Hopko's Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation Within Orthodox Christian Tradition. This series outlines the book of Revelation within an Orthodox framework.  The Orthodox lectionary doesn't have a single reading from Revelation, it is the only NT book left out of their reading cycle.  Hopko goes on to teach that its inclusion is not necessary because Revelation is woven throughout the Orthodox liturgy as a foundational principle.

Christian time differs from earthly time.  It is caught up in the idea of time being something that is conceded to man so we can better understand who God is. Worship is then an active rehersal of the world according to God.  To think of time being final to God is quite silly.  Revelation as scripture is highly illogical in the most rational sense, because it must be read in relation to the entire canon. By removing the fairly recent interpretation of Revelation being a calender and instead integrating it within Christian time gives us a better reading, and a truer one to the larger tradition of Christian history.

Doing this isn't easy, and it takes stretches that might need a generation.  Revelation must be preached, and not just to ease congregational concern.  It is like remolding play-dough, and even having to add some water to it in the process.  Revelation is a book of worship acted out in participation.  It is an apostolic narrative of resisting the world.  The 7 churches in chapters two and three set the stage, and the rest of the book is a culmination of biblical idolatry and the consequences of it. 

In the end (no pun intended), we live against the idea of the end of times and actually think of the book as the entirety of time.

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

 

Adding to the library

To make Christmas easier for the various parts of my family I started an Amazon wishlist years ago.  This year, it seemed to be used by more and more people in the family.  Most of them had things to say about the amount and type of reading that was on my list, but I think my sister's thought takes the cake:

Mom..the funny thing is this isn't just for school, this is his leisure reading!!!

I will say that building a good library on things your are interested is is important, and part of that is putting resources in that you don't necessarily agree with. I am working on a post for my main blog about how to review commentaries for personal use, it should be up in the next few days.

But here is what I added to my Revelation library this Christmas through the graciousness of my family.

 

A Very Zombie Holiday

I found this link through Erudite Mess. A great little instructional video for the dealing with the undead during the holiday season

The Two Tensions and the End of Times

Earlier this week on twitter I tweeted this.

 

 

 

I got a few responses out of it, with most of them asking about what I meant by classic liberal eschatology.  I have learned in the last few months about these sort of loaded phrases, so I want to tell you how I am defining it first.  Classic Liberal Eschatology is part of the biblical studies project of the early to mid 20th century.  It is typified by writers such as Schweitzer and Dodd. What their view does  is maddening in how they take thoughts on the end (eschatology) and place them inside the gospels and the understanding of the Kingdom of God.  They are true in understanding Jesus having an eschatological message, but they shift the focus specifically on the idea that Jesus made a failed attempt to force in an eternal kingdom. This is part of the classic liberal theological perspective of Jesus and the breaking of his divinity and pre-existence.

This creates a mainline (traditional mainline denominations are Prebyterian, Lutheran and Methodist) eschatology without an end.  The language is merged with thoughts on the "kingdom of God", which in and of itself is not a bad thing, but it breaks the idea of future Christian hope, best shown (in the liberal/main-line perspective) of Jürgen Moltmann.  Their idea of the Kingdom of God is Christ making a present kingdom, and no future hope exists.

The various liberal theologies did not happen on their own.  The exact same time period also serves as the rise of some pretty extreme fundamentalist views in America, in which the interpretation of Revelation was getting seriously out of control and fantastical.  The two thoughts were held in tension, fighting against each other.  The whole world was reacting to the two World Wars, and being birthed out of the sociological view that had predominated the 19th century, in which man would (and could) create the perfect world, and bring in the eternal kingdom.

So for the last century, Christian eschatology has been divorced.  One side doesn't want to deal with the idea of a future reality and the other refuses to think of anything except for escape.  But both sides have become intertwined with each other; The Mainline, through its liturgy, has regained a vision of the future and the conservative side has become thoroughly Tillichian in how they want to make Christianity work within the worlds terms and ideas. So the liberals have become more conservative and the conservative has been influenced by the liberal...but without either regaining good ground.

So what we end up with is a version of eschatology that is so fractured we can barely discern it as Christian.

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

The Sociology of the Apocalypse and American literature

My undergraduate work was in sociology, specifically surrounding unique American social myths (I had a think for cowboys and the stories of the west).  I still think it would be fun to do further education in that field, and my interest in sociology is integral to the way that I think theologically.  I have my notes on it packed away, and it will be a project for further research, but I think that the modern idea of an apocalypse is an example of a broad sociological shift starting the mid 1850's. 

Google Ngram is part of the Google books project.  It allows you to search keywords throughout the digitized library and it creates a graph noting when the word had the most usage in its library.  I played around with it this weekend, and came up with a few interesting graphs. Here is one of them.

The three words have interesting information.  Blue (notating the use of the term antichrist) has a huge spike from the range of 1805 to 1870, peaking in around 1820.  This is roughly the same time as a major American fascination with eschatology begun...the premillennial dispensationalism theology was just one of the new movements at this time. A good resource to understand this period is Discovering an Evangelical Heritage

Both Apocalypse (Red) and Eschatology (Green) are almost dormant during this time.  They start to rise around 1860.  I would imagine this can be credited to the societal turmoil at the beginning of the American Civil War.  This was a very tumultuous time in American Christianity due to the ideas of utopianism, evangelism, and religious fanaticism that are characterized in this era. We also see another spike in around 1915, at the point of World War I.  Around 1941-1942 we see all three categories start to rise considerably.  What is interesting is the red and green peak in the late 1990's along with blue starting to take a steady rise upwards.

Some of the data surrounding the term apocalypse could be skewed, because that word has shifted from a primary theological role and more into a cultural idea, but that is part of the data that makes it interesting.

This is really basic data, and its trustworthiness is subject to some questions, but it at least shows a basic drift of when some keywords surrounding the idea of "end" were popular in American literature.  This was a quick look I took as I continue to research and think about how the West thinks about the end of times.  I hope that I can spend more time working on this type of thought in the next few months.

Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture

This semester I have been prepping to write a Thesis on the book of Revelation.  I spent some time in a Doctoral seminar on the history of Biblical Interpretation.  As part of that class I read Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture by Francis Young. This book looks at the foundations of Christian exegesis (the study of scripture) and how it was part of forming the unique Christian culture in the first few centuries of faith.  I read the book and then engaged it specifically with the book of Revelation and how we can apply some of the patristic principles to our modern day reading of Revelation.  Here is the paper (embedded from my Scribd account).

Engagement With Young and Revelation