World Without End

The Morning After.......

So it didn't happen. The internet is abound with jokes, judgements and taunting. Alot of it comes from the mouths (and fingers) of Christians, critiquing what was rightfully an ill found theology.

Several of my readers asked me last week why I was absent from speculation, linking and commentary. I was actually really busy these last few weeks, but as Saturday grew closer and closer, I felt the pit of my stomach aching for what was going to be a bad weekend for Christians. It was bad for those who hoped Camping was correct and it was a bad weekend for those who will now be lumped in with the disappointed. It will also be a bad weekend because many other Christians are slowly showing our stripes, and earning the the stereotypes of judgemental, arrogant and know it all.

The simple fact: It is easier to make fun of a bad eschatology than a developing a good eschatology.

While many pointed out that Camping was wrong, I did not see many good theological contributions as to why he is wrong. We can point our fingers, but the task of eschatological leadership is hard. While the church (and society) can postmodern away the stickier pieces of eschatology, those in it for the long haul must roll their sleeves up.

We need to learn to talk about judgement.
We need to learn to talk about finality.
We need to relate to secular apocalyptic vision.
We need to understand the actions of immanence pertaining to the words of Christ.
We need pastors who teach about eschatology.

In the words of Robert Jenson, "We need to become fiercely eschatological."

Eschatology is the orientation of the church. Without the promised 2nd coming, we have a worthless faith. We essentially sit around talking about Christmas while it is December 27th. Instead, let this infatuation with the return of Christ stay on our minds.

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

 

Church Leadership and the Zombie Apocalypse

 
A few of us have been thinking about how the scenario of the Zombie Apocalypse speaks to the future of the Church in America.  This might seem a morbid analogy, but it is not based off of a sci-fi geekery (well...maybe a little).

In the catalog of books and movies of the zombie family, one of the biggest threats is "being overrun", when the masses of undead overwhelm the living. A critical mass no longer exists, and the possibilities of demise are soon.  There is only a matter of time until nothing is left.

For those that serve and attend thriving churches, this might seem odd. Christian life and worship is thriving! But a drive through the interior city or a rural location will show plenty of churches that are for sale, have bare minimum of attendance or are just simply vacant. The numbers tell us that Christianity is in decline.

This is not a situation of popularity or participation, but of existence!

What this means is that we need creative leadership strategies.  A frequent response in several zombie tales is the armored schoolbus.  This creative solution finds the answers to several problems (transportation, protection, etc..) in a single innovation.  Survivors abandon what might have previously worked, and understood that they needed to transform to fit the situation. We need to learn to identify what no longer works in our ministry and leadership and fix it.

Adaptability will be the king.

What would be the wrong answer is for us (the church) to simply hole up and wait for our time to end.  Instead, we need to start finding these places of transformation. In the last 50 years, the conservative American church has followed the lead of the Liberal Protestant Paul Tillich, allowing culture to inform the Gospel message, and this has contributed to our decline. This mindset brings the devil of conformity into every conversation. Our methods might change...but our message does not. As a United Methodist, the wesleyan distinctives of Repentance, Faith and Holiness serve as a ruler as does the Gospel that has been proclaimed for 2000 years. Christ is always the same, yesterday, today and forever.  Our homebase is the word and message of God made manifest in the Son, Jesus Christ.  We have the Holy Spirit as the person of God among us and empowering us in these tumultuous times.

Related Posts:
3 Reasons the Church Should Understand the Zombie Apocalypse-Chad Brooks
In the Zombie Apocalypse You Defend Diminished Territory-Rev. Aaron Mansfield

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

 

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...

 

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

End Times Roundup 10.21.10

1. Reasons to teach Eschatology-by Daniel Blanche
One of the questions I have to field many times is why folks even need to think about Eschatology. Daniel does a great job quickly relating it in this post.

2. Predestination and Eschatology-John Roop
Roop offers a view of how Predestination and Eschatology interact with each other in the classic sense as well as from the Great Tradition, that mercy and grace were determined from the beginning.

3. Surviving the Apocalypse Hollywood Style-Wired Magazine
Wired did a section on the Apocalypse in a recent issue.  This is a great survival guide according to Hollywood. Check out the rest of the articles...they are great fun.

4. Eschatology is the cause of our modern malady-Dylan Nickelson
A good post outlining a form of secular eschatology oriented around John Gray’s  Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia.  A good read for anyone enjoying philospohy and social critique.

Pessimism and hope

In a recent blog post found via boingboing.net, Douglas Coupland offers his article A Radical Pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years.  While amusing, his article narrates our current western world very well.

Many of the 45 items deal with the idea of individualism fading, our sense of a middle class diminishing and the general luxury of being American will fade.  Perhaps what is most telling in the last entry; number 45.

We will accept the obvious truth that we brought this upon ourselves

It is in vogue for us to look back on the last 50 years and realize the fall of the West.  Some would offer a critique of us simply becoming to “wordly”, and leave it at that.  Others, in the church specifically, try to show how our consuming nature was baptized by Christianity and has contributed greatly to what some label doom and the coming crisis of Western Civilization.  Both of these option leave out hope.

The easiest way to explain Coupland’s article is that the world is suffering from a lack of hope.  Hope can be barely explained in secular terms; such as “I hope traffic isn’t bad”, “I hope that they aren’t sold out of fresh bread” or “I hope I get to eat dinner early”.  We have taken hope and somehow made it a see-saw between comfort and ideals.

Hope, as Christians, is a confident movement toward the future.  Anthony Kelly in Eschatology And Hope (Theology in Global Perspective) describes it as a non-renewable resource because our trust and confidence has dwindled.  Hope has turned from an idea that God will fully restore this world to a expectation of escape from what is simply hopeless.

Just as Christ entered the world and caused a new reality to exist, the Christian hope for the future is expectant in the final new reality of Eschaton. The Resurrection (and Re-creation) isn’t a resuscitation of a dying world, but the act of the Triune God remaking this place into being the staging ground for the ultimate (and final) relationship between God and Man.  In the 2nd coming, Christ brings His bride before the Father...and we are caught up inside of His love.

This is Hope.  Christians own hope...we should have the market on it.  Our gospel message is not one of human striving, but the actions of God directed at man, bringing us back to him.  Hope isn’t placed inside a relationship with the fallen creation, but with the redeeming and restoring creator.

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

Worship, Eschatology and Sacramental Imagination

I teach people about blogging and social media alot (its one of the main topics I hit on at the other blog outsideisbetter.net).  In keeping up with my hits from search engines on this blog I notice that I get alot of inquiries regarding sacraments and eschatology.  I have referenced this paper before, but I wanted to put it up in the embedded format.  I wrote this for a Sacraments class a couple of years ago and I think it answers alot of questions.  I will warn that this is an academic paper-so it gets heady, but I still like it and have sent it to folks that have emailed me with questions.  Enjoy

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

Worship, Eschatology and Sacramental Imagination

Apocalypse Soon: The Sacred Secular marriage

I have used the phrase "secular apocalypse" before, and I wanted to take a moment to explain it better.  It doesn't have a simple definition, but is more of a cultural phenomenon that I think is a result of Protestantisms engagement with the modern world.  In the drastic social changes over the last 100 years, the church has had to develop some interesting ways to deal with a truly secular Western world.

This article on scientists and fundamentalists (from Huffington Post correspondent Clay Farris Naff) explains how both scientists and fundamentalist Christians are both agreeing in an immanent violent event that will change the face of Earth.  A few excerpts:

Many of the best-informed scientists agree that we have left it too late to prevent anthropogenic climate change from bringing on a global catastrophe. Whether this results in actual extinction or merely the ruin of civilization is a matter they are still debating.

Fundies entertain no such doubts. Preacher Tim LaHaye and his potboiler copilot Jerry Jenkins have made a vast fortune describing the gory biblical end they gleefully anticipate. Their Left Behind novels have been bestsellers, but don't get the idea they think this is mere fiction. In a recent Fox News interview with Governor (and former Republican presidential candidate) Mike Huckabee, LaHaye says the End Times are due to start, and that President Obama's "socialism" is speeding the day....

Evangelical doomsayers, on the other hand, say "bring it on." They are elated by the thought that they will be snatched up to heaven while all those godless liberals and assorted heathens suffer torment below. They even welcome climate change as part of "God's plan." Check out the scorching sun and 100-pound hailstones in this slick video:

While the article is heavy on a specific Christian view, and light on science, it does show the view of how Christians have begun to handle what the Earth is, where they are in response to it's location of "heaven", and how they feel about those who are not part of the club...

Part of the secular movement was the idea that the world was created by chance...and we are not on a decided timeline, but one that is motivated and guided by situations that are perfectly unpredictable (such as evolution theory and the idea of a natural cataclysmic event).  The evangelical movement took up a baptized version of this story, and clung to apocalyptic stories of escape and destruction.

When the world puts itself on a timeline, but has no shape or form to the story, we will end up making up our own stories regarding beginning and end (Robert Jenson's article How the World Lost It's Story is key..go read it).  If the world started by chance...then it must end by chance.  Apocalyptiscism, as presented by Hollywood, is our culture making its own timeline, reacting against the idea that humans could make everything perfect themselves.  Our pendulum has swung to the opposite side of early 20th century liberalism, with the exact opposite of a positive outlook on the place God called "good".  When a finality is created apart from the idea of salvation and worship, we have a pretty bad fracture.  As Christians, especially those branded evangelicals, we offer a poor response to the false narrative of secularism. We care about escape and not renewal by the power of the cross.

This doesn't mean that we neglect the idea of judgment-we know it must happen, but we counter their story with one that does have a distinct beginning and end.  Instead of making the chance apocalyptic event the "Rapture", we offer a message filled to the brim with the desire and necessity of a final event that places those in right relationship with the Father (through a recognition of the lordship of Christ and an identification within him) as inheritors of the promised blessing (Rev 21:6).  We quit trying to escape this world (the whole idea of an "evil" world is very gnostic and not Christian at all), and instead realize that the promised idea of a New Earth is God fixing the unbalances that are the result of humans denial of Him in the garden.  When we give the message of "bring it on", we are telling the world that we simply quit caring for them. 

Often enough, the Kingdom that the church supposedly believes in does not offer a strong enough contrast to secular society (instead functions as Christianism within it).  Our lives are filled with a hope for the future, and this hope should be drawing us to both care for others and live explicit gospel lives in our actions towards them.  Jesus is our hope, and we should very direct with our intentions.

In a postmodern structure, the secular story is one of individualism and chance.  The Body of Christ offers a true alternative communion through the Holy Spirit into the nature of Christs offering to the Father on the Cross and the knowledge that God has a plan for this world...and it has been unfolding through the vehicle of grace since the beginning.

related posts:
Christians and Postmodernity

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

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The power of story and apocalypse

A sampling
Originally uploaded by chadbrooks

I have been on vacation for a couple of weeks and today is my first full day home. I wanted to watch a movie for a little while just to lay low. Out of 5 DVDs randomly on top of the player...these three were found. The others were some of Meredith's marathon documentaries.

Most of my friends laugh at my collection, because I have a thing for post-apocalyptic movies. Funny thing is, most of our culture (especially the younger folk) do as well. In a secular culture that has no narrative of a beginning... a narrative regarding the end has to be made up. Consider it the joy of living in a postmodern matrix. Our reaction of some random scientific situation beginning our world means that some other random moment will end this world.

These movies provide a secular prophetic narrative, hopefully showing the woes of societal disintegration and causing the viewer to beware of what led to it. Whether it is the war machine, a random zombie virus, or the aftermath of a culture barely functioning and feeding off itself, these three movies provide just a hint of the story that folks and trying to write. By pointing out what could happen....the hope is that we now will change to avoid it.

The genre is one of my favorite (trust me...Zombieland is very entertaining) because it is sometimes humorous, but more in how it tells the story a world without the Triune God is hoping to avoid. It is our culture trying to imagine how a world that was never created can implode.

This is why I think about these things so much. As a church, we should be telling our story...from creation to end.

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