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Why we need apocalyptic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Walter Lowe
Walter Lowe*
Affiliation:
1647 North Rock Springs Road, Atlanta, GA 30324, USAwlowe@emory.edu
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Abstract

The thesis of this article is that an appropriate apocalyptic is remarkably pertinent, perhaps essential, in addressing certain theological challenges of our time. What an appropriate understanding of apocalyptic might be will, I trust, emerge with discussion; clarifying the contemporary challenges will be the first concern. Once that is done, the argument will proceed through two steps or concepts: first, the issue of concreteness and second, a concept I will call ‘contextualisation’. These steps establish the connection between the challenges and apocalyptic. I conclude by sketching some implications. Throughout, the article is guided by an ongoing conversation with Karl Barth, especially II/1 of the Church Dogmatics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 41 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2010

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References

1 Molnar, Paul D., Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2002), pp. 311ffGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 311.

3 Ibid.

4 Cf. Bonhoeffer, ‘Whether I do or not believe is something that no reflection on my religious acts can determine; it is equally impossible for me, in the process of believing, to focus on my faith (Glaube), so that I would have to believe in my faith. Faith is never directed towards itself but always towards Christ, towards that which comes from the outside’, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), pp. 93–4. (In a note, Bonhoeffer remarks that even Luther sometimes loses sight of this point.) One hopes that the book's appearance as vol. 2 of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, freshly trans. by Hans-Richard Reuter and with a valuable Introduction by Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr., will bring it the readership it deserves. In a postmodern context that stakes much on the notion of ‘event’, Bonhoeffer's patient exploration of ‘act’ and ‘being’ can be compelling.

5 Ibid., p. 312; emphasis added.

6 Ibid., p. 311.

7 It is important to note that this logic of immanence points in a direction opposite to that of Molnar's (and Barth's) theology of the immanent Trinity. The latter phrase precisely does not refer (in the first instance) to the Trinity as immanent within this world.

8 Here I draw (contrastively) upon Robert Sokolowski's insightful presentation of the classic Christian tradition in The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 8–9, 31–40, a useful text for teaching.

9 Molnar, Divine Freedom, pp. 311–12. For present purposes we will not treat a final criticism which targets ‘the lack of precision in Christology which leads to the idea that Jesus, in his humanity as such, is the revealer’ (p. 311). Cf. the discussion of the relation between primary and secondary objectivity in the last paragraph of the present article.

10 Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Miller, A. V. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1910, 1931). The Miller translation is generally preferred.

11 Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1972), p. 384.

12 Ibid., p. 397. Cf. ‘I am necessary to God. That is the basis of Hegel's confidence in God . . .’ (p. 420).

13 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, II/1: The Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), pp. 608–77Google Scholar.

14 In Hunsinger, George, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 186–209Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., p. 188.

16 Ibid.

17 ‘If the individual is dialectically turned inward in self-assertion in such a way that the ultimate foundation does not in itself become dialectical, since the underlying self is used to surmount and assert itself, then we have the ethical interpretation.’ . . . ‘The ethical finds contradiction but within self-assertion’, Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, vol. 1, Text, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 572. To note their concurrence on this point does not, of course, diminish the very real differences between the two theologians.

18 Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, pp. 197, 200.

19 Ibid., p. 200, emphasis added.

20 Barth, CD II/1, p. 149.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., pp. 631–8. The editors draw attention to this passage in their preface, p. viii.

23 Ibid., p. 632; quoting from the end of Schleiermacher's second Address.

24 Ibid., p. 634.

25 Ibid.

26 In this connection Kierkegaard speculates that one reason the crowds turned upon Jesus was that ‘he unremittingly kept the people in tension. . . . [I]t was precisely this which precipitated his downfall, the fact that it took such a short time, and yet the people at no time were permitted, as it were, to exhale. The whole thing is like one breath’, Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, vol. 1, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 138. In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observes of the rich young man, ‘But Jesus is not interested in the young man's problems; he is interested in the young man himself’ (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 80. On the apocalyptic and discipleship in Mark, see Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), pp. 101–4 and passim.

27 Barth, CD II/1, p. 633.

28 J.-B. Metz makes the point with appropriate firmness: ‘The Christian idea of imitation and the apocalyptical idea of imminent expectation belong together. It is not possible to imitate Jesus radically, that is, at the level of the roots of life, if “the time is not shortened.” Jesus’ call: “Follow me!” and the call of Christians: “Come, Lord Jesus!” are inseparable’ (Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), p. 176. Cf. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol. 1, p. 142.

29 Ibid., p. 149, emphasis added.

30 Ibid., p. 637.

31 For more on contextualisation, see Lowe, Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 19–22, 138–9. Regarding what is herein called, somewhat awkwardly, ‘processionalism’, cf. ‘the idealist diamond’ (ibid., pp. 23–7, 120–6).

32 See in this regard John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987).

33 Metz, Faith in History, pp. 73–4.

34 In a different context I have tried to make clear the positive importance of the tradition of Hegel and Heidegger for contemporary Christian theology. See Lowe, ‘Postmodern Theology’, in John Webster, Kathryn Tanner and Iain R. Torrance (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 617–33.

35 Barth, CD II/1, p. 159.

36 In Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Glorious Appearing: The End of Days (Wheaton, IL: Tynsdale House, 2004), the climactic volume of the Left Behind series, a spokesperson provides a summation: ‘the whole theme through my teaching of the events of the end times has been the mercy of God. To many of you this seemed inconsistent with what was prophesied and what came to pass. But . . . all of this, all twenty-one judgments that have come from heaven in three sets of seven, have been God's desperate last attempts to get man's [sic] attention’ (p. 103). Note the implication that what is crucial in order to apprehend the mercy and to know the name of the true God/saviour (which is of course crucial), one must understand not just ‘what was prophesied’ and ‘what came to pass’, but the fit between the two. A convert from Islam, reflecting upon the reason for his ‘towering leap of faith’ (p. 144), recalls that what had been ‘most persuasive . . . were the almost daily fulfillments of prophecy’ (p. 145, cf. p. 146; in contrast, pp. 178–9). But this means that (for the unraptured, at least) access to the truth of Christianity is inextricably linked to having the right basic timeline, which is the key to seeing the fit. Thus, in an important if not decisive sense, the timeline does become the ground on which one stands. It triggers religious conversion – which in turn assures that one can regard Christ's coming in judgement as the greatest ‘show’ (the notion runs throughout the book) of all time. Cf. Kierkegaard on revelation and the aesthetic mode.

37 Ibid., p. 171.

38 Douglas Farrow says of Christ that ‘God has put him as a question for everyone simply by withdrawing him into the sanctuary of his own house [by the ascension]. Does Jesus’ incomprehensible absence not confront us with the anomalous character of our alienated place and time? But who understands the divine irony? Who is really aware of this absence? As an absence without parallel it is little noticed, much less identified for what it is, even where talk about absence (in the abstract) may be all the rage.’ Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), p. 271.

39 Barth, CD II/1, p. 177.

40 Cf. ‘timor filialis: filial fear; namely a fear of God characteristic of true children who both fear God's anger and stand in loving awe of his [sic] righteousness . . ., to be distinguished from timor servilis, servile fear, characteristic of those who merely fear divine punishment’, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology, ed. Richard A. Muller (Grand Rapids. MI: Baker Book House, 1985), p. 305. The distinction may be useful in discussing various treatments of apocalyptic.

41 Martyn, J. Louis, Galatians (New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 99Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., emphasis added.

43 See Aulén, Gustaf, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement (London: SPCK, 1965)Google Scholar; and Lowe, ‘Christ and Salvation’, in Vanhoozer, Kevin J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 235–51, esp. pp. 242ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 ‘In short, the standard is not a “should” but rather an “is”, a cosmic announcement couched in the indicative mood in order to describe the real world . . .’ (Martyn, Galatians, p. 567.)

45 Ibid., p. 104.

46 Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, p. 231, emphasis Farrow's. Note the unreservedly apocalyptic character of Farrow's concluding pages (pp. 270–3); and his extensive critique of processional theology, particularly as represented by Teilhard de Chardin (pp. 198–220).

47 For further reflection along these lines, see Harink, Douglas, Paul Among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology beyond Christendom and Modernity (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2003), pp. 67–103 and passim.Google Scholar

48 Barth's apocalypticism as delineated here bears close comparison to what Ingolf U. Dalferth calls ‘Karl Barth's eschatological realism’. See his essay by that name in Sykes, S. W. (ed.), Karl Barth: Centenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 14–45Google Scholar.

49 Barth, CD II/1, p. 16.

50 Ibid., p. 19.

51 Ibid., p. 16, emphasis added. Cf. the fact that knowledge of God is revealed ‘without any prejudice to its certainty, but in this very certainty, it is mediated knowledge’ (p. 9); which does not diminish the fact that the God thus known ‘becomes, is and remains’ to the human knower ‘Another’ (ibid.).

52 Ibid., pp. 67–8.

53 I am grateful to the Henry Luce foundation for supporting a research leave without which this article would not have been possible.

54 An earlier version of this article was presented to the Karl Barth Society of North America at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, November 2006.