Matt was raising the question under my last post whether Christianity could simply do away with its claim to end-time supremacy –– what I would call its apocalypticism –– and be ultimately better off. Or to put it another way, can you be a Christian but not think that God will condemn non-believers at the end of time?

With apologies to Matt, I’m not really going to consider here the suggestion that the Gospel writers added all of Jesus’ apocalypticism to his “real” teachings when they wrote the Gospels. I just don’t think that’s a reasonable historical claim, based on a number of points.

It seems to me that scholars who do try to claim Jesus wasn’t apocalyptic are simply trying to salvage a Jesus they like, and as a result they are left without any reasonable explanation for how Christianity came to be so thoroughly apocalyptic, as evidenced by just about every book in the New Testament. What’s more, pretty much the whole impetus behind apocalyptic literature is a preoccupation with justice and the belief that God will vindicate the righteous and punish the wicked, so I’m not sure how we could keep some apocalypticism and do away with Christ’s end-time supremacy (i.e., the idea that he will vindicate the righteous and punish the wicked), either.

NEW REVELATIONS IN SCRIPTURE

So, setting aside the historical question, I’d like to deal with this as an honest theological question. Can we strip Christianity of its apocalypticism –– that is, the idea of a coming end-time judgment in which people are judged and given either eternal life or eternal death based on their religious commitments and behavior –– and still have a viable religion?

Or more importantly to my mind, does God intend for us to somehow move beyond apocalyptic Christianity and embrace Christ as the founder a different kind of faith?

First of all, if we’re taking the Bible as a fully authoritative and final guide to truth about God, then the question pretty much falls apart. Virtually every part of the New Testament depends on this notion of a final judgment, and committment to Jesus is always central to the kind of judgment that’s going to take place.

So to set aside apocalypticism, you have to assume that descriptions in the Bible about how God deals with people are not necessarily eternally true. This may sound offensive at first, but it’s implicit in all the covenants reflected in Scripture, and it’s lurking in the background whenever the New Testament explains what Jesus’ death and resurrection mean––that they somehow replace the way God dealth with people under the old covenant.

One important point to realize is that the Old Testament reflects traditions from hundreds of years, and often its ideas about God change from an earlier time to a later. For example, different parts of the Old Testament disagree on how God deals with human wickedness: does God punish sin to the third and fourth generation (Ex 20:5), or does God only punish the person who commits a sin (Ezek 18:20), or are prosperity and suffering pretty much independent of whether a person is loyal to God (Job)?

We could take these as contradictions of one another (which I admit I’m prone to do), but they could also be seen simply as God choosing to deal with people differently at different times. The implication is that God may have said one thing then, but he’s saying something different now.

END-TIME REWARD AND PUNISHMENT?

To get closer to the point we’re dealing with here –– whether the church can lay aside its apocalyptic theolgoy –– I think it’s significant that the Sinai Covenant and the early history of Israel don’t say anything about an afterlife. The people of God were to be given a promised land, but there was no real notion of what would happen to them after death.

They did have a sort of mythical idea of Sheol, which is essentially the same thing as Hades in Greek thought, a sort of land of the dead. Rather than an actual afterlife, it appears to be a netherworld of only partial existence, more dull and hazy than joyful or painful.

As for heaven, it was described as the place where God and the angels were, but not as the place people went after they died. Elijah may have been taken up to heaven, but he went there alive, and anyway there’s no indication in the early history of Israel that righteous people in general expected to earn such an honor. When Saul raises Samuel’s ghost (a bizarre story in 1 Sam 28:3-25), Samuel comes up from the ground (28:13), not down from heaven.

Later on, however, God’s promises become grander. At the end of Isaiah, for example, we read about “new heavens and a new earth” (65:17; 66:22), in the day when God will set things right again. Yet it looks like this will all happen on earth, where people will continue to grow old and die (Isa 65:20). Isaiah’s vision is a lot like later apocalyptic teachings, but it doesn’t fit with what we see in Revelation (e.g., Rev 21:4).

Then we have the book of Daniel, which is set after Persia conquers Babylon in 539 B.C., but which was probably written after certain political events in Jerusalem in 167 B.C. It describes an actual resurrection of the dead at the end of time –– the only passage in the Old Testament that talks about this. Regardless of when the book was written, it claims that Daniel is told to keep his writings secret until the “time of the end” (Dan 12:4), which means that the message about the resurrection was not intended for people who lived earlier.

So what am I saying? Moses thought that the promised land was the best thing there was. Isaiah thought that God’s ultimate deliverance would be just like earthly life, only better. Daniel thought people would rise from the dead to eternal life, but he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it until after about 167 B.C.

Whatever you think about biblical inerrancy, it is difficult to deny that later biblical stories expand on the ideas from earlier stories. Just exactly what God will do is not the same in every part of Scripture, but instead we can see certain kinds of trajectories (maybe agreeing or maybe disagreeing with one another) that lead us into a huge assortment of Jewish literature in the centuries before Jesus. Much of that literature (especially 1 Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls) is heavily influenced by apocalyptic ideas.

By the time Jesus came around, many (but not all) Jews believed in the kind of salvation Daniel talked about, that at the end of time God will raise all the dead to be judged, at which time the righteous will be rewarded with eternal life while the wicked will be punished in hell. People naturally had different ideas about just who the “righteous” were.

Jesus continued this kind of teaching, as did all the authors whose books ended up in the New Testament.

DOES IT STOP THERE?

So the question is: Is that the final word on the matter?

Before we conclude too hastily that of course Jesus’ words are eternally true, it is important to remember that Jesus’ teachings about a final judgment were not given to the people in early Israel. Yet I don’t think most of us would conclude, based on that, that God was lying to Israel through Moses.

Rather, the entire history of the writing of the Bible consists of a mixture of affirming, reinterpreting, and overturning previously-held beliefs about God.

And it doesn’t quite work to say that God stopped revealing new things when Jesus came, because development continues even in the New Testament. 2 Peter is written to people who are pretty obviously anxious because Jesus’ promise to return “soon” doesn’t seem to have come true. Their neighbors are starting to mock them (3:4), and Peter reassures them by reinterpreting what his church thought they knew about the end: “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (3:8). Appropriately, this line is a virtual quotation from the Book of Jubilees (4:30), a popular Jewish text which used the line to try to explain why Adam didn’t die on the same day he ate the fruit.

Both of these texts are unwilling to say that the scripture they are interpreting is untrue, but both of them use reinterpretation to radically change what others considered to be the plain meaning of the earlier text.

HOW DOES THE CHURCH USE THE BIBLE?

Even for those who agree with this analysis, I don’t really think it gives us a clear answer for what to do with apocalypticism. So we are left with our three options: we can affirm, reinterpret, or overturn.

Should we assume, then, that since Jesus taught extensively (if ambiguously) about the end of the world, Christians are compelled to hold that same teaching? Or should we argue that God calls on the church to continually reinterpret the teachings of Scripture, perhaps seeing the end as a judgment outside of time, rather than a literal historical return of Jesus to earth? Or should we consider overturning the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus, suggesting perhaps that God wanted the church to hold to apocalypticism for a time, but that now we are to move on to other ways of understanding the world?

I tend to go with the first option, because I think the New Testament is too thoroughly apocalyptic for the teaching to be in any way optional. To use a medical analogy: You can remove a lung or a kidney, but you can’t remove, say, all the bone marrow from a person and expect their body to still function.

I imagine we’ll have some other perspectives here, though.