| ||
The apocalyptic worldview holds that God’s good world is now under the control of evil angels or demons. At its core, apocalypticism is a theodicy - - an attempt to reconcile a good God with evil in the world. In most of the Old Testament, humans are responsible for their own wickedness (the serpent doesn’t force Eve to do anything), and God shows God’s justice by rewarding and punishing human deeds. But some OT texts challenge this idea: Job argues (correctly, according to the story) that he suffers unjustly, and Ecclesiastes laments that the good and bad in life simply happen, without any apparent reason. Apocalypticism insists, instead, that fallen angels have taken control of creation, and that the justice of God (who has effectively relinquished control) will only be seen at the end of time, when wickedness reaches its climax and God steps in to end history, destroying the wicked and vindicating the righteous. The world will be transformed into a new age that will have no wickedness or suffering. God will again be in control, and the world will work like it’s supposed to work. Bits of apocalypticism can be found in the OT (esp. the end of Isaiah and the second half of Daniel), but it flourishes in Jewish literature in the centuries just before Jesus. Apocalypticism is at the heart of New Testament theology. Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God meant that God would soon take back control of the world. Paul argued that Jesus had initiated the end times, and that he would soon return to set the world right again. Revelation insisted that a new heaven and earth would soon replace the old, fulfilling Isaiah 65:17. This affects how Christians live, because we believe in the paradox that the world is a good place, but that it is influenced by forces of evil that will never be fully overcome until Jesus’ return. We work for good, but we know that human progress can never fully redeem the earth; that task is reserved for the avenging Son of Man at the end of time as we know it. Reading suggestions: Within scripture, important apocalyptic passages include Isaiah 65:17–66:24; Daniel 7-12; Mark 13; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; 2 Peter 3:3-10; and of course the book of Revelation. Even better, the most important apocalyptic work of all is probably 1 Enoch, which you can read online here (see esp. chs. 6-10 and 45-51). 1 Enoch was actually written in pieces, much of it from around 200 B.C., and one important part (including chs. 45-51) from probably around the time of Jesus. For secondary literature, I’m a big fan of John Collins, so I’d suggest his book The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Also, see my related post here. |
March 15th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
“This affects how Christians live, because we believe in the paradox that the world is a good place, but that it is influenced by forces of evil that will never be fully overcome until Jesus’ return.”
What do you mean by “we”? Are you suggesting that all Christians believe the same thing? Or are you using the royal we?
March 15th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
I’ll admit that I’m not being very diplomatic to put it that way, but I’m basing it on the comment I make a few sentences before that: “Apocalypticism is at the heart of New Testament theology.”
Clearly there are Christians who disagree about whether apocalypticism is the best understanding of the world, but I maintain (as I argued here and here) that it is pervasive in the New Testament. That puts the burden of proof on people who want to get rid of it, rather than on people who want to keep it.
As I see it, you can set aside, for example, the sexism of the NT without fundamentally changing the message of what the NT says about Jesus. But I don’t think you can do that with apocalypticism, which means that if you want to get rid of apocalypticism, you have to ignore the NT’s essential theological claims about Jesus and start virtually from scratch with a new Christology. Problem is, you need to start with some historical core about Jesus, and the best historical sources we have about Jesus (the NT Gospels) say that he was an apocalyptic prophet.
I would use we to refer to people who hold roughly to the common Christian orthodoxy of the church over the centuries. I don’t really know Christian history well enough to know how many Christian groups have rejected apocalypticism in recent years, but it does seem to me that a person would have to do serious violence to the NT in order to get there.
If someone wants to basically reject the fundamentals of NT theology, I suppose I’m willing to acknowledge them as a Christian if they hold themselves to be one, but I’m not sure exactly what it means. Some people reject traditional Christology, argue for a view of God that’s based primarily on philosophy, and then accept Jesus’ moral teachings; I think that’s a reasonable set of things to believe, but I’m not sure Christian is the right word for it, at least not if Christianity is a faith. Maybe call it Christianism or something, but I take Christianity as holding also to the tenet that Jesus is Lord.
This is a big fight going on in the Christian world recently, as it has gone on throughout Christian history: Who gets custody of Jesus? As you can see, I have my own biased opinion as to the answer.
March 16th, 2008 at 9:50 am
I see that this theology is internally consistent. However, it does not seem
“that fallen angels have taken control of creation, and that the justice of God (who has effectively relinquished control) will only be seen at the end of time, when wickedness reaches its climax and God steps in to end history, destroying the wicked and vindicating the righteous”
is in any way related to how the world actually works.
No empirical evidence exists of fallen angels controlling creation. Instead, hundreds of years of data indicate that the laws of physics control creation. And if these fallen angels are at the mercy of Newton’s laws, then they aren’t really in control of anything.
I don’t doubt the emotional attachment that millions of people have to this epic Biblical story of good and evil.
But popularity and emotionalism sure don’t make it true.
I suppose your answer might be, that’s where faith comes in. But by that standard, then popular faith in *any* internally consistent, emotionally gripping story makes it “true.” And that would lead to a relativism that I imagine you would reject.
Also, if these fallen angels are, indeed, controlling our world, then where are they and why are they invisible?
March 16th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
“[Apocalypticism] is pervasive in the New Testament. That puts the burden of proof on people who want to get rid of it, rather than on people who want to keep it.”
But the NT said the apocalypse was imminent. The burden of proof is on those who want to keep a prediction that was off by at least twenty centuries.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
@jill-
The work of the angels is primarily in leading people into sinful behavior. In God’s original world, people acted justly and temperately; in the world controlled by fallen angels, many people are wicked, i.e., they despise God and hurt people.
(In reality there are, of course, people who reject God and treat people well, as well as people who believe in God but hurt people. The apocalyptic world view would assume that both groups have been led astray.)
Interestingly, in antiquity it was commonplace (if I remember correctly from a course I took last semester) to assume that the stars and planets were divine beings who controlled the universe, and that deviations in their mathematical courses were signs that those forces were actually evil. The Old Testament creation story, ironically enough, somewhat de-mythologized the cosmos by claiming that the heavenly bodies were just objects, put there by God to mark the passage of time, and not other god figures at all.
This is one place where apocalypticism (which seems to have entered the Jewish tradition only at the tail end of the books that ended up in the OT) is somewhat at odds with the theology of Genesis.
It is true (as far as I know) that demonic influence in the universe isn’t demonstrable by the scientific theory, but then theology’s standard claim is that empirical explanations of human experience are inevitably reductionistic. So for example, humans often commit cruelties that go beyond simply fighting over limited resources. To haul out the stock example, physics can’t explain Hitler or Stalin, and it also can’t explain why, e.g., men rape their step-daughters.
There are psychological explanations for these things, but then psychology can’t be verified by the laws of physics either. Maybe this is just an excuse for religious people to claim mystery and espouse a god of the gaps in the one area (namely, brain functioning) that it too complex for science to measure empirically (so far). I admit that this is possible, and it gives me great cause for doubt.
Yet, the atheist and the agnostic still can’t explain why anything exists at all, so it’s not as if the scientific world view doesn’t have an enormous flaw with no satisfying solution.
In light of that flaw, I choose theism. Since I can’t fathom a God that would create all this and not act or reveal anything in the world, I choose religion. And since Jesus Christ, as described in the New Testament, is the most compelling example of divine revelation I’ve encountered, I choose Christianity and the Bible.
March 19th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
First, science certainly does explain why things exist.
Human conception, for example, isn’t caused by magic, it’s caused by the meeting of sperm and egg.
Black holes aren’t created by dreams, but by the implosion of the core of supernovas.
Sickness isn’t caused by demons, as was thought by people of good faith for thousands of years, but by germs, genes, and viruses.
Therefore, finding causes is not a “flaw” of science, but rather a goal of science that is often and brilliantly achieved. Sam Harris writes eloquently about this.
You admit that you are appealing to the God of the gaps, and that ensures that your God gets smaller and smaller as we discover more about the universe. This tiny view of God saddens me as a fellow theist.
What leaves me most gobsmacked, however, is the incredible leap you make between pointing to the limits of science to believing in something as empirically as unsubstantiated as Apocalypticism.
You are brilliant, and a scholar. You know as well as I do, that every explanation of an unknown is not equal. Because we cannot definitively “explain Hitler or Stalin” doesn’t mean demonology or the will of Zeus are just as good explanations of those men as psychology, sociology, or systems theory.
March 21st, 2008 at 12:22 pm
I think we disagree on how to use the word “why”. Sure a baby is born because a sperm and an egg are joined, but that gives no explanation for why there is a universe at all, let alone one in which something as absurdly beautiful and elegant as DNA can be formed out of random chemicals, and can cause a single fertilized egg to know how to grow into a body with so many complex, elegant parts.
Personally, that blows my mind, and speaks powerfully of a creating God, even if evolution could explain everything from the big bang forward.
My attack was not against science — I agree that it does magnificent things. My attack was a against a purely scientific worldview that thinks theology isn’t necessary because science explains everything.
My contention — and I don’t think it’s a weak one — is that apart from theology we have no explanation for why anything exists at all. You’re right that that’s not a flaw with science, but it *is* a flaw with the view that science is all we need, which admittedly makes it a better criticism of atheism than of agnosticism. But as far as I can tell, the idea that everything exists “just because” is basically unintelligible. Theism (as I imagine you agree) is more satisfying because it at least begins with the idea of a supernatural god who could more plausibly be eternal.
I certainly don’t make a leap straight from theism to apocalypticism. As I said explicitly, there are a couple of steps in there, most notably my belief that Jesus represents divine revelation. The most compelling part of Jesus is his moral claims, which admittedly are mirrored by other moral teachers among the world religions. But what’s unique about Christianity is the claim that Jesus rose from the dead, which is supported by the historical testimony of witnesses.
That testimony can’t be verified empirically, of course, but the proper way of evaluating eye-witness testimony, in the absence of corroborating physical evidence, is to judge whether the witnesses are trustworthy.
Someone who assumes that Jesus *couldn’t* have risen from the dead will, of course, assume that the Bible texts are not trustworthy. But apart from ruling out the resurrection a priori, the four canonical Gospels actually present pretty strong historical evidence that people who knew Jesus (1) found his tomb empty and (2) saw him alive on multiple occasions afterwards.
Just as an example, people who were creating a story about having found an empty tomb would not have chosen women as the characters to have found it. That’s known as the criterion of embarrassment, and it’s typically a powerful indicator of the authenticity of a tradition.
I’m not saying this will convince anyone, but I also don’t think I’m making any unfounded leaps. If Jesus was really raised from the dead, then it is certainly worth considering whether his apocalyptic worldview might be the right one after all.
Thanks for the ongoing discussion.
April 17th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Can you explain why it is easier to believe that God exists “just because” than to believe that the universe exists “just because”?
A being who could create this fantastically complex universe would have to be even more fantastically complex itself. So why is the “just because” existence of this being any more “intelligible” than the “just because” existence of the universe ?
April 17th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Let me know if this doesn’t answer your question exactly, but I think the biggest point is that eternity makes sense if there is a God, but it makes no sense if there isn’t a God. That’s not to say a person has to believe in eternity necessarily, but then how do we explain when everything began?
As I understand the world, physical existence is always bound up with time, and time always moves in the same direction (even if it can speed up and slow down). As far as I’ve heard, there aren’t really any good theories for what happened “before” the big bang, for example. If time only moves in one direction, we would really need an explanation for what started time. But if we have a notion of a God that exists outside of time (whatever that means), then we can presume that God could have created time with a starting point.
My point is that looking for a beginning point of time actually contradicts our empirical study of the universe, but we can at least imagine a God who could be beyond that, even if we didn’t understand it.
I know that’s a garbled explanation, and maybe I‘m overlooking something. I’d be interested to hear your response, Brian.