Re: NT Wright and the confusion of kingdom and new creation

Andrew - apologies to you and Ryan for inserting this before you had time to answer Ryan’s questions, but I have to seize the moments when they become available.

Overall, I think your argument raises the question of what exactly God’s people will end up doing in the new creation - but that’s another issue.

My interpretation of palingenesia is not far removed from yours; I would see it as starting with the renewal of the people of God (and actually therefore, starting with Christ himself at his resurrection, since this was the start of the renewal/regeneration). There is then a sense in which the renewal/regeneration is both "now" (and includes judgment on unfaithful Israel in history) and "future" (final judgment, in which the disciples may also participate with Jesus in judgment).

The "now" and "future" dimension of what Jesus is saying is emphasized in the rest of the passage. There are rewards in this life ("a hundred times as much") for those who leave everything for the sake of Jesus (this is even clearer in the parallel passage in Mark), which includes "eternal life" ("life of the age" if you will), but that "eternal life" (or "life of the age" ) spans life now and life to come.

However, the "thrones" in Matthew 19:28 are for judgment (now or future); that they might also be for a continuing reign is only an inference at this point.

In 1 Corinthians 6:2, the judgment could also be both temporal and final, but I would be more inclined to think that a final judgment is in view here, because a temporal judgment on Rome/Corinth (akin to judgment on Israel) simply never seemed to happen, or not in a way that we have ever  been aware of.

The ’wrath of God’ passage in Romans (1:18ff) is as much directed at Israel as the ‘pagan’ world, and as mentioned in a previous post, the difficulty with locating "the day of God’s wrath" - Romans 2:5 in temporal history is that it is qualified in  Romans 2:16 with a statement that places it more naturally in a final judgment - at the end of history.

In other words, I am not sure that the "two horizons" idea (of Jesus and Paul) works out quite so neatly in practice. It is also true that Paul is just as much concerned with Israel’s temporal judgment as Jesus was.

I also don’t think that 1 Corinthians 15:24-26 is describing the "end" of the kingdom; it doesn’t actually say that. It does say that Jesus "hands over the kingdom to God the Father", after the final defeat of the powers, but that does not mean its end. It does say that Jesus must reign "until" the final defeat of his enemies - but "until" is ambiguous. It can mean "until" and not beyond; it can also mean "until" and continuing, where the "until" simply underscores the final defeat of Jesus’s opponents through the kingdom. So what ends is Jesus’s enemies; what continues is the kingdom.

The "handing over" of the kingdom to the Father cannot be taken in a crudely literal way; it’s really a metaphorical way of emphasizing the ultimate conclusion that "God may be all in all". There isn’t any material division between God the Father and Jesus whereby something could be handed over from one to the other which the other didn’t already own. The reality of what the kingdom signifies therefore continues - there is a continuing reign of Jesus in heaven - but its focus and character must inevitably change when the nature of its earthly activity changes.

I would hesitate to make a definitive explanation of a passage which has been the subject of endless dispute over the ages, but I personally take the view that there was not a separate resurrection of a particular group of people at a time preceding others who were resurrected in Revelation 20:4-6.

I see this passage as a non-literal way of encouraging those who were martyred - their matryrdom will be reflected in the kind of resurrection they enjoy (that there can be different kinds of resurrection is a theme of the NT).

I also see three groups of people: those on the thrones; those who were martyred; and the rest of the dead. I think much of the time imagery here is simply a metaphorical way of underscoring the victory of the people of God. I think it is overstretching things to use the passage to support an innovative doctrine such as Christ’s reign coming to an end (in the way it has been described) at a future point in time.

In all, it is much simpler to take Revelation 22:5 as what it says: the servants of the Lamb will reign for ever and ever - just as Jesus is said to reign "for ever and ever" in Revelation 11:15 where "the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ" (a parallel, surely, of 1 Corinthians 15:24-26, but put in a slightly different way).

In other words, the reign of Christ, and of the saints, continues even after the defeat of the final enemy, but with that defeat, one would imagine that the way in which the reign, and the kingdom itself, was expressed would undergo some changes.