Andrew, I certainly agree with you regarding the poverty of our popular narratives!
I wonder whether there is not in Jesus’s teaching and action a greater incorporation of fulfilment and ‘covenantal perspective’ themes than perhaps your summary of the “Son of Man” theme allows for. Certainly the breadth of usage of this self designation is not only apocalyptic in scope. Perhaps by concentrating on the more Daniellic aspect of the Son of Man, there is too much of a gap being placed between the ‘kingdom’ teachings that straddle both a present ethic as well as future consequences?
There seem to be two separate issues. First, the question of whether the NT envisages Rome as ‘the enemy’ (in parallel with Jewish expectation) and relatedly whether the fall/subversion of Rome would therefore form a fitting end point with which to mark the vindication of the followers of Jesus? Second, would be whether a broader ‘Son of Man’ narrative continues to be a meaningful narrative or even a dominant one within and much beyond the NT period.
I hope that by “elsewhere” you are referring to a separate thread rather than off OST! Again I think you have hit the nail right on its head as far as the limitations that we have ourselves placed in our understanding of the very central concepts of gospel and salvation. The content and proper context of ‘the gospel’ are poorly applied even if properly understood. Perhaps one of the integrating factors of the NT that has been paid too little heed is that the gospel is not just a small set of propositions about how God saves us in Christ but is itself the working out in practice of following Jesus in His confrontation with ‘the world’ in order to save mankind. ‘Saving’ meaning something closer to ‘being in Christ’ rather than the more apocalyptic, “let’s all ensure that we get to heaven where we can relax at God’s right hand”.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: To bind or to loose?
Sam, thanks for keeping the conversation going!
Yes, we could say that Jesus’ self-understanding as Son of man is ‘not only apocalyptic in scope’; but I would still argue that it operates within the apocalyptic story, even if it may sometimes carry connotations that do not directly connect with the apocalyptic theme. I’m not quite sure what you mean by your reference to a gap between present ethic and future consequences but I would suggest that the ‘present ethic’ that we find in Jesus’ teaching only really makes sense in light of the ‘future consequences’ that are prefigured in the Son of man story. So, for example, when Jesus tells a story about a storm that will hit the two houses built on rock and sand, he has in mind specifically the storm of the Jewish war: only the community built on Jesus’ words will survive the catastrophe of divine judgment on Israel. This story concludes the sermon on the mount in Matthew, and I think we must read the ethical teaching that precedes, beginning with the beatitudes, in the light of it.
I see no reason why the church should not make use again of the Son of man story when it faces similar circumstances of oppression in order to construct a narrative of hope. But I would argue that this should not be allowed to compromise the historical integrity of the New Testament use of Daniel’s archetype. We understand the New Testament better if we do not try to place ourselves within the apocalyptic story as Jesus and Paul and others tell it. I also think that to do so potentially distorts the mission of the church.
It seems significant to me that Paul’s apocalyptic narrative in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 concludes not with the coming of Christ but with the handing over of the kingdom to the Father and the final defeat of death. The sequence is: Christ comes (the coming to receive a kingdom in Daniel 7); Christ reigns until all his enemies have been defeated; and finally Christ delivers the kingdom back to God. We have the same sequence in Revelation 19-21: the enemies of the people of God are defeated by the Word of God who comes to reign along with the martyrs; Christ reigns for a thousand years; death is finally defeated with the creation of a new heavens and new earth, at which point there is no allusion to the Son of man narrative. The parousia motif belongs to the moment of victory over Rome. The final enactment of justice and renewal of creation is described in other terms.
It is this latter moment of the renewal of creation that I think should fundamentally set the parameters for the mission of the people of God, not the historically limited moment of the vindication of a suffering community following judgment on a pagan oppressor. Mission now is again a response to a creational crisis not to the transitional eschatological crisis that confronted the community of renewal that followed Jesus away from the broad path of second temple Judaism.
From a narrative-historical point of view, the ‘gospel’ is the announcement first to Irael and then to the ancient world that God is coming to restore and reign over his people, bringing judgment and oppression to an end. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection ‘Israel’ has been saved from its sins - God has remained faithful to his promise to Abraham to keep a community of blessing in the world. That is a statement about something that happened in the past. The good news now is that there is an alternative way of being human, called into existence and sustained by the living creator God, redeemed from the material of the old humanity, in anticipation of a final renewal of creation and defeat of evil and death.
Re: To bind or to loose?
Andrew, I am probably not the right person to take up this question with you but let me try. There are two major ways in which the word ‘gospel’ is used in the epistles. One important use (that is often ignored) is that ‘the gospel’ (with referrences to ‘the teaching’ etc.) refers to the actual traditions of Jesus. The second use is the summary effect of having believed ‘the gospel’ and of now therefore being a part of the community of Jesus.
On the face of it neither of these uses is apocalyptic. Both often are linked to discussions grounded in the triumph of Jesus in the cross and resurrection. Paul in particular universalises in his teachings the effectiveness of the salvation that Jesus has accomplished to all and this is also true, in a different sense, of the Johanine works. It is a finished work the benefits of which we are to fully realise as God’s children. I don’t see anything temporal or delimited in these teachings, the effectiveness of God’s saving acts in Christ are to be a present reality right upto the eschaton and will be fully realised in practice at that time.
Revelations begins with the Son of Man and it seems to me that the continuity of imagery is then taken up by ‘the lamb’ as being very much contiguous in scope, but I confess that Revelations is one book that leaves me more puzzled the more I read of it.
The creational restoration themes in the epistles stem from Jesus’s own emphasis on the creation as outlining God’s goal for mankind. It is in this context that Jesus explicitly reinterprets the Mosaic law. The Sermon on the Mount is a particularly concentrated teaching on the new realities of life in God’s kingdom often in contrast to a more traditional undersanding of what the Law prescribes. Jesus is saying ‘this is how it was always meant to be’.
Certainly, Jesus looks forward in many parables to the judgement that will descend on Israel, but beyond that Jesus is also saying that anyone who attempts to follow His teaching will face the implacable hatred of ‘the world’. I don’t see any difference between this emphasis and what Paul himself experiences nor what the writer to the Hebrews tells the eklesia that they will have to expect.
The beginning of the fulfilment of the covenantal promises is proclaimed to have happened already in Jesus ministry and is a theme that Paul takes up especially in Romans. There is a very strong sense of fait accompli as Paul develops his argument. The power of the law has already been replaced by the righteousness of Jesus, we are therefore no longer slaves to sin but are NOW children of God - provided that we suffer with Him!
I do not doubt that the coming tribulation was very much in Paul’s mind as he must have seen (just as Jesus had) that the proclamation of the gospel would inevitably lead to terrible persecution as the forces of evil would try to stifle this remarkable wave of conversion and faith. Yet, I don’t see that anything this side of the eschaton changes with the destruction of Rome any more than with the rise or fall of any other civil authorities whether they are supposedly for or against the gospel of Christ.
I do absolutely agree that we have a problem with how we do understand ‘the gospel’ but to me the solution lies in restoring our understanding of the creational and covenantal aspects that Jesus’s proclamation foundationally rests upon. Getting back to the first use of ‘the gospel’, I have little doubt that it was the very practice of ‘the way’, the immersion of the followers in ‘the gospel’ that was at the heart of the opposition to the gospel. Similarly, for today’s world, little has changed - those who follow faithfully in their Lord’s footsteps will inevitably meet that same implacable hatred that you see as largely over-and-done-with in the demise of Rome.
Perhaps a part of the call to the narrow path is a call to follow our Lord leaving the broad path of institutional religion and walking into the wilderness of calling for justice and truth both for mankind and for God’s creation, just as our Lord once taufght us to do?
Sorry for a rambling, unfocused, and inadequate answer.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: To bind or to loose?
Sam, I’ve picked up the question about Paul’s ‘gospel’ in a separate post.
I partly go with you here, but it seems to me that the eschatological themes are so prominent in the Sermon on the Mount that it is better to see it primarily as Jesus’ definition of a community that will survive the storm and flood of the eschatological crisis (Matt. 7:24-27). This is not to say that elements do not carry over into the post-eschatological age, but that is not strictly within the purview of the narrative at this point.
Yes, of course. Jesus anticipated opposition from the Jewish hierarchy and from the Gentile overlords. Paul and the writer to the Hebrews had to deal with opposition from the synagogues and from paganism. As I see it though, this is all encompassed within the adapted story of the Son of man, who is not only Jesus but also the suffering community in him, facing opposition both from apostate Israel and from the pagan oppressor.
Yes, the ‘beginning of the fulfilment of the covenantal promises is proclaimed to have happened already in Jesus ministry’. What I would add is that this ‘beginning’ initiated a period of ‘birthpangs’ culminating in the victory of the early church over its supreme opponent that is expressly embraced by the eschatological story that first Jesus and then the later writers of the New Testament tell. What changes at the parousia is that the blasphemous pagan ruler is deposed from his position of authority and power over the people of God. This may seem a relatively trivial and ambiguous event from our perspective, but from the perspective of the New Testament church it was a matter of absolute significance because Rome was the definitive and supreme eschatological opponent, and it had the power to crush this fragile religious movement as it had crushed many others. In order to understand New Testament eschatology we must look forwards from where they stood, not backwards from our own era.
I’m inclined to agree with your last point, though we will explain this rather differently. In many ways the church is again in the position of the transitional community, existing in a ‘liminal’ (Alan Hirsch) situation between the ruins of Christendom and an as yet unclear, emerging paradigm of renewed creation - just as the eschatological community defined in the New Testament struggled to survive between the ruins of second temple Judaism and the emerging paradigm of an imperial church.
what is still de jure?
Andrew, I guess that we are much in agreement except for our understanding of the “birthpangs” ‘culminating in the victory of the early church over its supreme opponent that is expressly embraced by the eschatological story that first Jesus and then the later writers of the New Testament tell’. I am unable to see from within the NT this culmination clearly delineated as a necessary ‘further step’ in the process of salvation history, in order for the new creation in Christ to come into effect. It would seem that from within the text of the NT’s accepted eschatological bent, there is little to signify that such a further step is in any way necessary for God to fulfil His promises either to the Jews or to those who have already been grafted in by Christ.
Instead, the rapture and the eschaton are a part of the final promise where there seems to be a strong parallel drawn specifically between Jesus’s resurrection and our own ‘final path’ to that life in the kingdom that was first proclaimed by Jesus. Specifically, these are events that we look forward to as a culmination of our lives on earth and not as the means for that ‘obedience of faith’ that we are called to now in our missional lives here on earth.
Again we would agree that the further outworking of becoming followers of Jesus here, is in fact to be missional, with a mission and a commission and a gospel to proclaim, all of which are de facto already completed in Jesus life, death and resurrection. I would be in agreement here with Pannenberg and Wright that the concentration on the cross and resurrection is the seal of God’s approval not only on the Son with whom He is well pleased but also as validating precisely that gospel that Jesus both practiced and taught in His ministry.
Live to serve : Serve to live