open source theology

Tony, thanks for the questions. Some of these matters have been discussed on OST but it’s not always easy to track things down - and in any case, it doesn’t hurt to think things through again.

1. Yes, that’s correct, though the phrase ‘eternal life’ still sounds a bit too disembodied to me. I think what it really signifies in the New Testament is the ‘life of the age to come’, which is the life in the Spirit that the people of God experiences now. In John’s vision the renewal of creation is preceded by a resurrection and judgment of all the dead; and those whose names are found written in the book of life are not destroyed and (presumably) participate in the new creation. But the emphasis is not so much on the fact that this existence is ‘eternal’ (in the common sense of the word) as that i) God is at the centre and ii) wickedness and death have been destroyed.

2. This is a very good question and not an easy one to answer. The focus of the book is on the ‘production’ of the ideas and beliefs that make up what we call New Testament eschatology, not on their reception. We have very little idea how these teachings were received by the early Gentile churches, though there is some indication that they were sometimes misconstrued (eg. 2 Thess. 2:1-2). Arguably it was precisely at this boundary between the Jewish and Gentile mindsets that the potential for misreading eschatology first emerged, not least because the Jewish Scriptures were not so well understood.

There is obviously nothing odd in thinking that Paul’s outlook on the future was fundamentally shaped by traditions of interpretation that had their origins in Jewish Scripture. The problem is whether his readers could have been expected correctly to decode his highly condensed formulations in the absence of that background knowledge.

The coherence and credibility of the argument from Scripture suggests to me that Paul must have believed that they had some sort of prior awareness of the biblical background that enabled them to make sense of his teaching. That prior knowledge may have come from direct reading of the Scriptures or from Jewish believers in their midst. But it may also have come from apostolic teaching traditions that were then only briefly summarized or alluded to in the letters. Paul often refers back to things he had taught when he was with them (2 Thess. 2:5 would be a pertinent example). This prior teaching is barely visible to us, but it may well have included the sort of detailed development of biblical motifs necessary to bridge the knowledge gap that you identify.

3. It seems to me that Paul entertained, as you say, an intensely personal hope of imitating Christ both in his sufferings and in his resurrection (COSM 102-106), and that he expected others to follow him in this (106-108) - in that sense he applies the personal hope generally. My argument in the book is that in 1 Cor. 15:23-26 he makes a distinction between the resurrection of Christ, the resurrection of those in Christ who suffer in him, and a final ‘event’ when every opposing power is defeated, including death, and the kingdom is handed over to God the Father (169-172). It is not made explicit here but my assumption is that at this final event there will be the resurrection of all the dead, just and unjust, that Paul mentions in Acts 24:15 (cf. Rev. 20:12). It is surely significant that there is no reference to a resurrection of the unjust or of all the dead for judgment in Paul’s parousia passages.

Personally, I would avoid using the word ‘preterist’. It’s too loaded a term and, perhaps more importantly, it tends to mark out eschatology as a separate category of New Testament thought. I prefer to characterize this way of reading the New Testament simply as ‘historically contextualized’, or something like that. We are learning to read every aspect of the New Testament narrative with greater sensitivity to how it follows the contours of history. Eschatology is simply the forward-looking dimension of that narrative.