Di5415 - Eschatology (Judith Wolfe)
War Without Eschatology End
Apocalyptic Instincts in Christian Ethics of War and Peace
Long before Oxford ethicist Nigel Bigger ‘reacts’ against the “wishful thinking” of Christian pacifism in his 2013 monograph, In Defence of War, pacifist John Yoder lampooned so-called Christian realism as “pie in the sky” for its failure to articulate an eschatologically realistic cosmological perspective. Who was the hopeless idealist and who the strong-jawed realist? On the one hand, realists like Biggar emphasize Jesus’ divinity and sacrifice, following the ethic of Reinhold Niebuhr, who attacked the idea that Jesus’ return was precipitated by human action. On the other, pacifists generally emphasize Jesus as example, insisting Scripture establishes nonviolence as an absolute. The end of time, when God comes to finally right wrongs, is at the center of debates between the two schools of thought. The double meaning of “end” therefore can mean either some future event like the parousia, or the telos, the destination, of God’s “good” creation to which Christians are called to bear witness. Whereas Biggar calls for participation in statecraft for its limited ability to preserve justice, Yoder insists Christ has actually accomplished the peaceable kingdom. Christians are therefore called to live in such a way as to reveal that it is true, not just for (pacifist) Christians, but also for the world God is working to reconcile.
This paper sets out to think through the eschatologies of just war accounts and compare them to those by pacifist accounts, through contemporary theologians Nigel Biggar and John Yoder. While Biggar’s most directly relevant text is his In Defence of War, there is also much to be explored in Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics. Furthermore, his commentary and response to reviews in the 2014 edition of the journal Soundings can (and will) be employed to get at a broader picture of the eschatological impulses alive in Biggar's theology. Biggar’s eschatology, unfortunately, suffers from a lack of distinctiveness, frequently collapsing it as he does into “hope.” Indeed, his indices uniformly refer entries of “Eschatology” toward “Hope, eschatological” and point in the text to words that are often qualified further with words like “religious” and “theological.”
Yoder’s work on ethics and pacifism help us see precisely why ethics fails to be Christian insofar is it fails to be distinctively eschatological. His Politics of Jesus makes clear that eschatology is central to a properly Christian political ethics, and that Biggar is careless at best and negligent at worst in all but omitting any robust engagement with a theology of ultimate things. In it and Christian Witness to the State, Yoder constructs a convincing argument that believers are called to embodied testimony reflecting the real presence and sovereignty of God in the world. Yoder’s theology depicts the cross apocalyptically, as the central revelation that God’s answer to evil was to suffer, and that the Church should expect to do likewise because sacrificial love is the foundation upon which creation stands.
Keeping in mind the difficulties in distinguishing apocalypse and eschatology, this paper begins by trying to establish working definitions for the two, privileging etymology over popular usage. Secondly, I try to look at components of the New Testament to explore Biggar’s occasional claims that pacifism is not grounded upon sound exegesis as well as to think through the legitimacy of Yoder calling his methodology “Biblical Realism.” The final two sections explore Yoder and Biggar in greater depth, focusing on the works named above before concluding thoughts.
I. Eschatology and Apocalyptic: Distinctiveness and Relevance
The word apocalypse means ‘revelation’, deriving from the Greek kaluptein, to conceal, coupled with the negating prefix apo. Therefore, in a simple sense, apocalypse is the disclosure of something previously concealed. In a Christian context, it is God who does the revealing, from beyond the bounds of human perception and even reason. Put very simply, apocalypse is revelation by God through various means. Recent biblical scholarship has distinguished apocalyptic strands as they appear as 1) a social ideology, 2) a set of ideas and motifs, and 3) a literary category, which John Collins identifies as
a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it en visages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.
These distinctions, while illuminating, can move us away from thinking critically about how apocalypse is experienced in our world and in what way revelation is compelling, both theologically and ontologically. Whereas it is helpful to recognize the narrative frame that enables revelatory texts, Collins’ description of “other” to describe the spatial and temporal world within which the community of interpretation is captive can serve to let us off the hook from engaging with the profoundly prophetic utterings their authors certainly intended. If this revelation is primarily “other” worldly, how may it possibly be addressing us, in this world we can clearly see, hear, taste, touch, and smell? The “transcendent” nature of the apocalyptic vision can therefore be easily confused with externality and irrelevancy. Anything supernatural, the stream of thought goes, has little to do with the natural world around us that we can perceive.
However, the Biblical witnesses uniformly to a God who violates our notions of time and space. Modern ideas that apocalyptic resides primarily in the realm of fantasy and science fiction is problematic in that it privileges the perception of finite humans. If we cannot sense this thing called God, then it must not exist, and the things and people who point to it must be loony. Transcendence, however, is not mutually exclusive to human perception, as though it parks itself on just the other side of the boundaries of human knowing, but is inclusive of, and insists upon, residence within the hearts and minds of human hearers and seers. The Latin scandere is ‘to climb’, which the prefix trans makes clear is across the entire landscape of human experience. The transcendence of God and her revelation violates human notions of mere language or cognition. It may only suffice to acknowledge the finitude of our words and our ideas and recognize their encapsulation within the entirety of observable creation. Apocalyptic, then, must not privilege human perception; one must always keep in mind that it points away from human limitation to something more ontologically fundamental than human knowing or perceiving.
Collins affirms that apocalypse is expressive language of feelings and attitudes rather than objectivity. Apocalyptic is like the genre of myth, which “provides a rather clear example of language that is expressive rather than referential, symbolic rather than factual.” What is implied here by “factual” can be worrisome, since “facts” construed by and adhering to human-defined creation are in tension with theological convictions that Christians are called to hold, like human fallibility. Instead, what Collins calls for soon after is far less problematic for theological anthropology. If apocalypse is considered a subset of myth, then it can be quite useful as “a paradigmatic narrative (à la M. Eliade) or as a story that obscures or mediates the contradictions of experience.” Instead of sorting apocalypse into the bin we might call science fiction for its seemingly fantastical descriptions of the cosmos, it is something more like poetry or prose, evoking truths of a different caste than those we might derive from maths or empirical evidence. Allusions to something called reality that do not conform to human expectations are too often dismissed as legend, but to do so is to force poetry into the same category as a dictionary.
Collins most contributes to ethics when he insists “apocalypses do indeed present a kind of wisdom insofar as they, first, offer an understanding of the structure of the universe and of history and, second, see right understanding as the precondition of right action.” Mythical allusions are not so different from Biblical allusions, which “transfer motifs from one context to another. By so doing they build associations and analogies and so enrich the communicative power of the language.” By this account, revelatory literature contains the ability to transcend, to climb across, epistemic boundaries by painting a picture that violates the limitations of language. The literary form called “apocalyptic” therefore forces finite human minds to think about cosmological considerations and humanity’s place therein. The ultimate end toward which our history moves is inseparable from the source from which it emerges, which is God. Christian ethics and theology must not be segregated off intellectually from apocalyptic and eschatology, and any ethic without eschatology fails to be distinctively Christian.
As Collins helpfully illustrates, apocalypse paints a picture of cosmological structure and history, which must necessarily include its end. Eschatology has suffered a similar fate as that of apocalypse, being hijacked by a culture professing to be proximate to the person called “Christ” but too often associating itself more closely with the place called “Hollywood” and the phenomenon called “commerce.” Eschatology, from the Greek root eskhatos, concerns the “last” of all things. Benedict Viviano, in the Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, explains that “(etymologically, the doctrine about the “last things”) refers both to the final destiny of the individual and to the final destiny of all humanity.” This description brings up a linguistic loophole that can be confusing, since eskhatos as “destiny” implies something more then merely the “last” chronologically, but a more comprehensive picture of an “end” (from the Greek telos) within which an entire historical trajectory finds its purpose and meaning.
Eschatology then can be flattened to a mere attempt at narrating how God will finally judge the world (which is also too often reduced to the event at which Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead). A thicker meaning can include the full breadth of God’s dealing with human history that refuses to distinguish too sharply between “the end” and the means by which God brings it about. Eschatology, whether the study of the final things in time or a theology of humanity’s derivative relationship with God’s cosmos, is therefore a central consideration for Christian political theology and what it might say about war. This thin meaning of eschatology is employed by realists to justify martial means at odds with the end toward which God has structured his universe, relegating Christ’s action (and, ironically, sovereignty) to some future moment. Eschatologically determined ethics like Yoder’s bases human activity upon the thick meaning of the eschaton, seeing Christ’s passion as revelatory and therefore exemplary. The burden is upon realists to establish that their eschatology is coherent with the Church whose foundation is the sacrificed lamb.
II. Eschaton and Eucharist
In Soundings, Biggar makes the claim that “the early Christian tradition… regards the paradigm of just war, not at all as self-defense, but as the rescue of the innocent.” What he implies by “early” actually leaves a few hundred years off the map of “Christian tradition.” Ignoring for the moment that Christian just war traditions are latecomers to the doctrinal landscape, emerging well after the early councils of the fourth century, it will be crucial to show the centrality of eschatology from the earliest conceptions of Christian thinking and doing. It is my intent to show that an important particularity of the Church is to be found in its understanding that what God will finally complete by Christ’s entering back into rational and sensory human history has already been started in earnest by the incarnation. The mandate this has on Christianity is such that any politic identifying as “Christian” failing to account therefore does not quite earn the title.
At the 2014 Catholic Theological Association conference in London, Biggar described this messianic reentry as a “divine surprise,” the force of which we have not yet encountered and in which we should not put our hope. My memory of the context is that he wanted to caution against the kind of isolationist hole that pacifists often dig themselves into by the perceived disinterest in state politics. We must act, the force of his argument seemed to be, even if our action is inherently flawed or coercive. But this overlooks the surprising reality the Cross revealed to Jesus’ earliest followers. Moving the alarming nature of the messianic task from Golgotha to Armageddon is not supported by what we know of the birth, ministry, or passion of Christ as the evangelists depicted.
The question of God reigning on earth (and thereby displacing the oppressive system the Romans contrived) was important to early Christians because it meant that Caesar did not reign. Messianic hopes were in a strong military commander, and political language was used carefully in first century Palestine. Indeed, Benedict Viviano insists that ‘kingdom of God’ language
involves the combination of a political term, kingdom, with a religious term, God. It means that the user wants his politics to have something to do with his religion and his religion to have something to do with his politics.
To call anything but Caesar “Lord” was to invite violence from his avatars stationed above the Temple at Fort Antonia. The lexicon left to us by the evangelists was carefully selected not just for its rhetorical value, but also for its apocalyptic implications. It was not just that they hoped for a heavenly commander, but that they witnessed one in the person of Christ.
Viviano insists that the viewpoint of Biblical apocalyptic is “often expressed in the formula ‘the kingdom (or reign or kingship) of God.’” In the Hebrew Bible, “the idea of divine control over or intervention in history is expressed by verbal expressions like ‘God reigns’ (especially found in the Psalms) or the ‘Day of the Lord’ (found especially in the prophets, e.g., Amos 5:18–20; Isa. 13:6, 9, 13).” It is not that the evangelists advocated waiting for divine intervention, but that their readers see that it had begun with Emmanuel, with God-among-us.
Expectation was high after Jesus’ ascension that the promised re-entry of the Son would be swift, as the record of his promise to do so loomed large in the sacred stories taking textual shape. In each of the synoptic accounts of the Last Supper, Jesus himself uses “Kingdom of God” language, that prophetic eschaton in which Godly control was nigh, which in Irish parlance actually means “now.” This divine reign was so immanent that Jesus would not even drink of “the fruit of the vine” until the kingdom had come to earth. On the text’s own terms, the divine surprise would come just a few hours later, while the man the disciples aided and abetted (by reinforcing his now obviously delusional divine claims) hung bloodied on a cross. Peter knew they would come for him next, and did what he could to distance himself from the damning revelation by God of what reigning looked like for those who would follow in the bloody steps to state execution.
But before I stray too far from my point, it is important to point out that the synoptic references technically attach themselves to the wine, which Jesus does not seem to drink in the remaining Gospel passages. The pacifist claim, of emphasizing the ‘here and now,’ the immediacy of God’s kingdom (or at least that Christians are compelled to live as though it were) would seem to require Jesus to drink of the fruit of the vine for his comments to drive home a strong eschatological point. But he does not. At best, one might loosely interpret Jesus’ statements as implying a more generic interpretation hinging not specifically on wine, but the fellowship acquired in eating and drinking more broadly.
Luckily for Yoder, Biblical scholarship seems in his favor. Paul Bradshaw, in his Reconstructing Early Christian Worship, cites the problem of this argument as being in “the apparently contradictory situation of Jesus declaring in [Luke 22,] verse 18 that he will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine and then in verse 20 of his doing so.” Furthermore, the earliest traceable Eucharistic practices were fundamentally eschatological; “the focus of these Supper narratives is on eschatology,” being as they were “a joyful fellowship meal of the early Jewish-Christian communities” with “a strong eschatological dimension, being the anticipation of the messianic banquet.” If true, then the association of the parousia with wine would have been a later Pauline addition foreign to Jesus’ own intention. Rather, the divine intervention evoked by the language “kingdom of God” is not, as realists most often presume, some event hinted at in the gospels awaiting fulfillment in some later moment or return, but has to do with something much more organic to human dependency and activity – breaking bread.
If Bradshaw is right, then there is something connecting food to the imagery of Jesus reigning in power, of this new coming of the Kingdom of the Father. Jesus fellowships digestively with believers after his death and resurrection in numerous cases, evident in Mark 16.14, when Jesus returns to table with the disciples, and in Luke 24.30, when he breaks the bread with Cleopas and another believer, then disappears. Though John’s gospel does not have a last supper with a Eucharistic meal, in John 21.13 Jesus “took the bread and gave it to them” after the resurrection, when Thomas asks for and receives tangible evidence of the materiality of God’s earthly presence. For those who might claim the eschaton is mostly ‘not yet,’ these passages come as a challenge. If they affirm that God has indeed come and is reigning over human endeavors, then Yoder’s theology is more fundamentally “Christian” than is that of realists like Biggar or Niebuhr. Following Jesus is inherently eschatological in nature; like eating, the eschaton happens daily, it erupts when we forgive in hopes of being forgiven and when enemies are blessed though they justly deserve cursing. Bearing witness to the end toward which God created and is moving history is eschatologically realistic insofar as it anticipates New Jerusalem by living in accordance to its ethical norms. Revealing the reality of a world in which turning the other cheek is possible begins with the assumption that to do otherwise is contrary to our nature. If we are what we eat, then eating the body and blood of Christ makes us the people we were actually made to be.
Lofty language notwithstanding, agreement was by no means uniform in the early Christian communities, nor is it today. Primitive Christian communities wrestled with how (or if) such a divine reality ever became tangible enough to push Roman imperialism out of the holy land and people, for the heralds of Caesar were as prominent before Jesus’ ministry as they were after his death and ascension. What kind of ‘intervention’ ends with so little seemingly changed? What was desired before Christ’s Advent arrival remained in the hearts of the people long after, and that was a victorious overturning of the unjust world order, led by someone we could rise up with in clear and present triumph over evil. The same basic argument and desire is alive in the claims of realists, who privilege political forces of change over ecclesiological ones. The fault is in their eyes, in failing to see the promise beyond the plank. Those prepared to suffer for living in witness to the truth that God accomplished his mission hear from Jesus,
Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.
III. Yoder: Eschatological Ethics as Biblical Realism
Theological scholarship about war has been dominated since the period of the two world wars by just war theorists shaped by Reinhold Niebuhr. His realism grew out of a sharp critique of the social gospel movement of Rauschenbusch in the early 20th century. Niebuhr was reacting against the semi-Pelagian assumptions about outcomes used by activists who insisted that God’s work in the world derived from the Church doing good works, that the world would be more just when Christians began performing deeds that countered the injustice they saw in the world. The wars, besides destroying such theological optimism, reinforced in Niebuhr the idea that human decency is held captive to immoral societies, that the final destiny of humanity was only realizable by God’s salvific act in the world. Because evil was so apparent in such tragedies as two world wars and a nuclear arms race, such an act was ascribed almost exclusively future status in realist thought. Niebuhr claimed that the Social Gospel movement’s optimism in the institution of the Church privileged the destiny of [hu]man[ity] over the clearly immoral nature of society, that the hope it placed in the Church was woefully naïve and theologically heretical.
John Howard Yoder was a Mennonite theologian who had served in France immediately following the Allied victory, and wrestled desperately with the historic pacifism his faith held and the horrific realities through which his European friends suffered. Throughout his service, he continued to refine his theology and found in Niebuhr an important counterpart and theological debating partner. The realist school had dismissed Christian forms of pacifism as political irresponsibility and “prophetic irrelevancy,” so Yoder dedicated most of his energy to developing what he called “Biblical Realism.” He found just war traditionalists to have a weak sense of the cosmological implications of Scripture, so he “sought to take full account of all the tools of literary and historical criticism, without… letting the Scriptures be taken away from the Church.” Yoder defended his robustly scriptural “ethic of imitation [of Christ]” against accusations of being an irresponsible model for Christian politics by accusing the realists of redirecting the very same optimism they criticized in the Social Gospel by simply moving false hope to another institution, their nation. Invested as the realist school was in modern nation states and their survival, Yoder criticized apologists of just war for assuming that political power, as it found expression in the liberal democratic construction of states, was entitled to persistent existence.
The privileging by realists of the modern state reflected a weak eschatology, which Yoder insisted was otherwise crucial to any distinctively Christian political theology. Without the divinely ordained purpose of governing authorities and human living in sight, a politics could justify any evil, leverage any means, in pursuit of its own survival at the expense of human lives. Yoder’s Politics of Jesus unifies apocalyptic and eschatological considerations by insisting that the incarnation itself (inclusive of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection) was at once both revelatory and anticipatory. He sees no problem with interpreting Jesus’ entire earthly ministry as an eschatologically apocalyptic event, as revealing God’s comprehensively cosmological purpose to otherwise temporally and spatially governed human witnesses. Yoder seeks to emphasize “what was denied [by Niebuhr] before: Jesus as teacher and example, not only as sacrifice.”
It is clear to me that the mistake of realism is to collapse the chronological “end” (and all its linguistic ambiguity) of time into a crystallized moment restricted to some unseen future. This construal, however, fails to consider the transcendence of God and divine activity across time and space, simultaneously occupying as it does each individual moment as well as their totality; the entirety of time as it exists distinct from humanity’s capacity to understand it. Christian realism swaps mystery for certainty in order to have something to say in the face of things like war. Biblical realism, however, holds a more tenable apocalyptic balance of time, politics, and cosmos for Christian theology, since Jesus is “the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships… that new regime in which his disciples are called to share.” Eschatology, therefore, is absolutely critical to theology, either political or otherwise.
Yoder realizes that theology must derive from Scripture, with all its eschatological ambiguity, which is precisely the reason he articulates his method the way he does. The presence of apocalypses in the Christian canon is not to be explained away to literary irrelevancy or the inaccessibility of the future, but must occupy a central tenet of Christian interpretation of the bible. Far from glossing over these mythopoeic gems, Yoder insists they deserve careful theological care:
Biblical apocalypses… are about how the crucified Jesus is a more adequate key to understanding what God is about in the real world of empires and armies and markets than is the ruler in Rome, with all his supporting military, commercial and sacerdotal networks.
For Yoderian pacifism, what is “real” is not determined by human observation and reason, but by the Word of God. The whole of Politics is in fact an exegetical work, focusing especially on the Gospel of Luke. Yoder gives attention to the Biblical witness, for which eschatology plays an important role.
IV. Biggar: Hope in the Political Economy
Biggar’s eschatology, or “hope,” seems to adhere primarily to the school of thought that whatever it is that God reveals in Revelation and hinted at in the Supper narratives has not come fully, if quite at all. He couples several of his references to eschatological hope to a thin sense of the chronological “end” of history. He insists, against what Yoder claimed was denied by Niebuhr, that orthodoxy requires “a reading of Jesus not just as a moral teacher and exemplar but also as God incarnate as well as the eschatological hope that God will save and fulfill the world at the end of history.” Within a few lines he also implores Christian ethicists to be attentive especially to “eschatological parts of [the story] that attest the salvific presence of God in history and in its conclusion.” Furthermore, eschatological hope “is the hope that the justice that we humans cannot do here and now… will yet be done by God at the end of history.”
The above strongly implies a privation of the “here and now” from “the salvific presence of God in history” insofar as the here and now “cannot” accomplish the thing for which Biggar suggests human history waits. In other words, justice will come by God in the future. In the meantime, war is a politic that can ensure a modicum of justice and is therefore an ethically responsible option. Yoder would not disagree, but would question under whose reign such an option even exists. Perhaps more on Biggar’s level, he would wonder precisely how efficacious war might be shown to be even in rational, evidence-based considerations. One war in particular that Biggar defends, and in which I fought, never had clearly declared criteria for victory and is in the midst of renewed commitment of troops. Without identifying success, how is progress measured? Continuing as it has with no end makes clear there is no outcome by which to measure efficacy, much less success. Without eschatology focusing our gaze upon both the coming and transcendent end, war has no reason to cease. Immoral society will march blindly on because, apart from God, human evil knows no end.
In the hands of fellow theologians, Biggar’s Defence fares fairly well, and he avails himself of comments and rebuke in the 2014 journal Soundings. Provided space to summarize his motivation for writing, he recalls the inspiration stemming from a speaking event at which mentioned his support of the 2003 war in Iraq as a “just war.” An attendee approached him after the talk, insisting, “Surely there must have been another way.” The reply he gave was, “there might in fact have been a better way; but why did there have to be one?” Though the attendee did not give it, the answer is quite simple – “have” and “must” relates to conviction. If one is convinced that Christ is ruling from God’s right hand, that this is precisely the politic by which Christian theology and ethics all derive, then there “must” be another way, determined as it is by the recognition of Christ’s lordship.
The most insightful response to Biggar in Soundings is Charles Mathewes’s, of the University of Virginia, who digs deep into the eschatological foundations of realist theologies of war. While appreciative of Biggar’s project, Mathewes is careful to point out a few holes, not the least of which being that, in omitting any substantive critique of a war as unjust, Biggar has failed in “helping us to understand our situation and remain recognizably ethical actors” because his depiction of war is so uniformly affirmative. His enthusiasm for the thing that he defends has obscured the richness that Mathewes sees just war traditions as being able to offer. “The just war tradition contains the seeds of both a legal-ethical algorithm and a theological hermeneutic, though recent centuries have seen the former developed while the latter largely ignored.”
This theological hermeneutic begins to get at connection points between Yoder and Biggar, and at the genre Collins illustrated for us above. The importance of eschatology in ethics is that it gives us the “paradigmatic narrative” through which to make sense of “the contradictions of experience.” Though it may appear that evil reigns, that the only thing to save us is Christ’s triumphal return, ethics with eschatology gives us a frame of reference to see the world as God intends (intend in both the hopeful, anticipatory sense, but especially in the present tense, as in intent for the world right now). Mathewes’ crucial observation is that “the just war tradition entails a metaphysics… [of humanity before God, and in the cosmos, a] theological hermeneutic stand[ing] in a competitive relationship to other such foundational pictures of the human condition.” We hear echoes of Yoder, of apocalypses being the “key to understanding what God is about in the real world. A distinctively Reformed theology, of maintaining the sovereignty of God to the extent that it transcends secular political economy, could agree with the Anabaptist school. However, in omitting an eschatologically realistic metaphysics, what Mathewes can possibly mean by “cosmos” is too easily relegated to merely a futured status, instead of being inclusive of a present and past state in which God reigns and reigned. However helpful Mathewes is in discerning the importance of Biggar’s work, he shares a few problematic lenses.
In agreeing with Biggar’s criticism of Yoder’s “Christian Biblicist pacifism,” calling it “hermeneutically naive,” Mathewes makes it clear that pacifism can only be naive if it is divorced from eschatological realism. Mathewes goes on to claim that Biggar’s account provides “a richer understanding of the whole scope of Christian moral reasoning, a richer understanding that allows him to see more of the complexity in the tradition, in Scripture,” but this denies or disregards the particularly revelatory nature of Scripture and the tradition that brought it to us. Finally, while Mathewes laments Biggar’s lack of literary attention for a “tragic vision” within just war traditions, we too must lament their combined lack of attention for a particularly eschatological vision. Apocalypse, in light of Collin’s definition above, is not merely literary, the discipline from which Mathewes draws. Revelation, for Christian theology, is alive and active, from reading and interpreting scripture to dreams and visions that God passes to the beloved community.
Indeed, Mathewes is guilty of the same casual disregard of cosmological/ eschatological “reality” as Biggar is when he writes “rejection of what [Biggar] calls ‘the virus of wishful thinking’ is best understood [as]… an effort to make us attend more seriously to reality, and so be counseled to wisdom by attention to the possible.” Determining “possible” and reality” in their accounts is nothing more than political economy, not what Biggar summarizes as “ eschatological hope.” This kind of account renders all (present and future) messianic horizons hopeless, for “possible” exists solely within the secular political horizon they identify as “reality.” Regardless of how reluctantly or ill motivated we are, by ‘putting on Christ,’ by wearing the mask of the magnanimous One, we find our faces slowly but surely being formed to His. Likewise, eschatology is a requisite Christian enterprise that realizes the “reality” to which the Christian life (cruci)forms its members, on earth as in heaven, to which Christ calls his bride. Any path diverging therefrom is either disproportionately secular or inadequately Christian, which are effectively indistinguishable. Any ethic without eschatology is merely political economy. After all, which city does such vain “hope” reflect, the city of God or the city of man?
Conclusion(s)
Over the course of this paper, I have explored the importance of apocalypse as God’s revealing to humans something previously unknown, and proposed how the genre helps us see the double meaning of eschatology, of studying the “end(s).” Through the synoptic Last Supper narratives, I’ve shown that Eucharist, eschaton, and daily life mysteriously co-here, both for the earliest Christian communities and for our own lives of faith today. Yoder’s emphasis on eschatology and his exegetical work in The Politics of Jesus were shown to establish that a privation of cosmological perspective in Christian theology is suspect insofar as it privileges political economy and finite human comprehension over Biblical and eschatological realism. Yoder’s pacifist vision is more in line with the counter-intuitive imperatives of Scripture and relies heavily upon trust that God’s incarnate revelation is more reflective of the ultimate purpose and destination of all creation.
Biggar, however, suffers from a failure to specify what he means by hope, and in what way he sees it as having any particularly eschatological substance; beyond human desires like righting wrongs or raising the innocent dead from their graves, what is hope for? To what end is human history beholden, and by Whom? Biggar does little in the works explored to articulate the apocalyptic, revelatory nature of Christian scripture and the convictions to which it gives rise. Fellow scholars both illuminate his eschatology and share in some of its shortcomings, leaving the question of just war theology’s eschatological structure largely unanswered.
While there are many ways in which I agree strongly with Biggar’s critique of pacifism, he leverages imagery and symbolism birthed by a community to which he does not belong and claims to be motivated by the memory of people who may have very different things to say than what he does after holding them before his argument. As a combat veteran, I do not have the luxury Biggar does, of abstracting my personal, and at times very painful, martial experiences from intellectual deliberation. While I am grateful that he desires his contribution be “something that a soldier in the field could take seriously,” first-hand experience suggests the need for a far more cautionary tone then he is (willing or) capable of striking. After all, soldiers caught up in the fleeting glory of combat are just as capable as civilians are “of loving the wrong things, or at least of loving the right things wrongly.”
Pacifism, for all its faults, at the very least requires lives of radical dependency and virtuous humility. Love is directed to God because it seems so hopeless to anticipate something that contradicts two thousand years of human history. To hope that war will end might be crazy, but it is by no means unrealistic. At least, not as long as your life is determined by the conquering slaughtered lamb that is, and will be, the end of creation.
Bibliography
Biggar, Nigel. Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), 2011.
_____ In Defence of War (London, UK: Oxford University Press), 2013.
Bradshaw, Paul. Reconstructing Early Christian Worship (London, UK: SPCK), 2009.
_____ The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship (London, UK: SPCK), 1992.
Collins, John. S. The Apocalyptic Imagination (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), 1998.
Daley, B. "Eschatology in the Early Church Fathers,” The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology. (London, UK: Oxford University Press), 2009.
Viviano, Benedict T. "Eschatology and the Quest for the Historical Jesus," The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (London, UK: Oxford University Press), 2009.
Yoder, John H. The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), 1994.
_____ Christian Witness to the State (Scottsdale, PA: Herald), 2002.
