Compassionate Eschatology is a collection of diverse scholarly essays exploring the relationship of eschatology (‘end times’ theology) and Christ’s teaching on peace and reconciliation. The book gathers writers from across the theological board, including Lutheran, Anabaptist, Orthodox and Catholic traditions to address themes in a sort of peacemakers guide to the apocalypse, divine judgment and the Book of Revelation.
The compilation is unique in that it takes a specifically Girardian approach (i.e. Rene Girard’s mimetic theory) to theology, culture, advocacy and the environment. It features enormous breadth, from Hardin’s study on First Nation prophecy to Barbara Rossing on global warming to Andrew Klager’s recall of Gregory of Nyssa.
The studies on the Book of Revelation were very good summaries of some of the authors’ (notably Grimsrud and Bauckham) previous non-violent treatises on the Apocalypse. While I am sympathetic to Weaver’s Anabaptist interpretation, I don’t know that these expositional chapters were sufficient to break the impasse with previous challenges of objectors (esp. Miroslav Volf).
Nevertheless, the book as a whole certainly did accomplish its objective in reorienting our view of the future towards Christian hope. One essay after another offered an alternative vision to the doomsday gloom of the rapturists’ ‘hell-in-a-handbasket’ escapist fatalism. Divine judgment becomes part of God’s redemptive purposes by which the universe is renewed and Christ’s compassion actually wins the day. Imagine ‘the final day’ as an all-pervasive truth and reconciliation commission where absolutely everything and everyone is put right in the Jesus’ way of restorative justice—where our shrunken dreams of temporal retribution gives way to God’s grand plan to include healing and deliverance, restitution and rehabilitation, redemption and restoration.
In Moltmann’s essay on ‘The Final Judgment,’ already a classic, he says
Who has the keys of hell and death in hand? We human beings? No. God? No. It is Jesus Christ who was dead, but is alive from eternity to eternity (Rev. 1:18). What is he doing with these keys of death and hell? It is high time to Christianize our traditional images and perceptions of God’s final judgment and to evangelize their present effects on our lives and worldviews, so that we may greet the coming judge of the world with joy: “Maranatha, come LORD Jesus, come soon”—and may live already here and now in the sunrise of God’s justice on earth (Rev. 21:20). (222).
What does ‘Christianizing’ our images of God’s final judgment look like? Moltmann’s biblically reasoned universalism comes out strong here:
Anticipating God’s final judgment through dividing humankind into believers and unbelievers (with the possible consequence of persecuting unbelievers as enemies of God) is wrong, because it is godless. The God of Jesus Christ is not an enemy of unbelievers and also not an executioner of the godless. “God has imprisoned all in disbelief so that he can be merciful to all,” declared the apostle Paul (Rom. 22:32 NRSV). Whether they believe or not, whether they share our faith or have another faith, we respect and see every person being embraced by the mercy of God. Whoever they are, God loves them, Christ died for them, and the Holy Spirit is working in their lives. For God’s sake, we cannot be against them.
In light of these statements, I had hoped space would be given to working with Jesus’ apparent division motifs in the sheep and goats of Matt. 25, the parable of Dives and Lazarus, or his use of gehenna in the Jeremiah tradition (on the latter, cf. Brad Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut). Moltmann et al have thought through these issues carefully, but by failing to include Jesus’ own ‘violent judgment’ language (esp. the parables) in a study on compassionate eschatology, ‘Infernalists’ may underestimate the strength of this work and [mistakenly] presume that such passages are ‘deal-killers.’
As we can see from this excerpt, the book brings compassionate eschatology forward into our present. These are ‘now-words’ calling us to live as faithful partners in Christ’s Prince of Peace agenda for individuals, people groups and creation itself. As always, Tony Bartlett introduces the powerful vision of the Cross as the irrepressible active ingredient permeating and reforming our violent human cultures. He demonstrates how the vision of the crucified Christ is subtly effecting a social evolution:
… the cross is a transformative iconology shaping the human to itself, and because of this, because of the movement it produces, it is also more and more an iconchrony, the production of human time and meaning by reason of the cross (191).
In short the Crucified is in the world not simply or primarily as an agent of exposure of the old but as the declaration of the new. Every time the cross springs the joints of the sacred order it shows itself as the possibility of the new and pulls the universe toward itself, and this is eschatology (195).
God present in the crucified Christ has redefined the very nature of power and violence in our world—recasting oppressor and victim, especially in their relationship to God. Without the Cross, we might still believe that God is always on the side of the mighty and victims are always victimized precisely because God has cursed them with forsakenness. Every ethic of advocacy and cry for human rights is entirely dependent on God’s intrusion into this world as the Lamb slain. Once this seed was planted into the ground of human history, this Gospel and only this Gospel has or will slowly but inexorably reveal truths that virtually all humanity of any virtue already assumes: e.g. that slavery, the oppression of minorities, the subjugation of women, the abuse of children, war, poverty, and the rape of the environment are wicked and that whatever or whoever God is, God is love.
We may need another millennium or two to see these truths fill the whole earth in practice, but Bartlett, Moltmann and friends raise this hope in our prophetic imaginations. What if Jesus’ plan to save the cosmos actually works? What would that look like? And how might I be part of it? Compassionate Eschatology is an important work in advancing these questions and offering creative possibilities as answers.
I too would like to hear how the sheep and the goats is handled. It is exciting to hear the momentum of God's purpose proclaimed - we desperately need to hear this to confront the weak spurting of fatalistic escapism! Thanks Brad!
PS - my Bible doesn't include a 22nd chapter of Romans ;-) but 11:32 is rich with the thrust of the Gospel and the absolute of God's intention!
Posted by: Ted Hill | July 28, 2011 at 07:38 PM
Thanks for sharing this! I definetly need to read it, as I enjoyed 'Her Gates...' so much and am still going back to it from time to time.
Posted by: Florian Berndt | July 22, 2011 at 12:36 AM