Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination

by Ben C Blackwell

  The expected solution must address or correspond to the plight. For the first explanation of the human condition, therefore, the Last Judgment is expected to entail a victorious cosmic war against the evil cosmological powers,[44] at which time, God also vindicates their primary victims, the righteous few who have not allowed themselves to become complicit in the hegemony of the evil powers, often at the cost of persecution and death. God raises the righteous martyrs from the dead (a limited resurrection) and rewards them with eternal life (cf. Dan. 12:1–2). For the second explanation, the Last Judgment is expected to involve a cosmic courtroom before which all human beings appear before God for sentencing on the basis of their deeds.[45] To make this possible, all those who have already died are raised (a general resurrection) so that God can reward the righteous (a small number) with eternal life in the new age and condemn the wicked (a much larger group) to eternal death (perdition)—what Revelation calls “the second death” (Rev. 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8). For the former group, the sentence of death passed on Adam and his descendants is overturned; for the latter, it is confirmed and made eternal.[46]

  In both of these distinguishable patterns of ancient Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, the Last Judgment is a cosmic event (involving all people from all times), in and through which the Creator God of Israel eschatologically (i.e., finally, definitively, and irrevocably) rectifies (puts right) the world God has created: “this evil age” ceases to exist and “the age to come,” in which God reigns unopposed, takes its place. From a soteriological angle, the realm of life replaces the realm of death. In both patterns of ancient Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, furthermore, the righteous (or saints) are those who have acknowledged the sovereign claim of Israel’s God (the First Commandment) and have done so by committing themselves to God’s Law, which is God’s standard for determining who is to be rewarded and punished at the Last Judgment.[47] The Law, then, is God’s proffered remedy for death and its underlying cause, sin (the repudiation of God, which is the fundamental sin of Adam and each of his descendants). With the gift of the Law, God gives human beings a weapon to withstand evil powers (in the first explanation of the human plight) or a second chance to get it right (in the second explanation). In other words, when chosen and observed, the Law functions as a bridge for crossing the otherwise unbridgeable chasm—death—that separates human beings from God, and thus from life in the world to come.

  There is, nevertheless, a fundamental difference between the two patterns, as indicated above: in the first or “cosmological” pattern, human beings are victims of forces beyond their control,[48] whereas in the second or “forensic” pattern, human beings are held to be fully accountable moral agents.[49] As a result, the Apocalypse of God is also differently conceived, either primarily as a cosmic war against evil cosmological powers which have usurped his sovereignty, or primarily as a cosmic courtroom in which all human beings are held accountable for what they have done or not done.[50]

  Paul adapts elements from both patterns of ancient Jewish apocalyptic eschatology.[51] As Albert Schweitzer pointed out eighty-five years ago, however, Paul’s own perspective stands “closer”[52] to the apocalyptic eschatology of 1 Enoch than to that of 2 Baruch (or 4 Ezra), which is to say, closer to the cosmological pattern of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology than to the forensic pattern. For Paul, according to Schweitzer, the present world-age is “characterized not only by its transience, but also by the fact that demons and angels exercise power in it,” whereas the coming world-age “will put an end to this condition.”[53] Salvation is “thus cosmologically conceived,”[54] that is, as the expurgation of evil demonic or angelic powers from the cosmos. This has also been the view of Käsemann and Martyn. I, in turn, have sought to show that in Romans, Paul appears to be in conversation with Jews, holding to a contemporary version of the forensic pattern, whereas in Galatians, he is seeking to rebut Christian Jews (preachers who have invaded the Galatian churches), holding to a modified (“Christianized”) version of the very same pattern. In both letters, Paul does not reject or abandon the forensic categories, terms, and perspectives dear to his conversation partners,[55] but he does circumscribe or recontextualize them with notions that are fundamentally indebted to the cosmological pattern of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology. Sin and death, for example, are no longer simply matters of human behavior or experience, but are also conceptualized as evil cosmological powers that oppress, and thus victimize human beings—hence, Sin and Death (see esp. 1 Cor. 15:20–28, 54–56; Rom. 5:12–21). Paul sees all human history as a monolithic whole in which Sin and Death reign in tandem over the world, and have done so from Adam’s transgression onward. In such an understanding of the human plight, the Law is not only too weak and ineffectual for expurgating Sin, and thus also Death from the cosmos, it has also (ironically and lamentably) become a major tool in the hands of Sin for solidifying its Death-dealing hegemony over human beings.[56]

  When God’s Apocalypse is conceived of as the defeat and destruction of evil cosmological powers, God’s intervention at the Last Judgment has the character of an invasion, a military metaphor Martyn has consistently used with respect to Paul.[57] With the coming of Christ and his Spirit, God has begun a war of liberation against and from evil powers that have ruined, distorted, despoiled, and perverted human life.[58] God’s eschatological saving activity in Jesus Christ is, from beginning to end, apocalyptic in the sense that it entails a war of cosmic proportions against evil cosmological forces that have oppressed and victimized human beings.[59]

  As indicated, the Law, for Paul, functions as a tool in the hands of Sin, solidifying its Death-dealing grip on the human world. Especially in Galatians, but also in Romans, Paul regards being “under the Law” as being tantamount to being “under Sin” (Gal. 3:22–23; cf. Rom. 3:9; 6:14–15). Christ’s crucifixion is understood by Paul to be the event that announces and effects the end of the “world” (κόσμος) determined and given structure by the Law (Gal. 6:14–15).[60] For Paul, a world has been judged and destroyed in Christ’s crucifixion, and that is what Paul wishes to emphasize in Galatians with his repeated references to Christ’s cross and his crucifixion, instead of merely to his (atoning) death (cf. 2:19–20; 3:1, 13; 5:11, 24; 6:12, 14).[61] To be crucified is to be killed, to be violently put to death, and that is what happened to Paul—he was crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:19; 6:14)—of course, not in a literal, but in an extended sense: The “world” (Gal. 6:14) that he had known had been utterly destroyed, that world given structure and meaning and coherence and hope on the basis of the Law (cf. Rom. 6:6, 14). In short, the cross is understood to be an apocalyptic event which destroyed Paul’s earlier conviction that by being Law-observant, and so, creating his own righteousness based on the Law (Phil. 3:9), he could bridge the gap of death that separates the present evil age from the Kingdom of God. He came to understand that the bridge from the one to the other can only be the righteousness that comes as a divine gift through the faith(fullness) of Christ (πίστις χριστοῦ: Gal. 2:16, 20–21; Rom. 3:21–26; Phil. 3:9)[62] and the Spirit that came into the world as a result (Gal. 3:1–5, 14; 4:6; 5:16–18, 22–23; Rom. 5:5; 8:1–26).

  Paul’s Apocalyptic Language and Faith

  In contrast to the book of Revelation itself, Paul often uses the Greek noun ἀποκάλυψις “apocalyptically,” that is, to signify God’s eschatological activity in and through Christ, as he does the cognate verb ἀποκαλύπτω.[63] In 1 Corinthians 1:7, in particular, he refers to the Parousia as “the ἀποκάλυψις of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In the next verse, he asserts that God “will strengthen” the Corinthian believers “to the End (τέλος)” (1:8; cf. 15:24) so that they “may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:8). These two verses clearly point forward to chapter 15 where Paul refers explicitly to Christ’s Parousia:

  all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his παρουσία those who belong to Christ. T
hen is the End (τέλος), when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. . . . The last enemy to be destroyed is Death. (1 Cor. 15:23b‑24, 26)

  The ἀποκάλυψις of Jesus Christ concerns, then, his visible eschatological appearance at his Parousia and this is clearly an apocalyptic event, whereby the cosmological principalities and powers of this evil age, especially Death, are finally and irrevocably brought to submission “so that God may be all in all” (cf. 1 Cor. 15:24–28). The ἀποκάλυψις referred to is no mere disclosure of previously hidden heavenly secrets, nor is it simply information about future events, but rather, concerns eschatological activity and movement, an invasion of the world below from heaven above, which is also, in a sense, an invasion of the present by the future.[64] According to 1 Thess. 4:15–16, where Paul uses the imagery of war, “the παρουσία of the Lord” means that Jesus “himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God” (cf. 2 Thess. 1:7).

  Paul also uses this language in connection with the gospel he preaches. In Romans 1:16–17, he claims that in the gospel, “the righteousness of God is being revealed (ἀποκαλύπτεται) from faith for faith.” This gospel is “the power of God (δύναμις θεοῦ) for salvation.” Paul here relates the verb ἀποκαλύπτω directly to the notion of “the power of God.” The righteousness of God becomes visible and powerful, or powerfully visible, in the gospel itself, and for that reason, within the sphere of faith (πίστις). Faith is elicited or created by the gospel of God’s powerful righteousness and it is evidently, for Paul, a form of sharing in God’s eschatological revelation, that is, in God’s eschatological activity and movement.[65] Among other things, faith signifies for Paul that a believer can truly see and perceive this action, this movement, of God into (and then, in) the world. The movement and presence of God are to be seen in the crucified and risen Christ and his Spirit. Furthermore, that this activity and movement of God involves judgment upon “this world” is evident in Rom. 1:18–32: The revelation of God’s righteousness “through faith for faith” also means that “the wrath of God,” normally associated with the Parousia (cf. Rom. 2:5; 5:9; 1 Thess. 1:10), “is [now also being powerfully] revealed (ἀποκαλύπτεται) from heaven upon all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:16–18). The creation of something eschatologically new in the world, faith, also entails God’s judgment of a world marked by its absence before and apart from Christ.

  That the terms ἀποκάλυψις and ἀποκαλύπτω are also being used “apocalyptically” in Galatians was suggested by Martyn: “it is precisely the Paul of Galatians who says with emphasis that the cosmos in which he previously lived met its end in God’s apocalypse of Jesus Christ,” with references to Gal. 1:12, 16; and 6:14. “It is this same Paul who identifies that apocalypse as the birth of his gospel-mission (1.16), and who speaks of the battles he has to wage for the truth of the gospel as events to be understood under the banner of apocalypse (2.2, 5, 14).”[66] The basis for these claims actually lies in Gal. 3:23: “Now before faith came (ἐλθεῖν) [into the world], we were confined under the Law, being shut up until faith should be revealed (ἀποκαλυφθῆναι).” The noun “faith” (πίστις) is the subject of the verb “came” as well as of the verb “revealed” (both infinitives in the Greek text). As Martyn points out, this parallelism indicates that that the latter verb must mean something more than simply “unveiling (of previous hidden information)” for Paul.[67] Paul is redefining the word in terms of God’s eschatological movementinto the world.

  Furthermore, the context indicates that Paul here understands faith to be a metonym for Christ himself (cf. 1:23). According to 3:24, the “Law was our custodian until Christ [came on the scene], so that we might be justified on the basis of faith [i.e., on the basis of Christ]. But now that faith has come [i.e., now that Christ has come on the scene], we are no longer subject to a custodian [that is to say, the Law].” The πίστις in view is, in the first place, that of Christ himself.[68] By identifying πίστις with Christ in this way, Paul makes clear that faith as a human activity (or “response”) does not involve an innate or natural human possibility, but an apocalyptic‑eschatological possibility, which becomes an anthropological reality when elicited (in effect, created) by the proclamation of Christ’s faithful death “for our sins” or “for us” (cf. 1 Cor. 15:3; Gal. 1:4; 2:20–21; 3:13; Rom. 3:21–26; 2 Cor. 5:21). Faith is the visible mark of the “new creation” (Gal. 6:15),[69] an apocalyptic‑eschatological novum inseparable from Christ as God’s Apocalypse. Faith itself is a mark of the divine activity, of God’s invasion of the cosmos with God’s Son and the Spirit of that Son. Or, as Martyn puts it: “Paul envisions, then, a world that has been changed from without by God’s incursion into it, and he perceives that incursion to be the event that has brought faith into existence.”[70]

  Paul’s distinctively “apocalyptic” use of the noun ἀποκάλυψις and its cognate verb ἀποκαλύπτω may be indebted to two passages from Second Isaiah, a portion of Scripture Paul often cites from or alludes to in his letters, Galatians and Romans in particular.[71] According to Isa. 52:10, “the Lord shall reveal (ἀποκαλύψει) his holy arm (βραχίων) in the sight of all the nations (πάντα τὰ ἔθνη); and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation that comes from our God” (cf. Rom. 1:5, 16–17; Gal. 3:8; LXX Ps. 97:1–2). And in Isa. 53:1, whose initial question Paul cites in Rom. 10:16, we read: “O Lord, who has believed our report? and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed (ἀπεκαλύφθη)?” The “revelation” of God’s “arm” (a symbol of power and military might) is no mere disclosure of previously hidden information or of a heavenly mystery, but the visible coming of God to effect salvation in the world. Paul frequently uses the term in a very similar, though more “apocalyptic” way, to describe God’s eschatological invasion (in and through Christ) of the human cosmos under the hegemony of cosmological powers destructive of human life and opposed to God’s will and intention for the world (especially Sin, Death, and the Flesh).

  Conclusion

  In one longstanding tradition of scholarship of ancient Judaism and Christianity, apocalyptic concerns the (ancient Jewish) expectation of God’s own eschatological activity, whereby God will put an end to the present evil order of reality (“this age”) and replace it with a new, transformed order of reality (“the age to come”). Paul is an apocalyptic theologian in this sense, though it must also be noted that his apocalyptic theology: (a) is closer to the cosmological pattern exemplified by 1 Enoch 1–36 than to the forensic pattern exemplified by 2 Baruch, and (b) assumes (as does the book of Revelation) a christological modification to this expectation: The coming of Christ (or, if you will, of Jesus as the Messiah) represents God’s apocalyptic-eschatological invasion of the human world, whereby God has begun to wage a war of cosmic proportions against evil cosmological forces that have oppressed and victimized all human beings and brought about their separation from God and from life; this war will end in God’s sure triumph at Christ’s Parousia.

  * * *

  See M. C. de Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5, JSNTSup 22 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988); “Paul and Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, eds. J. Marcus and M. Soards, JSNTSup 24 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1989), 169–90; “Paul and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. I, ed. J. J. Collins (New York: Continuum, 1998), 345–83; reprinted in The Continuum History of Apocalypticism, eds. B. McGinn, J. J. Collins, and S. J. Stein (New York: Continuum, 2003), 166–94; “Excursus 2: Galatians and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in Galatians: A Commentary, NTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 31–35. This chapter takes these publications a
s a point of departure, as also the following articles: “Paul, Theologian of God’s Apocalypse,” Int 56, no. 1 (2002): 34–44; and “Paul’s Mythologizing Program in Romans 5-8,” in Apocalyptic Paul: Cosmos and Anthropos in Romans 5–8, ed. B. Roberts Gaventa (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 1–20. I am also deeply indebted to the work of J. Louis Martyn, in particular his article, “Apocalyptic Antinomies in the Letter to the Galatians,” NTS 31, no. 3 (1985): 410–24, and his magisterial commentary, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997), esp. 97–105. ↵

  This usage has probably occurred under the influence of the German noun Apokalyptik. Since the 1980s, some scholars have found the nominal use of the English word “apocalyptic” deeply problematic, but the nominal use has become ingrained in biblical scholarship in English through the publication of such influential works as D. H. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic: 200 BC—AD 100, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964) and C. C. Rowland, The Open Heaven. A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982). This usage can no longer be undone, nor does it need to be as long as authors are clear about how they are using the term. ↵

  I here use the term “eschatology” to mean simply human expectations concerning “the (very) last things,” that is, the final destiny of human beings and the world in which they live. Apocalyptic eschatology is a particular form of such expectation, to be further specified below. ↵