The Apocalyptic Nature of Paul's Letters
This post focuses on what James P. Davies has called “one of the hottest topics of Pauline study”: the apocalyptic nature of Paul’s gospel.[1] A number of recent books have traced the development of that theme from scholars like Ernst Käsemann, J. Christiaan Beker, and J. Louis Martyn to the more recent work of others like Martinus de Boer, Beverly Gaventa and Douglas Campbell.[2] All affirm that Paul’s epistles reveal his importance as an “apocalyptic thinker,” and all assert that the “recognition of apocalyptic transform[s] traditional theological categories.”[3]
Given this, it is crucial to define briefly what is meant by “apocalyptic.”[4] I follow Davies and others in understanding the adjective in literary context, in connection with the genre “apocalypses” (e.g., Daniel, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, Mark 13, and Revelation).[5] To say that Paul is “apocalyptic” means that he shares “conceptual affinities” with those texts.[6] This does not mean that Paul depended upon these texts or that he was directly influenced by them. Rather, it asserts that those texts were part of, and contributed to, the general eschatological perspective of first-century Judaism (i.e., an “apocalyptic worldview”) with which Paul was highly familiar. As a result, Paul is concerned with many of the same issues, expresses similar ideas, and thinks in similar ways.
This idea of a shared “apocalyptic worldview” should be understood as the “unseen and generally unexamined pre-cognitive framework through which any given community approaches the world.”[7] “Worldview” is not a well-defined “system of ideas” but a general attitude toward, or mode of engagement with, reality.[8] It includes not just our intellectual assumptions but also the way we “imagine” ourselves in relation to the world, through the various images, stories, and symbols we inhabit.[9] Paul’s letters are “apocalyptic” in the sense that the worldview they present overlaps substantially with the worldviews found in apocalyptic literature.[10] In particular, Paul shares with that literature the theological conviction that God is “apocalypsed” (i.e., revealed) in the Messiah, through whom he acts decisively to bring about the new creation of the cosmos.
The philological task of discerning where such affinities exist is partly an historical one. Paul’s letters were not written in a vacuum but in his socio-historical context. As numerous Pauline scholars (including Schweitzer, Käsemann, Beker, De Boer, and many others) have concluded, Paul’s thought arose within, and developed out of, Jewish apocalyptic thought.[11] Specifically, Paul’s thought was set within, and formed by, the conceptual “matrices” of Second Temple Judaism. As Alexandra R. Brown writes, he “express[es] views conforming to these convictions, and some of [his] letters are so permeated with them that the letters themselves seem justifiably classified as ‘thoroughly apocalyptic.’”[12] It is therefore impossible to understand the former apart from the latter without “risk[ing] making the apostle in our own image, allowing the word ‘apocalyptic’ to stand as a cipher for whatever contemporary theological issues we want to emphasize.”[13] Reading Paul in this way provides an important methodological control.[14]
What, then, are the contours of Paul’s “apocalyptic thought?”[15] Although there is not space here to provide a full or detailed exposition, it is sufficient to emphasize three of its core expectations.[16] First: that God—understood as a wholly “other,” transcendent God—will break into this world “from beyond.”[17] Second: that this inbreaking will be “a cataclysmic event” which will cause the old world to pass away and bring a new world into being.[18] And third: that the recreation of this new world will cause an “epistemological crisis,” both by revealing new truth and by establishing new ways of knowing.[19]
Paul is rightly understood in that context, as someone who shared those expectations and believed in Jesus as their fulfillment. As J. Louis Martyn writes, Paul “takes his bearings from the good news that in Christ – and thus in the act of new creation – God has invaded the cosmos.”[20] On that basis, we have entered a “new age” of knowing (cf. 2 Cor. 5:16-17) which, although in many ways compatible with the old, is marked by substantial differences.[21] To put it another way: the radically new ontological conditions generated by the Christ event have made possible revolutionary new ways of thinking. For that reason, new creation is central to Paul’s internal logic about epistemological change.
That logic is presented throughout his letters as having an invariable order of operations: God’s work of ontological transformation came first as the ground of, and driving force behind, epistemological transformation. God took the initiative, through the Christ event, to construct a new reality.[22] Some of the foundational principles of the universe were altered through God’s act of new creation. Thus, Paul did not have a new perspective on the same old world. Rather, he was confronted with God’s creation of a new world which “re-centered” his perceptions and inspired to think anew. New creation was, for him, like what Rowan Williams describes as a new “landscape [to] move into…You inhabit this new set of relationships, this new set of perspectives. You see differently, you sense differently, you relate differently.”[23] For that reason, “the most profound promise that apocalyptic poses for the future of theology lies with the possibilities it offers for thinking.”[24]
This order of operations also holds true at the anthropological level. Since humanity is part of the transformed cosmos, we too are inevitably affected. This cosmic-human interconnection is clearly expressed by Ernst Käsemann:
Man, for Paul, is never just on his own. He is always a specific piece of the world and therefore becomes what in the last resort he is by determination from outside, i.e., by the power which takes possession of him and the lordship to which he surrenders himself. His life is from the beginning a stake in the confrontation between God and the principalities of this world. In other words, it mirrors the cosmic contention for the lordship of the world and is its concretion. As such, man’s life can only be understood apocalyptically.[25]
At the anthropological level, God’s act of new creation has fundamentally transformed humanity by giving us renewed minds. This transformation enables us to receive and respond to truth in ways which were impossible for us before. It creates the right conditions within us for God’s word to reform us with performative power.[26] In addition, the demonic powers which seek to enslave human thought have been defeated through God’s act of new creation. Paul asserts that this liberates our minds to understand and think rightly, with renewed political agency.
[1] J. P. Davies, Paul Among the Apocalypses?: An Evaluation of the ‘Apocalyptic Paul’ in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 3.l
[2] Cf. Martinus C. de Boer, “The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5,” JSNTSup 22 (n.d.): 1988; Joel Marcus and Marion L. Soards, eds., Apocalyptic and the New Testament, Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990); R. Barry Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul: Paul’s Interpreters and the Rhetoric of Criticism, Journal for the Study of the New Testament (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996); Davies, Paul Among the Apocalypses?; Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters.
[3] Joshua B. Davis, “The Challenge of Apocalyptic to Modern Theology,” in Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn, ed. Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harink (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2012), 2.
[4] For a summary of some of the difficulties of defining “apocalyptic,” cf. Marcus and Soards, Apocalyptic and the New Testament, 37.
[5] Cf. Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul, 261.
[6] The phrase “conceptual affinities” does not imply “a direct line of literary dependence or theological genealogy” with one of these apocalypses. Cf. J. P. Davies, “Paul Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the ‘Apocalyptic Paul’ in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature” (PhD diss., St. Andrews, UK, University of St. Andrews, 2015), 30.
[7] Davies, 41.
[8] David K. Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002); Brian J. Walsh and J. Richard Middleton, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1984); James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 63; N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 28 n80; cf. Davies, “Paul Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the ‘Apocalyptic Paul’ in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature,” 32.
[9] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge; London: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2018), 171–72; Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 65; John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 283; Davies, “Paul Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the ‘Apocalyptic Paul’ in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature,” 34.
[10] Cf. Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, Prophets of Old and the Day of the End: Zechariah, the Book of Watchers and Apocalyptic (Leiden ; New York: Brill, 1996), 5–8. The choice of the plural “worldviews” is important: the apocalyptic texts do not present just one overarching worldview, but several overlapping ones.
[11] Cf. Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 11; Ernst Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler Press, 1996); J. Beker, Paul The Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2000), 181; Martinus C. de Boer, “Paul and Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, ed. Marion L. Soards and Joel Marcus (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989), 350.
[12] Alexandra R. Brown, The Cross and Human Transformation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 3.
[13] Davies, “Paul Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the ‘Apocalyptic Paul’ in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature,” 37.
[14] Cf. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 138.
[15] The author does not mean to imply that there was a single, systematic structure of thought in that period that can be identified as “apocalyptic.” However, it is possible to identify some of the basic characteristics that set texts apart as apocalyptic, including some theological assumptions they share in common. Cf. John J. Collins, ed., Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, vol. 14, Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1979).
[16] There are, of course, scholars who disagree that Paul’s apocalyptic thought shares (or needs to share) affinities with apocalyptic literature. Importantly, those scholars still can accept these three expectations. Cf. John J. Collins, Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Routledge, 1997).
[17] Nathan R. Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), 12; J. Louis Martyn, “The Apocalyptic Gospel in Galatians,” Interpretation 54, no. 3 (July 2000): 252–60; Cf. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 1–42.
[18] Richard B. Hays, “The Letter to the Galatians: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. J. Paul Sampley (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000), 187. This event is often and clearly associated with the coming of the Messiah.
[19] J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 108–9, cf. 104, 142, 146–48; Thomas F. Boomershine, “Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages in Paul, Jesus and Mark: Rhetoric and Dialectic in Apocalyptic and the New Testament,” in Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, ed. Marion L. Soards and Joel Marcus (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 148.
[20] Martyn, Galatians, 22.
[21] Extended discussions about the compatibility of “old age knowing” and “new age knowing” can be found in John J. Collins, Seers, Sibyls and Sages in Hellenistic-Roman Judaism (New York: Brill, 1997), 385–404; G. Macaskill, Revealed Wisdom and Inaugurated Eschatology in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 10–12; Davies, “Paul Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the ‘Apocalyptic Paul’ in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature,” 41–74. In agreement with these authors, this thesis does not claim that human wisdom, or Old Testament wisdom literature, are invalidated by God’s new creation. Rather, new creation enables us to utilize our human wisdom correctly. Nor does this thesis posit a false dichotomy between special and natural revelation or between apocalyptic and salvation history. We do not need to reject the narrative continuity of Israel’s story in order to say that God’s work of new creation has fundamentally altered our situation.
[22] Cf. Douglas Harink, Paul Among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 68.
[23] Benjamin Wayman, “Rowan Williams: Theological Education Is for Everyone,” ChristianityToday.com, 1, accessed August 21, 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/august-web-only/rowan-williams-theological-education-for-everyone.html.
[24] Davis, “The Challenge of Apocalyptic to Modern Theology,” 5.
[25] Ernst Käsemann, New Testament Questions for Today, trans. W. J. Montague (London: Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd, 2012), 136.
[26] The term “performative” is taken from Alexandra Brown, for whom God’s word has the power of a speech act to accomplish what it proclaims. Cf. Brown, The Cross and Human Transformation, 14–20.