1. The question of what the New Testament authors had in mind with their ‘end-time’ prophecies can be answered one of two basic ways.
They may have been concerned with the immediate effects of Christ’s enthronement as true King, and the repudiation of national Israel as the covenant people – and hence with the way YHWH structured his relationship to creation. Their description of the consequences would make the immediate future clear (that is, the destruction of the old covenant with Jerusalem/the Temple, and the passing of creation into a newness of earth and heaven under Christ alone) but leave a final consumation an unspoken certainty.
Or, they may have been concerned with a final consumation, describing this in symbolic detail meant for a time far removed from the original readers/hearers. In that case, the distant future (although always described as close) would be clear, but the immediate future of national Israel, Christ and new Israel (the Christ-followers) would be murky and unresolved.
There are of course some compromises to be made between these extremes. It may be that a majority of passages have one focus while a minority have the other. Or, the concept of ‘double-fulfilment’, ‘telescoping’ may bridge the gap. However, the problem with the first compromise is that any suggested division between the passages seems so often arbitrary with respect to the actual language of the text. The interpretative rule should be that if the same phrases/words are used, and the same imagery invoked, then prima facie the same thing is being spoken of. The problem with the second compromise (the better one, in my view) is that all too often, the original meaning – how the original audience heard it – is completely forgotten in the rush to assert that the text casts another, more distant, shadow.
2. *warning: the terms postmodern & relative are loosely used here* A year ago Matt quoted Mike Goheen giving a postmodern creed, which said in part:
I don’t believe there is one story that gives meaning to the world.
I like this phrasing. I understand it to mean: “there is no one story by which the world is moved and shaped and has its being”.
Goheen accurately pinpoints why postmodernism and relativism are popularly reviled in Christian circles. For instance, Chuck Colson’s How Now Shall We Live evinces horror at the lack of ‘absolute truth’ on offer from postmodernism/relativism. But in my view, Colson et al are guilty of so completely dressing Christianity in the garb of modernism that one must learn to love modernism before one can learn to love a biblical faith.
On the other hand Goheen’s statement doesn’t deny that there are many stories on offer – many (attempted) meanings in the world. This is a true insight of postmodernism/relativism. Some meanings are able to take good shape within God’s world. The methods and language of postmodernism are useful to deal with these. Other meanings are continually rebuffed by God’s world. The rebuff’s locus classicus is the Fall – God says one thing, the serpent says another, and Adam chooses the story of false gods by which to try and shape the world. And he dies, just as God said he would. Postmodernism wrongly ignores this.
So Goheen does something quite unusual. He pinpoints with theological accuracy the problem with postmodernism/relativism, but without prostituting Christianity to the singularities of modernism – and so allows appreciation of the genuine insights postmodernism delivers. There are many stories on offer. There are many meanings to be had and to be developed in God’s wide world, full of his re-creating images – us. Some of these meanings are genuinely different from one another, and yet also genuinely true: they each comport with the story by which God moves this world.
‘A wise man’, I once heard Douglas Wilson say, ‘allows the world to rebuke him.’ Laziness, for instance, produces want. So stop being lazy. That sort of lesson is an excellent application of Genesis: the world moves according to God’s story. Get with the program.
But a Colson-esque dismissal of everything that may sound ‘postmodern’ is unfortunate. Christians should be taught to understand the philosophical and linguistic milieu in which they move, so that they can speak appropriately to it. Not only that, but they should not be fooled into thinking that Christianity is really a particular baptized philosophy, while everything else is evil. That will only set them up for a new idolatry. Rather, God is God and we are His representatives. All is God’s by origin; all is ours in delegation. There are many meanings, but only one Meaning.