November 1996
Dear Co-laborer,
As you read this you are in preparation for the
Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday. Leette
and I pray that it will be a special family time of remembering and rejoicing.
Eschatology, Part
19
In the last issue we briefly looked at the importance of
understanding Christianity being rooted in history, and the part eschatology
plays in that. You don’t have to
read deeply in the Old Testament to discover that the physical world plays an
important part in God’s program for Israel.
God gave them the land in perpetuity, promising that in the future He
will return the Jews to Israel.
The Patristics maintained this view of an eschatology
rooted in the promise of a physically restored land.
Because they divorced God’s promises regarding the future physical
restoration from the Jews, the Patristics tended to create extra-biblical
visions of the millennial kingdom. This,
in turn, created a back-lash against chiliasm.
Many believe that John’s Revelation, from which we get
the word millennium,
was the path by which belief in a physical restoration of the world entered the
church. This is not true; every
Jewish convert carried something of his former beliefs with him when he entered
this community of Christ’s followers.
Jesus and the Apostles, as noted in part 2 of this series,
saw no distinction between Israel and the church. They were the true Israel.
Later, with the Jews’ rejection of Christ, the Patristics saw the
church as the true Israel and concluded that the Old Testament references to the
contrary were figurative.
The early church had to face not only the hostility of
Jewish rejection and persecution, but also the hostility of Hellenism which
sought to absorb Christianity as another mystery religion.
Gnosticism, an endeavor to do just that, was a pervasive problem as early
as the writings of John. Because it played a strategic role in shaping the doctrinal
debate in Christianity, let’s take a brief look at it.
GNOSTICISM
Derived from the Greek word know, Gnosticism purported to offer knowledge of the otherwise
hidden truth of total reality as the key to salvation.
It was a syncretistic religion, based primarily on a Hindu world-view,
that incorporated Jewish, Iranian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and other Oriental
traditions - all blended with Christianity.
All of these divergent religions were merged in a dualism
between man and the world and the world and God. Man and the world mirrors on the plane of experience the
primordial oneness of God and the world. Man
and God belong in essence together against the world, but are in fact separated
by the world.
Gnosticism taught that the God of the Old Testament was the
Demiurge, who believed himself to be the only God, and engaged in creations
designed to satisfy his ambition, vanity, and lust for dominion.
The Spirit is in a state of exile from His innerworldly
existence, as the result of a primeval tragedy, and is immersed in the soul and
body of man. The process of
conveying the saving knowledge to the
world-imprisoned hostage of Light begins with Adam and runs through history.
The Scriptural account of Adam is reversed; the serpent, as
the original messenger of knowledge in
defiance of the Creator’s mandate of ignorance, becomes the symbol of the
spiritual principle that awakens captive man.
There is an eternal Messenger who moves through history in
ever new incarnations, Buddha, Zoraster, Jesus, Mani, to name but a few
manifestations of him. The
anti-Jewish interpretation of Genesis is confirmed by the absence of Moses from
this list of incarnations.
Marcion, a proponent of this philosophy, rejected the whole
body of Hebrew Scripture. The main
battle was fought between the church and the Gnostics on the issues of their
irreverent exegesis and rejection of the Old Testament, along with their refusal
to identify the God of Moses with the Father of Jesus Christ.
The material universe is like a vast prison whose innermost
dungeon is the earth, the abode of man. The
tyrannical Demiurge, with His threat of retribution, aims at the enslavement of
man. Man is composed of flesh,
soul, and spirit. Both the body and
soul are products of the cosmic powers, who shaped the body in the image of the
divine Primal Man and animated it with the appetites and passions of natural
man.
Enclosed in the soul is the Spirit, a portion of the divine
substance. Only this innermost
Spirit is the true man, and he is not of this world.
The transcendent God (as opposed to the Old Testament God) is as alien to
this world as the Spirit in the midst of man. The goal of Gnostic striving is the release of the inner man
from the bonds of the world and his return to his native realm of light.
To do this, he must know about the transcendent God, about
himself, and about the nature of the world that created his problem.
Thus ignorance is the essence of mundane existence.
Since the transcendent God is unknown to the world and cannot be
discovered by it, revelation is necessary.
The goal of this revelation or knowledge is freedom from the mundane world and union with the
divine substance. The
individual’s ascent is part of the restoration of the deity’s own wholeness.
The end comes when the deity retrieves his own and they become one.
With the completion of this ingathering, the cosmos, deprived of its
elements of light, comes to an end.
GNOSTICISM AND THE
CHURCH
Early Christianity fought gnosticism most successfully with millenarism. Irenaeus and others
did this by reasoning that both an individual and corporate eschatology must be
preached.
In the Old Testament judgment of both the individual and
the nation runs parallel. Individually,
we note that God judged Adam and Eve, Cain, Achan, Saul, and David, to mention
but a few. Corporately, God judged
the world through Noah, Egypt through the Exodus, Babylon, Edom, and of course
Israel, as well as many others.
Although in the New Testament, the preponderance of
evidence is in the direction of individual judgment,
nations are included in passages such as Matt 25:31-46.
For the a-millennialist, there can be no final judgment of
nations; a material re-creation is necessary for such a judgment.
There can be no corporate accountability in the end time (eschaton)
without a material re-creation of some kind.
O’Hagan notes that Gnosticism with its dualism, was
rejected by the church. A-millennialism
emphasized the importance of the corporate, mystical church, while
pre-millennialism that of the individual and the physical church, in the
re-creation of Revelation 20. For
the a-millennial, Rev 20 was spiritual; for the pre-millennialism it was
physical. In this,
pre-millennialism had a stronger defense against Gnosticism.
The Bible teaches that the world is good; God will re-create it.
Gnosticism teaches that the world is bad; man is to escape from it.
Many years later, a-millennialism corrected this with its
emphasis on the cultural mandate.
In the Old Testament the Greek words for “world”
(aeon and cosmos) are consistently good - i.e., the world is good.
In the New Testament the world is consistently evil.
Pre-millennialism teaches that this evil world will become good in the
material re-creation of the millennial kingdom of Christ.
A-millennialism eventually defended itself against Gnosticism by teaching
that the present world is good, but that there will be no material re-creation
in the eschaton.
Patristic anti-Jewishness fed the Gnostic tendency as well
in that the Patristics taught that God had rejected His Old Testament people,
and Gnosticism taught that the Jews, along with Abel, Jacob, Moses, et. al were
evil. To the degree that the church
allegorized the Old Testament, they had difficulty refuting the Gnostics.
Ignatius of Antioch refuted Gnosticism by stressing a
literal, physical resurrection in Revelation 20, while those who opposed
chiliasm believed Revelation 20 to be spiritual.
In the Jewish view of Scripture, the fulcrum of history is
the Day of the Lord when Messiah sits on David’s Throne.
According to Revelation 20, judgment occurs after the millennium.
The a-millennialists saw Christ’s first advent as the fulcrum of
history and the second advent only as a time of judgment and consummation; for
them there is no material re-creation of the earth.
For the Patristics, who were historic pre-millennialists, because they
divorced the material re-creation of the earth in the eschaton from a Jewish
hope, the earth played a relative unimportant role.
Thus, when there was an abatement in persecution, they had no compelling
reason to hold it.
CONCLUSION
From this we learn two important lessons:
First, we again see the subtle, but strategic role culture plays in the
life of the church. Culture can and
must be resisted, but still it has its way.
Its influence may not be perceptible to the present generation, but
glaring to those who look in retrospect and evaluate.
Second, because the Bible is written by God and is a
unified whole, what we believe about one aspect of biblical truth appreciably
influences the whole. We may divide
the truth of Scripture into various components we call doctrine, but each
doctrine is intertwined with all others; modify one doctrine, and you modify
them all. Your view on eschatology
will influence your understanding, not only of the timetable of God, but more
importantly, your understanding of God Himself.
The view of the early church on eschatology and God’s
commitment to Israel, influenced its ability to withstand the attack of
Gnosticism. Israel is God’s
illustration of Sovereign Grace and Election.
If you conclude that the Jews flunked the test of God’s grace, where
does that leave you?
His....Your Servant,