Now-and-Not-Yet
AM Psalm 5, 6 • PM Psalm 10, 11
Num. 35:1-3,9-15,30-34 • Rom. 8:31-39 • Matt. 23:13-26
The eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans is full of comforting statements which have given hope to Christians since the first century. Today’s epistle reading is Paul’s summation of that chapter, which begins: “What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?”
Like many of you, I have often turned to this chapter for consolation and encouragement, but when I spent some time with it while preparing to write this reflection, I noticed a couple of things that I’d overlooked before. Some of the consolations that Paul found are taking place in the present while others are stated in future tense. “What’s this about?” I asked. I also noticed that smack in the middle of these comforting words, in verses 18-25, sits a seeming digression, a prophecy, a foretaste of good things to come: “I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager anticipation for the revealing of the children of God.”
The biblical scholar N.T. Wright looks for answers to questions like mine by reading biblical texts, including Romans 8, in their historical context.* By the 50s, he asserts, the eschatology of many first century Jews and early Christians shared a hopeful two age scheme of “this present time and the age to come” or “now and not yet.” Or, I would add, “on earth as it is in heaven.”
For the earliest Christian communities, the age to come (the Kingdom of God) had been inaugurated in their own times through Jesus’ death and resurrection, but it had not yet been fully realized. In Wright’s words, “Something had happened to bring the expected kingdom to birth, and something was yet to happen through which that already-inaugurated kingdom would reach its ultimate goal.”
The earliest Christians took comfort from words like those that Paul addressed to the nascent Christian community in Rome. They might have agreed with Wright’s assertion that the Kingdom of God had already been inaugurated through the death and resurrection of Jesus and by the coming of the Holy Spirit. But how would they have understood Jesus’ statement in Mark 9:1 and other passages like it that “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the Kingdom of God has come with power?” Jesus’ return did not happen by the time his hearers had died off, and Paul probably realized before he wrote his letter to that Romans that it might not happen in his lifetime. His Christian audience may have felt the same way. So what did the earliest Christians think about the “not yet”?
First, let me say that I doubt they would recognize the body of beliefs known as dispensational premillennialism, a systematic body of thought which emerged, not in the first century but in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. This tradition built a timeline of the last things based upon a reading of the books of Daniel and Revelation that its founders understood to be “scientific” in the empirical tradition of Francis Bacon. From this timeline emerged the narrative of a cataclysmic battle of Armageddon, associated with various historical events, which have necessarily changed over time when the end didn’t come. Until recently, this body of thought was limited to a relatively small subset of evangelical Protestantism, but since at least the 1970s it has grown to become a widely held point of view within American culture, even though most of its adherents probably never heard of dispensational premillennialism or C.I. Scofield.** Secularized premillennial eschatology is now often coupled with hyper-nationalism, and this combination strikes me as very far from the teachings of Jesus and Paul.
Here's what Wright says about the earliest Christians’ understanding of the “something” that was yet to happen: “Romans 8 does not…describe a catastrophe or ‘disaster.’ It is not ‘the end of the world’ in the normal sense. The present creation will not be destroyed; rather the reverse. It will be set free from destruction…It will be more truly itself when, in the end, God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15.28¬). All this is guaranteed in Romans 8 by two things: the death and resurrection of the Messiah and the power of the spirit.”
Of course, Professor Wright has no inside scoop on the future, but his view makes sense to me.
*See History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology (2019).
**If you want to learn more about this tradition, see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism (1980). Marsden provides a respectful but critical analysis of the movement.
Written by Bob McMath
Bob and Linda are thankful for Jack Cleghorn’s leadership of St. Paul’s choirs, and we look forward to being part of the choir with him in residence at Exeter Cathedral.