Ben Witherington has been doing a thorough and informative series of posts on N.T. Wright’s new/forthcoming book Paul and His Recent Interpreters, starting here—in itself a good overview of recent Pauline scholarship. I haven’t been tracking with it too closely (I have been persuaded to read the book), but a remark in part nine gave me pause.

It comes up in a discussion of Wright’s reliance on Wayne Meek’s The First Urban Christians. Witherington quotes Wright’s explanation of why at certain points he finds Meek’s sociological analysis inadequate….

Last week I went with my friend Steve Knight to see Hamlet at the Barbican. Hamlet is a tragedy. By the end of the play everyone of any dramatic importance is dead. The old king has had a “leperous distilment” poured in his ear. Polonius is stabbed in error behind the arras. Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are sent to their doom in England by Hamlet’s cunning. In the last scene, Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes and Hamlet manage to poison each other within the space of a few minutes in a manner that teeters on absurdity. Only Ophelia’s death has any pathos to it. The poor demented girl slips into a river off-stage and drowns. Millais’ sumptuous depiction is well known.

I heard Rikk Watts from Regent College, Vancouver, talk this week to a group of church leaders about what’s currently going on in theology. He began with some good reflections on the challenges facing anyone trying to keep track of developments across the ever-expanding—or ever more boggy—field of New Testament studies. To paraphrase his paraphrase of Bernard Lonergan, there are good ways of not knowing everything and bad ways of not knowing everything.

But the core of his argument with respect to the New Testament was that we are steadily abandoning systematic constructions of theology in favour of 1) a historical narrative about 2) a thoroughly Jewish Jesus, which 3) has been shown nevertheless to generate an early high christology.

What happens at the end? What sort of transformation does John have in mind when he says that earth and heaven “fled away” from the presence of God at the judgment of all the dead (Rev. 20:11)? Are we to suppose that the world-as-we-know-it must finally disappear—or perhaps be destroyed—to be replaced by an utterly new heaven and new earth (21:1)? That has probably been the traditional view, but other interpretations are available. J. Richard Middleton, whose stimulating book A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology I have been poring over recently, insists that what John describes is not cosmic destruction but the renovation of this world. Others will argue that John, like Isaiah, uses the language metaphorically to speak of the restoration of God’s people following the judgment of AD 70. Here’s why I think the “traditional” view is nearer the mark.

It is often argued that biblical prophecies may have two or more frames of reference. For example, Middleton allows that the language of cosmic dissolution in Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse (sun and moon darkened, stars falling from heaven) may refer to events leading up to the war against Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem. He even concedes the possibility that “all the signs of the Olivet discourse were fulfilled in AD 70”. But he argues, nevertheless, for a multivalent hermeneutic:

Without denying any of this, I would also note that it is possible for the language of celestial signs and (seeming) cosmic destruction to have a double referent, pointing to both sets of events simultaneously, much as some Old Testament prophecies clearly refer to events in the prophet’s own day and also have a later and more climactic fulfilment in New Testament times (for example, Isaiah’s prediction in 7:14 of a royal birth in Ahaz’s court, or possibly the prophet’s own son, later applied to the birth of Jesus in Matt. 1:23).

One of the ways the evangelical church is attempting to correct the traditional notion that salvation has to do with individuals going to heaven when they die is to affirm instead the idea of salvation as the redemption of creation. J. Richard Middleton’s book, A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology, is an excellent contribution to the enterprise. But does the argument work? My sense is that the paradigm oversimplifies the biblical narrative, either by suppressing much of the political detail or by assimilating it into a universalised notion of redemption. Middleton’s discussion of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom, I think, illustrates the problem.

Based largely on a reading of the “Nazareth manifesto” episode in Luke 4:16-30, Middleton argues that Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God entailed the promise of “concrete, this-worldly deliverance and restoration” (258). The manifesto applies, in the first place, to Israel, and Middleton recognises this. But his statement of Jesus’ mission at this point has a wider perspective: it is to “proclaim in word and deed that God is at work restoring this fractured world—breaking the grip of evil, healing diseased bodies, bringing life out of death” (259).

Who or what is saved? And how does salvation fit into the biblical story? In his book A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology J. Richard Middleton argues against an old model which defines salvation as a personal journey towards an otherworldly destiny: Jesus died for my sins so that I may go to heaven when I die. He expounds instead a “holistic” model of salvation as the journey that creation itself is on towards the renewal of heaven and new earth. The aim of the book is “to sketch the coherent biblical theology (beginning in the Old Testament) that culminates in the New Testament’s explicit eschatological vision of the redemption of creation” (15).

He is at pains to stress, moreover, that this restoration of all things does not entail the destruction of the world-as-we-know-it. “The point is that although the kingdom of God may seem to be making only small inroads into the oppressive powers of evil, it will eventually transform the world, just like a bit of yeast transforms the entire dough” (210). So the mission of the church is, in effect, to save the universe—or at least, to collaborate actively with the creator in its eventual redemption.