This is the first in a new series of posts exploring how to understand both the Bible and contemporary culture in a way that help us bring them into meaningful and rigorous conversation. This first post addresses what it means to talk about “the way things are” from a biblical perspective.
For the Christian, any understanding of “the way things are” currently cannot be adequately articulated without reference to the future parousia when the creation will be transformed. Our present reality is irreducibly one that is to-be-transformed, and the “way things are” is irreducibly haunted by the reality of the eschaton, a temporal feature of biblical temporality that Stanley Grenz and John R. Franke try to capture in the terms “eschatological ontology” and an “eschatological realism”.[1] Whereas naïve realism understands the world it apprehends in the present to constitute objective reality, eschatological realism holds that “[t]he objectivity set forth in the biblical narrative is the objectivity of the world as God wills it”,[2] and the world as God wills it “lies in the eschatological future”, so “[t]he ‘actual’ universe is the universe as it one day will be” and this future reality “is far more real—and hence far more objective, far more actual—than the present world, which is even now passing away”.[3] To apprehend the world and its creatures objectively is to apprehend them with the “eschatological realism” of this forward-looking perspective, to understand the objective reality of things not simply in terms of their current state but in terms of the future realization of their fullness at the eschaton. This eschatological realism sets the reality of radical transformation, not simply of conservative restoration, at the heart of a biblical ontology. The new heavens and new earth are not simply a return to Eden, but a transfiguration of the Edenic paradise into a grander, more complex vision of reality incorporating all the best of the millennia of human culture.
The irreducibly to-be-transformed nature of reality at the heart of eschatological realism signals more than a one-time transformation on the day of judgment, because the resurrection is only one moment in the Christian story of transformation. We who are the firstfruits of the new creation are already beginning to be transformed, and pockets of the creation are being becoming what they are as they are brought under the rule of Christ, imperfectly for now and perfectly at the judgment.
Eschatological realism has quite remarkable implications for a biblical view of time. It means that the eschatological future is folded into the present in a way that charges our day to day existence with a significance deeper than that which can be drawn out of a secular, atomised present. One classic example of this is C. S. Lewis’s eschatological anthropology in The Weight of Glory:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. […] There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.[4]
As Lewis shows us here, eschatological realism has immediate implications for our day to day dealings in the world, and for our understanding of the significance of even the most ephemeral of relationships. As we shall see in the next post in this series, it also has implications for the way we understand the Bible’s relationship to diverse human cultures.
[1] Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001) 271. Kevin Vanhoozer engages with the idea and rebaptizes it “theodramatic realism” in “Pilgrim’s Digress: Christian Thinking on and about the Post/modern Way”, in Myron B. Penner (ed.), Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2005) 98.
[2] Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism 272.
[3] Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism 272.
[4] C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 2001) 46.
