Tag Archives: eschatology

Middleton’s “Strange Views” on Eschatology: The Tom Wright Connection, Part 1

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This is part 1 of a four-part post on my connections to N. T. Wright, the prolific New Testament scholar.

Many people have observed the similarity between my teaching on eschatology and Tom Wright’s position on the subject. Both Wright and I affirm the redemption of creation (a new heaven and a new earth) as the core biblical teaching on the expected future, in contrast to popular ideas of an otherworldly destiny in an immaterial “heaven.”

Middleton’s “Strange Views”

When I first came to understand the New Testament’s vision of the redemption of creation as the climax of God’s purposes, and then started teaching on the subject, I was an undergraduate theological student in Jamaica. That was back in 1976 and I had never heard of Tom Wright.

There were a number of influences on my thinking at the time, none more important that George Eldon Ladd’s The Pattern of New Testament Truth (1968). Ladd contrasted the dualism of Plato’s worldview (with its goal of ascent to a heavenly world) with the biblical vision of God’s coming from heaven to earth to redeem earthly life. Ladd then illustrated different ways this biblical vision was articulated in the Synoptic Gospels, in the Johannine literature, and in Paul.

Beginning in 1979, soon after I moved to Canada, I began teaching non-credit courses on the topic of a Christian worldview in a variety of campus ministry settings at different Ontario universities. This was an outreach program to Christian university students developed by Brian Walsh through the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. Brian also taught some of these courses.

The point of these courses was to help Christian students live a more integrated life. Through communal reflection on Scripture, theology, western intellectual history, and contemporary culture, along with exploring a sense of vocation in God’s world, many of our students were impelled to be more intentional about their discipleship. They were encouraged to connect their academic studies and participation in society with their Christian faith. This meant breaking down the sacred/secular split that most Christians have internalized, since this unbiblical dualism leads to a compartmentalized faith, which cripples the church’s witness to the coming of God’s kingdom in this world.

Although we had slightly different emphases in our courses, Brian and I were united in grounding all our “worldview” teaching in God’s desire to redeem creation. Our shared approach to the subject led us to co-author The Transforming Vision in 1984, which further developed our views on the subject, especially in Chap. 5: “Transformed by Redemption” and Chap. 6: “The Problem of Dualism.”

After that book, the redemption of creation continued to be a major theme of my teaching in campus ministry settings, not only in Canada, but also in the U.S. And this theme was central to my formal teaching as well, at both undergraduate and graduate institutions, in both countries.

For many years, undergraduate students at Roberts Wesleyan College would refer to my “strange views” on eschatology, as if they were distinctive to me. Although I assigned readings by other authors with a similar point of view, few of these readings were by biblical scholars and the biblical scholars I assigned weren’t that accessible to non-specialists. I was therefore delighted when Tom Wright began publishing his views on the subject, especially his popular Surprised by Hope (2008). Suddenly, my views were no longer quite so idiosyncratic. I was in good (scholarly) company.

In part 2 of this post I’ll explain when I first encountered Wright and how he began to influence my thinking.

Resurrection Ethics

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Matthew Davis

Matt Davis is writing an M.A. thesis at Northeastern Seminary on the ethics of resurrection in the New Testament. He kindly agreed for me to post a recent email exchange we had.

Guest Post from Matt Davis—A Student’s Note after Class

I’ve been struggling with how my life should be reflecting my study of resurrection ethics. You write on the last two pages of chapter 7 (“Resurrection and the Restoration of Rule”) in your forthcoming book, A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology, that the “resurrection turns the world upside down.”

I have been trying to get a better understanding of turning certain habits in my life upside down. I have been thinking more about my income and where my money goes. How much I give, and where I give it, is becoming increasingly important to me.

Also, you say that the cultural mandate and the resurrection “cannot be separated” and I agree. Your understanding of the cultural mandate in association with resurrection (the notion that God will restore the righteous to earth-stewardship) has given voice to my recent interest in ecology and being a responsible person concerning the earth. After discussing the resurrection, Paul says that “in the Lord our labor is not in vain” (1 Cor 15:58). I see people’s everyday ecological choices as laboring in the Lord, knowing they are not in vain.

Using the language of “power” and our “misuse” of that power, I feel an increased responsibility to fulfill the cultural mandate, and, in doing so, “anticipate and embody God’s new world that is coming” (last sentence in chapter 7).

I feel like I’m thinking aloud and most of this is obvious, but thought I would send this off to you since I wasn’t able to speak to you after class Thursday.

Middleton Response to Matt Davis

Thank you so much, Matt, for sharing these profound thoughts with me. I’m glad to see you thinking about (and struggling with) these things.

I certainly don’t have full answers to all your questions. And I can’t say that I fully live out my own ideals. But I think it is important to continue on the journey, and keep on raising questions so we don’t become complacent.

I also don’t believe we should become guilt-ridden and paralyzed over these questions. For two reasons.

First, salvation (including resurrection and the restoration of rule) is God’s gift to us before it is a calling to fulfill in our lives. God is already at work in us by his Spirit before we even begin to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

Second, we are part of a body/ community tasked with embodying God’s coming kingdom. Therefore, it is unrealistic to think that one individual could fully embody this kingdom. We are in process together with others, and should be encouraging each other and challenging each other to manifest the kingdom in more and more consistent ways.

One of the things I’ve said for a long time is that I need a church community that is aware they are trying to answer the question of what it means to be the church faithfully in the contemporary context. That I haven’t always found such a community has often been a source of disappointment for me.

As you know, the church I’ve been attending (Community of the Savior) was constituted formally as a Free Methodist Church this past Sunday (and I became a charter member). At that ceremony one of our pastors said explicitly that we are beginning to realize that we need to keep asking the question of how we are to be the church today (rather than just continue on our merry way in acquiescence with the status quo).

This awareness of the question helps me know that “in the Lord [my] labor is not in vain” (1 Cor 15:58).

We should talk more about this face-to-face.

Creation to Eschaton—And the Kitchen Sink?

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You may be wondering about the title I’ve chosen for this website, “Creation to Eschaton.” Or, to put it in ordinary English, “Beginning to End.” What sort of topics will I cover with an expansive title like that?

Woody Allen commented ironically that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote a book about everything, called Being and Nothingness. You can’t get more comprehensive than that, he noted.

Well, I won’t be quite as comprehensive as Sartre, though my interests are pretty broad. The title I’ve given this website indicates that I’m interested particularly in theological matters of origins and endings. But I’m also interested in what comes in-between.

In the course of giving a heads-up about what sorts of topics you can expect in this blog in the weeks ahead (I expect to post about once a week), I thought I’d take the opportunity to first look back. What unites the diverse topics I’ve covered in my past research and writing? This is a question I’m often asked.

Unlike some biblical scholars who focus on one particular block of material (such as the Johannine literature, the Pauline epistles, the Pentatuch, or the Book of the Twelve), I seem to have dipped into Scripture at multiple points (and I’ve often gone beyond biblical studies per se, into theology and cultural analysis).

So I’ll try and clarify the rationale for what I’ve been doing.

Then I’ll look ahead.

Creation Theology

Much of my previous work has explored biblical creation theology, including a book on humanity created as the image of God (The Liberating Image), which is dependent on an earlier article of the same title.

Creation theology is also central to essays I’ve written on:

In all cases I’ve been interested in the ethics associated with creation theology. How might understanding God’s original intent for the world direct us to live in the present? This emphasis is found in pretty much everything I’ve written on the topic of creation, but it’s the explicit focus of a short entry on the “Image of God” that I wrote for the Baker Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics.

Eschatology

In theology, attention to endings is typically known as “eschatology” (eschaton is Greek for “end”). In contrast to creation, I’ve written only one article focused on this topic (“A New Heaven and a New Earth”), which has since become the basis of a book with the same title.

But like creation, my exploration of eschatology is driven by an ethical passion. How might understanding God’s telos or goal for the world shape our lives today?

In Scripture, the beginning corresponds to the end, a motif that German theologians have called Urzeit and Endzeit. Thus the eschaton is God’s new (redeemed) creation; it is the fruition of the Creator’s purposes from the beginning, after evil has been overcome.

Creation-to-Eschaton as a Normative Framework

I have found that the narrative arc from creation to eschaton (the biblical metanarrative or macro story) provides crucial orientation for approaching the manifold complexity of particular texts in Scripture (especially problematic texts). And by framing the meaning of human life in the present, the macro story of Scripture provides guidance for thinking about, and living in, the contemporary world.

This creation-to-eschaton framework (the biblical worldview) is central to the first book I coauthored with Brian Walsh—The Transforming Vision, though the narrative character of this worldview wasn’t fully clear to us at the time.

The narrative character of the biblical worldview became more explicit in the later book I wrote with Walsh—Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be (an attempt to contextualize biblical faith in postmodern culture)—and it is central to our stand-alone essay that articulates the core argument of that book.

The creation-to-eschaton framework is especially prominent in my forthcoming A New Heaven and a New Earth, which has a section explicitly entitled “From Creation to Eschaton.”

But, in one way or another, this framework grounds almost everything I’ve written. It would be tedious to list each case, but a recent example is the article I coauthored with Michael Gorman on “Salvation” for the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible.

Evil and Suffering

My interest in the ethical implications of creation and eschaton (God’s purposes for the cosmos) has led me to reflect on the problem of evil and suffering—both in human life and in the Bible. Undoubtedly, my own life experience has lent an existential edge to these reflections.

Awareness of evil and suffering is most explicit in an essay in which I contrasted approaches to theodicy (the problem of evil) in the western theological tradition and in Scripture.

A focus on suffering is evident in an essay on Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn that Brian Walsh and I wrote, and it motivated my proposal for moving beyond a naive reading of Psalm 23 (through interaction with a Cockburn song).

The awareness of evil shaped my analysis of violence in the David and Goliath story and the abuse of power in the narrative of Samuel’s relationship to Saul; both essays anticipate a book for Eerdmans on 1 Samuel plan to work on in the future, where the focus is on human responsibility.

Concern with evil and suffering is also the basis of some shorter pieces I’ve written—on Herod in the Christmas story, on the lament psalms, and on “Violence” (for the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible). And it guides my interest in working on a new book (which is now complete) on Abraham and Job.

Caribbean Theology

One other area of interest that deserves mention is the Caribbean. I grew up in Jamaica and did my undergraduate theological studies there. In the years since, I have continued to visit family and friends and kept professional connections with Jamaica Theological Seminary (my alma mater) and the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology.

My Jamaican heritage has motivated me to explore theology from and for the Caribbean. Thus I’ve written on a spirituality of cultural resistance in the music of Bob Marley and the Wailers, and I’ve advocated the need for creation theology in Caribbean life; the latter essay appears in an anthology of works by Caribbean scholars that I edited with Garnett Roper, on behalf of Jamaica Theological Seminary.

Looking Ahead

I plan on continuing to explore topics in creation theology and eschatology and much that is in-between.

Look for blog posts on the nature of the world as a cosmic temple, on creation themes in Isaiah, and new light on humans as the image of God—especially what I’ve learned since my 2005 book on the subject.

I plan to post on various topics associated with my new book on eschatology, including:

  • why holistic eschatology (the renewal of the earth) is important for the church;
  • the meaning of “heaven” in Scripture;
  • New Testament texts that seem to contradict the renewal of the earth;
  • what the Bible intends by its description of cosmic catastrophe (including stars falling from heaven);
  • and the loss and recovery of the idea of the “new earth” in the history of Christian thinking about eschatology.

I hope to post my thoughts on various topics connected to the interpretation of Scripture, such as:

  • why I love (and hate) theological interpretation of Scripture;
  • my understanding of Abraham as morally deficient in Genesis 22;
  • the possibility that the book of Job might be an answer to Abraham;
  • the meaning of Sabbath beyond the sacred/secular split;
  • and my assumptions for studying and teaching the Bible.

Other topics I may post on include:

  • why I am neither conservative nor liberal (and loving it);
  • the best way to read an academic book;
  • and the most important questions I’ve learned to ask in my intellectual journey.

Also expect to see my responses to various articles and books I’m reading in biblical studies and theology, including works by Caribbean authors.

And one more thing—which might be just a little bit controversial (for some).

I recently joined a three-year interdisciplinary research project with nine other Christian scholars, focusing on the relationship of the evolutionary origins of humanity to the doctrine of the fall and original sin. We plan to produce a conference, then a book, on the subject.

Given that the entire research team is a bunch of orthodox, trinitatian, Nicean Christians who take both science and the Bible seriously, we’re approaching the topic in humility, but without fear.

As the only Old Testament scholar on the project, I expect to post some of my thoughts on Genesis 3 in light of hominin evolution and the origin of Homo sapiens sapiens. These posts are meant to be exploratory, preliminary to writing an extended essay on the topic.

And the kitchen sink?

Thankfully, I’ll leave that out.