Apocalyptic Thought in Early Christianity (Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History)

Daly, Robert, S.J.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441206220
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This volume explores how early Christian understandings of apocalyptic writings and teachings are reflected in the theology, social practices, and institutions of the early church. It enables pastors and serious students of the Bible--particularly those interested in patristics and church history--to read the book of Revelation and related writings through ancient Christian eyes. This is the second volume in Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History, a partnership between Baker Academic and the Stephen and Catherine Pappas Patristic Institute of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts. The series is a deliberate outreach by the Orthodox community to Protestant and Catholic seminarians, pastors, and theologians. In these multiauthor books, contributors from all traditions focus on the patristic (especially Greek patristic) heritage.

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“I KNOW YOUR WORKS”

Grace and Judgment in the Apocalypse

THEODORE STYLIANOPOULOS

In the inaugural vision of the prophet John, the exalted Christ thunders a series of seven oracles or prophetic messages to the seven Asian churches (Rev. 1:12–3:22). Five of those messages contain the refrain “I know your works.”[1] The third message explicitly warns, “I will give to each of you according to your works” (Rev. 2:23c). Throughout the Apocalypse numerous scenes depict horrific punishments for sinners and celestial blessings for the righteous distributed respectively on the basis of deeds. In the account of the Last Judgment, God’s books are opened and all humans are judged “according to their works” (Rev. 20:12–13). The final oracles of Christ include the utterance: “Behold, I am coming soon, and my reward is with me, to repay each according to his own work” (Rev. 22:12). It seems that in the scope of the Apocalypse the standard by which God dispenses eschatological rewards or punishments is the principle of judgment according to works.

My task in this essay is twofold. At one level I want to examine the meaning of “works” (erga) in the Apocalypse. Does Revelation teach salvation by works? It certainly seems so, but in what sense? At a deeper level I want also to engage the question of grace and judgment, an issue dramatically prominent in the Apocalypse and problematic particularly for those who seek to read Revelation as God’s word.[2] Because the Apocalypse presents itself as a book of “prophecy” (1:3; 22:7, 10, 18–19), and for many the climax of biblical prophecy,[3] to raise the question of the theological significance of its message in the light of the gospel is of no small consequence. And I propose to accomplish this double task with an eye on the greatest preacher and theologian of the gospel—the apostle Paul.

Judgment according to Works

Several years ago Kent L. Yinger published an insightful monograph[4] in which he analyzed what he calls the motif of judgment according to deeds in the Jewish Scriptures, the Pseudepigrapha, the Qumran literature, as well as the letters of Paul. Building on the “new perspective” on Judaism and Paul advocated by E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn, and now others,[5] Yinger argued that all this Jewish literature, with minor variations and developments, evidences the same covenantal perspective of grace and judgment familiar in the biblical tradition. The focus of Yinger’s interest was Paul. His main purpose was to demonstrate the thesis, outrageous for the Reformation tradition, that the principle of justification by grace through faith and the principle of judgment according to deeds stand next to each other in Paul’s major letters with astonishing comfort.[6] According to Yinger, Paul’s thought in this respect is in complete continuity with what Yinger calls the “fundamental and living axiom”[7] of judgment according to deeds widely attested in Jewish literature. Further, according to Yinger, Paul reinforces the concept of judgment according to deeds by reviving the parallel concept of reward according to deeds, something that “had nearly died out in Judaism of the last two centuries of the pre-Christian era.”[8]

Works in Paul’s Letters

I acknowledge my indebtedness to Yinger’s background work pertinent to this essay on grace and judgment in the Apocalypse. I begin by raising the question about “works” or “deeds” (erga). What is the nature and content of those works or deeds that serve as basis of God’s judgment in the Jewish tradition, Paul, and the Apocalypse? In the case of Second Temple Judaism, the works in question are the works of the Law, the Torah, viewed in its unity and totality. In the case of Paul things, of course, are quite different. In Paul the centrality of the Torah has been replaced by the centrality of Christ, a fundamental position of which Yinger is fully aware. Nevertheless, Yinger, influenced in part by the “new perspective” on Judaism and Paul, does not fully grasp the role and implications of the “works of the Law” (erga nomou) in Paul. While Yinger, following the “new perspective,” rightly rejects the erroneous view of Judaism as a religion of meritorious works, he does not clearly see that Paul implicitly marks the first sign of the breakup of the unity of the Torah or Law (nomos),[9] an assumption that the author of the Apocalypse also significantly shares with Paul.

This point needs further clarification. The apostle Paul, as is well known, holds to the authority of the Torah as Scripture but sets aside the old order of the Torah as the standard of salvation. Yet at the same time he attests to what Yinger calls the Jewish “axiom” of judgment according to works as an operative soteriological principle. But the decisive difference has to do with Paul’s understanding of the content of those works. The works that Paul asserts to be a standard of judgment are no longer the “works of the Law” (erga nomou), namely, circumcision, festivals, kosher foods, and other such Jewish practices.[10] Nor can it be demonstrated that, as the “new perspective” would have it, such Jewish practices were for Paul an expression of “ethnic” claims that could be set aside by virtue of the universality of the gospel. Paul in no way thinks in those terms. For him the whole Law is God’s holy Law given for life.[11] Yet, for Paul those God-given religious practices that fundamentally defined the identity of God’s elect people are now, at God’s own initiative in Christ and by reason of their inefficacy due to the power of sin, put aside as the criteria of salvation.[12] For Paul the soteriological function of works as a formal principle is still operative and in continuity with Second Temple Judaism, but the nature and content of works is decisively different. The meaning of works pertains no longer to the observance of the corpus of the Law as a unity but to a new spiritual and ethical understanding of God’s law determined by God’s revelation in Christ. The new basis of judgment according to works in Paul has to do with the keeping of what he instructively calls “commandments of God” (entolai Theou, 1 Cor. 7:19). These are drawn from the Torah, particularly the Decalogue (Rom. 13:8–10), but yet differentiated from circumcision and other Jewish religious practices.[13] The commandments of God which are still obligatory under the new order of Christ, and which elsewhere Paul calls “good work” or “well-doing” (ergon agathon, Rom. 2:7, 10),[14] are of a spiritual and ethical nature having to do with the transformed life of the “new creation.”[15] Those commandments for Paul sum up the “just requirement of the Law” and must be fulfilled by those who now are in Christ and walk according to the Spirit (Rom. 8:4; 13:8–9; Gal. 5:13–26).

I do not claim that we find in Paul an explicit distinction between moral and ritual commandments, or that the apostle advocates a universal moral law as clearly as later patristic authors do. But I am contending that Paul has made a critical, though implicit, move in that direction. Paul’s sweeping condemnation of humanity in Romans 1–2 pivots around idolatry and immorality. His whole argument about the impartiality of God’s judgment on both Gentiles and Jews, whether reward or wrath, rests precisely on doing those things required by the Torah that are also written on Gentile hearts (Rom. 2:5–15). The lists of vices in several Pauline letters,[16] which suggest contrasting virtues, implicitly make the same point. For Paul, the required works under Christ as standards of God’s judgment are of a new nature and content—for lack of a better expression “spiritual and ethical”—drawn from the Torah but now transformed in the context of the new creation in Christ and the Spirit.[17] Thus while the principle of judgment according to works as a formal theological principle is attested in Paul in continuity with Judaism, the nature and content of those works are in significant discontinuity with the traditional understanding of the Torah and its injunctions as a unity.[18] That, of course, explains the magnitude of the controversy in early Jewish and Christian circles over Paul’s ministry, and charges of apostasy against him (Acts 21:20–21, 28), because of his proclamation of the gospel to the Gentiles based on faith in Christ and life in the Spirit and free from the yoke of the Mosaic Law.

Works in the Apocalypse

The author of Revelation stands on similar ground as does Paul, but he relativizes the authority of the Jewish Scriptures even more radically. On the one hand, the prophet John is enormously indebted to the Jewish Scriptures through his use of scriptural vocabulary, images, concepts, as well as fundamental theological categories. On the other hand, unlike Paul, he neither appeals to the authority of, nor explicitly cites, the Scriptures. Being the direct recipient of the living word of God from Christ and angelic figures, the seer seems to claim an authority higher than that of the scriptural word. At the same time, however, just as in the case of Paul, the seer requires faithful obedience to the “commandments of God” (entolai Theou, Rev. 12:17; 14:12). These commandments are nowhere explicitly defined in the Apocalypse. Certainly they have nothing to do with keeping or not keeping Jewish religious practices. Revelation evidences no conflict whatever over the “works of the Law” that mightily troubled Paul’s ministry. For John and his communities, that issue is long dead. The controversy with Jews alluded to in the oracles to Smyrna and Philadelphia (Rev. 2:9; 3:9) involves other matters.[19]

An overview of the Apocalypse shows that the author’s major concerns are virtually identical with Paul’s—idolatry and immorality. Thus for the prophet John, too, for whom the breakup of the Torah is by now an established presupposition, the content of those required commandments of God are of an ethical nature. John unarguably shares with both Second Temple Judaism and Paul the formal soteriological principle of judgment “according to deeds,” a standard repeated time and again in the Apocalypse.[20] But those deeds, though drawn from the Torah, are now redefined by the new situation in Christ and particularly the requirement of keeping the “witness” (martyria, Rev. 12:17) and the faithfulness (pistis, Rev. 14:12) of Jesus. In the case of the seer, just as in the case of Paul, we find continuity with Judaism on the formal principle of judgment according to works, but striking discontinuity as regards the understanding of the nature and content of those works.

The meaning of “works” in Revelation is not denoted as much as it is connoted. The understanding of works, whether deserving reward or punishment, is connected to the familiar biblical division of humanity into two groups, saints and sinners, insiders and outsiders, a view also occurring in Paul.[21] In the Apocalypse this division is depicted in a far more pronounced apocalyptic perspective. Nevertheless, as also in Paul it is not strictly sectarian because God’s judgment—and so too the standard of judgment according to works—applies equally to both insiders and outsiders on the basis of the impartiality of God. The saints are praised for their commendable works but they are also severely rebuked for condemnable works. The sinners, who are repeatedly designated with the telling characterization “inhabitants of the earth” or “earth-dwellers” (lit. “those who dwell on the earth”)[22] do works for which they are severely punished but are assumed also to be capable of repentance,[23] and therefore of deeds for which they would be rewarded. The works themselves, whether positive or negative, are defined in polar relationship to each other.

With respect to the saints, the meaning of “works” in Revelation is bound up with the meaning of a whole series of words occurring in the same contexts such as “labor” or “toil” (kopos), “patience” or “endurance” (hypomonē), “affliction” or “tribulation” (thlipsis), “poverty” (ptōcheia), “love” (agapē), “faith” or “faithfulness” (pistis), and “service” (diakonia). On the one hand, the Christian communities are variously praised and encouraged on account of their works that evince such attributes. On the other hand, the communities are admonished and threatened with extreme judgment on account of the lack of such attributes. John’s primary purpose is hortatory in line with the epistolary character of the Apocalypse. The ultimate intent is not to condemn and punish but to praise and chastise in order to bring about a way of life that God will crown with eschatological blessings. The standard of judgment according to works functions, on the one hand, as praise and promise of reward and, on the other hand, as critique and admonition leading to correction. In line with the author’s rhetorical purposes, the conclusion of each of the seven oracles, and the conclusion of the whole book, highlight the eschatological blessings promised to those who achieve victory through commendable works.

Here we may connect with Yinger’s study on several points. The understanding of works in Revelation signifies a whole way of life, just as Yinger finds true of the entire Jewish tradition and Paul. The issue is not one of counting and weighing individual works and their merits in a casuistic way, but one of whole-hearted devotion and obedience to God. Revelation also takes for granted the biblical principle that God’s judgment begins with the household of God. This principle, however, though it distinguishes true and false members in the same faith community, does not achieve in Revelation or Paul’s letters the same kind of sectarian significance that Yinger finds prominent in the Pseudepigrapha and Qumran where salvation is for the faithful alone. For Paul and the prophet John the main dichotomy is not between true and false Christians as much as between Christians and outsiders for whom the hope of salvation still remains. Nevertheless, that God’s judgment according to deeds begins with God’s own household entails the considerable implication that the security of the saints in Paul as well as in the Apocalypse provides no immunity from God’s judgment, just as in the Jewish tradition according to Yinger. Finally, Revelation abundantly attests to the principle of not only judgment but also reward according to works that Yinger sees revived in Paul because of the new confidence of believers who already enjoy in part the new creation in Christ and the Spirit.[24]

The more specific aspects of the understanding of works in the Apocalypse are related to the author’s major concerns about false teaching within the communities and persecution against Christians from without. Throughout the Apocalypse both concerns are linked in a particular way to the recurring terminology of toil, affliction, endurance, faithfulness, and witness. Neither reason nor space here calls for attention to these issues that have been taken up by numerous commentaries and studies.[25] As regards false teaching, suffice it to say that the false teachers, signified by the code words Balaam, Nicolaitans, and Jezebel (Rev. 2:14–15, 20), are influential rivals to John who advocate more or less free interaction with pagan culture and its attendant idolatrous practices.[26] In biblical perspective, the seer’s references to fornication (porneia, porneuein, Rev. 2:14, 20–21), and also the parallel references to either soiled or white garments (Rev. 3:4, 5, 18), have most likely in view not sexual matters alone as much as a compromised way of life pertaining to the dominant Greco-Roman culture. It is Rome, the “great harlot,” that has intoxicated and corrupted the nations and “the earth-dwellers” with the “wine of its fornication.”[27]

As regards persecution, the disputed issue of the nature and intensity of persecution in Asia Minor in the late first century is not central to this essay.[28] I take it for granted that, just as in the case of 1 Thessalonians, 1 Peter, and later Pliny’s letter to Trajan (112 CE), there is early evidence of significant forms of social oppression and specific instances o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. “I Know Your Works”: Grace and Judgment in the Apocalypse
• 2. Apocalyptic Themes in the Monumental and Minor Art of Early Christianity
• 3. Turning Points in Early Christian Apocalypse Exegesis
• 4. “Faithful and True”: Early Christian Apocalyptic and the Person of Christ
• 5. Pseudo-Hippolytus’s In sanctum Pascha: A Mystery Apocalypse
• 6. The Divine Face and the Angels of the Face: Jewish Apocalyptic Themes in Early Christology and Pneumatology
• 7. Hippolytus and Cyril of Jerusalem on the Antichrist: When Did an Antichrist Theology First Emerge in Early Christian Baptismal Catechesis?
• 8. Expectations of the End in Early Syriac Christianity
• 9. Heavenly Mysteries: Themes from Apocalyptic Literature in the Macarian Homilies and Selected Other Fourth-Century Ascetical Writers
• 10. Eschatological Horizons in the Cappadocian Fathers
• 11. Christ’s Descent to the Underworld in Ancient Ritual and Legend
• 12. The Early Christian Daniel Apocalyptica
• 13. Temple and Angel: Apocalyptic Themes in the Theology of St. John Damascene
• 14. Images of the Second Coming and the Fate of the Soul in Middle Byzantine Art
• Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Subject Index
• Modern Authors Index
• Ancient Sources Index
• Notes