Grounded in Heaven

Recentering Christian Hope and Life on God

Michael Allen

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781467451260
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Eschatology and ethics are joined at the hip, says Michael Allen, and both need theocentric reorientation. In Grounded in Heaven Allen retrieves the traditional concept of the beatific vision and seeks to bring Christ back into the heart of our theology and our lives on earth.

Responding to the earthly-mindedness of much recent theology, Allen places his focus on God and the heavenly future while also appreciating ways in which the Reformed tradition provides a unique angle on broadly catholic concerns. Reaching back to classical ethics as well as its reformation by Calvin and other Reformed theologians, Grounded in Heaven offers a distinctly Protestant account of the ascetical calling to be heavenly-minded and to deny one's self.

1

In the End, God

Retrieving a Theological Eschatology

Eschatology came of age in the twentieth century in many ways. In that century Karl Barth said that any theology that is not wholly eschatological has nothing at all to do with Jesus Christ. In that century Ernst Käsemann argued that apocalyptic is the mother of all theology. Such claims for the importance of eschatology have been matched by new emphases regarding the substance of eschatology. And, perhaps more than any other person, Jürgen Moltmann has insisted that eschatology suffuses the Christian faith, and invigorates the moral and political imagination, with hope. Within the sphere of influence of Dutch Reformed theology as well—especially that based on the work of Abraham Kuyper and the so-called neo-Calvinism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—eschatology has been a major area of study. Proposed reforms in eschatology get at the nature of Christian hope and its telos (eternal life in heaven? new heavens and new earth?). Watchwords of this new emphasis can be identified: “embodied,” “earthy,” “cosmic,” and “holistic.”

Reform can be productive or parasitic. Theologically speaking, attempts to revitalize a doctrine, practice, or church sometimes lead to flourishing by way of deepening. But reforms can also be so intently or myopically focused as to lead to the unintended loss of a wider theological context and of confessional integrity. The danger of polemics in theological debate, then, is not only a matter of tone (whether loving or vindictive) and of content (whether true or false) but also of breadth (whether well balanced or narrow). Too many times, potentially prophetic words misfire because they are separated from a wider doctrinal commitment to the whole counsel of God. In such cases, a reform (perhaps a needful and good reform) takes a parasitic turn and eats away at the substance of the doctrine, confession, practice, or church. Should modern reforms to Christian eschatological hope be viewed as productive or as parasitic? How can we steer them toward the former and away from the latter?

Hope grasps at the future, but a serious Christian hope for our times also needs to reach back to the past.¹ The present chapter argues that contemporary Reformed theology, or at least the segment thereof that is heavily influenced by the neo-Calvinists or by the Kuyperian tradition, tends at times to maintain and extend its Reformed distinctiveness at the cost of its catholic substance. This forgetfulness is symptomatic not only of historical amnesia but of biblical dislocation. In several prominent recent accounts, central elements of the Kuyperian vision have been articulated in such a way that the center of our faith—the God who is with us (Immanuel)—goes missing at the finale. To regain a genuine Reformed catholicity, we need to retrieve an eschatology that is unabashedly and substantively theological.

Not that the neo-Calvinist emphasis upon the universality of Christ’s lordship is wrong; far from it, for it too is exegetically vital and theologically central. Nor that the Augustinianism of the Kuyperians, with its testimony to Christ’s reign throughout history and his providential governance of all things unto their blessed end, is misguided; again, nothing could be more appropriate and fundamental in reading the witness of both the prophets and the apostles. But the neo-Calvinist emphasis often forecloses other lines of scriptural teaching that have marked the church’s life and ministry through the centuries. Kuyperians have been unduly suspicious of these teachings as well. In particular, Kuyperian eschatology has so emphasized the earthiness of our Christian hope that it has sometimes lost sight of broader biblical priorities and has consequently undercut the catholic tradition’s emphasis upon communion with God and the ultimate bliss of the beatific vision. While Kuyperians have maintained an Augustinian emphasis upon God’s grace and Christ’s lordship, which bring us to our designated end in the kingdom of God, they have sometimes let slip the precise content of that end, namely, the presence of the triune God. We need to be wary, therefore, of unwittingly falling into an eschatological naturalism that speaks of God instrumentally (as a means to, or instigator of, an end) but fails to confess communion with God as our one true end (in whom alone any other things are to be enjoyed).

Lord of All: The Kuyperian Reform of Christian Cosmology

Neo-Calvinism has shaped the Reformed theological world like no other movement in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Largely owing to the instigation of Abraham Kuyper and to the analysis of Herman Bavinck, the Dutch Reformed theological vision has had inestimable impact far beyond the borders of the Netherlands or even of its immigrant churches elsewhere. Reformed theologians in other geographic, cultural, and denominational backgrounds have been resourced by Dutch Reformed theologians, ranging from Kuyper to Bavinck to Berkouwer to Hoekema.² In recent years N. T. Wright has advanced Kuyperian principles in his many academic and popular writings, extending the influence of the tradition much more widely in his prolific work.³

Further, the tradition has had a catholic ripple effect in various ways. No doubt, the most intellectually respected movement from the Reformed world of late has been that of “Reformed epistemology” as developed by Alvin Plantinga.⁴ Nicholas Wolterstorff has established himself as one of the most significant philosophers of recent decades, participating in conversations on a range of topics including the doctrine of God, aesthetics, justice, and the doctrine of divine revelation.⁵ Both Plantinga and Wolterstorff have been Gifford lecturers, perhaps the highest mark of academic distinction in their field.

Not only in the highest echelons of philosophical inquiry but also in the grassroots movements of Christian education, the Dutch Reformed neo-Calvinist vision has spread like wildfire. Many primary and secondary schools now operate with an awareness of God’s sovereignty or lordship over all things, of the calling to take captive every thought to Christ, and of the need, therefore, to think systemically about Christian formation and education. Recent criticisms by James K. A. Smith of neo-Calvinist worldview education only illustrate the strength of the movement inasmuch as they offer qualifications and contexts for its furtherance (not its demolition, as some misinformed readers of Smith surmise).⁶ And institutions with no specifically Reformed commitments (e.g., Wheaton College) are marked by philosophies of education that owe much to the emphases of the neo-Calvinists, as evidenced by the programmatic statements issued previously by Arthur Holmes and more recently by Duane Litfin.⁷ Evangelicals at Wheaton and other schools have not all gone Dutch, of course, but it takes little detective work to see the lessons learned from the Kuyperians. I experienced the strengths of this neo-Calvinist approach in my studies not only at Wheaton College (for multiple degrees) but also in a Christian school founded by the Dutch Reformed in Miami, Florida, of all places. When a movement from the Netherlands and the Dutch Midwest has reached the “capital of Latin America,” one can see something of its wide cultural influence.

What have the neo-Calvinists given to this wider world of academe and its various pockets or institutions of culture making? It is not inaccurate to suggest that the Kuyperian advance was a distinctly Reformed extension of certain reformational truths heralded by Martin Luther and John Calvin regarding the doctrines of creation, of humanity, and of vocation. Kuyperians have responded to the later temptation of modernity and its relocation of the religious in the private sphere by reaffirming and elaborating upon those reformers’ teaching on the glory of the ordinary. In the hands of the Kuyperians, the sacred/secular dichotomy has been critiqued, reminding countless modern Christians that all of life is to be lived as unto the Lord (1 Cor 10:31).

Further, we must note that the Kuyperians have rooted these expositions of created reality in a deeper matter: the doctrine of the triune God. Perhaps no one is as impressive in this regard as that great dogmatician, Herman Bavinck. In his 1904 essay “The Future of Calvinism,” he attempted to express the core commitments of the movement:

The root principle of this Calvinism is the confession of God’s absolute sovereignty. Not one special attribute of God, for instance His love or justice, His holiness or equity, but God Himself as such in the unity of all His attributes and perfection of His entire Being is the point of departure for the thinking and acting of the Calvinist. From this root principle everything that is specifically Reformed may be derived and explained. It was this that led to the sharp distinction between what is God’s and creature’s, to belief in the sole authority of the Holy Scriptures, in the all-sufficiency of Christ and His word, in the omnipotence of the work of grace. Hence also the sharp distinction between the divine and human in the Person and the two natures of Christ, between the external internal call, between the sign and the matter signified in the sacrament. From this source likewise sprang the doctrine of the absolute dependence of the creature, as it is expressed in the Calvinistic confessions in regard to providence, foreordination, election, the inability of man. By this principle also the Calvinist was led to the use of that through-going consistent theological method, which distinguishes him from Romanist and other Protestant theologians. Not only in the whole range of his theology, but also outside of this, in every sphere of life and science, his effort aims at the recognition and maintenance of God as God over against all creatures. In the work of creation and regeneration, in sin and grace, in Adam and Christ, in the Church and the sacraments, it is in each case God who reveals and upholds His sovereignty and leads it to triumph notwithstanding all disregard and resistance. There is something heroic and grand and imposing in this Calvinistic conception. Viewed in its light the whole course of history becomes a gigantic contest, in which God carries through His sovereignty, and makes it, like a mountain stream, overcome all resistance in the end, bringing the creature to a willing or unwilling, but in either case unqualified, recognition of His divine glory. From God all things are, and accordingly they all return to Him. He is God and remains God now and forever; Jehovah, the Being, the one that was and is and that is to come.

For this reason the Calvinist in all things recurs upon God, and does not rest satisfied before he has traced back everything to the sovereign good-pleasure of God as its ultimate and deepest cause. He never loses himself in the appearance of things, but penetrates to their realities. Behind the phenomena he searches for the noumena, the things that are not seen, from which the things visible have been born. He does not take his stand in the midst of history, but out of time ascends into the heights of eternity. History is naught but the gradual unfolding of what to God is an eternal present. For his heart, his thinking, his life, the Calvinist cannot find rest in these terrestrial things, the sphere of what is becoming, changing, forever passing by. From the process of salvation he therefore recurs upon the decree of salvation, from history to the idea. He does not remain in the outer court of the temple, but seeks to enter into the innermost sanctuary.⁸

The elaboration extends quite far, of course, but it centers always upon God. While Kuyperianism may be most noteworthy in the integrity of created reality, which it honors and upholds over against the recurring temptations of gnostic or escapist metaphysics, eschatology, and ethics, Bavinck argues that the unique feature of this (and the wider Calvinist) tradition is the doctrine of God applied consistently. He has not argued that the doctrine of God itself is distinctive; rather, its consistent connection to and rule over all other areas of inquiry distinguishes this approach to faith and practice from all comers. For the Calvinist all things recur to God; the neo-Calvinist insists that the novum of the kingdom is precisely this universal and ultimate recurrence: Christ is making all things new (Rev 21:5). To think well, then, of the kingdom or of our civic responsibilities in Christ’s various domains, we must always trace matters back from the realm of economics or gender or politics or knowing to God himself.

One example of this connection between the Trinitarian material of the faith and its methodological application across the dogmatic loci occurs in the realm of eschatology. Inasmuch as God created humanity to be the image of God (Gen 1:26–27) and has restored humanity to that same image in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:29), the neo-Calvinists have insisted that we must see the connection between creation and eschatology.⁹ They have expanded upon this further by noting ways in which the biblical writings express our hope in Christ in forms that are creaturely, embodied, and earthy. Whether through returning to prophetic texts like Isaiah 60 and their teaching regarding the future destiny of the ships of Tarshish, or by means of honoring the canonical closure found only in the depiction of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21–22, the Kuyperians have led the way in articulating a this-worldly hope for Christians.¹⁰

The Earthy Hope: The Kuyperian Reform of Christian Eschatology

The Kuyperian advance has focused at great length upon eschatology and the ways in which it connects to other topics: creation, humanity, image of God, and ethics among them. Perhaps no book so extensively illustrates this commitment as J. Richard Middleton’s much-heralded A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology.¹¹ It will repay our efforts to note his exposition, his forms of argument, and his application to Christian faith and practice. Only after paying due attention to his own argument might it be helpful to present a statement of caution.

Middleton’s book itself addresses a polemical target, what he calls the “problem of otherworldly hope.” As he surveys the heightened eschatological inquiry of the modern era, he avers: “The twentieth century has seen more intense focus on eschatology than ever before. Yet much of this eschatological reflection has been confused and inchoate, conflating an unbiblical impetus to transcend earthly life with the biblical affirmation of earthly life. This is true among both professional theologians and church members, and also among Christians of differing theological traditions” (15). He further focuses his target: “Although there are many New Testament texts that Christians often read as if they teach a heavenly destiny, the texts do not actually say this” (14). Middleton consistently functions with a dichotomy: the spiritualist approach of otherworldly hope says heaven is our destiny, while the biblical witness says heaven is not our final homeland.

Repeatedly Middleton notes a seeming tension laden in the heart of the church’s lived theology and explicitly in the testimony of some of her most significant theologians. “While the traditional doctrine of the resurrection of the body is usually affirmed, this typically stands in some tension with the idea of an atemporal, immaterial realm” (23; see also 12). The movement of his text attempts to alleviate this tension by presenting what he repeatedly terms a “holistic eschatology.” The argument moves in five parts: from creation to eschaton; holistic salvation in the Old Testament; the New Testament’s vision of cosmic renewal; problem texts for holistic eschatology; and the ethics of the kingdom.

Middleton’s rebuttal takes the form of sketching “the coherent biblical theology (beginning in the Old Testament) that c...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Eclipse of Heaven
• 1. In the End, God: Retrieving a Theological Eschatology
• 2. The Visibility of the Invisible God: Reforming the Beatific Hope
• 3. Heavenly-Mindedness: Retrieving the Ascetical Way of Life with God
• 4. Self-Denial: Reforming the Practices of Renunciation
• Epilogue
• Bibliographic Essay
• Index of Authors
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index