Saved By The Apocalypse Of Divine Love

Last updated on: May 30, 2018 at 12:10 am by Scot McKnight

Saved By The Apocalypse Of Divine Love 2018-05-26T10:15:17-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Is the Christus victor model of redemption sufficient to explain all the redemption that is needed? Many over the years have asked this about the propitiatory model — will it lead to transformed lives? Or of justification — does it lead to a life of justice? (Tim Keller has often said so.) And now the apocalyptic theologians are asking if the Christus victor model is adequate for comprehending a Christian theory of salvation. We are looking at Philip Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology. In true apocalyptic thinker fashion, he opens by posing his view against N.T. Wright.

Ziegler turns to both Ernst Käsemann and J. Louis Martyn to guide him into redemption “by the apocalypse of sovereign divine love.” At the heart of apocalyptic soteriology is a shift from anthropology to cosmology as the core of redemption, which entails from personal to cosmic redemption. I will watch to see if Ziegler actually escapes from the typical result of Christus victor theology, namely, social justice as the arena of redemption. My reading of apocalyptic theologians is they end up in liberation theology as do Christus victor theologians, which is why many in the progressive camps like either both of these schools of thought or one or the other.

He begins with Käsemann:

To be a human being, to have life in the body as a creature, is to be irrevocably knit into the fabric of a larger reality: “the world.” This at first seemingly banal claim proves to be anything but. For, in the first place, it signals a polemical repudiation of modern characterizations of human beings whose chief currency is talk of individual autonomy and “self-reflexivity.” Such visions of autonomy are recognized to be illusory when we acknowledge, as Paul does, that the human “body” is “that piece of world which we ourselves are and for which we bear responsibility because it was the earliest gift of our Creator to us.” To be a human being is to live n and to be “of a piece with” a world that is constitutive of our individual existence. All humanity is always already claimed humanity.

Now, envisaged evangelically, human existence is held firmly within a specific understanding of the world as a field of struggle between competing powers, and indeed finally as the site of a single contest between God and the anti-God powers of the fallen creation.

So, as “specific pieces” of this world, human beings stand under one of two signs, that of the Christ of God or that of the Sin that owns Adam: one has either Christ or anti-Christ as a lord. In such an apocalyptic vision of things, there is no thought that human existence as such is or could ever be neutral vis-a-vis the eschatological either-or that exists between the claim of God and his Christ and the sphere of Adam.

How this Adam-Christ theme is “apocalyptic” is not explained. It’s about lordships and humans become exponents of the power domain in which they live. Both victims and agents, they are. Redemption then looks like this:

… Käsemann essentially construes the matter thus: “God’s power reaches out for the world, and the world’s salvation lies in its being recaptured for the sovereignty of God.” Deliverance involves the “assault of grace upon the world of the body” in order to effect a change of lordship, effectively translating the human being out from the sphere of Sin and idolatry and into the sphere of Christ. Exercising divine right as Creator, God comes on the scene in Christ to wrest his captive and complicit creatures from their servitude and plight under the false yet all too actual reign of Sin. To talk of an exchange of lordships or transfer of spheres in this way is to evoke nothing less than the advent of the new creation, the gift of a new world whose only presupposition is the invading power of divine grace itself.

Grace and righteousness then are modalities of God’s redemptive rule. God’s act in Christ then is victory over the world.

Our redemption out from under the power of Sin is therefore a liberation whose form is precisely that of judgment and forgiveness: it involves the overcoming of enmity and the reconciliation of renewed creatures with God. As liberation, salvation includes rather than bypasses personal sin: the gospel promises that God wills to wrest the earth out from “our egoism and our deep-seated indolence and hypocrisy,” and that God does so by freeing us from the tyrannical powers that enslave us. These are two aspects of the one rectifying movement of God’s sovereign grace.

Ziegler quotes Käsemann talking about church as reconciled community but Ziegler himself does not discuss that, but turns toward the Christian life flowing out of this apocalyptic gospel redemption.

First, Käsemann insists that the apocalyptic inflection of Paul’s doctrine of salvation takes it in a more, rather than less, realistic direction. … In short, because Christians most fundamentally belong to their Lord, their very existence is conscripted into the service of making his lordship manifest. This line of thinking makes discipleship a crucial category by which to understand the Christian life, as the only self-understanding available to those redeemed by the Crucified One “arises from the act of following” itself and not from any abstract idea.

Approached in this way, biblical concepts of participation “in Christ” and of “union” with him are liable to distinctive interpretation. They now are heard less as mystagogical descriptions of ontological ascent and more as realistic descriptions of our effective recruitment into Christ’s cause and thus to his active service here and now.

An apocalyptic account of salvation in Christ such as this stresses the radical objectivity and exteriority of God’s saving acts: salvation is always something that happens to us; it is something that befalls us ab extra (from the outside) despite ourselves. … If we ask about the contours of our discipleship, if we inquire into the form and direction of human existence held by the Spirit in the sphere of the crucified Lord’s power, we hear from Käsemann chiefly talk of freedom, witness, struggle, and resistance.

In keeping with the logic of the Christus Victor, the overarching conceptuality of the Christian life here receives a decidedly political cast. Given the realism of Käsemann’s apocalyptic hearing of the gospel, this once again is no mere trope. As Käsemann writes, Christ’s “lordship over body and soul, heart and mind, disciples and demons, this world and the world to come, is a political fact.”

… Käsemann rather provocatively in this vein proposed that Christian service in the world should be thought of as a form of exorcism.

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