![]() ![]() ![]() Of course, the New Testament doesn’t claim that everything has already been fulfilled and there’s nothing more to come. Or to echo New Testament scholar Paula Fredriksen, shouldn’t the day after “the day of the Lord” look a little different from the day before? Part of the reason many find this answer unsatisfying, however, is that we’re talking about a belief that people held 2,000 years ago, and the history of the past 2,000 years has made that belief harder and harder to hold onto without completely emptying it of its original Jewish, eschatological meaning.Īs one reviewer of Wright’s big book on Jesus puts it, “if the features of first-century life make it impossible to credit that the Jews of that period believed that the exile had ended, do not the features of human life from Easter Monday until the present make it equally impossible to believe that Jesus as the messiah had brought the exile to an end and inaugurated the reign of God?” And so the big question is: Why did the followers of Jesus talk like this? How do we account for this remarkable feature of early Christian belief?įor believing scholars like Wright, the answer is blindingly obvious: Jesus really did rise from the dead, God really did pour out his Spirit on his followers, and all of that really was the fulfillment, however surprisingly, of ancient Jewish kingdom expectations. Most Jewish groups of the time didn’t talk like this. This is a big part of what makes the New Testament so strange and surprising. They believed that, through this messianic achievement, the long exile was over, the great Sabbath had dawned, the ‘new Temple’ had been built (consisting of Jesus and his followers) and the creator God, through Messiah Jesus, had established his sovereign rule over the world, however paradoxical this might seem in terms of continuing persecution and struggle.” As Wright himself says elsewhere, the earliest Christians “lived, spoke and wrote with the presupposition that an event had occurred through which Israel’s God, the creator, had returned at last and had, through his chosen Messiah, won the decisive battle against the real enemy-even though this ‘return’, and this ‘battle’ and ‘victory’, were now seen quite differently to what we find in earlier Jewish expectations. The answer, in most cases at least, is clearly no.Īnd yet that’s precisely what the earliest Christians were saying. ![]() Wright asks, “Would any serious-thinking first-century Jew claim that the promises of Isaiah 40-66, or of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Zechariah, had been fulfilled? That the power and domination of paganism had been broken? That YHWH had already returned to Zion? That the covenant had been renewed, and Israel’s sins forgiven? That the long-awaited ‘new exodus’ had happened?… Or-in other words-that the exile was really over?” Wright drives this point home at the beginning of his book Jesus and the Victory of God by putting it in the form of a question. So to say that God’s kingdom has come when the dead were still in their graves, Israel was still living under the heel of pagan oppression, and creation was still subject to death and decay, would just sound like pie in the sky to most devout Jews in that period. Because to talk about the kingdom of God in that world was to talk about a comprehensive transformation that had to happen in real life-not just in the hearts of believers or in the politics of heaven, but in this world. And to most Christians today, conditioned as they are by 2,000 years of Christian theology, it seems totally normal.īut in the world that Christianity came from, the world of first-century Judaism, to talk about God’s eschatological reign as something already established was not normal. It’s a fundamental part of the early church’s worldview. This is what biblical scholars refer to as realized or inaugurated eschatology. The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered and now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah have come (Rev 5:5 12:10). The end of the ages has come (1 Cor 10:11). ![]() In many ways the New Testament shares an outlook that was widespread in first-century Judaism, an outlook that looked forward to the very near future as the climax of history, the time when evil would be overturned once and for all and divine justice would finally prevail throughout the earth.Īnd yet over and over again, the writers of the New Testament talk as if the climax of history has already in some sense happened. There’s something strange about the New Testament, and most of us are so used to it that we don’t realize how strange it is. Introduction: The Problem of Realized Eschatology ![]()
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