Preaching apocalyptic passages in the New Testament Epistles and elsewhere is a task often met with a degree of apprehension. Defining ‘apocalyptic’ is a mammoth undertaking, but for our purposes, it broadly refers to an author’s account of God’s unveiling of reality (often through a revelatory experience or an angelic mediator). The description that I’m using here is not limited to ‘an apocalypse,’ but is also used adjectivally, to describe something. So, we can speak about language, ideas, and literature as ‘apocalyptic’. When faced with John’s apocalypse in the book of Revelation, or apocalyptic language in passages such as Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4–5, and 2 Thessalonians 2, the preacher is faced with an interpretative decision. The way in which such texts are read, understood, and preached will depend on a number of factors, including our preconceptions, our appreciation of genre, our intended audience, and our own aims.

Although I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, my teenage years and early twenties were spent as a part of the Pentecostal Church. It is fair to say that my understanding of the gospel, my engagement with prayer, and my worldview were all significantly shaped during that period. It was at this time that my own perception of the world, and indeed, of the ‘spirit world,’ was reformed. Preaching and ministry included a clear focus on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, with the gifts of the Spirit given a central place in services. Indeed, my own passion for Jesus came through an encounter with him in the midst of my own spiritual searching. It follows, then, that my interpretation of apocalyptic language in the New Testament cannot be disentangled from my own experiences. Likewise, as each one of us preaches such literature, and as much as we might attempt to hold an unbiased and objective posture, our stories shape our sermons.

I suggest that this was also the case for our New Testament authors. Whilst their context, tradition, and location shaped their own perception of the world, the revelation of Christ reoriented their worldview and intentions. With the apostle Paul as an example, his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus reformed his understanding of Jesus and renewed his mission, changing him from one who persecuted followers of Christ, to one who preached Christ as the Messiah. In this article, I will address a number of ways in which we might handle apocalyptic passages and offer a series of suggestions for our own preaching. As a means of doing this, I will focus on Paul’s apocalyptic language in Romans 5–8, contending that his own preaching of Christ was thoroughly apocalyptic, and that to discount this, or to fail to take it seriously, is to preach a deficient gospel.

WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH APOCALYPTIC LANGUAGE?

First, we must acknowledge that the New Testament world did not share our own cosmological underpinnings. Of course, my use of ‘our,’ here, is representative. It would be a mistake to suppose that all people in the twenty-first century subscribe to the same cosmological worldview, as was also the case for the early Church. Nevertheless, the New Testament authors’ conception of the world’s structure, and the drama in which humans are involved, alongside a plethora of suprahuman agents, is a far cry from modern Britain. The question that must be asked is, ‘what are we to do with apocalyptic language?’

In the twentieth century, New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann responded to this question with his ‘Demythologisation Programme’. Bultmann recognised the disparity between the worldviews of the first and twentieth centuries, and as a result, concluded that a continued endorsement of the New Testament’s ‘mythological’ worldview would have missional implications. That is to say, it would serve as a stumbling block. As a result, Bultmann sought to demythologise the New Testament text — something which he claims the New Testament authors had begun themselves — in order that the text might be more missionally palatable. For Bultmann, this meant taking ‘mythological’ aspects of the New Testament, such as its cosmology, its suprahuman beings, and its miraculous events, and separating such elements from the essence of the author’s intended message. However, one of his doctoral students, Ernst Käsemann, disagreed with Bultmann’s convictions, and responded by offering an apocalyptic rendering of New Testament texts. For Käsemann, the New Testament’s apocalyptic worldview is not a contextual methodology to be updated, but an unveiling of the cosmos as it is. Indeed, the human’s place within a cosmological arena, populated by suprahuman beings, is something to be taken seriously. Of course, the way in which we think about apocalyptic language in the New Testament significantly affects the way that we understand, and preach, the gospel of Christ.

PREACHING THE GOSPEL

Atonement — that which broadly refers to the reconciliation of humanity with God — is at the heart of the gospel. Whilst this relationship is centre stage, we must not isolate it from the rest of creation. It is important to recognise that the Biblical story is cosmological, that is, it encompasses humanity, extra-human creatures, the physical world, and suprahuman beings. The Biblical drama is not an individualistic account of me and my God, or even of us and our God. That is not to say that it is not personal — it is thoroughly personal — but the personal account sits within a cosmological frame. Beverly Gaventa refers to such a perspective as a ‘Widescreen Edition’. If we were to take something that was filmed for a widescreen display, and play it on a square screen, we would miss out on the full width of the feature. Similarly, Gaventa warns that if we fail to take notice of the New Testament’s apocalyptic world, the full scope of the authors’ use of characters and their intentions are overlooked.

As we will see below, the interpretation of Paul’s language in his Epistle to the Romans is disputed territory. However, it is my conviction that in Romans 5–8, Paul offers a complex account of the gospel, and that such an account is thoroughly apocalyptic. In recent years, Martinus de Boer has offered what he identifies as two patterns of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology: a ‘cosmological’ pattern, and a ‘forensic’ pattern. The latter is evident in texts such as Genesis 3, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch, and focuses on humanity’s rejection of God, and the final judgement in which the righteous and the wicked will be examined on their obedience to the Law. In contrast, the former ‘cosmological’ pattern is referenced in texts such as Genesis 6:1–6 and the ‘Book of the Watchers’ in 1 Enoch 1–36. Here, the disobedience of angelic beings has rendered the cosmos and humanity under the power of suprahuman agents. The earth is the arena of an eschatological war, involving humans, and only God has the power to remedy such a situation. For de Boer, these two patterns are not exclusive, but rather they overlap in the minds and writings of our New Testament authors. When we consider apocalyptic ideas in the New Testament Epistles, this identification bears much fruit. For example, in returning to the subject of atonement, we can see such distinctions in contemporary theories, and therefore, in the way that we preach the gospel.

The most dominant account of the gospel that I have heard preached in the Church is based on the model of ‘Penal Substitutionary Atonement’ (PSA). This approach broadly asserts that humans owe a debt for sin, and so on the cross, Christ paid this penalty on behalf of others by means of legal and forensic substitution. However, whilst this theory seems consistent with the New Testament, it has recently received a critical re-evaluation. First, the work of scholars such as Jacob Milgrom and Jonathan Klawans has offered an analysis of the priestly system, a distinction between moral and ritual purity, and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). This, then, has recently been extended by Matthew Thiessen in Jesus and the Forces of Death, and David Moffitt’s collection of essays in Rethinking the Atonement. Then, in a recent contribution entitled Lamb of the Free, Andrew Remington Rillera argues that PSA is not an accurate account of Christ’s salvific work in the New Testament. In part, this is the result of a conflation between Jesus’ association with the role of the Passover lamb in Exodus 12, and the sacrifices on Yom Kippur. For Rillera, Jesus did not die instead of us (so PSA), but ahead of us, that we might also participate in his death and resurrection.

This participatory account is certainly evident in Romans 5–8, in which Paul uses baptism as the means by which followers of Jesus share in his death (Romans 6). However, this takes place within a broader schema. Whilst PSA is able to function according to a two agent account of atonement — involving humans and God — an apocalyptic gospel account necessitates the role of a third agent; the enemy of God and his creation. For Paul, by participating in Christ, the neophyte is liberated from the enslavement of anti-God powers. In this sense, the Christus Victor model of atonement, as that which concerns Christ’s victory over Satan, Sin, and Death, better accounts for Paul’s articulation of the gospel. However, in returning to our earlier engagement with the Bultmann-Käsemann debate, we are faced with an interpretive choice. What are we to make of Paul’s language? Does he really conceive of anti-God agents? Does Paul’s gospel require a process of demythologisation, or are we to preach an apocalyptic account?

AN APOCALYPTIC ACCOUNT OF ROMANS 5–8

In Romans 5–8, Paul depicts Sin and Death as the subjects of verbs (capitalised, here, in recognition of this). They are agents that ‘do things’. In particular, he presents Sin as that which ‘entered,’ ‘increased,’ ‘reigned,’ ‘enslaves,’ ‘produced,’ ‘revived,’ ‘took opportunity,’ ‘deceived,’ ‘killed,’ and ‘dwells’. Sin, as a noun, occurs 42 times in Romans 5–8, compared to three uses of the plural (two of which are Old Testament quotations), and seven uses of the verb ‘to sin’. For Paul, in Romans, ‘sin’ is overwhelmingly used in the singular. What, then, are we to do with Paul’s depiction of Sin as a singular agent?

In the wake of Bultmann and Käsemann, this question is far from straightforward. Whilst scholars such as Stanley Stowers and Emma Wasserman recognise the cosmological worldview of the New Testament, they conclude that Paul’s depiction of Sin should not be considered akin to other suprahuman agents. Rather, if we read Paul’s language in line with other philosophers in the first century, ‘Sin’ is used figuratively to speak about the inner conflict of the human. Alternatively, others, including Troels Engberg-Pedersen, argue that Sin should be considered a suprahuman agent, but that like Bultmann, such an understanding is no longer appropriate for the twenty-first century.

In contrast, Gaventa challenges the idea that a first century worldview has been surpassed by modern ‘advancements’. In her article, ‘The Cosmic Power of Sin in Paul’s Letter to the Romans: Towards a Widescreen Edition,’ (Interpretation 58, no. 3: 2004, page 238) she asserts that it is the ‘obligation of Christians to entertain the possibility that Paul might be right and “we” might be wrong’. As a result, scholars such as Gaventa, Matthew Croasmun, and Susan Eastman, identify the figures of Sin and Death as integral to Paul’s gospel account. In fact, when Paul’s depiction of Sin is read in light of agents in Graeco-Roman mythology and philosophy, as well as Jewish apocalypticism, Sin is better identified as an anti-God agent. Indeed, Sin’s very ‘existence’ is antithetical to God and his creation. Sin is an antiperson.

So, what are we to make of Paul’s gospel? How might we preach the gospel of Christ in light of Paul’s apocalyptic language in Romans 5–8? First, we need to treat the New Testament’s cosmological worldview and apocalyptic language with all seriousness and humility. Whatever our own preconceptions, Paul’s language requires that we reevaluate our understanding of the world, of ourselves, and of the gospel. Second, an acknowledgement that Paul thinks of Sin as an agent is not equal to a dismissal of sinful behaviour. Through our own disobedience, we become complicit in Sin’s agenda. Therefore, as both victims of Sin and contributors to it, we are entangled in the cyclical chaos that usurps humanity of its freedom. Finally, the gospel of Christ cannot be limited to the modification of behaviour or to a restored moral ethic. Nor is it contained to a theory of atonement which preaches our own evasion of punishment in exchange for Christ’s substitutionary suffering. Rather, to preach an apocalyptic gospel is to recognise the inbreaking of God in Christ. In a destitute state, creation exists under the reign of Sin and Death, with humans enslaved to their master, Sin. Yet, in Christ, Sin was condemned in the flesh, and Death overcome. In participating in the Christ event, we too, are liberated from this enslavement, filled with the Spirit of Christ, and set under the lordship of Jesus.