Theology for beginners (21): Completion

Summary: At the End, our broken stories are lifted up and integrated into the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and we are thus included in the story of God’s deity.

Throughout this series, we have been speaking (or rather trying to speak) of Christian faith from the perspective of the gospel. The gospel narrates certain events as the happening of God’s own deity. A certain Jewish man is crucified outside Jerusalem and is raised to new life – this is the event of God’s deity, the event in which God identifies himself, the event in which God is God. In speaking of various main themes, therefore – God, creation, salvation and community – we have tried to take our bearings from this event, so that our talk about God is guided not by any prior conceptions of what a “divine being” should be like, but by God’s own self-definition in the story of Jesus.

In turning now to our final theme – traditionally called “eschatology” or “last things” – we are really not taking up a new topic, but are simply turning back to the same event in a new way. At this point, we are talking again of the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection as the event of God’s deity. But we are now concerned explicitly with the questions: What is the significance of this event for the ultimate destiny of our lives? What does this event lead us to expect from the future?

The story of Jesus, we have said, narrates reality. It is the context of meaning within which all other things become “true” and “real.” This is because God has eternally elected this story to be his own story, the story of his identity. And the story of God’s identity has a specific conclusion: the crucified Jesus is raised to new life. Further, as we have noted repeatedly, the story of Jesus is also a story about ourselves: in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead our own stories find their proper conclusion. We can therefore say quite comprehensively: the end of all our stories is this risen one; the future that awaits us all is this lowly God, this exalted human, this one whom the Father vindicated through the Spirit by raising to new life.

Our future is the “place” where the risen Jesus reigns as Lord in perfect fellowship with the Father through the Spirit. And so even now this future floods our lives with the light of hope and meaning. Even now, we receive our identity from this future.

At present, all our individual and collective stories are marked by fragmentation, confusion, disconnectedness. Our stories lack closure and unity. They are broken stories which lack the harmony of a fitting end. But the gospel tells us a new story – it tells us that God has raised up Jesus “for us and for our salvation.” Our own broken stories thus receive new harmony from this story. Through the power of the Spirit, our own stories are made to cohere in the story of Jesus. Where our lives were fragmented, they are now integrated. Where we were without hope and without a future, we now receive the cohesion of a fitting end from the future of the risen Jesus.

When we speak of the End, therefore, we are speaking of this narrative fittingness that integrates our stories into the story of Jesus. In the final act of a play, all the preceding acts are brought together in a coherent dramatic unity. So too, the final End that we await is the act by which God’s Spirit gathers all our individual, fragmented stories and pieces them together. The Spirit comes from the Father and integrates us into the event of Jesus’ death and resurrection – which is to say, into the event of God’s own life. By including all our little broken stories in his own story, God therefore raises us to participate in his life. Our stories become part of God’s story – yes, part of God’s identity!

Here and now in the present, the Christian community is the place where this narrative cohesion is already anticipated in advance. Here and now – in proclamation, in baptism and in Eucharist – we re-tell and re-enact the story of Jesus as the dramatic unity of the whole created world. Here and now, in acts of justice, beauty and peace, we anticipate the sheer goodness of this story’s conclusion – a cosmic goodness in which chaos, violence and injustice are finally overcome. Here and now, as we live in the freedom of the Spirit and share in each other’s lives, we experience – or rather, we are – the foretaste of the joyful freedom that this story promises. In such ways, the Christian community thus performs God’s deity as an event whose dramatic unity already integrates our lives here and now, and whose conclusion will finally be revealed as the hope and the meaning of all things.

Our existence is thus placed in a new context, transposed into a new key, and we are set free by the Spirit to participate in the unceasing harmony of God’s own thrice-repeated deity. In this divine harmony, all created things find their meaning, their place, their fittingness. And so, in the end, all creatures are brought together in this surprising and joyful dramatic unity, this story of the God who raised Jesus from the dead, this story of the God who is love.

Further reading

• Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama, Vol. 5 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998).
• Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics III/2, § 47; IV/3, §73.
• Fergusson, David and Marcel Sarot, eds. The Future as God’s Gift (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000).
• Hart, David Bentley. The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 395-411.
• Jenson, Robert W. God after God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 157-79.
• Moltmann, Jürgen. The Coming of God (London: SCM, 1996).
• Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology, Vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 527-646.
• Rahner, Karl. Theological Investigations, Vol. 2 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963), pp. 203-216.

An even worse liturgical invention

A while back we were all discussing the worst liturgical invention. But my wife has now come across one that’s hard to beat. On the weekend she visited a large church, and the church’s newsletter included the following announcement:

Water baptisms: held the last Sunday of every month.
Baptism in the Holy Spirit: held the second Sunday of every month.

One cannot even parody such an announcement, since it is already its own parody. Anyway, my own suggestion was that they should also schedule regeneration for Tuesday evenings and sanctification for the third Friday of every month.

Reading Paul Tillich

The indefatigable Patrik has now completed his vast 36-part series on Paul Tillich’s systematic theology. Be sure to check out this excellent series – and then take that dusty old copy of Tillich down from the shelf and read a little.

Pannenberg's eschatological ontology

One of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s most fascinating and controversial ideas is his eschatological ontology. For Pannenberg, the being or essence of a thing is determined by its future. The future exercises a “retroactive” (rückwirkend) causality on the present – and so a thing can possess its essence here and now only by anticipating what it will be in the future.

This is admittedly a very complex cluster of ideas. But in his important book on Metaphysics and the Idea of God, Pannenberg explains all this with a very helpful illustration taken from his home garden (apparently he is quite an avid gardener). His illustration focuses on the pretty zinnia:

“A zinnia is already a zinnia as a cutting and remains one during the entire process of its growth up to blossoming, even though the flower bears its name on account of its blossom. If there were only a single such flower, we could not determine its nature in advance; and yet over the period of its growth it would still be what it revealed itself to be at the end. It would possess its essence through anticipation, though only at the end of the developmental process would one be able to know that this was its essence.” (p. 105)

In a similar way, Pannenberg says that all being is determined retroactively from the future of God’s eternal kingdom.

The experiential egg or the doctrinal chicken?

On his nicely redesigned blog, Aaron discusses Yale and Chicago approaches to doctrine: “Which came first, the mature chicken that is developed religious tradition, or the nascent egg of potentially-meaningful experience?”

The highest form of thought

“It is simply the case that the highest and most comprehensive form of thought is adoration. Prayer is the most decisive word that a person can say. There are some highly articulate scholars who are yet in an ultimate sense deaf-mutes: they do not listen to the word of God, and have nothing to say to God.”

—Karl Rahner, Mission and Grace: Essays in Pastoral Theology, Vol. 2 (London: Sheed & Ward, 1964), p. 108.