Ministry in the New Realm (eBook)

1

Inaugurated Eschatology

The Framework for New Realm Ministry

Inaugurated Eschatology in the New Testament Generally

The central message of the New Testament is soteriological—a message of saving grace in Jesus Christ for undeserving sinners, both Jew and Gentile. But this salvation does not appear in a historical vacuum. The coming of Jesus and the salvation he brings is a point of historical culmination; he arrived “when the fullness of time had come” (Gal. 4:4). But this historical culminating point in Jesus is not simply a particularly decisive event in history. It is a new beginning.1 Specifically, it is the beginning of the new creational age that the Old Testament longed for.2 Two thousand years ago the latter days dawned. The eschaton (lit. “last time”) arrived. It has yet to be completed—a point that must not be lost sight of (and which is clear in 2 Corinthians, such as when Paul anticipates the future “day of our Lord Jesus” in 1:14). But the present evangelical consciousness tends to focus on what we await, not what we already have, so in the present study I am going to push hard in the direction of what we already have. And so I say with force and clarity that while the central message of the New Testament is soteriological, the overarching context of that salvation is eschatological. Running just under the surface throughout 2 Corinthians and the entire New Testament and surfacing at times explicitly is the framework of inaugurated eschatology from which all of Paul’s thinking and writing flow.

It is worth clarifying exactly what we’re talking about from the perspective of the New Testament as a whole before going specifically to 2 Corinthians. Some contemporary New Testament scholars have held inaugurated eschatology front and center in their theologies of the New Testament—G. K. Beale (influenced by Geerhardus Vos), for example, and Thomas Schreiner (influenced by George Ladd).3 But I am not aware of any treatment of 2 Corinthians in a focused way that self-consciously maintains the lens of inaugurated eschatology.

In a standard systematic theology text, “eschatology” refers to matters pertaining purely to the future and comprises the last chapter of the book. “Eschatology” as I will be using it in this book refers not to the future but to the future-as-having-been-launched-back-into-the-present. And so we call it inaugurated eschatology—the last things have been inaugurated, decisively begun, already.4 What was expected to happen at the end of history has been launched back and dropped into the middle of history.5 Christ’s first coming—especially his resurrection—began the eschaton, and his second coming will escalate the eschaton into its full blossoming.

William Manson expressed this vividly in 1953:

When we turn to the New Testament, we pass from the climate of prediction to that of fulfillment. The things which God had foreshadowed by the lips of His holy prophets He has now, in part at least, brought to accomplishment. . . . The supreme sign of the Eschaton is the resurrection of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Church. The resurrection of Jesus is not simply a sign which God has granted in favor of His Son, but is the inauguration, the entrance into history, of the times of the End. Christians, therefore, have entered through the Christ into the new age. . . . What had been predicted in Holy Scripture as to happen to Israel or to man in the Eschaton has happened to and in Jesus.6

The reason that it often does not feel as if the eschaton has in fact arrived is that the old age, the realm of sin and death, continued existing alongside the new realm that dawned in Christ. When Christ returns, that old realm will once and for all cease. We can see why theologians speak, then, of “the overlap of the ages.” We who live between Christ’s two comings live in a strange tension, one that was not experienced by Old Testament saints (for whom there was old realm but not new realm) nor will be experienced by citizens of the new earth (for whom there will be new realm but not old realm). We must immediately clarify that this does not mean believers are “split down the middle,” half of each believer belonging to the old realm and half to the new realm. Many days it may feel that way—or indeed, that we belong far more to the old realm than the new! But the clear and persistent teaching of the New Testament is that our basic identity is as citizens of the new creational age that dawned when Christ was raised from the dead. Our spiritual ID card now says “new realm” where it used to say “old realm.” “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20).

A word on terminology: I will be using the word realm in this book in an effort to communicate as clearly as I can, though this is not the only serviceable word. Other ways we could describe this new period of history are new creation, new era, new order, new covenant, new aeon, new world, new epoch, new kingdom, new age, and so on.7 I prefer new realm as that which is, in my judgment, least open to misunderstanding. It also usefully overlaps semantically with the language of “kingdom” in Jesus’s teaching in the Synoptic Gospels. Douglas Moo uses this verbiage in his 2021 treatment of Paul’s theology, and I found it useful there, so I gratefully carry forward that language here.8

Let’s press more deeply now into what I mean by inaugurated eschatology or the dawning of the new realm. When we speak of the new realm having erupted in the middle of history, what are the actual biblical markers sustaining such a claim?

We can look at it this way: What were the major events or markers that God’s people in the Old Testament were anticipating? What, according to the prophetic ministry they had received, were they expecting to happen at the end of history? When Mark tells us that Joseph of Arimathea “was also himself looking for the kingdom of God” (Mark 15:43), what exactly was the content of that eager expectation?

From the perspective of the Old Testament, a constellation of world-shaking events would signal and usher in the latter days and the new creational kingdom, or what we’re calling “the new realm”:9

1. Messiah would come.

2. God’s enemies would be defeated.

3. The fall in Eden would be undone.

4. Sin would be judged.

5. The nations would stream to Jerusalem.

6. God’s people would be vindicated over their enemies.

7. God’s latter-day kingdom would be ushered in.

8. The dead would be raised.

Here’s the key point: from the vantage point of the New Testament, every one of these expectations has been fulfilled:

1. Messiah has come (Rom. 1:3–4).

2. God’s enemies were decisively triumphed over—not on a battlefield but on a cross (Col. 2:13–15).

3. A second Adam has succeeded where the first Adam failed—in being tempted by Satan, for example (Luke 3:38–4:13). Moreover, the second Adam’s exorcisms (driving demons out of people) were a middle-of-time accomplishing of what Adam failed to do (driving Satan out of Eden).

4. Sin was judged once and for all at the cross. The cross was the end-time judgment on sin, all funneled down onto one man (Rom. 5:9; 1 Thess. 5:9).

5. The Gentiles are now flooding into the kingdom as never before (Rom. 15:8–27).

6. God’s people have been vindicated in their justification (Rom. 5:1). The declaration of “innocent” anticipated at the end of time has been announced in the present based on a middle-of-history event.

7. As Jesus himself announced, the kingdom is here (Mark 1:15; cf. Acts 20:25; 28:31; Rom. 14:17). We are now in the latter-day kingdom or realm (Heb. 1:2).

8. In Christ, the dead have been raised (Eph. 2:6; Col. 3:1; cf. Rom. 6:4).

The message of the New Testament is not that some of the Old Testament anticipations have been fulfilled and some haven’t. The message of the New Testament is that all of the Old Testament anticipations have been fulfilled—but in an already / not yet way. A future consummation is still needed at every point. We call it inaugurated eschatology, not fulfilled eschatology. But the decisive moment has nevertheless already quietly taken place in the person and work of Jesus.

The preceding analysis does not mean that the Old Testament saints or prophets were wrong in expecting all eight of the above promises to occur at the end of human history. They saw truly, but they saw from a distance. Geerhardus Vos uses the image of mountain peaks, helpfully communicating that while from a distance the peaks may look next to one another, one may actually discover a great distance between various mountain...