Apocalypse When?. Jerry L. Sumney

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СКАЧАТЬ in a just (i.e., fair) God. So in the face of persecution, the ethical faiths of Judaism and Christianity opted for the belief that God’s righteousness is exercised in a realm beyond earthly life. Judgment in apocalyptic is usually based on morality. In Judaism this meant faithfulness to the Law; in Christianity it meant adhering to Christian morality as understood in a particular community and not denying the faith in persecution.

It was also this belief in the justice of God which led to the belief in the resurrection of the dead within Judaism. The idea of an afterlife which offered more than fading away in Sheol had been growing within Judaism since about the fifth century BCE, but it was the events associated with the Maccabean Revolt (see below the introduction to Daniel) that finally resulted in a fairly widespread belief in the resurrection of at least some of the dead. Just before and during the time of this revolt, Jews were executed precisely for being faithful to God and the Torah (see the graphic story of the torture and execution of seven brothers and their mother in 4 Maccabees4). Such terrible events, of course, push the question of the justice of God to the forefront. How can God be just and allow people to be tortured to death for their faith? Since God did not rescue these martyrs as God rescued the faithful in the stories of Daniel, there must be some other way in which the justice of God is satisfied.

God’s justice demands that the righteousness and faithfulness of these martyrs be rewarded. Because of this divine necessity, belief in an afterlife for the righteous flowered in this period. At the beginning, only the extraordinarily righteous or martyrs and the extraordinarily wicked had an afterlife, but as time passed most Jews came to believe that all persons participated in the afterlife.5 So belief in a resurrection that included judgment grew out of the injustices experienced by communities that held firmly to their belief in a sovereign and just God.

We should not think, however, that judgment based on morality requires that apocalypticists be legalists. That is far from the case. Only a very few apocalyptic writings (e.g., 3 Baruch6) assert that judgment is based solely on one’s deserts. Most acknowledge that people are found righteous in judgment only through God’s grace and mercy. God’s grace does not impede the exercise of God’s justice; they are necessarily cooperative but each equally necessary. Again, judgment based on morality does not mean judgment without grace and it does not mean legalism. You can see this in the Qumran War Scroll (ch. 11) when it says that God delivers God’s people through God’s loving kindness and not according to their works. Similarly, 2 Esdras trusts that since humans cannot overcome their evil tendency, God will supply grace at judgment. When apocalypticists think of judgment, fear is not their first thought. Rather, this is the moment when retribution is meted out to their and God’s enemies. They certainly do not lose sight of the accountability judgment brings to them, but they trust God to fulfill God’s purposes and nature by bringing them into the place God has prepared for God’s people.

      The idea of God being just in judgment makes modern people nervous. We are more ready to focus our attention on God’s love and mercy, thinking that these are the opposite of justice. But they are not. If God is not just, then God is unjust. The alternative to God being just is that God is unfair, that God plays favorites or is capricious. This unhappy alternative would mean we could never trust God. Furthermore, the justice of God is the basis for all Christian calls for justice in the world. Since Christian ethics is based on the character of God, we have no basis for working for justice, including equal rights for all people, unless we believe in the unshakable justice of God. So apocalyptic brings us back to a characteristic of God with which we are less than comfortable, but which is essential to who God is and to what makes God a God we can trust and a God who is worthy of worship.

      Human nature in apocalyptic thought

      To understand the view of human nature seen in our material we must begin with a survey of how human nature was seen in the Hebrew Bible. Instead of finding one consistent view of human nature in the Hebrew Scriptures, there is a development in thought within Israel about this matter. In the traditions found in the Pentateuch, the individual was not as important as the group. One’s family or tribe always took precedence over the individual. This emphasis on the group meant that the way one lived on after death was through what she or he had contributed to the well-being of the group. Thus, the afterlife for individuals was envisioned only to a very limited extent. When people died they went to Sheol, at least temporarily. This was not a pleasant place; it was a place where one is powerless, where one cannot even remember the goodness of Yahweh. There were no moral distinctions in Sheol and eventually you fade out of existence.

      The prophets begin to give more place to the individual. The emphasis is still on the group and the reward of the righteous is primarily the good of Israel and of one’s descendants, but some ideas about the continuance of the individual emerge. The importance of the individual emerges especially clearly in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 18, the result of a person’s sin is to be visited on them alone rather than on their children (or by extension their nation). This separation of the fate of the individual from that of the group is a somewhat different perspective from what we see in the Pentateuch and is the sort of thought that prepares the way for the views we find in apocalyptic.

      All apocalypticists believe that humans continue to exist after death. As we have already seen, the experiences of persecution and martyrdom seemed to require some avenue other than what happens in this world for the expression of God’s righteousness and justice. Clearly martyrs were not dealt with justly in this world. Outside the thought of apocalyptic, martyrs were sometimes seen as receiving the punishment due to the nation and thus paving the way for Israel’s restoration. But the continuing unfaithfulness of some in Israel seemed to make national restoration impossible. So personal rewards and punishments become the ways God responds to faithfulness and wickedness. Beyond this concern about justice, the desire for continued fellowship with God and with the fellow faithful pushed forward the belief in an afterlife with rewards and punishments. This belief could also be seen as a type of fulfillment of national hopes since the individual was not blessed in isolation, but with others who were faithful.

With the exception of a very few documents (most notably Jubilees7), apocalyptic writers (including the Apostle Paul) envisioned the afterlife as a resurrection of the body, not as the immortality of the soul. The idea of a resurrection of the body is consistent with the Hebrew idea that a human is a unitary psycho-physical unit. That is, they did not separate the body and soul, giving the soul a higher value, as the Greeks had done. Thus, a person cannot be complete or happy without both body and soul. Sheol had been a place where one had no body and such existence could only be temporary and could not be considered true life. So apocalyptic continues to see human personality as a unity rather than as a duality. Believing in the resurrection of the body did not mean that life was always conceived of as bound to material, earthy existence. Rather, they sometimes looked forward to the transformation of the body, a transformation which suited the body for life with God. A fairly extended explication of this notion is found in chapter 7 on 1 Corinthians 15.

      Ethics in apocalyptic thought

      In this section we turn our attention to what humans are held accountable for in apocalyptic thought. Only a very few scholars whose major field of research is apocalyptic have argued that apocalyptic has no concern for ethics because it has separated the kingdom of God from earthly realities. As this view has it, apocalyptic, rather than being socially responsible, becomes preoccupied with the damnation of the oppressor or with blessings in another realm. Though this is a common perception about apocalyptic thought among non-specialists, most scholars reject this interpretation and many assert that ethics is central to apocalyptic.

      The expectation of judgment found in all apocalyptic implies that ethics is central even when it is not explicitly discussed. One of the primary reasons authors wrote apocalyptic texts was to encourage faithfulness to God and loyalty to the Law of God, even if it leads one to death. All apocalyptic is hortatory. Discourses that encourage ethical living and specify what that means are common in apocalyptic texts. Encouraging faithful (i.e., ethical) living was a primary goal of Daniel 1–6 and in 2 Esdras the sole characteristic of the saved is СКАЧАТЬ