Paul and the apocalypsis Jesou Christou

For Saul of Tarsus, a zealous rabbi within first-century Judaism, the Torah of God was not only a comprehensive way of life for faithful Jews but also the structuring principle of all creation.� The Torah revealed the very Wisdom and power by which God the Creator brings all things into being and holds them together.� Living by Torah amounted to discerning and participating in the pattern and coherence of the cosmos.^[1]� Paul�s �pre-Christian� zeal for Torah was zeal for the truth of creation, the truth of all humankind and all nations.� Israel is the people who bears this truth in its flesh, in its daily, bodily faithfulness to Torah, and thereby witnesses among the nations to God�s wisdom and justice.^[2]

The nations (ethn_), on the other hand, are subject to, or rather, had been handed over to, other gods and other lords, other rulers, authorities, principalities and powers, other ways of life (i.e., ways of death), because of their failure to acknowledge the one true God whose power and eternity should have been discerned through the wisdom of his creation.^[3]� In this bondage under enslaving powers the nations awaited the day of judgment.� Only those few individual Gentiles who might find and follow the way of Torah would escape the day of wrath.� As Terence Donaldson has recently argued, it is quite probable that before his conversion Paul was engaged in just this task � proselytizing Gentiles into the way of full obedience to Torah, and thus into membership in Israel, the people of God who would be preserved against the day of wrath.^[4]

Paul�s �conversion,� however, brought with it a profound re-ordering of his �convictional world�.^[5]� God had found an other way to deliver the nations from their various enslavements.� J. Louis Martyn describes this other way as Paul�s �cosmological apocalyptic eschatology�:

Paul�s view of wrong and right [in the human scene] is thoroughly apocalyptic, in the sense that on the landscape of wrong and right there are, in addition to God and human beings, powerful actors that stand opposed to God and that enslave human beings.� Setting right what is wrong proves, then, to be a drama that involves not only human beings and God, but also those enslaving powers.� And since humans are fundamentally slaves, the drama in which wrong is set right does not begin with action on their part.� It begins with God�s militant action against all the powers that hold human beings in bondage.^[6]

When the crucified Jesus, risen and radiant with the glory of God, appeared to Paul, Paul recognized immediately that �God�s militant action� on behalf of the nations had been taken.� The great disruption in Paul�s previous way of life and thinking caused by this event is that he realized that Torah plays no role at all in bringing the nations near to God.� The powers which held the nations/Gentiles in bondage are not conquered through their acknowledging and keeping Torah but through God�s work in the crucified Jesus Christ, whose apocalypsis signaled for Paul the conquest of the enslaving powers by a power hitherto unknown in human history, a power so strange to the worldly human eye that it looked like weakness, shame and folly.� Indeed, its very strangeness exposes the habituated enslavement of worldly vision and renders judgment against the �rulers of this age� who, failing to recognize the �Lord of glory� as the one true power and wisdom of God, crucified him.� Only those with �the mind of Christ� discern the secret of the new aeon, the reign of the Crucified One.^[7]

It is this good news of God�s deliverance of the nations from enslaving powers, and of a corresponding way of life in the new-found freedom, that Paul carried into the cities of the Roman empire (rather than, as is usually thought, a message about individual justification by faith).� It is a message in which theological, christological, cosmological, social, political and personal motifs are intricately interwoven and inseparable.� These motifs come together powerfully in that place where God�s invasion of the cosmos in Jesus Christ has cleared the territory, so to speak, for a new humanity and a new creation � that is, in the ekklesia.� Far from being a merely �religious� event, for Paul this invasion signaled a fundamental challenge to and re-ordering of the hierarchies, powers, and kingdoms of the universe, from top to bottom.� Just as nothing stands outside the sovereignty of the creator God of Israel, so nothing escapes the imperial reach of this decisive re-ordering act of that same God.

Paul�s mission, then, must be understood as an announcement among the nations of God�s new empire, established in the crucifixion and resurrection of God�s Son, Jesus Christ, an empire which infiltrates and undermines Roman imperial order, including its cultic, political, social and economic manifestations.� Where Paul�s message received a sympathetic hearing, he organized assemblies (ekklesiai) of those loyal to the new kyrios, the new emperor.� These assemblies stand as signs of God�s invasion of the cosmos, and of a new humanity and a new creation on the way, even now breaking in among the nations and empires rooted in the old order.� In the assemblies of God which Paul established in the cities of the Roman empire an alternative imperial/empirical order � cultic, political, social, economic � is taking shape according to the pattern of life enacted by the Faithful One, the kyrios, Jesus Christ.� That the character of this alternative order, this new polis, is radically different from that of the Roman imperial order, should not cause us to think that the new order is something else besides political � for example, �religious�.� On the contrary, for Paul, the apocalyptic appearance of Jesus Christ was the decisive political event for which the cosmos and humanity had been waiting.

The foregoing brief account of Paul�s �conversion,� message and mission may sound strange to ears attuned to hear in Paul�s letters only or primarily a word about how the individual person, suffering under the conditions of sin, guilt and fear of God�s judgment, might find eternal peace with God through faith in God�s gracious justification of the sinner by the atoning death of Jesus Christ.� Such an individualistic domestication and confinement of Paul�s message has a long history, which cannot be told here.� That it is a domestication and confinement is becoming more and more clear under the impact of recent Pauline scholarship on the apocalyptic, Judaistic, socio-economic and political character of Paul�s preaching, mission and theology.^[8]�

In what follows I will draw on and fill out the above outline of Paul�s message as I engage in discussion with three contemporary Christian theologians who are addressing the question of the political witness of the church after the decline of Christendom.� These theologians � John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and others influenced by them � are asking the question, How can the churches in North America and Europe faithfully re-assert the gospel as good political news?� Moreover, they are doing so without assuming that �politics� is something in addition to the gospel, an �expression� or �implication� of the gospel to be �worked out� in the institutions of worldly power where politics �really happens.�� Rather, the gospel is itself, intrinsically, a politics enacted first in the ekklesia, a people called out from the nations by the crucified and risen king, Jesus Christ.� I will show that this vision of the political witness of the church stands in fundamental continuity with the Pauline vision, and in particular that it is a timely and necessary recovery of the thoroughgoing apocalyptic and ecclesial character of Paul�s message.� In so doing I am attempting to co-opt some of the valuable insights of recent Pauline scholarship in aid of a contemporary theological politics.^[9]

Apocalyptic Mission: John Howard Yoder

It is one of the great merits of John Howard Yoder�s work that he has consistently engaged Christian social ethics as a task of reading and re-reading scripture.� This is the fruit of his conviction that in its work of discerning God�s will in new contexts the Christian community must continually be �looping back� to the biblical testimony to test its received wisdom against the normative way of Jesus Christ, to which the scriptures testify.^[10]�

There is widespread awareness that Yoder engaged in a careful reading of the gospels in order to write a book on �the politics of Jesus�; less well-known is the fact that Yoder also took pains to show, in that same book, that the politics of Jesus is just as deeply inscribed in the Pauline writings.� He had to do this because a great deal of Christian social ethics, early and recent, liberal and conservative, has assumed or argued that while Jesus may have had a vision for the social body of Israel, Paul transmuted this into a message having to do primarily or exclusively with the inner life of the individual person coram Deo .� According to this understanding, the concrete socio-political character of the setting, motives and enactment of Jesus� messianic mission may indeed be acknowledged, but these �external� matters must be seen as �the symbolic or mythical clothing of his spiritual message.... Especially Paul [so the argument goes] moves us away from the last trace of the danger of a social misunderstanding of Jesus and toward the inwardness of faith.�^[11]� In particular the doctrine of justification by faith is seen to move in this direction:

[N]ever should [justification] be correlated with ethics.� Just as guilt is not a matter of having committed particular sinful acts, so justification is not a matter of proper behavior.� How the death of Jesus works our justification is a divine miracle and mystery; how he died, or the kind of life which led to the kind of death he died, is therefore ethically immaterial.^[12]

One of Yoder�s main tasks in The Politics of Jesus is to refute such readings, which supposedly discover and make much about the fundamental inwardness, individualism and �spirituality� of the central Pauline themes of righteousness, justification and grace.� Against them Yoder proposes and defends the �alternate hypothesis that for Paul righteousness, either in God or in human beings, might more appropriately be conceived as having cosmic or social dimensions.�^[13]� On this understanding, for Paul justification is an intrinsically and explicitly social and political doctrine, of which the ekklesia of God is the most immediate and direct correlate in human life.� One can thus speak as justly of �the politics of Paul� as of the politics of Jesus, a politics rooted firmly in a narrative about the �faithfulness of Jesus Christ� (pistis Jesou Christou), the messianic agent of God�s new political order, about God�s conquest, through the cross of Christ, of the rebellious �principalities and powers� which hold peoples in bondage, and about the creation in Christ of a new polis in which enemies are reconciled and believers are called into a new social order governed by the pattern of Jesus Christ.

I have shown elsewhere that recent Paul scholarship lends increasing credibility to Yoder�s interpretation of the apostle.^[14]� Here I am particularly interested in how Yoder renders the relationship of this new social body, the church, to the wider world, and how he conceives of the life of the church in the midst of the nations.� I suggest that �apocalyptic mission� is a way to characterize his thinking on this issue.� The meaning of this phrase is perhaps best captured by phrases in the titles of other works by Yoder: �the priestly kingdom,� �the royal priesthood,� �for the nations.�� Yoder stresses that God�s invasion of the cosmos in Jesus Christ creates a people whose calling and task is to live amidst the nations for the sake of the nations, as a paradigmatic sign of humanity�s and creation�s destiny, and to do so as witness, servant, exemplar, and intercessor.

For Yoder, the church�s existence among the nations is characterized not primarily by its difference from them, but by its being a people specified by God�s apocalypsis in Jesus Christ.� Stating the issue this way does not immediately tilt towards a construal of the relationship of church and wider world in oppositional terms.� For Yoder there are good reasons, theological and historical, why the church must not assume in advance its �distinctiveness� from the nations.

To make �distinctiveness� a value criterion is to measure the truth value of meaning system A in terms of the other systems (whether B or C or N or X) that happen to be around, from which [A] is supposed to differ.� That is a method mistake.� Some of the neighboring systems may be very much like it.� Some of them may be historically derived from it, which is true of most of the post-Christian value systems in the West.� To ask that Christian though be unique is nonsense.� What we should ask of Christian statements is that they be specifically or specifiably Christian, i.e., true to kind, authentically representing their species.� Whether a specifiably Christian statement is �distinctive� depends on the other guy.^[15]

The distinction between distinctiveness and specificity is crucial in understanding Yoder�s thinking on the church�s relationship to the wider world.� It enables him to render the existence of God�s people among the nations as an existence for the nations, and to take up as a primary task of Christian political ethics the discernment of overlaps and well as differences between shape of the church�s political life and that of the wider society in which the church finds itself.� Not only is the church itself a political community, a �body politics� � it is decidedly that � but it is also just such a community whose political practices are enacted �before the watching world�.^[16]

To this watching world the church displays a way of life which is neither esoteric nor �religious�.� On the contrary, in the central and constitutive practices of the church, the sacraments, God enacts his reign in the ordinary material, bodily, social, economic and political affairs of the people of God.� Founding events are retold and celebrated and political allegiances declared (preaching, worship), social differences are relativized (baptism), earthly goods are shared (eucharist), skills and work are organized and contributed to the well-being of the whole (the charismata) and the right of speech is given to all as the community discerns direction and policy (the church meeting).� The fact that the sacraments, so understood, attend to matters that any society or culture must attend to, only in a manner specified by the words and way of Jesus Christ, means that these practices are in a real sense visible and accessible also to those beyond the church.� �[E]ach of these practices can function as a paradigm for ways in which other social groups might operate. . . . [T]hey are accessible to the public.� People who do not share the faith or join the community can learn from them.�^[17]� And the public has so learned.� Yoder suggests that current notions of �egalitarianism,� �freedom,� �democracy� and legal due process are ways of secular social life which correspond to, and may be historically rooted in, these ecclesial practices.

Thus, quite apart from mission or evangelism in the usual senses of those terms, the church, by being what it specifically is called to be, enacts a public sign of what the wider society and culture might become if it borrowed or took up the ways of the people of God.� The church �tells the world what is the world�s own calling and destiny, not by announcing either a utopian or a realistic goal to be imposed on the whole society, but by pioneering a paradigmatic demonstration of both the power and the practices that define the shape of restored humanity.� The confessing people of God is the new world on its way.�^[18]

Just so the church has no good reason to set itself apart a priori as distinct from its host societies and cultures.� Where it detects correspondences in the wider world to its own gospel-shaped practices, it can only celebrate these and seek to co-operate with them.� Yoder is explicit and intentional about keeping the church open to the cultures and societies in which it finds itself.� The model of such a relationship is the diaspora Jewish communities from the time of Jeremiah to the present day � the �Jeremianic model� as Yoder puts it � in which, according to the instructions of Jeremiah (Jer. 29:7), the exiles in Babylon were to �seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.�� Yoder suggests, in fact, that Jeremiah�s point is better stated as �seek the salvation of the culture to which God has sent you.�^[19]� Living by this instruction the Jews became a culturally flexible, polyglot people who not only maintained their specific identity but also contributed significantly in and to many cultural and social contexts.� For Yoder, �galuth� (exile) is not the fate but the vocation of faithful biblical communities (Jewish or Christian).� But exile does not presume in advance that the exilic community will be, simply, and in terms of its own self-definition, alien in relation to its surroundings.� �How pointedly, and at what points [the alternative social and political ethics of the Christian community] will set us at odds with our neighbors, will of course depend on the neighbors.�^[20]

Back of these proposals which Yoder makes about the church/wider world relationship is his understanding of the Pauline �principalities and powers�.� These may best be understood in contemporary language, according to Yoder (following the work of Hendrikus Berkhof^[21]), as analogous to the concrete �structures� � religious, intellectual, moral, political, economic � within which human beings live, and without which they cannot live.� These powers/structures were created by God for human welfare, but have rebelled against God�s purposes and now hold human beings in bondage.� As God�s creatures, however, though in rebellion, the principalities and powers remain within God�s �providential sovereignty� and are used by God, even without their willing co-operation, to serve God�s purposes of preserving human communities in some form, albeit fallen.� Since they are crucial to human flourishing (even as they enslave), �[i]f . . . God is going to save his creatures in their humanity, the Powers cannot simply be destroyed or set aside or ignored.� Their sovereignty must be broken.�^[22] This God does through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, in his defeat of the powers through submitting to them in his crucifixion.� �Differing from Adam, Lucifer, and all the Powers, Jesus did �not consider being equal with God as a thing to be seized [the form of the Powers� rebellion]� (Phil. 2:6). His very obedience unto death is in itself not only the sign but also the firstfruits of an authentic restored humanity.�^[23]� This �authentic restored humanity� is instantiated in the church as it lives according to Jesus� own pattern of freedom from and subordination to the powers.

The church lives among the principalities and powers of the world; it cannot live apart from them since they are the means of God�s providential sovereignty in the world; and it finds the possibility of their redemption through Christ in its own communal existence.� For these reasons the relationship of the church with the structures and orders of the wider world must not be that of indiscriminate opposition but of critical discernment, in which the question of retrieval or rejection of social and cultural structures, or of cooperation or non-cooperation with them, must always be asked anew.� For Yoder the possibility of agreement, co-operation and participation in the structures of the wider world cannot be ruled out a priori.� Yoder is consistent in stressing this point against what has often been charged as �sectarianism�.

Yoder�s view of the �principalities and powers� and of the work of Jesus Christ and the church in relation to them is a valuable attempt to retrieve a central theme in Pauline theology �� God�s apocalyptic conquest of the enslaving powers through the crucifixion and vindication of the Faithful One, Jesus Christ.� Against what may be an historic Anabaptist tendency to read the church/world relationship in terms of an apocalyptic dualism,^[24] Yoder wants to stress, precisely through his apocalyptic theology, the creational continuity of the church/world relationship.� It is nothing less than God�s mission to re-order and re-structure creation, society and culture under the lordship of Christ, and of the centrality of the Christian community in that mission, that Yoder wants to emphasize in his use of Paul�s concept of the principalities and powers.

The clearest parallel to Yoder�s emphasis in the Pauline corpus is in First Corinthians.^[25]� In that letter Paul is certainly intent on re-ordering the Corinthians� notions of wisdom and power in accordance with God�s own strange wisdom and power revealed in the cross.� But he is also intent on getting the Corinthians to see that God�s cruciform wisdom and power must be enacted in the social body of the Christian community and in the personal bodies of its members.� These bodies, social and personal, remain in Corinth.� They are visible in the city, they walk the streets, they eat the food sold in the market places and they meet for worship in the houses of Corinthian residents.� They are called to be Christ�s body as Corinthians, in Corinth, that is, as a segment of the Corinthian polis which has been freed by God through Christ from its previous enslavements to gods-but-not-gods and delivered into the truly human freedom of the ekklesia.� In this community the status-seeking disorder (the �hierarchical ideology of the body�^[26]) of the Corinthian polis � its notions of wisdom and power under the influence of idolatry, revealed as disorder precisely in the light of the crucifixion of Jesus � stand to be overturned and changed into the order of mutual service and exchange of gifts toward the building and fortifying of the new social body.

The Corinthian believers saw their deliverance differently.� They viewed their freedom as separate from the body, whether social or personal.� No bodily and social re-ordering was necessary because the body was not considered worthy to share in the power of the Spirit.� �How are the dead raised?� With what kind of body do they come?� they asked sarcastically (1 Cor 15:35).

Paul responds that the Corinthian body, whether social or personal, must itself be brought into submission to Christ, re-ordered according to his own pattern of self-abasement and self-offering, in order to make visible the social body of Jesus Christ in the midst of the Corinthian polis.� The body, its functions and its needs � eating and drinking, sexual intercourse, social intercourse � is precisely the site of God�s reclamation of Corinth in Jesus Christ, made possible by his conquest of the powers that hold Corinth and its people in bondage.� Food offered to idols may yet become food available to the saints: it may be reclaimed from the idols� grasp by receiving it with thanksgiving from the one God of all creation and partaking of it, even if with the necessary regard for those with weaker consciences, those insufficiently weaned from attachment to the idols, for whom the food still looks like an idol�s dinner.

Just so, the ecclesial body claimed by God, in its visibility to the wider world of Corinth, does indeed look something like that wider world � the ecclesia is a paradigmatic polis in its own right, in need of protection and fortification.� Paul�s instructions on sexuality and women in worship reflect contemporary cultural understandings of threats to the personal and political body, and the ways in which the body must be protected from such threats.� But the ecclesial body also looks very different. The difference from the status-seeking Corinthian polis is evident just insofar as the ecclesial polis is ordered according to the pattern of the crucified and exalted Jesus Christ.� Those members who are weak, powerless and dishonourable by worldly Corinthian standards are in fact the honourable ones in the new social body, the new polis.� Just . Then, however, the unbelieving Corinthian polis is itself altered by the presence within it of a sign of its own truest possibility, should it turn from its idols to serve the living and true God; and of a warning of its imminent judgment, should it reject the offer of rescue and re-creation in Christ.

The �dialectic� of similarity and dissimilarity between the Corinthian church and Corinthian society which Paul argues for in 1 Corinthians provides us with a model which corresponds closely to Yoder�s proposals.� For Yoder, as for Paul, the church is the site of God�s apocalyptic mission to rescue cultures, communities and cities from their enslavement, and to form and transform them to serve the one Creator God.� For Yoder, as for Paul, the church shares in this mission in the confidence of God�s apocalyptic triumph over enslaving powers and ideologies.� The church begins its life in that fissure which the proclamation of the gospel splits open within a given social and cultural context, and there it shapes a living sign of what a society and culture might become if it acknowledges the reign of Jesus Christ.

Apocalyptic Holiness: Stanley Hauerwas

I have argued in another paper that the titles of recent works by Hauerwas and Yoder reflect a real difference in their respective approaches.� While Hauerwas presents a volume of essays on political theology entitled Against the Nations,^[27] Yoder later, and responding in part to Hauerwas, presents a volume on the same theme entitled For the Nations.� It is easy to construe Hauerwas�s work as an attack on the �liberal society� which is named as a theme in his subtitle, and such a construal has been made often and vigorously.� A good example is the criticism made of Hauerwas by Max Stackhouse:

Stanley Hauerwas hates liberalism.� He hates liberal theology, liberal ethics, liberal churches, liberal politics, liberal economics, and liberal democracy.� He uses military terms . . . to signal that he is part of a great battle against liberalism, waged on behalf of virtue, character and pacifism.^[28]

But, claims Stackhouse, �Christianity has a liberal element at its core.�

Stackhouse�s charge may at first glance seem right to those who have read even a modest amount of Hauerwas.� But a more careful look at his work suggests that Hauerwas�s criticism of liberalism is both motivated by and has a purpose very different from that which Stackhouse attributes.� Hauerwas is indeed engaged in a �great battle against liberalism,� but the clue to the reason for this battle comes in Stackhouse�s claim that �Christianity has a liberal element at its core.�� For precisely this conviction, according to Hauerwas, is what has resulted in and goes on perpetuating the failure of the church in America.

It is important to state that that failure does not in any primary sense have to do with �virtue, character and pacifism.�� Rather, it has first to do with the First Commandment, the exclusive loyalty which the God of Israel and Jesus Christ requires from his people.^[29]� The churches of America, whether conservative or liberal, are divided in their loyalties; divided between allegiance on the one hand to American liberal democracy and society, and on the other to the triune God.^[30]� When it comes to the decisive moments � the �apocalyptic,� revelatory moments, when America goes to war in the name of liberal democracy � the latter loyalty almost always takes second place to the former.� What Hauerwas �hates� is idolatry, and American liberalism is the one great thing for which most American Christians are prepared to make the costliest sacrifices � the lives of their own and others� children.� �What must be recognized is that liberalism is not simply a theory of government but a theory of society that is imperial in its demands.�^[31]�

Hauerwas�s battle against liberalism must thus be seen as a battle for the holiness of the American churches, a holiness which corresponds to the holiness of the one God beside whom there is no other.^[32]� �[I]t would be a mistake to make the church look good by making American society look bad. . . .� Rather, the issue is how to help the church recover a sense of its own integrity that it might better be able to make discriminating judgments about the society which we happen to call America.�^[33]� Until it is no longer assumed that the task of the church in America is to produce good citizens of the liberal democratic state rather than a holy people and faithful disciples, it will be necessary to show how the �liberal element at the core� of the church is in fact idolatry.� This is what Hauerwas does.� This is the peculiar form of his theology as an explication of the apocalypsis Jesou Christou.

Hauerwas�s works do not abound in exegetical performance.� References to biblical texts and narratives are present in all of his works, but he has not himself displayed the careful attention to biblical texts that characterizes the work of Yoder.^[34]� Still, I believe Hauerwas reflects apocalyptic themes and style in his theology that resonate deeply with that of Paul, particularly with Paul�s letter to the Galatians.

It is well-known that Paul responds in Galatians to a very real threat of apostasy among the Galatian believers.� The particular form of that apostasy is not that the Gentile believers are tempted to fall �back� into their pagan ways, but rather to fall �forward� (as they see it) into observing Torah.� But what would be wrong with that?� The history of the interpretation of Galatians since Luther, and possibly before, proposes that the Galatians� imminent apostasy is a matter of leaving behind �faith alone� and taking up �faith plus works,� that is, to think that they might be saved by their own efforts or deeds � a reversion to �Jewish legalism�, so it is thought � rather than by Christ, solely through faith.

Much of recent Paul scholarship has rendered judgment against the typically Protestant reading of the Galatian situation and Paul�s response.^[35]� It is a reading made abstract by thinking that Paul is writing about �the human condition� in general and not about Gentiles and Jews in particular, about universal human attitudes such as trust and self-righteousness, and not about Christ and Torah.� Paul does indeed address �the human condition� but only concretely as the question about Christ and Torah and cosmic powers, and the way these free or enslave peoples, break down or rebuild walls of division between Gentiles and Jews.

According to J. L. Martyn, a Christian-Jewish mission, led by �Teachers� who follow-up and aim to correct or complete Paul�s work among the Gentiles, come to the Galatians.� They proclaim a �gospel� about Christ and Torah as the necessary conditions of incorporation into God�s people; more specifically about how Christ is the doorway into the faithfulness of Torah obedience for Gentiles.^[36]� Against them Paul argues with great passion that Christ is the sole condition of Gentile incorporation into God�s people and their worship of the God of Israel, and that the Torah of Moses, having been eclipsed by Christ, has no role whatever to play in the Gentiles� faithful response to the God of Israel � except as it contains a word of promise about Christ.� Even more, if Martyn is correct, Paul argues that the Torah of Moses is not even from God, but rather came from angels through Moses (Gal 3:19-20).^[37]� This is a radical statement, as Martyn puts it, about the �godless origins of Torah� and about how the arrival of Torah through angels and Moses is a contradiction of the shema. Paul later modifies this (potentially Marcionite) proposition in Romans 7, but in Galatians it is one of the arguments he makes to convince the Galatian Gentiles not to subject themselves to Torah.

In fact, argues Paul later on the letter (Gal 4:1-10), for the Galatians to come �under the law� is no different from, is identical to (4:8-9), being enslaved as they formerly were to the stoicheia tou cosmou, the �elemental spirits of the cosmos�, the not-gods of the world.� It was from these that God�s apocalyptic rescue in Jesus Christ had freed them � to come �under law� would be to nullify this rescue altogether.

What is at stake for Paul is precisely the shema, precisely the First Commandment.� The sole purpose of God�s apocalyptic rescue of the Gentiles from their houses of bondage is that the Gentiles might, through Christ, be set free to worship the one God of Israel, and beside him no other.� Anything that might come between God and this reclaimed segment of Gentile humanity would contradict the oneness of God and the truth of his deliverance.� Any suggestion that Torah faithfulness would be good for the Galatians, that in any case it does not contradict the apocalypsis Jesou Christou and might indeed share significant continuity with it, that, in other words, there might be a �torah element at the core� of the good news to the Gentiles, would have to be resisted with all the vigor that Paul could muster.

It is now becoming clear how Hauerwas, in his criticism of liberalism, is authentically tapped into Pauline apocalytpic motifs and style.� What Hauerwas detects in the American church, as Paul does in the Galatian situation, is an insufficient clarity about the one-and-onlyness of Israel�s God and his Christ, and the exclusive loyalty which this God demands from his people.� Is not a liberal democratic polis precisely that into which Christ came to induct American Christians, and of course finally all the peoples and nations of the earth?� Is such a social order not the goal of Christian political existence, and therefore must not the subject of the church�s ethics and theology and preaching and the sacraments be, finally, America, as just such a paradigmatic polis?� Just insofar as American Christianity has always been tempted to answer these questions in the affirmative, so must liberalism be exposed for what it is: enslavement to the �elemental spirits�, the not-gods of the cosmos.

Into this murky situation comes Hauerwas, proclaiming the good news of deliverance, for which he is in good company with Paul when it comes to apocalyptic overstatement.� There may sometime be more time and space for careful qualifications and restatements � but to my mind Hauerwas does not think that time has yet come.� Right now the American church is under submission to �a yoke of slavery,� �fallen away from grace,� caught up in a dual allegiance to Christ and the liberal polis, and therefore standing under God�s apocalyptic wrath, a situation in which �Christ will be of no benefit� in the coming judgment (cf. Gal 5:1-5).� Hauerwas seeks nothing less than the conversion from apostasy, the holiness, of American Christianity, which will come only with the flat-out rejection of the liberal state and its claim to be another or better gospel.� The American church must die to liberalism, so that it might live to God, so that Christ might live in it.� For if justification � for Paul, always a theological/social/political concept � comes through a liberal democratic society, then Christ died for nothing (cf. Gal 2:19-21).� The only hope of a just polis rests in the justice of God revealed in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ and the people which has found its life in him, the people in whom Christ must become formed.

Apocalyptic Ontology: John Milbank

Paul�s proclamation of deliverance from the principalities and powers, the �elemental spirits of the cosmos�, the idols of this world, is always implicitly and sometimes explicitly a positive ontological claim, a claim about what there is, the constitutive character and shape of being, whether cosmic or human.� In Galatians time itself is pregnant with the Son, until God sends him forth to be �born of a woman, born under the law� (4:4).� In the cross of Christ the cosmos is crucified to Paul, and Paul to the cosmos, so that a new creation might be everything (6:14-15).� In 1 Corinthians Paul speaks of Christ crucified, �the power of God and the wisdom of God� (1:23-24).� This same crucified one is the one of whom Paul goes on to say: �for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.� (8:6)� Just so, for Paul the crucified and risen Jesus is the clue to �the grain of the universe,� as Yoder frequently puts it. That is, through Christ the true character of all reality, whether cosmic or human, is revealed, made visible.� �One has died for all; therefore all have died. . . . From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view.�� (2 Cor 5:14-16)). ��If anyone is in Christ [Is anyone �outside� of Christ?] there is a new creation: the old has passed away; see everything has become new. . . . [I]n Christ God was reconciling the cosmos to himself.� (2 Cor 5:17-19; see also Col 1:15-20).� The God of Israel enacts his love toward humankind concretely in the cross of Jesus Christ; the cross is God�s love which breaks the imprisoning bonds of Torah and the powers alike.� Nothing in �all creation,� neither death nor life, nor powers, nor time, can separate humankind from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:38-39), because the very fabric of creaturely being is created, reconciled, and finds its coherence in his cross and resurrection.

Paul�s ontological claims about human socio-political reality come primarily in his letter to the Romans and in the profoundly Pauline epistle to the Ephesians.� In the strange account of God�s purpose with Israel in Romans 9-11 we discover that the priority of Israel as God�s elect people sets up a dynamic history of mutual disobedience, enmity, dependence and finally blessing between Israel and the nations.� Only in this way is God�s purpose of enclosing all peoples within his mercy effected � always the chosen for the sake of the not-chosen, and the not-my-people for the sake of my-people.� �For God has imprisoned all in disobedience [Israel imprisoned under Torah, the nations under the idols], so that he may be merciful to all.� (Rom 11:32)� The goal of God�s mercy is the body of Christ (12:1-8) in which Israel and the nations �welcome one another� and glorify God together � which is the apocalypsis of the mystery of eschatological peace (15:7-13; 16:25-27).

The Pauline theology of the �mystery of God�s will� comes to a climax in Ephesians.� This is the mystery which God has made known, �according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fulness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.� (Eph 1:9-10) The reality of this mystery �hidden for ages in God who created all things� (3:9) is made manifest in the church, the new humanity created by the destruction of the hostility and wall of division between Israel and the nations.� The Gentiles, once excluded from the commonwealth (politeia) of Israel (2:12), have now been brought near through the cross, reconciled with Israel, and made fellow citizens (sumpolitai 2:19) and members of the same household with Israel.� �He [Christ] himself is our peace . . .� (2:14).

No one in recent times has sought to inscribe this Pauline apocalypsis of the ontology of peace into theology and theological politics with such imagination and power as John Milbank.�

The logic of Christianity involves the claim that the �interruption� of history by Christ and his bride, the Church, is the most fundamental of events, interpreting all other events.� And it is most especially a social event, able to interpret other social formations, because it compares them with a new social practice.^[38]

Milbank�s entire theology is an attempt to explore this logic of the interruption of history, the interruption of the reign of the gods and powers which incite enmity, struggle and violence on cosmic and social scales.� There is, of course, a kind of continuity, a kind of predictability, and so also a kind of �peace� in the history of worldly occurrence under the reign of the idols.� But it is a peace which always comes forth from a more primordial violence, and a peace which can envision no future except by way of more violence.� This is the peace which is no peace, and thus the peace which requires interruption, apocalypse.� Only the apocalypse of the cross, in which violence is conquered by submission to violence, can be the ground of true peace, because the cross is the apocalypsis of the one creator God.� The cross is an event of reclamation by the triune God of Israel, Jesus and the Church.� Apocalypse and creation are revealed together in their truth in a single history, the history of Christ and his bride, the Church.� Milbank attempts, with Paul,

to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.� This was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Eph 3:9-11)

As in Pauline thought, Milbank�s apocalyptic �counter-ontology� has, in the social realm, ecclesiology at the center.� The ecclesia is the true polis, in which the mystery of creation is made known to the wider world.� Just so, Milbank uses �Christ and his bride� as the place from which to re-imagine the truth of being, cosmic and social.� Milbank�s main contribution to theological politics is the impetus he has given to reclaim and renew political (and any other kind of) rationality as always already a theological engagement.^[39]� Milbank aims for nothing short of a radical theological �takeover� of the intellectual disciplines which sustain the modern polis.� �[E]very discipline must be framed by a theological perspective; otherwise these disciplines will define a zone apart from God, grounded literally in nothing [or, which is the same thing, in the not-gods of this cosmos].�^[40]� He describes this task as a way of recovering the �Augustinian vision of all knowledge as divine illumination� and in turn �seeking to deploy this recovered vision systematically to criticize modern society, culture, politics, art, science, and philosophy with an unprecedented boldness.�^[41]�

Milbank thus joins cause with Paul and Hauerwas in their passion for the shema and the First Commandment.� But the criticism of modern society has a specific goal in mind which reveals that the apocalyptic imagination which moves the Milbankian project is not a dualist apocalyptic.� For the criticism of modern society is aimed not only at �interrupting� the discourse of modernity about the things which constitute the life of the polis: �embodied life, self-expression, sexuality, aesthetic experience, human political community.� (Note the similarity with Yoder�s list of powers/structures.)� It is also aimed at �upholding their relative worth over-against the void,� and in so doing reclaiming �the mediating participatory sphere which alone can lead us to God.�^[42]� In other words, Milbank�s project bears a close resemblance to Yoder�s.� Each is committed to discerning the continuities of creation, not as a set of primordially given �orders,� but as the cosmos and humanity claimed by God �prior to� human sinfulness and rebellion of the powers.� Rather than rejecting the structures and forms of life which make human existence in the polis possible, it is the task of Christian thinking, after interrupting the false continuities and antinomies of history under the gods, �to articulate a more incarnate, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more socialized, even �more Platonic� Christianity.�^[43]

Any polis is a theological undertaking of one kind or another, a place upon which some god or another has already laid claim.� It is no different with the so-called �secular� polis, the modern nation state.� �To see the state . . . as an alternative soteriology is to begin to notice the inherent conflict between the state practices and the practices, such as the Eucharist, which Christians take for granted.�^[44]� Only in the church and its practices is the destiny of creation realized and made visible, such that with its presence in the midst of the nations God reveals his eschatological judgment on the nations, divided against each other out of loyalty to their tribal gods and therefore always poised for war.� The Christian theological task is to narrate the new polis, the new humanity, the new creation, which is revealed in Christ and his bride, the Church, as the clue to the character of all reality.� In so doing, Milbank, Cavanaugh and company are simply recovering and extending the work which was begun when Saul of Tarsus, who was violently seeking to dismantle the nascent church, was interrupted by the apocalypsis Jesou Christou.

Conclusion

The power of the Pauline apocalyptic imagination was transmuted and muted for centuries into �eschatology,� in� which theologians disputed different timelines and scenarios for �the return of Christ�.� The first and still the� greatest recovery of Paul�s apocalyptic for our time is Karl Barth�s R�merbrief.� Here, in classic Pauline style, was a powerful interruption of centuries of theological thinking which presupposed, or at least hankered after, the stable continuity of Christendom as the key to the way God works in the world.� Barth�s commentary on Romans set the precedent for the kind of work we find in Yoder, Hauerwas and Milbank.� However, as Walter Lowe has recently noted, it is the prevalent habit of reason to �contextualize� the apocalyptic of a Jesus or Paul or Barth, the temptation to inscribe apocalyptic as an �historical phenomenon� which one can then �explain� in other terms.� �In doing so, the historian asserts a priori the very continuity of history which apocalyptic would question � into the dustbin of history goes the notion that history is headed for the dustbin.�^[45]� But, writes Lowe,

Christian theology proceeds upon the quite different premise that we ourselves have been contextualized; and not just conceptually, but actually.� It is we who have been inscribed.� It may be that, whatever else it does, apocalyptic stands as a primary means by which scripture effects or announces such inscription.^[46]

What is required instead of timelines into which apocalyptic is inscribed, or which it perhaps becomes, is �an apocalyptic without reserve,� that is, �the suspension of all things human within an unqualified apocalyptic � a suspension which is unqualified because it is apocalyptic.�^[47]

Just such a �suspension,� in which we ourselves have been contextualized, is that to which the apostle Paul bore faithful witness.� I hope I have shown how at least one part of the story of Christian theology in the twentieth century since Barth, the story which extends from Barth to Yoder to Hauerwas to Milbank and �radical orthodoxy�^[48], is an attempt to repeat, for our time, the witness of the apostle � witness to the apocalypsis Jesou Christou which makes possible the new creation amid the ruins of the old.