As You See the Day Approaching: Reformed Perspectives on the Last Things

As You See the Day Approaching

Reformed Perspectives on the Last Things

Edited by

Theodore G. Van Raalte

As You See the Day Approaching

Reformed Perspectives on the Last Things

Copyright © 2016 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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ISBN: 978-1-4982-3406-1

EISBN: 978-1-4982-3407-8

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

As you see the day approaching : Reformed perspectives on the last things / edited by Theodore G. Van Raalte.

x + 170 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-4982-3406-1

1. Theology, Doctrinal. 2. Reformed Church—Eschatology. 3. Eschatology. I. Van Raalte, Theodore G. II. Title.

BT803 A75 2016

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/17/2015

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version©, NIV©. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, and 2011 by Biblica, Inc.© Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version© (ESV©), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The figures in chapter 3, Finding Eschatology in the Old Testament: The Psalms as Case in Point, are creations of the author, Jannes Smith.

The image of John Calvin in Figure 2 is in the public domain (Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calvin_1562.jpg/).

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Chapter 1: Eschatology, or Doctrine concerning the End Times

Chapter 2: Adam, Moses, and Christ

Chapter 3: Finding Eschatology in the Old Testament

Chapter 4: Working Politically and Socially in Anticipation of Christ’s Coming

Chapter 5: In Between and Intermediate

Chapter 6: Is Hell Obsolete?

Chapter 7: A New Earth?

Chapter 8: Until He Comes

Acknowledgments

Books, of course, do not produce themselves.

The contents of this volume began to take shape in the Spring of 2014, when the planning committee for the annual conference of the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary (CRTS) of Hamilton, Ontario, began to discuss with the conference speakers what topics they would address at the next (January 2015) conference. We thank this committee of students, professors, staff, and one minister—Jeremy DeHaan, William DenHollander, Leanne Kuizenga, John Smith, John Van Popta, and Ted Van Raalte—for their careful planning. Once the Senate had approved their proposal regarding the presenters and speech titles, they took care of everything. Thanks to them, the conference ran like a well-oiled machine. Whether it was sound, food, supplies, accompaniment to the singing, moderating, programs, parking, etc., everything was completed in a professional manner and on time. Thank you all most warmly!

The seminary community was very pleased to have Lane Tipton, professor of systematic theology at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia join us for the conference and give the opening speech. Please come again!

We thank the respondents who helped stimulate discussion at our conference, namely, Karlo Janssen, Bill DeJong, André Schutten, and George Van Popta. They had copies of four of the papers ahead of time, and each man gave a five-minute response. Although, per the plan, we are not publishing these brief responses, we truly appreciate their time and expertise. And to all our attendees, especially those who made comments and asked questions, we express our appreciation. Some of the papers have benefited from further reflection, including reflection upon the discussions at the conference.

The Ebenezer Canadian Reformed Church of Burlington is hereby acknowledged for the use of their most suitable facilities and their wonderful army of volunteers who help in the kitchen. Bruce Hartman gave his time as audio-video technician. Immediately upon the conference’s close he provided us with a very good quality set of CD and DVD recordings. These are now hosted at canadianreformedseminary.ca. Martin Jongsma encouraged our singing by his spirited accompaniment on the organ.

This volume is now the second to appear under the Lucerna: CRTS Publications logo, a series connected to the Publication Fund of CRTS. We are thankful that this fund can offer assistance where needed, to see the volume to print. We’re also pleased to have had the manuscript accepted by Wipf & Stock, and we intend to continue publishing with them.

While I remain responsible for any remaining oversights and errors, I am most indebted to Bill Helder for his meticulous attention to detail and his relentless consistency in copy editing each of the essays. Thank-you!

The faculty of CRTS prays that this volume will increase the fervency and the clarity of the church’s prayer: Come, Lord Jesus!

On behalf of the faculty of CRTS,

Ted Van Raalte

Contributors

Dr. Lane G. Tipton, PhD, is the Charles W. Krahe Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Penn-sylvania.

Dr. Jannes Smith, PhD, is the Professor of Old Testament at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario.

Dr. Cornelis Van Dam, ThD, is the Emeritus Professor of Old Testament at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario.

Dr. Theodore G. Van Raalte, PhD, is the Professor of Ecclesiology at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario.

Dr. Jason P. Van Vliet, ThD, is the Professor of Dogmatics at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario.

Dr. Gerhard H. Visscher, PhD, is the Professor of New Testament at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario.

Dr. Arjan de Visser, ThD, is the Professor of Diaconiology at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario.

1

Eschatology, or Doctrine concerning the End Times

An Introduction

Theodore G. Van Raalte

In 1841 a new word entered the English language. Both that year and the next saw the dawn of eschatology as a translation of an almost equally new word in another language: the German Eschatologie.¹ The word was explained as doctrine concerning the last things.² As such, in both the German and English, it came straight out of Greek, logos meaning study of or doctrine of, and eschatos meaning last, farthest, or final (in the New Testament ta eschata means the last things).³ Nevertheless, prior to about 1900 an eschaton in English was a small interval in music and had nothing to do with theology.

In contrast, since about 1900, theologians have frequently used eschaton as a word in English for the end-time period itself, and they casually bandy about the term eschatology as if everyone knows what the words mean. Some teach that Christians are already in the eschaton; others that it will commence with Christ’s return. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2004) lists eschatology as a noun meaning the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and destiny. For the most part, the present volume uses the word in this traditional sense. However, more needs to be said.

Analysis suggests that there are three distinct ways in which the word eschatology is being used by theologians today. First, there is the most traditional usage, noted above. Although the word itself was coined later, it represents a topic in theology that reaches back to the medieval era and treats of the last things.⁴ Second, there is a more philosophical usage that began to develop in the early twentieth century with scholars such as Barth, Bultmann, Moltmann, and Pannenberg. Third, one encounters a more orthodox development that may have actually preceded the more philosophical usage of the term. This development begins especially with Geerhardus Vos, and in many cases eschatological is a synonym for the term redemptive-historical. While it is the first and third usages that interest us most, we will also review the second.

The Twentieth Century and Eschatology

David Fergusson introduces a series of essays on Christian eschatology as follows: One of the distinctive features of twentieth-century theology has been the recovery of interest and confidence in eschatology.⁵ Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson agree, writing, The twentieth century will be remembered in the history of theology for its rediscovery of the centrality of eschatology in the message of Jesus and early Christianity. But they add an equally interesting comment, But it reached no consensus on the shape and meaning of that eschatology.⁶ The three usages traced above help explain why this was the case.

Indeed, the renewed emphasis on eschatology did not mean a focus on the end-times and the traditional topics of our death, Christ’s return, judgment, heaven, hell, and the new creation. To explain these new emphases, we will first note the effects of the Enlightenment and of Hegelian philosophy, then review several Reformed theologians who were at the fringes of Reformed orthodoxy (Barth, Pannenberg, and others). This will flesh out the more philosophical usage. To introduce the redemptive-historical usage of the term, I will present several theologians (Vos, Ridderbos, Gaffin) whose views were and are in agreement with the confessional Reformed orthodoxy espoused by the contributors to the current volume. Reviewing these distinct usages will help set the stage for the contribution this volume of essays wishes to make. Readers with minimal background knowledge of philosophy and liberal theology could profitably skip the following paragraphs and resume reading where I begin to deal with Geerhardus Vos, but because of the significant role played, still today, by Barth and Pannenberg, some analysis of their contributions must be included.

Liberal Enlightenment Theology

First, throughout the nineteenth century, influences of Enlightenment thinking among European philosophers and theologians cast doubt upon the biblical claims of miracles and prophecy. These doubts extended to the biblical teachings about life after death, so that liberal theologians began to focus only on the here and now, spinning out a Christianity that was all about the ethics of imitating Jesus and had little to say about an afterlife. Around 1900, New Testament theologians such as Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) agreed that Jesus himself and early Christians had expectations that the coming of God’s kingdom was imminent, but he concluded that unfortunately Jesus had been mistaken.⁷ According to Schweitzer, Jesus himself was not even raised from the dead.

At the same time German theologians had been developing a stronger appreciation for history, in line with the prestige of Hegelian philosophy. Development and progress became important motifs in philosophy and theology. These motifs played into an organic, evolutionary, and optimistic eschatology, but not a biblical eschatology wherein the resurrection of Christ powerfully opens the way into a new creation. Rather, humanity would just continue to self-improve until the utopian future was reached. In this case both the secular and the Christian views coalesced in a postmillennial optimism.⁸ The practice of an ethic of love in the present was the way into this higher and better future, and the signs of reaching this were apparently ubiquitous.

Karl Barth (1886–1968)

After the First World War, the optimism just noted had been crushed. The great Karl Barth (1886–1968) declared God’s judgment on such self-assured views, for they omitted attention to God’s awesome righteousness, man’s utter sinfulness, and God’s intervening sovereign grace in Jesus Christ as the only hope for anything new.

Barth argued that everyone needs to account for the always-present divine judgment that creates a situation of crisis and tension for every person. Crisis, not progress, became his byword: The eschaton is ‘the existential crisis of man living constantly at the brink of God’s eternity.’ In his view, every person is faced with the choice for or against Christ and will only find him in the midst of one’s own existential crisis in the encounter with the Word. As a result, "If Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology, there remains in it no relationship with Christ."⁹ Barth’s view thus represented a radical shift from the liberal theologians who preceded him and from the traditional topics of eschatology as found in Reformed theology (resurrection, judgment, heaven, hell, new creation). The latter he called a short and perfectly harmless chapter at the end of dogmatics.¹⁰ What Barth meant by eschatology is not easily explained, given his peculiar mix of theology and philosophy.¹¹ But clearly eschatology became much more than just a topic within theology—Christianity was to be thoroughgoing eschatology that, unlike Schweitzer and the liberals, took divine judgment seriously. Eschatology became a window into all of theology, a vista from which to get the right perspective on everything.

While we could review the ways in which other theologians, such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) and Jürgen Moltmann (1926– ), used the term eschatology, we will focus momentarily on Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014), one of the most prolific and important theologians of the late twentieth century.¹² He spoke of eschatology probably much more than Barth, though what he meant by the term is not always clear or coherent.

Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014)

Pannenberg gave the future a kind of present reality, as if it exists now, though not fully. He then made this future determinative of all our present knowledge of God and of our task in this world. He took the position that God will be fully revealed only when history reaches its end. Orthodox Reformed believers can agree with the latter statement as such, but before we agree with what Pannenberg means by it, we need to understand why he emphasized this and what he meant by it.

Pannenberg was looking for a new foundation for our talk about God (that is, our theology). He did not want to say that God revealed himself by his past deeds as recorded in Scripture and that he continues to reveal himself through the scriptural record. This would root theology in the past and present, both of which are incomplete as revelations of God. In fact, even God himself will only become fully actual or real at the end, the eschaton. Christiaan Mostert summarizes, "Indeed, I call Pannenberg’s doctrine of God eschatological."¹³ Similarly, humans are said to exist only in anticipation of that which they will be in the light of their final future, the advent of God.¹⁴ Therefore, the future exists now as a kind of power or thing more real than the past or present because the future is more full of being. Existence and being are then rooted in the future because that is where God and humanity will be fully reconciled.

In philosophical terms, Pannenberg espoused a kind of reverse causality, where the future causes the present and past. Pannenberg wrote, We see the present as an effect of the future, in contrast to the conventional assumption that past and present are the cause of the future.¹⁵ Various authors have called this notion counterintuitive. Cooper asks, How can anything not yet actual have positive power? . . . In my view, [Pannenberg’s] ontology of the future is counterintuitive and philosophically unconvincing.¹⁶ The incoherence only increases when Pannenberg insists that the path from here to the future is not determined in its course; there is freedom for reality to develop one way or another. If this is the case, what future is actually exerting its power in the present? Not only is the future not yet actual, but its final shape is not yet determined. This has led some critics to associate his views with process theology, though this may be incorrect.¹⁷

What’s at least obvious is that for Pannenberg eschatology became the foundation and driving force of all of theology and of the Christian life, even for all existence. What is here and now derives its reality from the future; eschatology is underneath everything. Eschatology became a catchword for an entire philosophical approach, a metaphysics as such.

Unfortunately, although Pannenberg was of Reformed persuasion, his view of the nature of the reconciliation of the divine and human was not within the pale of Christian orthodoxy. John Cooper argues convincingly that Pannenberg put the world’s existence inside God, within the Triune life of God, which he thinks of as an infinite, all-inclusive force field.¹⁸ This puts Pannenberg in the circle of panentheists rather than theists. He failed to maintain a clear demarcation line between the Creator and his creation/creatures.

In conclusion, although Pannenberg’s way of describing Christ as the one in whom this future has already been fully realized is (as will be pointed out in the following pages) quite capable of orthodox understanding, his wider framework of thought elicits significant concerns from Reformed theologians.¹⁹

Other European Reformed Theologians

Similar ideas, by which eschatology was made determinative for all of theology, were voiced by Arnold A. van Ruler (1908–1972), professor of theology at Utrecht.²⁰ Hendrikus Berkhof (1914–1995) and Gerrit C. Berkhouwer (1903–1996), two other twentieth-century Dutch professors, also paid much more attention to eschatology than had their predecessors.²¹ Klaas Schilder (1890–1952) maintained a much more intuitive view of eschatology than Pannenberg later would, for Schilder considered the beginning of history, with the good creation and the subsequent fall into sin, as determinative of the history that followed. Schilder’s theology witnesses to an abiding emphasis on eschatology in terms of God’s progressive revelation of himself in real human history. His important monographs on the nature of heaven and hell and on the Book of Revelation represented deep explorations in eschatology.²²

Reformed Insights I: Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949)

There are elements of truth in the approaches that make eschatology hegemonic for all of theology, or at least, for soteriology. It is true that in Christ the beginning of the new creation already exists, for he has been glorified in body and soul. One could say that in Christ the end or eschaton is here. Believers today do live with an anticipatory already of who we are in Christ combined with the frustrating not-yet of our present experience of sin. But these truths need to be rooted firmly in Scripture, the principle external source for our knowledge of Christ, salvation, and the future. In this regard the orthodox Reformed theologian Geerhardus Vos, professor of biblical theology at Princeton from 1893 to 1932, blessed the church with some wonderful insights. With Vos we now come to the third of our three ways in which the term eschatology is used—in which eschatological often functions as a synonym for redemptive-historical.

Gaffin summarizes the relationship of Vos’s usage to the traditional usage very helpfully in his foreword to the republication of Vos’s The Pauline Eschatology (1979; originally published in 1930). He writes,

The title of this volume can be misleading. The reader who understands eschatology in its conventional, still popular sense will expect a specialized study limited to those last things associated with the second coming of Christ. The author, however, intends something more. His basic thesis is that to unfold Paul’s eschatology is to set forth his theology as a whole, not just his teaching on Christ’s return.

Few developments in biblical studies over the past century are of such far-reaching importance as the increasing recognition of the New Testament writers’ broadened understanding of eschatology. Christ’s coming, culminating in his death and resurrection, takes place in the fullness of time (s) (Gal

4

:

4

; Eph

1

:

10

), in these last days (Heb

1

:

2

), at the end of the ages (Heb

9

:

26

), in the fully eschatological sense. The present experience of those united by faith to Christ in his suffering and exaltation (Gal

2

:

20

); Eph

2

:

5

,

6

; Col

3

:

1

), not only their future, is essentially eschatological; the Christian life is an eschatological life.

Vos was a pioneer in calling attention to this fundamental datum of New Testament teaching—what can be termed its eschatological, redemptive-historical orientation. His brief but perceptive volume, The Kingdom and the Church (

1903

), pointed out the eschatological nature of the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus as not only future but present in his person and work. It is also worth noting that The Pauline Eschatology first appeared in the same year (

1930

) as the German original of Albert Schweitzer’s The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle . . . Vos’s treatment, however, is much more balanced and true to Paul, faithfully capturing the controlling eschatological motif of his teaching.²³

Vos calls the apostle Paul the father of Christian eschatology. He considers Paul under divine inspiration to have taken the various strands of eschatological teaching already present in the Scriptures, gathered them together, and woven them into a compact, well-rounded system, so coherent, that, speaking after the manner of man, it became next to impossible for any of the precious texture henceforth to be lost.²⁴

He notices that believers in the New Testament were conscious of being in the last days or at least of living very close to them. According to the New Testament, the fullness of the times refers to the designated time for the Messiah’s appearing; he is the last Adam (in Greek: the eschatos Adam) with whom the end of the ages has come upon believers.²⁵ This affects the way believers think about their fundamental identity, victory over sin, presence of the Holy