Beginning. Middle. End.

September 9th 2011

N.T. Wright. Surprised by Hope. HarperOne, 2008. First Edition. pg 103-104.

This serves as a follow up to yesterday’s post where I said that the new hopeful eschatology springing up from the rubble of post-modernism is generally reacting against one thing: a misreading of Christian eschatology. Post-modernists have to find hope somewhere because we have spent the last 80 years wandering about in survivor’s guilt. But modernism’s tendency is to view the world on a spectrum of progress that will finally achieve its own immortality. Since much of the language involved in these eschatologies is essentially borrowing from the Christian one, I felt like it would be worth an honest reading of first century Christians in the wake of their own upheaval: that of Christ resurrecting. N.T. Wright is about as good a source to look to as one can find.

I found a passage that sums the theme of Christian eschatology that is not one where the “good” people get sucked out into a floating city of heaven, but rather this creation is remade, transformed, in the hope of resurrection. Which has very real consequences now, presently.

Posted at 4:10pm and tagged with: eschatology, N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, postmodern, despair, hope, Christ,.

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…[An] image deeply embedded within the created order itself: that of new birth…Paul again uses the imagery of the Exodus from Egypt but this time in relation not to Jesus, nor even to ourselves, but to creation as a whole. Creation, he says (Romans 8:21) is in slavery at the moment, like the children of Israel. God’s design was to rule creation in life-giving wisdom through his image-bearing human creatures. But this was always a promise for the future, a promise that one day the true human being, the image of God himself, God’s incarnate son, would come to lead the human race into their true identity. Meanwhile, the creation was subjected to futility, to transcience and decay, until the time when God’s children are glorified, when what happened to Jesus at Easter happens to all Jesus’s people…The whole creation is on tiptoe with expectation, longing for the day when God’s children are revealed, when their resurrection will herald its own new life. Paul then uses the image of birth pangs…Once again this highlights both continuity and discontinuity. This is no smooth evolutionary transition, in which creation simply moves up another gear into a higher mode of life. This is traumatic, involving convulsions and contractions and the radical discontinuity in which mother and child are parted and become not one being but two. But neither is this a dualistic rejection of physicality as though, because the present creation is transient and full of decay and death, God must throw it away and start again from scratch. The very metaphor Paul chooses… is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old.

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September 8th 2011

7 notes |#

- from “A Divine Comedy: Among the Danteans of Florence” by Elif Batuman. pg. 55-65. Harper’s, Sept 2011. — Special thanks to Tragos for pointing me to the article.

Batuman’s argument that the comedy (things ending well and whole) of the Divine Comedy is to be found in the continuous present moment of history is something I see popping up all over the place these days. I think it is an attempt at hope newly emerging from the postmodern despair, the “breeding of lilacs out of the dead land.” Science and philosophy are expressing a new(ish) hopeful eschatology; folk-level art is expressing it (I think Josh Ritter’s present moment eschatology is similar to Batuman’s). In my mind, it is simultaneously exciting and terrible: the hope sounds eerily similar to the modernist hope that culminated in the first World War; hope is better than despair, but what sort of havoc could we wreak with our new technologies that WW1 and WW2 could not?

My solution isn’t to instead revert back to the postmodern despair, but rather to have an honest reading of the eschatology that all of these things are singularly reacting against; the Christian eschatology. The orthodox eschatology of Christianity, despite the zeitgeist in America today, was not one where “meaning and truth reside in the afterlife” but rather that the hope of a redeemed life makes meaning now. The continuous present moment is informed with hope because of a promise where THIS WORLD is redeemed - not trashed or sucked up into a golden city in the sky - but remade, here; albeit, a whole here. Jesus Christ died on the cross, and when He stepped out of the tomb, He still bore the scars of his execution, but the scars were in a new and whole flesh.

So, I agree very much, and disagree very much at the same time with Batuman’s thesis. The end of the article though, is gorgeous prose.

Posted at 3:59pm and tagged with: eschatology, Elif Batuman, Dante, Divine Comedy, Harper's, Jesus Christ, hope, despair, postmodern,.

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…meaning and truth in Dante’s world reside in the afterlife, where figurae are fulfilled and totalities formed. Mortal existence is, by contrast, incomplete, illusory, secondary. But I think the opposite can be said, with equal accuracy: it’s the afterlife that is a tissue of illusions. Dante’s afterworld may be highly structured, but he invented that structure himself, synthesizing classical mythology, Christian theology, and medieval demonology. Dante’s afterworld, drawing attention to its own eccentricities, paradoxes, and loopholes, is not a universal afterworld - it’s Dante’s afterworld, based in his own experiences. Seen from this perspective, the only thing that’s indubitably real, the only thing everyone can see and agree on, is the stuff of this life - all the stuff that Dante himself studied with such interest and love. Is Paradise more real than all that? Is it better? Is Paradise enough to compensate for the loss of the world?
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t…But if this world is all there is, then it’s in history itself that the riddle finds its solution. The meaning of Dante’s existence is revealed not by his place in the chorus of Paradise but by the fate of his corpse and his corpus IN THIS WORLD. Then Dante’s head is a figura for Mallegni’s plaster cast, and his poetry a figura for wine, and Ugolino eating Ruggieri’s skull is a figura of forensic scientists extracting Ugolino’s bone marrow.

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