By: NT Wright
Little did Paul know how his
colorful metaphors for Jesus’ second coming would be misunderstood two
millennia later.
The American obsession with the
second coming of Jesus — especially with distorted interpretations of it —
continues unabated. Seen from my side of
the Atlantic, the phenomenal success of the Left Behind books appears puzzling,
even bizarre[1]. Few in the U.K. hold
the belief on which the popular series of novels is based: that there will be a
literal “rapture” in which believers will be snatched up to heaven, leaving
empty cars crashing on freeways and kids coming home from school only to find
that their parents have been taken to be with Jesus while they have been “left
behind.” This pseudo-theological version
of Home Alone has reportedly frightened many children into some kind of
(distorted) faith.
This dramatic end-time scenario
is based (wrongly, as we shall see) on Paul’s First Letter to the
Thessalonians, where he writes: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven
with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of
God. The dead in Christ will rise first;
then we, who are left alive, will be snatched up with them on clouds to meet
the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians
4:16-17).
What on earth (or in heaven) did
Paul mean?
It is Paul who should be credited
with creating this scenario. Jesus
himself, as I have argued in various books, never predicted such an
event[2]. The gospel passages about “the
Son of Man coming on the clouds” (Mark 13:26, 14:62, for example) are about
Jesus’ vindication, his “coming” to heaven from earth. The parables about a returning king or master
(for example, Luke 19:11-27) were originally about God returning to Jerusalem,
not about Jesus returning to earth.
This, Jesus seemed to believe, was an event within space-time history,
not one that would end it forever.
The Ascension of Jesus and the
Second Coming are nevertheless vital Christian doctrines[3], and I don’t deny
that I believe some future event will result in the personal presence of Jesus
within God’s new creation. This is
taught throughout the New Testament outside the Gospels. But this event won’t in any way resemble the
Left Behind account. Understanding what
will happen requires a far more sophisticated cosmology than the one in which
“heaven” is somewhere up there in our universe, rather than in a different
dimension, a different space-time, altogether.
The New Testament, building on
ancient biblical prophecy, envisages that the creator God will remake heaven
and earth entirely, affirming the goodness of the old Creation but overcoming
its mortality and corruptibility (e.g., Romans 8:18-27; Revelation 21:1; Isaiah
65:17, 66:22). When that happens, Jesus
will appear within the resulting new world (e.g., Colossians 3:4; 1 John 3:2).
Paul’s description of Jesus’
reappearance in 1 Thessalonians 4 is a brightly colored version of what he says
in two other passages, 1 Corinthians 15:51-54 and Philippians 3:20-21: At
Jesus’ “coming” or “appearing,” those who are still alive will be “changed” or
“transformed” so that their mortal bodies will become incorruptible,
deathless. This is all that Paul intends
to say in Thessalonians, but here he borrows imagery—from biblical and
political sources—to enhance his message.
Little did he know how his rich metaphors would be misunderstood two
millennia later.
First, Paul echoes the story of
Moses coming down the mountain with the Torah.
The trumpet sounds, a loud voice is heard, and after a long wait Moses
comes to see what’s been going on in his absence.
Second, he echoes Daniel 7, in
which “the people of the saints of the Most High” (that is, the “one like a son
of man”) are vindicated over their pagan enemy by being raised up to sit with
God in glory. This metaphor, applied to
Jesus in the Gospels, is now applied to Christians who are suffering persecution.
Third, Paul conjures up images of
an emperor visiting a colony or province.
The citizens go out to meet him in open country and then escort him into
the city. Paul’s image of the people
“meeting the Lord in the air” should be read with the assumption that the
people will immediately turn around and lead the Lord back to the newly remade
world.
Paul’s mixed metaphors of
trumpets blowing and the living being snatched into heaven to meet the Lord are
not to be understood as literal truth, as the Left Behind series suggests, but
as a vivid and biblically allusive description of the great transformation of
the present world of which he speaks elsewhere.
Paul’s misunderstood metaphors
present a challenge for us: How can we reuse biblical imagery, including
Paul’s, so as to clarify the truth, not distort it? And how can we do so, as he did, in such a
way as to subvert the political imagery of the dominant and dehumanizing
empires of our world? We might begin by
asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left
Behind ideology? How might it be
confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality
in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s
world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured
Paul’s wholistic vision of God’s whole creation?
[1] Tim F. Lahaye and Jerry B.
Jenkins, Left Behind (Cambridge, UK: Tyndale House Publishing, 1996). Eight other titles have followed, all runaway
bestsellers.
[2] See my Jesus and the Victory
of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1996); the discussions in Jesus and the
Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the
Victory of God, ed. Carey C. Newman (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press,
1999); and Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), chapters 13 and 14.
[3] Douglas Farrow, Ascension and
Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology
and Christian Cosmology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
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