a word on eschatology: “the end” of presenting bodies as spiritual worship
Eschatology, the end of things, is a charged category. It is interesting to think of Jürgen Moltmann’s premise that Eschatology is really the nucleus of theological inquiry, what he describes as, “the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day.” (16) With regard to Christian hope, his enlightening words seemingly help forge a fresh and imaginative path forward in contrast to images of burning buildings, raptured souls, and a Romanian born anti-Christ under the pseudonym of, Nicolae Carpathia (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then consider yourself fortunate…)
Whether for ill or not, eschatology holds a lot of our theology. We talked about this in class as talk of “end times” raises all sorts of topics of inquiry: soteriology/damnation, politics, heaven/hell, life/death, and the persistent suffering of trauma that sometimes seems to impede the kind of hope that Moltmann articulates. And yet, these are places that most Christians dare not tread. Eschatology becomes the fix to the complexity of life in the present. We do not know what to do with trauma, death, and suffering and so we envision heavenly landscapes to sing about and wish that sooner or later we would be at, “home”. I remember as a child hearing my grandfather, who had suffered a severe stroke and could barely articulate word or phrases, tell my father that, “I just want to go home.” He would repeat it over and over again. It instilled a fear of growing old in me, a fear of death and the suffering that often unhurriedly accompanies it as life, whether external or internal, slowly withers away.
Equally as provocative as Moltmann, I appreciate how Kathryn Tanner reflects on the heinous categories of death and sacrifice in her text, Christ the Key. Tanner is examining theological topics such as creation, atonement, politics, and pneumatology from a place that sees the Incarnate Christ as the locus, the key in which all theology sings. While not examining eschatology per se, her reflections tease out the shreds of anxiety that eschatological talk tends to contain. She sees the incarnation as connecting two disparate realities, that of humanity and divinity. In order for us to participate in and with God, God cannot merely transform human life into an approximation of the divine. Rather, as she puts eloquently and equally provocatively, “God must attach us, in all our frailty and finitude, to God.” (viii). It is this frailty and finitude that she examines in her essay entitled, “Death and Sacrifice”. Tanner develops an atonement theory based on the incarnation that heeds the cry of protest presented by feminist and womanist scholars who worry that the cross be a model for abuse or condone the historical surrogate status of black women. Instead of standing as our legal substitute, Jesus stands in our place as he assumes our humanity in the incarnation. Christ’s sacrifice is therefore not what we think of today, which is primarily a, “non-cultic act involving self-renunciation for others.” (266) The true theological and biblical view of sacrifice, stemming from the cultic sacrifices of Israel and Greece, are the exact opposite and lead to joyous communion. The controversial claim that Tanner offers is that humans are not offering anything to God, rather God is the one sacrificing and the one sacrificed. The cross is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, to echo Hebrews 10. This atonement theory based on the incarnation moves in a direction that claims that death is not what sanctifies humanity, but rather death is precisely what is being sanctified.
I’m still attempting to wrap my mind around the both exquisite and complicated logic that Tanner is laying out. I think of Paul’s words in Romans when he asks his readers to, “present their bodies as a living sacrifice.” I can see the the twinge of fear and pain that feminist and womanist scholars see in holy writ. Where is the eschatological hope that Moltmann speaks of in such a command that has often gone right off course as the marginalized and oppressed have been violently subjected to sacrifice their humanity in the name of spiritual worship? I have no easy answers, but I appreciate Tanner’s conclusion that revives such spiritual worship as the love of neighbor. It is not in the death of the martyr, but rather the vibrant life that this witness lives that echoes the truly wondrous reality of the atonement and incarnation. If eschatology is an end, perhaps it can be an end to the call to sacrifice bodies that already bear the scars and wounds of trauma. Maybe that is where a glimpse of hope can be found.
Jürgen Moltmann. The Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1967.
Kathryn Tanner. Christ the Key. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
