David Congdon on Salvation as Apocalypse
Reading chap. 3 of The God Who Saves
I’ve been reading David Congdon’s new book The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch and writing about it as I go. Today I look at his third chapter, entitled “The Act of Salvation,” which Congdon describes as the heart of his book. I’ll hold my comments to the end in order to try to handle it with care.
Any attempt to articulate a Christian doctrine of salvation faces a number of problems. To begin, we lack a single agreed upon doctrine of salvation. Indeed, “the biblical texts do not know a single account of salvation, not even a single account of the cross” (60). So we can’t just re-state a so-called biblical doctrine of salvation since there are several. Even if we could, (and we can’t) we would still face the problem of hermeneutics or interpretation. That is, biblical descriptions of salvation are products of their time and place. They are the fruit of one particular culture as it sought to interpret Jesus. As such, biblical metaphors do not necessarily transfer to our present time, place, and culture. Perhaps “some metaphors are ‘dead to us’” and we must “discern new metaphors and concepts to make sense of the biblical text for the present moment” (62). Congdon advises that we “inquire after the kerygma that comes to contextual expression in the New Testament, and then reflect on how this kerygma may appropriately come to expression in our contemporary situation” (64). Put another way, just as the biblical authors sought to articulate something, we must try to articulate that same thing in our own words. Crucially, we are not simply translating their words into our own language. Rather, the thing needing articulation (the kerygma) must itself be present to us in order for us to articulate it. We cannot simply articulate that which was present to others in the past. We must articulate that which is present to us again today.
This leads us to Congdon’s account of salvation as apocalypse, or eschatological unveiling. Eschatology has to do with expectations for God, especially expectations concerning how God will save his people from what they think ails them. If, as Congdon argues, theology must focus on soteriology (that is, on salvation) then it must also focus on eschatology since this concerns how and when God will save. Congdon rightly observes that “salvation in the New Testament is fundamentally a matter of eschatology, wherein one is saved through the inbreaking apocalypse of God” (64). One’s perspective on the problem will shape one’s expectations for the solution. The early Jewish Christians came to spiritualize both the perceived problem and its solution. Rather than expecting concrete political salvation of their God, they came to expect a salvation that “could be actual and effective without any external or empirical evidence” (72). Against all appearances, the crucified man was their saviour. God was well pleased with the one who was hung upon a tree, an erstwhile guarantee of divine displeasure. Yet this difference between appearance and reality left early Christians hoping for a resolution, that is, a time when the reality that they perceived would be made manifest for all. A triumphant return of Christ in glory would do the trick, and they expected one very soon. Soon and very soon, the earliest Christians reckoned, all would behold what they knew to be true. Yet Christ did not return, and has yet to return in the sense expected. This delayed return of Christ required yet another round of revisions to Christian eschatological expectation, just as Christians once revised their Jewish expectations.
Regardless of how they did proceed, how should such revisions proceed? In a phrase, Congdon proposes that “the apocalypse is no longer cosmological and future but rather existential and present” (70). By this he means, I think, that we should no longer expect an apocalyptic end of history via a glorious return of Christ at some future moment. Instead, we should look for an existential apocalypse in the present, within history, modeled for each person on the apocalypse of Jesus as crucified saviour. This apocalypse, or unveiling, is hidden from all but those who receive it, as they are receiving it. As such, it cannot be a cosmic event for all to see, or for any to grasp and control. And since this unveiling is modeled on the death of Jesus as one forsaken by God, Congdon describes it as cocrucifixion with Christ. The crucifixion of Christ is God’s eschatological solution to what ails humans. The expected coming apocalypse of Christ is, Congdon suggests, our own existential cocrucifixion with Christ. The second coming becomes a personal, rather than a global, cataclysm — modeled upon Christ’s own godforsaken personal cataclysm.
Nevertheless, the delayed return of Christ ought to embarrass Christians in some sense. Congdon follows Eberhard Jüngel in embracing this embarrassment rather than resolving it:
The certainty that comes with either denying or affirming the coming advent leads to the comfortable domestication of the kerygma. To prevent this, the embarrassment “must remain . . . a lively embarrassment,” so that we never experience ourselves as settled and secure (76).
The delayed return of Christ is meant to unsettle us, and Congdon calls for an eccentric eschatology since the eschatological deed of God draws us out of ourselves:
If Christ is near at hand in his very disruption of our propensity toward easy solutions and self-security, then his parousia occurs in the event of the word of justification that disturbs our illusions of peace and safety and thereby places us outside ourselves (extra nos). And this disturbing word from the eschatological beyond, this verbum externum, would indeed be the “new coming of the one who has already come,” since the essence of Christ’s initial presence was the proclamation of this same unsettling eschatological word. I call this existential account of the apocalypse an eccentric eschatology; it is a soteriology determined by the ex-centricity that defines the being of the person who belongs to the new age of faith, who is a justified creature before God (77).
Cocrucifixion involves being unsettled or placed outside oneself, and the embarrassment of the delayed return of Christ serves this purpose. What does this have to do with the kerygma that we want to articulate today? On Condgon’s dogmatic sketch, “the proclamation of the kerygma in the present situation is the parousia of Christ, the expected future, the new coming of the one who has already come” (78). We might say that the second coming of Christ is replaced by the present preaching about him, but this preaching is not simply a translation of the New Testament. Rather, the second coming of Christ is God’s existential apocalypse in the lives of those being cocrucified with Christ today. This brings us to what I suspect is the rock bottom of this book. Congdon agrees with the apostle Paul’s view that salvation occurs through cocrucifixion:
He [Paul] thus declares, in what I would identify as the kerygmatic norm — the only potential “canon within the canon” — for all Christian soteriology: Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι, ζῶ δὲ οὐκέτι ἐγώ, ζῇ δὲ ἐν ἐμοὶ Χριστός — “I have been crucified with Christ; and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2: 19– 20; [Congdon’s] translation) (81, emphasis added).
Here we have it. Being crucified with Christ in the present is the saving eschatological act of God that we anticipate, rather than some future cosmic apocalypse. This being crucified with Christ is itself the saving apocalypse, or unveiling, of God. The crucifixion in question is existential, rather than necessarily literal or physical. So understood, we are saved from ourselves, rather than from various traditional threats, such as suffering, death, or hell. We are saved from “the illusion that we belong to ourselves, from the anxious attempt to secure ourselves, from the desire to possess our identity and thus our future, from the struggle to assert our freedom and authority” (80). As goes the problem, so goes the salvation — being placed outside of oneself via cocrucifixion. That is, “God eschatologically interrupts our existence and places us outside ourselves, thus making us wholly insecure in ourselves but wholly secure in God” (83).
If we reinterpret the second coming of Christ as our own cocrucifixion with Christ, then instead of speaking of salvation in terms of the common “already but not yet” tension, Congdon insists that we speak of salvation as “wholly past, wholly present, and wholly future” (85). That is, the same apocalyptic unveiling that occurred in at the death of Jesus is also happening today as we are crucified with Christ. And it will continue to happen in the future. It is already, is present, and is yet to come.
But what is it about the death of Christ that counts as God’s eschatological unveiling? In a phrase, the death is “apocalyptic and saving because it is a death in God-abandonment” (85, emphasis original). If humans need to be unsettled, then it would seem that there’s nothing that does the trick quite like being abandoned by God. Congdon wants to take Jesus at his word in his cry of abandonment from the cross and look to this godforsaken experience of Jesus as a template for cocrucifixion with Christ. He even draws an interesting comparison between the loud cry of Jesus on the cross and the two other exorcism-related loud cries in Mark’s Gospel. He almost speaks as if the crucifixion was the exorcism of the world from Jesus. Nevertheless, what does abandonment by God accomplish at the cross? What is gained by being forced out of ourselves (extra nos as Congdon puts it)? Briefly, Congdon addresses this question and writes, “Cocrucifixion is a movement extra nos for the sake of being pro alio, for another” (89). That is, “To be cocrucified is to be given eyes to see the old world in a thoroughly new way . . . to see each person as the neighbor in need” (89).
I promised to keep my comments to the end, but I think it would be best to save them for next time. My real aim in this post has been to understand what Congdon means, and I hope I’ve come close. Meditating upon this chapter the past couple days has provoked a great deal of thinking, and things might seem even clearer tomorrow. In any case, there’s a bit more of chapter 3 left to cover, in which Congdon explains with this account of salvation leads to or requires a doctrine of universalism (on which all people are ultimately saved in the manner described above). Until then.
