The form of this order of things is passing away: who is wrong—Paul or Matthew Thiessen?

I said I would come back to Matthew Thiessen’s “incoherent” account of Paul’s eschatology, so here we are. Chapter four of A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles is about Paul the “End-Time Jew.” Thiessen begins: “Paul never wrote an autobiography. Why would he when he expected an imminent end to the current structure of the cosmos?” (49).

This “apocalyptic expectation” was central to Paul’s thought. His response to concerns expressed by the group of believers in Thessalonica was not that the parousia would be delayed indefinitely but that many of his readers would live to see it. Paul includes himself among the living who would be caught up in the clouds, after the resurrected dead, to be with the Lord forever (1 Thess. 4:15-17). Thiessen says: “Paul expected Jesus to return during the lifetime of some of his readers (and possibly during his own lifetime)” (50).

In 1 Corinthians, Paul advises his readers that “the time has grown short” and that the “structure of this cosmos is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:29, 31); the “ends of the ages” have come upon this generation (10:11). Therefore, believers should, in Thiessen’s words, “live their lives unencumbered by their present conditions.” In other words, classic millenarianism.

From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. (1 Cor. 7:29-31)

Thiessen thinks that this conforms with a pattern of Jewish apocalyptic thinking which encouraged a certain “detachment from the bonds of the current state of affairs since the end was imminent.” For example:

Let him that sells be like one who will flee; let him that buys be like one who will lose; let him that does business be like one who will not make a profit; and let him that builds a house be like one who will not live in it; let him that sows be like one who will not reap; so also him that prunes the vines, like one who will not gather the grapes; them that marry, like those who will have no children; and them that do not marry, like those that are widowed. (4 Ezra 16:41-44)

Thiessen concludes:

Paul’s letters repeatedly attest to the fact that he was convinced that Israel’s God was about to act decisively to defeat sin, death, and Satan, bringing about God’s kingdom once and for all…. (51)

So is this coherent? Is it right? Did Paul expect an “imminent end to the current structure of the cosmos”?

We who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord

We can agree that the apostle thought that the event described in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-20 would in all likelihood happen within the lifetime of the recipients of the letter. It is more a less a principle of the narrative-historical approach that biblical prophecy operates within a realistic or foreseeable horizon. So if we think we are still waiting for the parousia, for example, that means the prophecy has failed.

I’ll come back to what constitutes a foreseeable horizon, but first, what sort of event is described in this passage? Clearly, it entails the descent or coming of the Lord Jesus from heaven, the resurrection of the “dead in Christ,” and the “snatching away” of those still alive in clouds with them to meet the Lord in the air.

This is a parousia, however, that doesn’t go anywhere. The believers do not return to heaven with Jesus, nor does Jesus continue his royal procession to earth accompanied by the saints. They are left in mid-air. The apocalyptic vision is fulfilled in the reunification of the living and the dead with their Lord. I think, therefore, that it is better to read it not as a realistic account of movements between heaven and earth but, in the first place, as an elaboration of the symbolic parousia tradition from the Gospels, with its emphasis on the gathering of the scattered and persecuted “elect”:

Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man…, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. (Matt 24:30-31; cf. 24:27, 39)

In effect, the New Testament narrative conflates two key visions from Daniel: the “one like a son of man” coming with the clouds of heaven and the resurrection of the “many of those who sleep in the flat of the earth” (Dan. 7:13-14; 12:2 LXX). The Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven from the throne of God, having received power and glory, specifically to deliver, vindicate, and reward his faithful servants, dead and alive.

This follows directly on from a “day of affliction… such as has not occurred since they were born until that day” (12:1 LXX), when the people will be “lifted up” or “delivered” (Theod.) and some of the dead are raised. This is how I put it in The Coming of the Son of Man:

there is an apparent distinction between those who are “saved” or “lifted up” in the midst of an end-time crisis and the dead who are raised. If we take into account the overall importance of these chapters in Daniel for Paul’s eschatology and the specific possibility that Michael is the archangel whose voice signals the parousia of the Lord in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, it seems likely that Paul’s statement about the dead and the living at the parousia owes something to Daniel’s prophecy about the deliverance of the righteous on the Day of the Lord. 22 The snatching up of the living is how, within the terms of the apocalyptic narrative, he conceptualizes the rescue of those who suffer from their afflictions.1

The parousia motif—the coming of a dignitary to a town or city—then provides the symbolic movement that connects the heavenly presence of the Son of Man with the earthly experience of the persecuted churches. Paul has extended (“by a word from the Lord”) pre-existing apocalyptic traditions to address the particular pastoral problem, but I’m not sure he has broken with the symbolic mode of narrative associated with Jewish apocalyptic.

In any case, he says nothing about an “imminent end to the current structure of the cosmos.” As in Daniel 7-12, the drama of the vindication of the righteous plays out on the stage of history.

The form of this order is passing away

Paul’s pastoral advice regarding social relations in 1 Corinthians 7 is premised on his belief that “the form of this world (to schēma tou kosmou toutou) is passing away.” What does he mean by that?

Thiessen’s use of “structure” for schēma suggests something fundamental to the kosmos, but schēma, much like morphē, signifies “outward appearance.” In BDAG we have 1) “the generally recognized state or form in which someth. appears, outward appearance, form, shape”; and 2) “the functional aspect of someth., way of life.” Paul’s “form of this world” is listed under the second sense, along with a couple of Greek texts.

• Dionysus is dressing Pentheus as a woman so that he can see the maenads, his frenzied female devotees, which has some uncomfortable modern resonances. First, he will cause his hair to grow long; then Pentheus asks, “What will be the second schēma of my kosmou?” (Eur. Bacc. 832). Here kosmos means something like “adornment”—he is asking about a change in his outward appearance.
• Apollonius speaks of a “form of this order” (to schēma tou kosmou toude), which is the order imposed by a good or god-like man on a disordered society (Philostratus, Life of Apoll. 8.7.23).

So at the very least, it appears that Paul is not talking about the collapse of the structure of the cosmos or of the end of the world in anything like a literal sense. It is not the substance but the outward appearance of the world that is changing, and the Philostratus passage perhaps suggests that “form of the present social order” would not be far from Paul’s meaning.

Simply put, Greek-Roman paganism was under divine judgment (cf. Acts 17:29-31; Rom. 1:18-32; 1 Thess. 1:9-10) and sooner or later would give way to a monotheistic social order in which Jesus is confessed as Lord. Three hundred years was longer than Paul imagined it would take but still within a realistic or foreseeable prophetic horizon.

The context of 4 Ezra

The passage from 4 Ezra is part of a prophecy of divine “wrath” and “destruction” against Babylon, Asia, Egypt, and Syria—Israel’s enemies (4 Ezra 16:1-2, 9). “Behold, famine and plague, tribulation and anguish are sent as scourges for the correction of men” (16:19).

At first, provisions will be so plentiful and cheap that “men will imagine that peace is assured for them” (16:21), but then disasters will strike (cf. 1 Thess. 5:3). In those days, “ten shall be left; and out of the field, two who have hidden themselves,” and “three or four shall be left by those who search their houses with the sword” (16:28, 31; cf. Matt. 24:40-41). Therefore, Israel must prepare itself for a time of conflict and affliction, which will come upon them like the pains of child birth (16:38-40; cf. Matt. 24:8; Mk. 13:8; 1 Thess. 5:3).

Then we have the passage quoted by Thiessen with no reference to context. Under the tumultuous conditions of God’s wrath against the nations, the Jews should not count on normal social and economic outcomes. They face a very uncertain future. But there is no end of the cosmos. The advice is given in order that the people would get through the chaos and destruction and be delivered out the other side.

This would be a day of fire by which the people of God would be tested:

They shall be like madmen, sparing no one, but plundering and destroying those who continue to fear the Lord. For they shall destroy and plunder their goods, and drive them out of their houses. Then the tested quality of my chosen people shall be manifest, as gold that is tested by fire. (16:71-73)

The time has grown short, the “days of tribulation are at hand,” but God will deliver them (16:74)

We hear in this late first century text multiple echoes of Daniel, Jesus, and Paul, and we must assume, I think, that the type of event in view remains the same: a great political-religious crisis involving Israel and the nations, conceived as an outworking of the wrath of God, from which the righteous would be delivered and, along with some of the dead, vindicated and glorified.

An end of the ages of pagan domination is envisaged, to be replaced by an age of righteousness, when a restored people, under the rule of God not of pagan kings, would function as a holy priestly community in the midst of the nations. In this way, history continues, with all its ups and downs, successes and setbacks, horrors and glories. The world does not end.

The incoherence

Finally, the “incoherence” in Thiessen’s account of Paul’s eschatology, to my mind, is in the failure to differentiate between the imminent end of the cosmos and the rule of Israel’s messiah over the gentiles. The assumption is that these “ends” coincide.

My argument is that kingdom belongs exclusively to history. In certain contingent respects, it includes the defeat of “sin, death, and Satan” (51): judgment of Israel’s unrighteousness or of Greek idolatry, the resurrection of the martyrs, the binding of Satan following the overthrow of Babylon the great , which was imperial Rome, so that there would not be the same sustained, demonic opposition to God’s people for a thousand years (Rev. 20:1-3).

But wrath, tribulation, vindication and glory, and rule in the midst of enemies at the right hand of God presuppose the troubled conditions of human history, not the end of the kosmos, imminent or otherwise.

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  Andrew Perriman, The Coming of the Son of Man: New Testament Eschatology for an Emerging Church (2005), 164-65.