I read Kevin Beck’s This Book Will Change Your World in response to some gentle and persistent prompting from Mike Morrell. As Mike observes, there are some interesting similarities and some distinct differences between Kevin’s exposition of Transmillenialism and the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man and of Re: Mission. Some of the issues raised were addressed a few years ago in a post on Transmillennialism™ on Open Source Theology. I won’t go into great detail here but will list some of the thoughts that came to mind as I read the book, which hopefully will help to clarify the main points of agreement and disagreement.
1. I agree with the argument about the shaping influence of stories and with his observation that the same story can be told in different ways (12-13).
2. Kevin puts a lot of emphasis on love both as a definition of God and as a motive for mission. While I would not want to suggest that love is anything other than central to our calling, I felt that the biblical analysis was rather skewed by his need to oppose a loveless fundamentalism. The following does not sound to me like a sound basis for a hermeneutic: ‘I simply must believe that there’s a truer way of telling the story. One that pictures God as someone kinder and gentler than the godfather’ (13). I think this leads to a misreading of the judgment theme in scripture – a bias that is evident in quite a lot of emerging theology.
3. I think that the book suffers somewhat from the prominence of the polemics. The suspicion is that what we have is really a repudiation of Beck’s fundamentalist heritage rather than a more objective attempt to tell the biblical story. Ok, we are all vulnerable to that charge one way or another, but I felt that in this case there were one or two really quite unnecessary distortions – not least the failure to recognize that historic Christianity, and indeed ‘modern’ Christianity, has taken many other forms than North American fundamentalism, not all of them lacking in love and grace. He claims far too much for Transmillennialism at times: other movements have provided the same freedom from literalism, intolerance, extremism and absurdity without the radically modified eschatology (116).
4. I still don’t understand why we need another (trademarked) made-in-America eschatologically defined subclass to rescue us from apocalyptic mayhem. It seems to me that the Transmillennial label is more likely to perpetuate than resolve the internecine squabbles. I would much rather promote a more general scholarly hermeneutic (Beck makes mention of Wright’s ‘critical realism’ and explains it well) as a dogmatically independent (some will scoff at that suggestion) methodology. I take the point that this is how people tend to think in the United States (20), but it imposes severe limitations on the appeal and accessibility of his case – and arguably merely reinforces the mindset that he is trying to escape from.
5. The chapter on colourful biblical language is very good. This was a nice paragraph:
As a Second Temple era Jewish rabbi, Jesus thoroughly knew the linguistic stylings of Israel’s prophets, guys like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. And he knew the expectations of his kinsmen. In fact, he was so in tune with the prophetic impulse that some of his contemporaries actually called him Jeremiah. Standing in the prophetic tradition, Jesus recognized that the ancient seers regularly employed language about the heavens in order to communicate complex ideas that had nothing to do with astrophysics and he followed in their steps. (38)
6. This comment in a footnote puzzled me: ‘Andrew Perriman goes so far to suggest that by the time of Jesus, dissenting groups within Second Temple Judaism were cults, emerging from the eschatological hopes found in the book of Daniel.’ I wish he’d included a page reference. I really don’t recognize that statement.
7. There’s a good discussion of Schweizter, Bultmann, Moltmann, and others in chapter 3. Beck has a good sense of the historical incongruity of the ‘now and not yet’ formula; and he takes an effective satirical swipe at the modern soothsayers who confidently predict the imminent end of the world but will not take seriously Jesus’ insistence that the end of the age was at hand (50-51). ‘Why does Hagee’s “at hand” really mean “at hand” but Jesus’ “at hand” means thousands of years?’
8. Beck overlooks the significance of the suffering motif in the New Testament eschatological narrative, which I think is crucial for how we understand apocalyptic language and resurrection.
9. I’m not sure I really understood his argument about a progressive creation (67-70), but I it strikes me as out of keeping with the Jewish worldview and the biblical narrative. That would need to be looked at in more detail. McLaren has argued for something similar.
10. There is much I agree with in Beck’s attempt to make sense of New Testament prophecy within the historical purview of the new Testament. I think he does a good job of putting the case across in simple, readable terms. But as I pointed out, I don’t think that everything can be reduced to AD 70. I think Beck misses the significance of the historical confrontation with paganism; and for reasons I outline in the earlier post, I don’t think we can dismiss the thought that the creator will ultimately defeat the chief enemies of creation, namely evil and death.
11. Beck has a tendency to dismiss arguments by picking one or two texts, drawing what may or may not be legitimate conclusions, and then assuming that the same holds in all other instances. So he points out, for example, that in Romans 6 Paul speaks of resurrection metaphorically and concludes from that that all references to resurrection are metaphorical (97). Similarly, the fact that expressions such as ‘world’ and ‘heaven and earth’ are in some places used metaphorically does not mean that they are always used metaphorically (68). This rather spoils the effect of his colourful language chapter.
12. I have the same problem with Transmillennialism that I have with McLaren’s Everything Must Change – it is apparent that they have learned a lot from each other, and presumably Beck’s title owes something to McLaren. I think that Transmillenialism is over-optimistic about the potential of the argument to change the world, to assimilate the whole world into the two age schema. To my mind, the Bible has lower expectations about the nature of the impact of the people of God on the world around it. I think the basic paradigm is of a new creation people existing prophetically and concretely in the midst of – and for the sake of – the nations and cultures of the world. New creation remains much more vulnerable, marginalized, and metaphorical than the Transmillennial rhetoric suggests. To make the whole world turn around the axis of the first century eschatological transition in anything like a realistic sense seems to me to be as implausible and ‘modern’ as the fundamentalist programmes that Beck critiques.
13. Part of the problem here is the confusion of the micrcosm and the macrocosm in the biblical narrative, the story about the people of God and the story about the world. I think these remain much more distinct in scripture than is suggested by Beck’s inclusion of the whole world in the covenant order – if I have understood him correctly (74).
14. I really don’t think the argument about the 1000 years of Revelation 20 being a symbolic representation of the 40 years between Jesus’ death and the destruction of Jerusalem works (86-88). The two things that are said about this period are that Jesus and the martyrs reign (and 1 Cor. 15 suggests that with the final defeat of death Jesus hands back the kingdom to the Father) and that the satanic power that inspired the oppressor is confined. This doesn’t fit Beck’s reading. The 1000 years in John’s schema also follows the judgment of Babylon the Great. Whether we take this as a reference to Jerusalem or Rome, I don’t see how a period that follows this judgment can be identified with the period leading up to AD 70.
15. I made the point in the ‘third horizon’ post that I think it is a mistake to detach Jesus’ resurrection either from the collective resurrection of the people or from the final renewal of creation. The argument that this remains as much an escapist option as a Left Behind rapture theology misreads Revelation 21-22. The issue here, I think, is not the escape of the faithful from the world but the assertion of the ultimate sovereignty of the creator over the forces that have marred his creation, evil and death. Even those whose names are written in the book of life must face a final judgment according to what they have done. The force of that vision is to inspire the new creation people in the present to trust in the redeeming power of a God who is not himself ultimately the prisoner of these cosmic powers.
16. Beck’s argument about the church in the New Testament as a transitional ‘firstfruits’ community (106-107) is very similar to my argument about the transitional role of the suffering community of Son of man. The main difference is that I think this story works itself out over a much longer period because it must also explain the suffering of the church at the hands of Roman paganism.
17. I think it is more constructive to speak in terms of a post-Christendom rather than post-Christian identity (115-116). Beck has no way of accounting for the ‘historic Christianity’ that he now wants to transcend. Again, I think the problem is that the whole thing has been thought out primarily as a reaction against a particular form of North American Christianity. As soon as you try to globalize a local solution to a local problem, you are bound to run into trouble.
So that is a limited, hasty and no doubt one-eyed response to Beck’s book. There are parts of his argument that really need more careful consideration – and if I have misrepresented him in any way, I’m happy to be corrected. I guess the three basic concerns that I have are: i) it is too much controlled by the dispute with fundamentalism; ii) Beck is over-zealous in reducing all New Testament eschatology to AD 70 – I think the narrative is more complex than that; and iii) I don’t think the story of the world can be so easily subsumed into the story of the people of God.
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