An Elegant Ending: Biblical Reflections on Kingdom, Crisis, and Human Destiny

By Samuel Cocar

Millions of Christians the world over hold strong convictions about what happens to humankind at the end of history: Jesus will rapture the church away. Non-Christians will suffer eternal conscious torment in hell. We will play harps on clouds forever. But what if conventional Christian ideas don't align with what the Bible actually teaches? By scrutinizing the faulty assumptions and shaky exegetical foundations found in dispensationalism, An Elegant Ending offers believers an eschatological vision that is simpler, clearer, and more strongly grounded in the biblical canon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666717266

Samuel Cocar

Samuel Cocar is a pastor and educator. He is the co-author of Practicing the Monastic Disciplines with Sam Hamstra Jr. He lives in southern Wisconsin with his spouse Valerie and two daughters.

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Introduction

Although this is a work of nonfiction, the chapters that follow make the most sense in light of the particularities of my experience. I grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago in the 1990s. My parents fled the harsh regime of Communist Romania and found asylum in the United States in the prior decade. My father was—and remains—a Baptist pastor, and our household was traditional and evangelical. We made two trips to the city every Sunday for morning and evening services, and life in the church framed and grounded my life generally.

There is much in that formative period for which I am grateful: a loving, supportive community (in my case, Romanians and Romanian Americans); an immersion in the Christian Scriptures; a bit of insulation from the fractious, counterproductive culture wars of mainstream American Evangelicalism. But with the benefit of hindsight, I recognize much that was also idiosyncratic. The subject of the end of time in particular filled me with anxiety. At every loud noise, I would gasp: Was that the trumpet of the archangel? If I didn’t see anyone in our house at some given moment, this was likewise cause for dread: What if the rapture happened and I have been left behind? I was terrified to read the book of Revelation or to hear it read. This state of affairs was exacerbated by media like the Left Behind series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which was at this time achieving stratospheric popularity. The series was somehow extremely popular even in my Sunday school class, even though the authors rather uncharitably identified the antichrist as Romanian rather than leaving his nationality hazy.

My eschatological angst was of course not unique. My wife, Valerie, who also grew up evangelical, experienced some of these same anxieties about the antichrist, the mark of the beast, secret raptures, and making the cut. Furthermore, to write of this ominous reading of the book of Revelation is to invoke another anxiety-inducing doctrine—the evangelical view of hell. To be unsaved, lost, or left behind reflected different ways of expressing the ultimate reality of being consigned to hell. As conservative-Christian camp counselors, we played radio dramas with the sound of human wails laid over the loud crackling of inextinguishable fire. What hell means for Evangelicals has permeated the culture at large: the unsaved person experiences the torment of infernal, never-ending fire, without amelioration of any kind or even the bare consolation of actual death. Of course, this image is so brutal that it usually must be translated into a kind of caricature and played for laughs: cartoon devils, pitchforks, and unsurprised rock stars and celebrities on the wrong side of the cosmic divide.

It is the contention of this book that much of what Evangelicals believe on these subjects is misguided, incomplete, or just plain wrong. While it will deal mostly with theological and biblical material, it will also address the ways in which wrong or incomplete theology leads or contributes to skewed sociopolitical orientations. Put another way, misunderstanding the Bible often leads evangelical Christians to engage society in tragic or wrongheaded ways.

It is of course the case that rational, correct modes of thinking can lead to unpleasant psychological states. If I cause someone intentional harm, it is correct that I should be burdened later on by a sense of guilt. If I dwell on the certainty of my future death, this may cause me real anguish. It is my contention, however, that much of evangelical eschatology is both theologically incorrect—which is to say wrongheaded, hazy, slapdash, and piecemeal—and psychologically onerous. In sum, there are significant theological, pastoral, and psychological objections to evangelical eschatology as it is conventionally taught.

Method

Method is an important dimension of works of history and theology, as well as other academic disciplines. Mine is a theological rather than a religious-studies approach. While I do broach religious communities and practices as such—the concerns of the sociologist of religion—I am primarily concerned with what is actually the case from a theological vantage point. In line with most Protestant Christians, I foreground the knowability and reliability of Scripture. Scripture, and the New Testament documents in particular, assume epistemological primacy here, with secondary support from history and philosophy.

This book makes a series of interconnected but modular arguments about eschatology, soteriology, and theological anthropology. This requires a bit of unpacking. Eschatology refers to the study of last things, the consummation of history and human destiny. Soteriology is the study of salvation—who is saved, how we are saved, and to what ends we are saved. Anthropology, as a subset of theology, is analogous to the secular discipline; it refers to our understanding of the essential character and composition of humankind.¹

When I argue that these theological loci are both modular and interconnected, I mean that they are technically separable but should not be considered in total isolation from one another. For instance, your theological reading of the human body—its form, function, and essential durability—will, or should, inform your understanding of ultimate human destiny. To ground this further, and to avoid charges of being coy, I will sketch several of the sub-arguments that will receive further development in subsequent chapters. This concatenation of an argument makes the most sense when all its links are in place, but it is perfectly legitimate to scrutinize the component parts.

Christian anthropology: Human beings are best understood as enspirited bodies rather than dualistic (or even tripartite) beings. Mortality lies at the core of our nature. In contrast to the Greco-Roman notion later adopted by Christians, humans do not have a mortal body enveloping an immortal soul. In glorious defiance of the basic datum of mortality, those found in Christ are specially gifted with immortality and imperishability (i.e., eternal life). Those outside of Christ experience judgment in the ultimate and final form of death.

Soteriology: Within the locus of soteriology, our primary focus herein is the scope of God’s redemptive activity. Exclusivists contend that only a relatively small remnant of humanity will be saved, and the majority is lost. Universalists hold that all humans will eventually receive the salvation of God, although some would hold that humans may experience a redemptive fire prior to ultimate blessedness). I argue that the best way to understand the scope of God’s redemptive activity is inclusivism: not every human being will receive salvation, but many will; God operates with a preferential option toward mercy and inclusion.

Human destiny: Redeemed humans are destined to live with God and Christ in the midst of a renewed creation that the book of Revelation calls the new heavens and new earth. Unredeemed, unregenerate persons will experience God’s wrath in the form of exclusion from eschatological paradise, the painful fire of judgment, and perpetual infamy and disgrace. Their destiny is not eternal conscious torment (ECT) but a final death—the eternal deprivation of life. This position goes by several names, but at present is most commonly called annihilationism or conditional immortality (depending on the emphasis).

Collectively, the theological positions for which I will argue in the following chapters include holism, physicalism, annihilationism/conditionalism, inclusivism, and a few propositions which defy such tidy categorization. As the reader, it falls to you to judge the soundness and plausibility of each sub-argument as well as the broader theological perspective I propose. For example, you may find inclusivism compelling but remain attached to the traditional concept of hell as a realm of eternal conscious torment, and so on.

That is alright. I have been spared the hubris and self-delusion of imagining that I am perfectly correct or that I will convince the majority of readers. I can only present to the best of my ability an argument consistent with logic and the biblical data. If this book forces you to think more deeply about the theological issues considered herein, it will have served its purpose handsomely. Too often, Christians’ view of the end times is haphazard and incongruous, more absorbed by osmosis than constructed by careful study and reflection. Ultimately, it will be easier and much more satisfying to examine what the New Testament actually teaches, rather than prop up a patchwork of quasi-beliefs from pop culture, Left Behind, and the sagacious musings of your great-aunt Martha.

Although it is not necessarily uncharitable in se to have a sharp theological disagreement with Christian brethren, insofar as dispensational Christians worship Jesus as Lord, we are united in a common body and cause. It doesn’t make sense to me to alienate those Christians who may not have been exposed to theological viewpoints outside of their tradition and who may yet be won over to new perspectives if the tone of the interlocutor is not dismissive, condescending, or antagonistic. Ultimately, our focus ought to be on the biblical vision of last things. To be sure, it is a portrait that I would draw differently from classical or progressive dispensationalists, but it is not our intellectual differences which are of primary concern. This is all an argument, to be sure, but it should be construed as an intra-Christian debate rather than a scathing rebuke or denunciation. I will strive to communicate my theological perspective in a manner that is not dismissive, condescending, or antagonistic but rather constructive and charitable.

The late Dallas Willard, an exceptional philosopher and theologian, often included in his books the disclaimer that readers would have to exercise some real effort to comprehend his argument—as did C. S. Lewis.² I am neither a Willard nor a Lewis, but I suspect the same is true here: this book is not a devotional but a work of exposition and argument. Whether that argument stands or falls in the end must be left to thoughtful readers and to him from whom comes all knowledge and wisdom (Prov 2:6–7 NRSVA).

1

. Nontheistic anthropology can be further divided into forensic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, among other branches. Each provides unique insights into the human experience.

2

. See Willard,