What Is Jesus Doing?: God's Activity in the Life and Work of the Church

Jesus is present here and now, Christians have always affirmed. But how are we to understand his present activity in a challenging, post-Christian context? In what ways is he at work in our congregational worship, pastoral care, preaching—and even our board meetings?
At a time when many feel uncertain about the future of the church, What Is Jesus Doing? brings together leading thinkers in pastoral theology, homiletics, liturgical theology, and missiology in a compelling resource for pastors and theologians. Emphasizing the reality of Jesus both as the resurrected, ascended Christ and as present and active today, the contributors consider how to recognize the divine presence and join in what God is already doing in all areas of church ministry.
Contributors include:

- David Fergusson
- Dwight J. Zscheile
- Scott J. Hagley
- Craig Barnes
- Roger Owens
- Anthony B. Robinson
- Will Willimon
- Andrew Root
- John D. Witvliet
- Nicholas Wolterstorff
- Angela Dienhart Hancock
- Trygve D. JohnsonWith deep theological reflection, personal stories, and practical suggestions, this interdisciplinary conversation invites leaders to remember that the church is first of all God's project, not ours—and that this truth should fill us with hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Release date: Jan 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780830865222

Book preview

Couverture : Edwin Chr. Van Driel, What Is Jesus Doing? (God’s Activity in the Life and Work of the Church), InterVaristy PressIllustrationIllustration

I invite you to risk the thought that God shows up as more than the posthumous influence of Jesus or as the vague hovering of the Spirit. Something much more radical than the call to skillful caring is at work. Of course we should not exclude asking, ‘What would Jesus do?’. . . . But it is more important to ask, ‘Who is Jesus Christ for us today and what is Jesus doing here and now, in this hospital room, during this committee meeting, in this service of worship, in this counseling session and so on?

ANDREW PURVES, THE CRUCIFIXION OF MINISTRY

CONTENTS

Preface

 1 What Is Jesus Doing?

Christological Thoughts for an Anxious Church and Tired Pastors

EDWIN CHR. VAN DRIEL

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY

 2 He Ascended into Heaven

The Ascension and Agency of Christ in the Theology of T. F. Torrance

DAVID FERGUSSON

 3 Rethinking Church in a Post-Christian Age

EDWIN CHR. VAN DRIEL

MISSIONAL THEOLOGY

 4 Cultivating the Spirit’s Leadership in Congregational Life

DWIGHT J. ZSCHEILE

 5 A Present Witness

Incarnation, Participation, and the Spirit of God

SCOTT J. HAGLEY

PASTORAL THEOLOGY AND PASTORAL CARE

 6 The Mission of God in Pastoral Care

M. CRAIG BARNES

 7 Shaping a Pastoral Spirituality

Learning from the Spiritual Vision of Quaker Thomas R. Kelly

L. ROGER OWENS

 8 Baptizing the Ordinary

Divine Agency and Church Administration

ANTHONY B. ROBINSON

 9 God’s Agency in Ecclesial Structures

A Time of Pruning

WILL WILLIMON

10 Ministry and the Concursus Dei

ANDREW ROOT

LITURGICS AND HOMILETICS

11 The Mysterious Mingling of Divine and Human Agency in Liturgical Participation

Pedagogical Reflections

JOHN D. WITVLIET

12 Preaching the Word of God

NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF

13 The Prophetic Agency of Jesus Christ and the Task of Preaching

ANGELA DIENHART HANCOCK

14 Preaching in Context

TRYGVE D. JOHNSON

Contributors

Scripture Index

Notes

Praise for What Is Jesus Doing?

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

PREFACE

Edwin Chr. van Driel

Who is Jesus Christ for us today and what is Jesus doing here and now, in this hospital room, during this committee meeting, in this service of worship, in this counseling session and so on?" ¹ According to pastoral theologian Andrew Purves, these are the questions pastors ought to ask as they engage in ministry. Elsewhere, Purves aims to use this as a starting point for building a new foundation for pastoral theology. For too long, Purves claims, ministerial work has been cast in terms of human agency shaped by and responsive to the work of God in Christ. Instead, Purves argues, the focus ought to be on God’s ministry; and the church’s ministry is nothing but participation in what God already is doing. ²

Purves is not alone in taking this position. Fellow practical theologian Andrew Root opens his recent Christopraxis with the observation that while practical theology has been able to create rich projects on human action in relation to church life, society, and pastoral practice . . . these fruitful articulations have not always sailed practical theology into the deep waters of exploring divine action. It is the central place of divine action in practical theology that Root expounds in his book. ³

Two observations could be made about Purves’s and Root’s projects. First, they seem extraordinary timely projects. The end of Christendom has thrown the church in the West into deep confusion and anxiety about how to move forward, and pastors carry these tensions in their bodies and souls. It is therefore crucial that pastors and churches be reminded that, at its heart, the church and its future is God’s work and not ours. Second, while Purves and Root clearly perceive themselves as swimming against the tide of their discipline, their intuitions about the centrality of divine agency in the life of the church and the ministry of the pastor are shared by several contemporary voices writing in other fields.

For example, in homiletics, some years ago Thomas G. Long encouraged preachers to recover the vibrant sense of the living divine reality, the holy presence of God. Preachers have lost themselves in holy sounding talk with all the edges filed away, Long charges, in language that refers not to the wild, undomesticated presence of the living God, but only to us, to our sincere hearts, spiritual intentions, and our desire to do good things in life. ⁴ Instead, preachers need to learn to speak again about God in the present tense. ⁵

In liturgical theology, Nicholas Wolterstorff published a book that redirects the attention from our liturgical actions to the understanding of God implicit in our liturgical texts and acts. Thus Wolterstorff focuses on God as one who listens and hears favorably and who speaks and participates in mutual address. In this context, Wolterstorff conceives of the minister as a deputy of God—one who speaks on behalf of God, in the name of God, so that his or her speaking counts as God here and now saying something to these particular people. ⁶

Finally, the same emphasis on divine agency can also be found in the way missiologists have recently urged a rethinking of the church’s mission in the light of the notion of missio Dei. Rather than framing mission as a human activity in response to, let’s say, the Great Commission, mission ought to be seen as participation in the work that God is already doing. ⁷ The practical result of this emphasis can be seen in a recent publication of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s 1001 New Worshiping Communities, a movement to encourage new church plants. A guide entitled Starting New Worshiping Communities has as its subtitle, A Process of Discernment. If mission is first of all God’s work, then our participation therein can only begin with discernment about where God already is at work.

This book brings voices from these different disciplines together—both to foster an interdisciplinary conversation, and to offer pastors a kaleidoscope of lenses through which to look at the life of the church and their work as pastors, and to ask questions about divine agency. How is God at work in the church and in ministry? How do we recognize divine presence, and how do we get in on what God already is doing?

This book appears on the occasion of the retirement of Andrew Purves from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. For more than thirty years, Andrew invited new generations of students and pastors to think about their ministry in the light of who Jesus is for us today and what he is doing here and now. With this book we celebrate Andrew’s ministry among us. Some of us are long-standing friends of his; others know him only through his books; a few of us have spent our careers in very different fields than his. But we all are drawn to the very themes that Andrew devoted his ministry to. And so we hope that this collection of essays honors Andrew’s work by continuing the conversation he and we believe the church so sorely needs.

WHAT IS JESUS DOING?

CHRISTOLOGICAL THOUGHTS FOR

AN ANXIOUS CHURCH AND TIRED PASTORS

Edwin Chr. van Driel

Oxford New Testament scholar Markus Bockmuehl recently observed that in his experience, when it comes to worshiping the resurrected Christ, liberal Christians will emphasize his presence; but it is not always clear whether this present Christ is dead or alive. By contrast, evangelical Christians will emphasize the resurrected Christ is alive; but it is not always clear if this living Christ is present. For liberal Christians, the spirit of Christ still inspires us, and as such, he is present; but since this sense of presence is often not rooted in an understanding of a real bodily resurrection and ascension, it is unclear whether this inspiring presence is any different from the inspiring presence of, let us say, Martin Luther King Jr. For evangelical Christians, the resurrection of Christ is often a cornerstone of their beliefs; but their spirituality is so focused on the reconciling work of Christ that they worship him more for his work of the past than for his active eschatological activity now and in the age to come.

The contributors to this collection of essays want to steer a course between this theological Scylla and Charybdis. In their essays, they invite pastors and congregations to consider a Jesus who is no less alive than he is active and who is present exactly as the resurrected and ascended One. The title What Is Jesus Doing? is thus not only a riff on the evangelical What would Jesus do? but it underscores the belief that our question simply cannot be, What would he do if he were here—as if he were the great absent One—but now that he is here, what is he doing? As the resurrected One he is alive and active, and as such is present in the life of the church and the ministry of the pastor. In fact, his presence and work is the sine qua non of any church life and any ministry, as it continues and upholds the church and its ministry, even when we ourselves have no idea what our next step might be. The contributors issue an invitation to reflect on this Jesus precisely because they believe that this is where many of us find ourselves at this point: unclear, uncertain, if not to say anxious, about the future of the church and our lives in ministry. In that context, what is Jesus doing?

In this introductory essay, I want to set forth a vision in which, in important ways, the subsequent contributors’ essays may be located. What is at stake in this book is a set of christological assumptions, convictions about the ways in which the resurrected and ascended Christ is present to, and is at work in and for, his people. In this essay I want to give voice to those convictions.

At the center of these christological assumptions stands the notion of Christ’s ascension. For most contemporary Western Christians, the ascension has dropped out of their religious imagination—how many of our communities still come together to celebrate Ascension Day? ¹ But for the early church it took front and center. Christ’s resurrection tells us that he is alive, but his ascension tells us that he is active, and that now, seated at the right hand of God, he occupies the place of power, leading his people and all of creation to its final goal. ² The writer of Ephesians underscores this with an evocative image: the ascending Christ is like a king who triumphantly returns from the battlefield, entering his capital city in a victory parade, leading with him his defeated enemies and distributing gifts to his people from the bounty won in battle:

Therefore it is said,

"When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive;

he gave gifts to his people." (Eph 4:8)

In this chapter I explore how we can imagine the victoriously ascended Christ to be present and active in the midst of his people. There are at least three ways of presence to explore. First, Christ is present in his absence—that is, in his ascension he goes to do work that radically reshapes creation. Second, Christ is present in his Spirit, incorporating us in his eschatological reign. And third, Christ is present through his deputies—through people whom he authorizes to speak in his name.

THE ASCENDED CHRIST—PRESENCE IN ABSENCE

Since Christ is the ascended One, the first thing to say about his presence is that he is present as the absent One. He is absent because he has work to do. But in this work, he is still deeply involved with us. The location of his work has changed from the hills of Galilee and Judea to the heavenly sanctuary, but the reach of his work has extended to the ends of the earth. The end of Mark’s Gospel tells us the ascended Christ works with his disciples by accompanying them and their message as they go out to proclaim the good news (Mk 16:20). A Christology that takes this accompaniment into account changes its mode, in the words of Andrew Purves, from the past to the present tense. ³ We no longer solely focus on Jesus’ work in the past, but we expect Jesus to show up, in our ministry and in the life of our congregation. ⁴

In this section I explore in what roles we may imagine the ascended Christ right now to be at work and to possibly show up in our midst. Reformed theology has often differentiated Christ’s work as that of a priest, a king, and a prophet. ⁵ Whatever one may think about the intrinsic value of this conceptual framework, for our purposes it is a helpful heuristic device. The resurrected and ascended Christ intercedes for us, reconciles us, and blesses us as a priest; rules us as a king; and speaks to us as a prophet.

Priestly work. The most straightforward answer to the question What is Jesus doing? is that he prays for us. In a section of Romans full of christological eschatology, to which I will return later, Paul claims, If God is for us, who is against us? . . . It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us (Rom 8:31, 34). In the same vein, Hebrews describes Christ as an eternal priest who is able to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them (Heb 7:25).

In his The Crucifixion of Ministry, Andrew Purves gives a recognizable and powerful illustration of what a lived awareness of the interceding Christ can mean concretely in the life of ministry. Called in the middle of the night to the hospital, he finds a couple from his congregation who just lost their baby to stillbirth. Amid their distress and pain, the couple asks their pastor to baptize their lifeless baby before it is taken away. Purves describes how, frantically thinking, his mind was drawn to the image of the ministry of the ascended Christ. If this is who Jesus is, then neither he, the pastor, nor the deeply distressed couple, are alone. They are cared for. They are not powerless. Jesus is at work. Calmed by that awareness himself, Purves takes the baby, and explains to the parents that he is about to show them what Jesus is doing with their baby, right now. He lifts up the baby upward, arms extended, and says something like, Father, I give you this child, in my name. This is, he tells the couple, how the ascended Jesus is interceding for their child. ⁶

What was true for this stillborn baby also holds for our congregations and our own ministry. Whatever we do, and wherever we go, we are not alone. With each step, Jesus himself prays for us. It strikes me that these notions are particularly meaningful at a time when pastors and congregations feel uncertain and anxious about the next steps in their ministry.

There is an interesting tradition in Scottish Reformed thought that holds that the ascended Christ not only intercedes for us, but that he also continues and completes the work of atonement. ⁷ The author of Hebrews draws on the liturgy of the Day of Atonement to explain the work of the ascended Christ. At Yom Kippur the high priest takes blood from a previously made sacrifice into the Holy of Holies, and sprinkles it on the cover of the ark and in front of it. In this way the sanctuary is purged from the pollution caused by the sins of the people. According to Hebrews, the ascended Christ, a priest according to the order of Melchizedek, enters the heavenly sanctuary, of which the earthly tabernacle is only a copy, and does the high priestly work not with the blood of animals, but by appear[ing] in the presence of God on our behalf (Heb 9:24). William Milligan points out that this tells us that the work of atonement was not completed on the cross. Rather, the intercession of the ascended Christ completes it in the present. This is in line with the logic of Israel’s cult, in which atonement is accomplished not through the death of the animal being slaughtered, but through the blood—the seat of life—supplied by it. Cleansing the sanctuary by means of the blood removes the burden of Israel’s wrongdoings from the interaction between God and God’s people. ⁸

Finally, the priestly work of the ascended Christ is expressed through his blessing. Luke tells us that while he [Jesus] was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven (Lk 24:51). This formulation suggests that Jesus’ blessing has not been brought to an end by his ascension; rather, his ascension is embedded in his act of blessing. To bless has a wide range of meanings in the biblical narrative. In important parts of it, blessing is strongly associated with the idea of a journey. The very first interpretation of the priestly blessing comes in the form of a collection of psalms that speak about being on a journey, going upward to Zion: twelve of the fifteen Songs of Ascents (Ps 120–134) take direct inspiration from one or more strophes of the blessing’s wording. To be blessed is to have your feet planted on the road. Over time, this notion of blessed journeying took on a decisively eschatological color. The New Testament frequently describes the eschatological future in terms of an unfolding of ultimate divine blessing. ⁹ The figure of the ascending Christ, blessing his disciples, tells us that it is through his hands that the blessing comes. When God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you, to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways, Peter tells the Jews gathered in Solomon’s Portico, according to Acts 3:26. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, according to Ephesians 1:3. In his blessing, the ascended Christ folds us into the eschatological future he has set for his creation.

Royal work. Christ’s ascension not only results in priestly presence, but it also amounts to royal rule. The creedal statement that he is seated at the right hand of God comes from a psalm that is no less political as it is religious (Ps 110:1). The notion of ascension evokes in and by itself the image of the one who came to the ancient One and was presented before him and to whom was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him and whose dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed (Dan 7:13-14). Ascension is a political act.

It would be a fascinating collection of essays that tried to unpack What is Jesus doing? right now as the King of kings. This particular book, focused as it is on Christ’s presence in the life of the church and the work of the ministry, does not do so. I would be amiss, however, if in this introductory chapter, I do not at least acknowledge that, because of the ascension, the church’s life takes place in a world that is ruled by Christ and led by him to its eschatological goal. This is certainly how the first Christian communities conceptualized the ascension. Think of the notion of Christ being the kyrios, the Lord, and if he is kyrios, Caesar is not; the idea of the Christian community as having alternative citizenship (Phil 3:20); the image of Revelation’s Christ as opening the seals of the scrolls and in unfolding it, steering the course of history until it climaxes in the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem: all of these moments of the scriptural narrative are pregnant with political meaning. For the sake of this book, the most important observation is that the New Testament sees the Christian community itself as the locus of Christ’s political action. It is not just that the church is situated in a world ruled by Christ; rather, it is itself a place where the ascended Christ enacts his eschatological reclaiming and transforming of creation. A good illustration of this is the argument of the letter to the Ephesians. In a later essay I will explore the importance of the letter’s ecclesiology for a rediscovery of the church as constituted by the work of Christ. ¹⁰ For now, I will simply say that the letter can be read as an extended meditation on the current ecclesial and political work of the ascended Christ—God seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come (Eph 1:20-21). According to Ephesians, the focus of Christ’s work is, in one sentence, to gather up all things into himself (Eph 1:10). The place where this gathering work becomes visible is the church. Here is the place where people from all different kinds of backgrounds and walks of life are brought together and knitted into a new humanity, a new household of God (Eph 2:15, 19). As such, they show to the powers-that-be that their time is up (Eph 3:10). Powers that have established their grip on people by pitting one group against the other—political powers, socioeconomic powers, powers of ethnicity, nationality, race, class, or gender—are conquered by Christ. This victory comes not so much by direct confrontation, but by drawing their subjects from under their authority. ¹¹ For this reason the letter exhorts the Ephesian church to preserve its unity (Eph 4:1-6). A divided church, at best, gives the powers hope that their time is not running out after all; more likely, a divided church places itself again under the rule of the powers that be, rather than under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Prophetic work. The ascended Christ not only engages us as priest and king, but he also becomes present among us as prophet. To put it differently, the ascended Christ not only works for and among us, but he also makes himself known.

Within Protestant theology, there are different ways of talking about the prophetic office of Christ. In recent history the most imposing account has been offered by Karl Barth, whose Church Dogmatics volume IV.3 offers an exuberant reflection on the self-declaration of the resurrected and ascended Christ. ¹² For the sake of the conversation that this collection hopes to initiate, I want to offer a much more restrictive account of how Christ makes himself known, drawing on some distinctions of philosophical speech act theory. Philosopher J. L. Austin distinguished three aspects of the act someone performs in saying something. First, the locution: uttering of a specific sentence. Second, performed in the locution is the illocution: the conventional aspect someone performs in saying something, such as making a request, issuing a threat, stating a fact, and so on. Finally, by making an illocution, one can make a perlocution: the causing of a specific response in the hearer, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, or inspiring. ¹³ On making distinctions between these three aspects of a speech act, one can see how one may engage in the second and third aspect of a speech act without engaging in the first aspect—the uttering of a specific sentence. For example, when I send a birthday card with a preprinted message of congratulations, I never utter a sentence, but I do engage in performing an illocution. After all, for the recipient of the card the preprinted message counts as if it were written by me. I never said a word, but I am still taken to have congratulated the card’s recipient by appropriating the preprinted message as mine. It is not my locution, but it is my illocution. In the same way, I may be able to perform a perlocution without ever engaging in a locution—not even an appropriated one. If my kids are rambunctious I may look at them and raise my eyebrows—and they’ll stop. I never said a word, but my action caused a specific response. My kids got the message, one might say. No locution, but nonetheless a perlocution.

For most of us, the ascended Christ does not communicate through locutions. There surely are reports of people who have received visions of the resurrection Christ in which he addressed them verbally. Those should not be discounted—one only has to recall the biblical narratives about Stephen, Paul, and John, all of whom are said to have heard the ascended Lord speak to them through the utterance of sentences. But more often than not, people find themselves addressed by Christ without hearing him say a word. They find themselves with convictions, beliefs, feelings, that they trace back to the working of Christ on them. They are convinced that Christ has made them promises, issued a calling, or leveled a warning, without being able to report an encounter with Christ in the way Stephen, Paul, or John did. In a section below, I will argue that the ascended Christ explicitly commissions people to speak in his name, so that what they say counts as his—deputized speech. With the threefold distinctions within a speech act, we can make each of these ways of divine address. ¹⁴ One can perform an illocution without making a locution, and perform a perlocution without an illocution. All this invites the Christian community primarily to a mode of discernment. If the ascended Christ can address us without himself uttering a clearly distinguishable word, our ears have to be prepared for how Christ may address us today.

THE ASCENDED CHRIST—PRESENCE IN THE SPIRIT

The ascended Christ not only accompanies us through his prayers, rule, and blessing, but he also accompanies us through the gift of his Spirit. In the New Testament narrative, Christ and Spirit are intimately related. The Spirit, says Jesus in John, will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you (Jn 16:14). Paul takes it even further: the Spirit does not just communicate to us what is Christ’s, but the Spirit is the very presence of the ascended Christ in our midst. You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you, Paul writes to the Roman community. And then he continues, Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness (Rom 8:9-10). Without any qualms, Paul identifies the Spirit with Christ and holds the presence of one to be an expression of the presence of the other. He complicates things further when he concludes, If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Sprit that dwells in you (Rom 8:11). ¹⁵

Without entangling the complicated relationships expressed in these verses, at this place I want to point out two things that are important for the purposes of this essay’s goal. What these verses imply is, first, that Jesus retains his own agency, and second, that Jesus and the Spirit arrived much earlier than could have been expected.

First, the Spirit’s work among us underscores that Jesus and we are not to be identified. Christ’s presence among us in the Spirit is described in images that evoke a strong sense of intimacy. Believers are in the Spirit, and the Spirit dwells in them. Christ is likewise in them. Because of the Spirit, believers cry, Abba! Father!—which is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom 8:15-16). Intimacy is possible only between two entities who are not the same, but different. Various theological traditions have given diverse accounts of how this intimacy should be understood. Inspiration and sanctification, participation and deification offer overlapping and sometimes competing models for how the presence of Christ to the believers in his Spirit is to be conceptualized. For our purposes it is not important to make a choice between these different models, but instead to observe that on each model there continues to be an ontological over-againstness between Christ and the believer. For Christ’s Spirit to give witness with our spirit implies that there are two agents, not one. For Christ to come in us, and for us to be in Christ, means that Christ and we are not identical. And if so, then, all intimacy notwithstanding, Christ is his own agent.

Observing this is quite important when a lot of our church language collapses Christ’s agency into ours. A prominent example is the beloved idea that the church is to be God’s hands and feet in the world—now codified in the ELCA’s brand tagline God’s work, our hands. But if anything I have said so far about the resurrected and ascended Christ is true, God has God’s own set of hands and feet—Jesus’ hands and feet. And Jesus does his own thing, through his own agency and powers—even when we do not know how to us our hands and feet, or when we misuse the powers that Jesus has given us. In fact, he started using his hands and feet long before we got ours, and so our primary job is not to somehow embody his presence in the world, but to discern where he already is active. ¹⁶

Second, God’s engagement of us through the gifts of incarnation and the Spirit comes much earlier than expected. As once the Spirit hovered over the void and darkness of creation and called forth something where there was nothing, so once again the Spirit hovers over our abyss and calls forth life where there was none. The Spirit is the spirit of him who resurrected Christ from the grave (Rom 8:11). Together, Easter and Pentecost are seen as the fulfillment of the Old Testament promises about the eschatological renewal of all things (Joel 2:28-32; Ezek 36–37). But as such, in resurrection and the Spirit’s outpouring the great transformation arrives much earlier than ever could have been expected. It was supposed to happen at the end of time. In Christ’s open grave and the Spirit’s wind filling the disciples’ abode, that transformation breaks into our reality already in the midst of time. History is still in full swing, but the first fruits of the eschatological harvest are already visible. It is therefore no coincidence that at several places the New Testament writers speak of the Spirit sent as an arrabōn, a first payment (2 Cor 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:14). Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and his outpouring of his Spirit are all early, unexpected advances on the eschatological transformation.

We have likely all been asked the question why God seems to delay so much in completing what God began in Christ’s resurrection. Why does history keep dragging on? A better question would be, Why did God start so early? Here we are, still in the midst of history, and we already taste and see a transformation that was promised only for the end. Why has God already started to make good on the promise of a new creation long before the old has passed away? Why is it that in our baptism we die and are resurrected long before our end has come? Why is it that in the community of the church the scattered fragments of humanity are already gathered and reunited before the powers are even defeated? None of this was yet supposed to happen: the dead were not to be raised till the end of time, humanity not to be renewed till history as we know it had come to an end. But here, while the days of old still run their tired track, the new age already has begun. The surprise of resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost is that the eschaton has moved from the future into the present.

In his Surprised by Hope, New Testament scholar N.T. Wright makes an interesting suggestion that could be an answer to these questions. In his book Wright argues that our eschatological future does not lie in a disembodied, spiritual reality. Eternal life is not going to heaven when you die. It rather is resurrection life, the gift of participation in a transformed space-time reality. But Wright does not want his emphasis on the earthly, embodied nature of the eschaton to be understood as an argument that God’s eschatological reign comes as the final stage of an immanent historical process. It is the result of an apocalyptic intervention of God. Therefore, Wright also rejects language that suggests, as the Social Gospel movement did, that the Christian community is involved in building the kingdom—as if God’s reign would come as the culmination of our faithful progression. Nevertheless, given his emphasis on the earthly, embodied nature of the eschaton, Wright does believe there is continuity between life now and life then. In fact, he argues, the Christian community can produce building blocks that God will use to determine the shape of eschatological life. In this context, Wright seizes on the words of Paul: Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain (1 Cor 15:58). Paul’s words come at the end of Paul’s own argument about the resurrection. Immediately before, he has argued that in the eschatological transformation our perishable bodies will put on imperishability, and our mortal bodies immortality. And just as the physical reality of our bodies will be used as a building block for the eschaton, Paul seems to say, God will likewise include the work of our hands. This is how Wright takes it: "What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. . . . They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom." ¹⁷ In other words, God’s restoration of all things is not the finishing touch on a journey of faithful progress undertaken by humanity. It is rather a radical, apocalyptic re-creation on God’s part that will definitively reshape the face of the earth. But in shaping this new creation, God makes use of building blocks developed in history. The new creation may be full of music; but it will not be music composed anew by the angel choirs, but rather a gathering of music produced over time—maybe well-known pieces, and maybe also pieces that have been forgotten. The new Jerusalem will be a center of worship; but we will not simply join in with the hymns sung by the four living creatures standing around God’s thrown. It will rather be a celebration shaped by liturgical forms gathered from many different times and cultures.

This then may answer why God initiated the re-creation of all things in the midst of time rather than at the end of time. By inaugurating the kingdom in advance of its consummation, God gives us a chance to live into this new reality; to let our