All shall be well

I have enjoyed Jess’ posts on Julian of Norwich and look forward to many more. I would also be interested in seeing posts about Hildegard von Bingen.

Thinking about God’s love and justice and the concept of anger naturally led me to reflect on the Dies Irae and the promised restoration of all things. What does it mean to say that “all things shall be well”?

As orthodox Christians, we can proclaim neither universalism nor annihilationism. We believe in everlasting conscious torment for the unrepentant (those whom our politically incorrect forebears would call “the damned” and “the reprobate”). For them as individuals, it will not be well.

They shall be in everlasting agony. While there may no way around this and we accept that it is necessary for such individuals to be removed from the new heavens and new earth, lest it be spoiled and justice denied, we (and surely God, who is love) must be sad at such an outcome. Indeed, Christ Himself said that the Way is narrow, and that few find eternal life. We might understand “few” in a kind of relative sense; but, on any reading, it presupposes that there will be those who do not find eternal life.

The image found in Revelation of people being cast into the Lake of Fire is a haunting one. To describe all things as being well is to speak in an overall, objective sense about the fate of the cosmos, with the great division between the redeemed and the condemned, on whom “the wrath of God remains” (John 3:36).

Having recently finished reading a book defending the historical reliability of John’s Gospel, I am apt to remind the traditionalists and conservatives here, that the same John who wrote “God is love” is the John who recorded Jesus as speaking about the wrath of God and who received and recorded the visions of Revelation, which include, inter alia, this verse: “Then one of the four living creatures gave to the seven angels seven golden bowls filled with the wrath of God, who lives for ever and ever” (Revelation 15:7, NIV). We must not mischaracterise the wrath of God, but neither must we pretend it is not a concept taught in Scripture.

Trumpets

I am still mulling the post-tribulational framework and will no doubt write more on the subject when I have found some appropriate resources. I would, however, like to set out some initial thoughts.

Post-tribulationists generally posit a parallel unfolding of the seals, trumpets, and bowls of Revelation, rather than the sequential reading espoused by pre-wrathers (and generally pre-tribulationists too). They must of necessity do this because they posit that Christ returns at the seventh trumpet, but the seventh seal clearly depicts his return. Therefore, in their schema, the seventh seal and seventh trumpet are different visions, but describing the same event. This is, as many of them have pointed out, is essentially the same process as we use to harmonise the Four Gospels, in order to dispel potential contradictions.

Revelation is clearly made up of different vision units. In general, I am quite comfortable with the idea that John revisits various events in the narrative to add further detail or show them from other perspectives, and this is consistent with how the Book of Daniel is written too (i.e. different visions given at different times, but describing – more or less – the same things).

However, I have always found Revelation 8:1-6 problematic for the reading of the seals and trumpets as concurrent, since it seems to imply that the trumpets follow the seals. I think, to preserve the concurrent reading, one would have to take 8:2 as indicating a new vision sequence has begun, which is certainly possible, as “And I saw” does seem to indicate new vision units in Revelation. The difficulty I have is as follows.

1. The Day of the LORD clearly comes after Jesus returns (as we see from reading Joel 2 in parallel with the Olivet Discourse and Revelation 6).
2. The Olivet Discourse (using the analogy of Noah) and the Lukan analogy of Lot, clearly depict physical catastrophe befalling the earth after Jesus has resurrected or transformed and gathered the saints.
3. The trumpets and bowls (unlike the seals) clearly describe physical calamities befalling the earth.
4. Therefore, it would make sense to understand these as the Day of the LORD and to place them after Jesus has returned, which is what the pre-wrath framework does.

I think there are a few ways the post-tribulationist can respond to this problem. One is to point out that physical calamities happen already in the present age, before Jesus has returned, so we need not locate the trumpets and/or bowls after the return of Christ simply because they involve physical calamities. Another, which I believe some – but not all – post-tribulationists do, is to make the seals and trumpets concurrent, but not the bowls.

This is a harmonisation the both places physical calamities after the return of Christ and keeps the seventh seal and sevent trumpet as concurrent. However, this view is not universally held by post-tribulationists because the earthquake at the seventh bowl is usually identified with the earthquake at the seventh trumpet, on the grounds of simplicity.

Lastly, I wanted to comment on post-tribulationism’s identification of the seventh trumpet of Revelation with the “last trumpet” mentioned by Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4. As many have pointed out, Revelation was written some time after 1 Thessalonians. Furthermore, Paul does not give additional detail about the last trumpet itself. Accordingly there are different theories about what he may have meant. This makes it hard to be sure that the last trumpet in Paul’s writings is the same as the seventh trumpet in Revelation. That being said, I have no firm opinion either way at this time.

Just as the resurrection is the hope of an individual, the Millennium is the hope of nations as entities in their own right.

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

-Revelation 20:4

When we really begin to look at the small details of life and set them alongside the big picture, we see a great need for evangelisation and for the return of Christ. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are longing to see Christ ruling from Jerusalem over the nations. They long to see the death of Babylon the Great and the destruction of the Beast and the False Prophet. Ultimately, they desire the imprisonment and judgment of Satan, our enemy. The rot, the corruption is everywhere to see.

We may note that there has always been failure and evil in the world; we are fallen beings and there are fallen spirits at large. That does not mean that evil will always have sway over the human world. The earth belongs to God – He has the right to rule it as He sees fit, and He will step in at some point in history to free the earth from despotic governors.

Corruption of the State

The state was ordained by God to ensure civil harmony and as a defence against foreign invasion. These are legitimate aims, and are most easily observed in the acts of the police, the criminal courts, and the army. The state is not entitled to interfere in all aspects of life, however.

We see the corruption in the big controversies on front pages of newspapers and blogs:

• redefining marriage;
• redefining gender;
• hampering free speech; and
• permitting abortion.

But the rot is seen in the small things, the boring aspects of our everyday lives:

• Inheritance tax;
• Capital gains tax;
• Some aspects of income tax;
• Corporation tax;
• Politicisation of education;
• Excessive regulation for businesses; and
• Quantitative easing.

The fingers of the state are in practically all aspects of our lives these days, and our ancestors would find this strange. Roger Scruton, talking about the free market, once remarked that one of the pillars of true conservatism is that we reserve some things from the market. These things we keep for family and church, and so forth. Similarly, we might remark that some things ought to be reserved from the state. The state has no right to interfere in private transactions, in matters of family life and personal expression. Conservatives are horrified by the vision of the state conjured up in Plato’s Republic; we ought to be asking ourselves whether those phantoms are present now even in so called “moderate” and “centrist” states. Where is the liberty our ancestors protected?

Corruption of Culture

If the state has signs of corruption, it inherited the disease from its people. Our legislatures, executives, and judiciaries are staffed by real, fallen human beings. As dangerous values perfuse the populace, they will inevitably find their way into the institutions that govern the people. The rise of leftism is evidence of this: even so called “conservative” parties show signs of the infection in their unquestioning approval of the expansion of the state. When small-government people ask questions or make observations, others around them look at them as if to say, “Are you out of your mind? Why shouldn’t the state be involved in X?” Few it seems are willing to ask the fundamental philosophical question of what the limits of state competence should be.

We have neo-conservatism to blame, in part, for this. Its constant use of the word “democracy” as a buzzword, as a sacred chant, has blinded people to the dangers of democracy and statism. It takes great effort now to introduce people to the ideas of classical liberalism and to show that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America were wary of the excesses of democracy they understood from their study of ancient Athens. A further contributing factor in the rise of this corruption is the decline of classical studies, which would reveal once again what the Founding Fathers knew from their childhood days. Were classical studies to become popular again, they would also need to be taught in a level manner – the leftist tendencies of revisionism would need to be exposed.

Corruption of the Church

The problems in the Church are increasingly being exposed for all to see across all traditions: Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, and evangelical/dissenting. Some of the most striking are:

• Pederasty;
• Ephebophilia;
• The “Prosperity Gospel”;
• National divisions within the Church (e.g. in the Ukraine);
• Annihilationism;
• Universalism;
• Gay marriage;
• Financial mismanagement;
• Full preterism;
• Ecumenism; and
• Inter-faith dialogue.

These issues not only deter outsiders from the Gospel, but they also cause issues of governance and participation within the Church. There is now a choice facing Christians in all these traditions: do we try to remove the corruption from our ranks or do we go elsewhere? This is not an easy decision. There are good reasons to stay, the principal reason being to witness to those who are not Christ’s in the hope that they will repent. Catholics will of course argue that as theirs is the one, true Church, they cannot flee Catholicism itself: such would be apostasy or schism or both. They have “underground” options to consider, however – though these are more common in places of overt persecution than in the West.

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I am aware that this post is largely assertions rather than argumentation. Such is required given the space of a single post, but it is worth discussing the reasoning behind these claims in the comments below as well as providing examples in evidence.