Journal: Trinity Journal
Volume: TRINJ 14:1 (Spring 1993)
Article: Pauline Eschatological Dualism and Its Resulting Tensions
Author: Don N. Howell, Jr.

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Pauline Eschatological Dualism and Its Resulting Tensions

Don N. Howell, Jr.*

In the apostle Paul’s understanding of redemption there is a critical tension between the present and the future. This eschatological dualism is comprised of an already (inaugurated)-not yet (consummated) continuum of the new age of salvation, presently realized but awaiting its full and final manifestation in the future. Since the nature of NT (including but not limited to Pauline) eschatology has been an area of spirited controversy throughout the twentieth century, we will first set out to survey the history of the debate in order to provide perspective in our exploration of the Pauline materials.

J. C. Beker has concisely catalogued the history of the interpretation (or misinterpretation) of the eschatological dimension of NT theology as one of extended neglect and recent rediscovery.1 “The interpretation of futurist eschatology in the church has been one long process of its transposition into a different key.”2 In the first five centuries several factors contributed to a misrepresentation of NT eschatology: (1) an adverse reaction to the extremes of Montanism in the second century leading to the rejection of millennialism at the Council of Ephesus in AD 431; (2) a shift from eschatological to protological concerns due to the church’s need to respond to heresies regarding the person of Christ and the relation of the persons of the Trinity; (3) an allegorizing hermeneutic employed by influential church fathers such as Origen and Augustine that translated the temporal element into the spiritual journey of the believer or equated kingdom and church. This unfavorable appraisal of futuristic eschatology continued through the Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation (chiliasm was condemned in the Lutheran Augsburg confession), and into

*Don N. Howell, Jr., Th.D., is a missionary to Japan (since 1979) with the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. He is presently an Associate Professor of New Testament at the Japan Bible Seminary in Tokyo.

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the modern period. “The impact of this spiritualizing process and the distaste for apocalyptic speculations made by sectarian groups have no doubt contributed to the overwhelmingly negative estimate of apocalyptic by biblical and theological scholarship since the Enlightenment.”3

A. Schweitzer is commonly identified as the leading representative of the school of “consistent eschatology” (konsequente Eschatologie), credited with recapturing the long neglected eschatological essence of th...