Boats that rescue in one way or another

I watched The Boat That Rocked last night. It's Richard Curtis' film about pirate radio and it's great fun - well acted, with some pretty wonderful music. It also, in passing, makes a bold claim for the importance of rock n' roll and the place of the pirates in ensuring we all got to hear it in the 1960s.

I am slightly too young to have had my love of pop and rock formed by the pirates, though I did listen to Luxembourg and Caroline. Curtis' film lovingly recreates the clash between the establishment and the pirates and reminds us just how different the world was in 1966.

Perhaps ministers-in-training should be watching it alongside reading Callum Brown's book on the church in that decade as well as other assessments of how significant the 1960s were in creating the world in which we now live.

And talking about significant boats in history, Friedman reminds us of one in his chapter on biodiversity. As he movingly tells the story of the last breeding pair of giant soft-shelled turtles, the language he uses, because no other language is good enough, is that of Noah and the flood. Indeed the whole chapter is littered with biblical allusions.

Take this as an example: 'we may be the first generation in human history that literally has to act like Noah - to save the last pairs of a wide range of species....Unlike Noah, though, we - our generation and our civilization - are responsible for the flood, and we have responsibility to build the ark...The beginning of wisdom is to understand that it is our challenge and our responsibility to act like Noah - to create arks, not floods.' (p181).

I wonder how many parties in the forthcoming election will be putting up posters of Noah leading the animals into the ark as they promise to get serious about climate change?

Apocalypse now...

I said I'd blog on whether apocalyptic is a better word than eschatology for talking about how Christians think about the future.

Since posting last on this issue, I came across this quote from John Goldingay: 'I tell students that whenever they use the word eschatology they should was their mouths out with soap, because it sounds like a technical term with a defined meaning, but actually means different things to different people.' Astute as ever.

And he could substitute the word apocalyptic where he uses eschatology. For while there is broad agreement on what constitutes apocalyptic writing, there are a range of views on what apocalyptic thinking is and more particularly how it impacts on early Christian thinking about what God has achieved through Jesus and how that affects the future of creation.

So, most agree that apocalyptic writing is concerned with the future of God's people, that it generally features an angel revealing to a prophet/author what is about to happen and what the signs of it will be. For that reason, apocalyptic writing is often lurid and complex - just ask most Christians to explain the message of Revelation (from where the word apocalypse as a type of literature comes) in a couple of sentences!

The reason why the adjective could be a useful substitute for eschatology is that the literature gave rise to a a series of key ideas in the emerging Christian faith. The great New Testament scholar, J Louis Martyn, argues that Paul's theology is apocalyptic through and through. His argument is pretty convincing (at least as far as I'm concerned).

It is from apocalyptic that the early Christians got their understanding of justification, the coming of the Holy Spirit, the certainty of resurrection, the defeat of the forces of evil and the re-patterning of the created order once that defeat had happened.

However, the biggest contribution that apocalyptic thinking makes on a Christian understanding of the world has to do with the relationship between the present age and the age to come. In most apocalyptic writing there is a contrast between the age in which we live - which is evil and, in particular, one where God's people are persecuted - and the age to come - where justice and peace, prosperity and wholeness are the order of the day. Separating these two ages is a single moment when God intervenes to end the old age and bring in the new one.

Jesus came teaching that the new age was dawning in his ministry and yet the old age was still running. Early Christian teachers argued that Jesus decisively defeated the powers of the old age on the cross and ushered in the new age - of justification, peace with God, new creation, the presence of the Holy Spirit, etc - and that new age runs alongside the old one.

What this does is to make what Christians hope for accessible to some extent in the present. Our hope of a new world inspires our action to make this world better, for example. Apocalyptic is hugely important for our understanding of Christian hope and Christian lifestyle in our present fallen world as we follow Jesus in anticipation of the new age that is dawning through his life, death and resurrection.

But, it takes a bit of explaining and I'm fairly sure that talking about hope and how that affects our lives here are now does the job just as well. So, no doubt occasionally we'll make fleeting reference to these technical terms but generally we'll be talking about hope - what we hope for and how that hope affects how we live in today's world.

More on the 'E' word

Well, we fell at the first hurdle with the 'E' word.

Eschatology is a word derived from the Greek word eschaton which means 'the end' and eschata meaning 'the things of the end' with ology derived from the Greek word logos meaning 'the study of' or 'words about' tagged on the end.

So, strictly speaking eschatology is the study of the end or things about the end and in Christian theology was traditionally associated with the end of the world and the second coming of Christ, the last judgement and the new heavens and the new earth.

Simon makes a good point that it's all very well to use the 'E' word in lectures but in a series at church, where you might define it in week 1, people will have forgotten what it means by week 2 or 3 and the preacher will forget to keep defining it.

Even at Spring Harvest this year, where I gather it was being regularly used in all the morning seminars, there were still baffled folk in various places asking what it actually meant.

When I was writing my Bible guide on Galatians and my Discovering the New Testament, I tended to use the word apocalyptic to describe similar ideas because the word apocalypse is at least in general use and so is not an entirely unfamiliar term.

Indeed I remember having a robust exchange of views with my then editor over whether people in church should know and understand what a word like eschatology means. Fortunately for all my readers, she prevailed and we didn't use it.

So, the 'E' word will probably not feature as we look at reasons to be hopeful. I will blog soon on why apocalyptic is a good word and whether we might use that one. I'd be interested in your views.

Shall I use the 'E' word?

So, I've been thinking a bit about our forthcoming series on hope, trying to give it some shape and find Bible passages that illustrate different aspects of the theme.

And I've hit my first issue: do I use the 'E' word?

They used it at Spring Harvest and it was marvellous to see all kinds of, I assume, Charismatic Christians talking earnestly over their Butlins' carry outs about 'Eschatology'. I imagine this doesn't happen in most churches across the UK on an average Sunday.

Did it help people? Well, you'll have to ask them. But the ones I talked to did find the word quite useful for labelling the full extent of Christian hope. It enabled them to see that hope is about more than the second coming and whether that's to be expected before, during or after the tribulation/millennium/rapture. Indeed it enabled most of them to realise that they could jettison the theology of the Left Behind series and still remain perfectly sound Bible believing Christians.

So, shall I be using the 'E' word?

I am tempted to because it will enable us to set the series - reasons to be hopeful - in the context of a full-orbed grasp of Christian thinking about the future and how it affects our lives in the present. What do you think?