2 Thessalonians 2- do we have to choose?

So I'm trying to nut out 2 Thessalonians 2 at the moment.
I've put aside the 'this is what happens all the time (and so never really happens)' kind of amillenial interpretation, and I'm trying to figure out what Paul is referring to. with the 'man of lawlessness'

Two options press hard.

First is some kind of reference to the Imperial cult of Gaius Caligula. James Harrison marshals some pretty interesting evidence, to do with Caligula's descriptions of himself as divine, his attempt to install a statue of himself as a new Zeus, manifest divine in the Jerusalem temple as a background to Paul.

Option 2 is seeing the 'man of lawlessness' as some kind of reference to apostate Israel, who has rejected her Messiah. Perhaps as the High priest. The faithful suffering of God's true people commends God's right judgement about them, while the false people commend themselves as God's.

It's the chestnut of a lot of eschatological judgementy stuff in the NT. Is the target Rome or Israel?

i'm starting to wonder whether we need to choose so clearly.

Who was it that was persecuting the Thessalonian church?

Acts 17:5 But the Jews became jealous,17 and gathering together some worthless men from the rabble in the marketplace,18 they formed a mob19 and set the city in an uproar.20 They attacked Jason’s house,21 trying to find Paul and Silas22 to bring them out to the assembly.23
Acts 17:6 When they did not find them, they dragged24 Jason and some of the brothers before the city officials,25 screaming, “These people who have stirred up trouble26 throughout the world27 have come here too,
Acts 17:7 and28 Jason has welcomed them as guests! They29 are all acting against Caesar’s30 decrees, saying there is another king named31 Jesus!”

The problem for the thessalonians seems to be both jealous Jews and the challenge of the gospel to the imperial cult.

I'm not quite sure how this is going to work out in 2 Thessalonians yet, just bubbling away in my head

Now, Not yet, and the shape of history

In the circles I travel in, the explanation of New Testament eschatology as 'Now but not yet' is so common as to be banal. Visually it is represented like this.
The idea is of an 'overlap of the ages'.
It's advantage is that it allows us to see God's eschaton beginning before the end of the old age.
But I'm starting to think it has serious limitations.
In the image above, the two ages never really interact, the new age never really breaks into the old (it floats of to heaven and is located there.
Also, the new age and time is seen as the same as the old, simply on a different register or plane.

So, I want to suggest a significantly more complicated picture

Where the ancients saw history as circular and eternal, we know that only God and his kingdom are eternal. History proceeds in a straight line, and not a straight line toward God's kingdom, but (initially) away from it. (the lines).
God intervenes, in actions that are both comprehensible and actual on that linear progression, yet are glimpses and real anticipations of the eschaton. (the circles)
This is true of Gods rescue of Israel from egypt, of every sabbath rest, of the return from exile, of Jesus resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, each sunday morning as we anticipate the first morning of the new creation. These interventions of God curve the linear progress of history toward the eschaton (though at no point could history be left to itself and find the eschaton)
The advantages of this picture, (I reckon), is that it allows us to see continuiy in God's activity between the old and new. it also allows us to apply similar interpretive strategies to prophecy in the Old and New Testaments, that is is, it allows us to say that some events are 'Then and not yet', rather than simply in an ever present now. This means that we can take things like the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD as genuine events in the action of God, genuine interventions of the eschaton onto actual, flesh and blood history, fulfilling prophecies in the NT, and yet which still give us a lense into the future (ie, we aren't full preterists who  think there is no more eschaton to come.)

Thoughts?

Blogs to change your life

Perhaps you are one of the few people who read this blog who do not also read the Blogging Parson and Nothing New Under the Sun. I'd like to recommend them as important for your life.

Michael Jensen at the Blogging Parson has been posting about the history of Sydney Anglicanism, and challenging us to avoid views of 'escaping the earth' and avoiding social responsibility. He outlines a vision for Sydney christians to have a prophetic voice for the large issues we face as a society.

Byron at Nothing New Under the Sun is such a voice. He gives us a calm and considered christian perspective on the looming (and now here) ecological, economic and energy crises. Byron's blog is an excellent resource for keeping informed. But more importantly, he helps us to think and live as christians within a changing world. It is a blog that every western christian should read and engage with.

knowing others according to the way of the cross

"the new way of knowing is not in some ethereal sense a spiritual way of knowing. It is not effected in a mystic trance, as the pseudo-apostles claimed, but rather right in the midst of rough and tumble life...it is life in the midst of the new creation community, in which to know by the power if the cross is precisely to know and to serve the neighbor who is in need... Thus at the juncture of the ages the marks of the resurrection are hidden and revealed in the cross of the disciples daily death, and ONLY there"
JL Martyn 'epistemology at the turn of the ages'

Stuvac: Holy Sonnets

HOLY SONNETS.

I.

THOU hast made me, and shall Thy work decay ?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste ;
I run to death, and Death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.
I dare not move my dim eyes any way ;
Despair behind, and Death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.
Only Thou art above, and when towards Thee
By Thy leave I can look, I rise again ;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one hour myself I can sustain.
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art
And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.


Source:
Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I.
E. K. Chambers, ed.
London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 157.

Yoder- Living as signs of another world

“The church can be a foretaste of the peace for which the world was made. It is the function of minority communities to remember and to create utopian visions. There is no hope for society without an awareness of transcendence. Transcendence is kept alive not on the grounds of logical proof to the effect that there is a cosmos with a hereafter, but by the vitality of communities in which a different way of being keeps breaking in here and now. That we can really be led on a different way is real proof of the transcendent power which offers hope of peace to the world as well. Nonconformity is the warrant for the promise of another world. Although immersed in this world, the church by her way of being represents the promise of another world, which is not somewhere else but which is to come here. That promissory quality of the church’s present distinctiveness is the making of peace, as the refusal to make war is her indispensable negative transcendence.”

– John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 94.

H/T Halden

I like this gear from Yoder, but has anyone found anything in Yoder about church discipline? If the church is to be a sacrament of peace for the rest of the world, how do we deal with the evil among us?

Yoder- do we need to twist the Bible to make it political?

“That story is about a people, a civil reordering in their very existence, not only potentially or by implication. No ‘bridge’ or ‘translation’ is needed to make the Bible a book about politics. The new order, the new humanity, does not replace or destroy the old, but that does not make the new order apolitical. Its very existence is subversive at the points the old order is repressive, and creative where the old is without vision. The transcendence of the new consists not in its escaping the realm where the old order rules, but in its subverting and transforming that realm.”

~ John Howard Yoder, For the Nations, 84.

Moltmann on Apolitical Queitism

I love this quote:

Revelation was not written for 'Rapturists' fleeing from the world, who tell the world 'goodbye' and want to go to heaven; it was meant for resistance fighters, struggling against the godless powers of this earth. Moltmann, Coming of God, 153.

Ben Myers: November 2006

Blogs like this make me ashamed. They are just soooo good! This is one of the biggest months I've seen to date.
What a month for Ben, there is too much here to mention, notice particularly

Pannenbergs eschatological ontology

Barth on Capitalism

Kim Fabricious ten Fab propositions on being human and Karl Barth

Snippets of Robert Jensons "Conversations with Poppi about God"

David Bentley Hart

Paul J DeHart's critique of post liberal theology, including a great quote from Hans Frei on the necessity of the resurrection, basically along the lines of, you beleive Jesus is risen, or that he was a fictional character, since the resurrection permeates his presentation and identity throughout the gospels.

Woo

Ben needs to get out more

Remembering the past: Nothing New Under the Sun

The very title of Byron Smiths blog invites us to look back over his archive. There is nothing new!

In October 2006
Byron was almost drawing to the end of his 'Heaven: not the end of the world' series, that didn't end my world, but certainly rocked it. There are many posts in this series.. read them, yes all of them, every last one, fantastic for the soul (hehe and obviously body too)

Byron draws on Augustine's self-criticism . Augustine seemed to be the ultimate blogger, but gives some good tips for comments


And this monster quote from Moltmann, which has shaped my experience of hope the most over the past two years