Category: Eschatological Economy

I have one reader. But what a reader. Solly has clambered into the lumber room of my head and has started picking things up and putting them back in their proper places. Already I am beginning to feel better. I think I see what I was trying to say. What we seem to have in this book The Eschatological Economy is a very simple contrast. On one had we have the economy of modernity (â??the way we are nowâ??) and on the other the economy of God, the eschatological economy. The eschatological economy is simply reality and the arrangements God makes by which we will enter reality, join him there and so become real ourselves at last .

Here is Solly setting out what is going on in The Eschatological Economy 5.5

â??It is the concept of God’s time, of God making time for us, and the idea of debit and credit in our relationships, that stands in opposition to this â??economy of modernityâ??. This is the focus that reassembles the fractured understanding Christian theology provides at the moment: Spirit is personal and proactive, not impersonal and reflective; time represents God’s longsuffering and hospitable attitude towards us not something we must suffer and finally be ejected from; we have responsibility to one another, humans are holistic and interactive, mutually giving and receiving, not prefabricated and schizophrenic automatons feigning freedom in an unfree world. The world as it is posits ends, ends we are all assumed to have accepted, but the revealed secret of the Emperor’s new clothes is that there are no ends, merely the eternal recurrence of the same, for there is no change in this world, only fashion, no growth, only talent acquisition, no people, only personalities. We live in a moebius strip, acclaiming the return of that which was past as new and fresh or secretly ironic.. The important fact of the work of the Spirit in the world is not that it represents the sum of what has happened – the spirit of the age, etc – but that it represents the fact of something new happening from outside the closed system we have made of the world, constantly opening up that which we seek to close off from God, just as the Spirit’s work in the resurrection of Christ stopped the foreclosure of that part of history. As the writer says in Ecclesiastes, characterising the secular world, there is nothing new under the sun. But God makes things new.â??

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See The Eschatological Economy at Amazon.com or at Amazon.co.uk or at Eerdmans

Here is the first of a series of posts on why I wrote The Eschatological Economy. I will start with atonement, move on to the doctrine of election and the people of God, and to the issue of time. Later on I will talk a bit about practices, bodies and the distinctive Christian life and then talk a bit about modernity and the non-Christian way of life. Since these are all interrelated there will be some repetition, but I hope you will not mind that.

The Eschatological Economy started because I wanted to know why the concept of sacrifice had become so alien to us, and whether sacrifice really is as wrong or incomprehensible as many believed. My own professor, Colin Gunton, had restated the place of sacrifice in theology of the atonement. In ‘The Actuality of Atonement’ he argued that some very traditional and unfashionable atonement models, such as the Christus Victor model, the concept of sacrifice, and Anselm’s account, still made good sense. But Colin Gunton was able to make only limited sense of sacrifice. He used to quote Hebrews ‘the blood of bulls does not take away sin’ at me and insisted that we moderns no longer practice sacrifice. I tied to convince him that we moderns sacrifice too. We don’t sacrifice sheep in the public square, but we do rear and butcher animals, and the way we surround this process with (industrial, commercial) ritual and keep it is as far out of the public eye as possible is equally strange and even (in a non-Christian sense) religious. It is not crazy to say we sacrifice people, or that other people are involuntarily sacrificed – expended – for us. The economic levers and gears that provide us with our standard of living may be doing so by grinding the faces of the poor, and if we deny that this could be the case, that our comfort is at the cost of their sacrifice, we may be living in denial. So I think we are mistaken if we think that sacrifice and ritual took place in the ancient world but don’t any longer – because this makes much ancient Christian teaching – most of Hebrews, for instance – difficult to understand.

See The Eschatological Economy at Amazon.com or at Amazon.co.uk or at Eerdmans