10. There are works which attempt responsible dealings with the covenant, but remain locked into Dispensationalism. 1) Campbell & Townsend, A Case for Premillennialism. 2) Saucy, The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism. The literalism with which all dispensationalists read the Bible, particularly prophecy, hampers understanding of the Bible as well as the doctrine of the Church.
11. Campbell & Townsend, A Case for Premillennialism, 236. It seems that Papias (AD 60–130) already struggled with premillennial problems.
12 Stam, Things That Differ, 29.
13. Jeffrey, Armageddon: Appointment with Destiny, 221.
14. Walwoord, Armageddon: Oil and the Middle East Crisis, 59.
15. Lindsey, There’s A New World Coming, 77.
16. Other significant New Testament names: Body of Christ, 1 Cor 12:27; Eph 1:23; Col 1:18; etc., Pillar and Ground of Truth, and the Household of God, 1 Tim 3:15.
17. Expression of this ecclesiastical unity appears also in the 1561 Confession of Faith, Art 27p, “This Church has existed from the beginning of the world and will be to the end, for Christ is an eternal King who cannot be without subjects.”
PARADOXICAL STUDIES
IN THE WORLD/NOT OF THE WORLD
Revelation on uncomfortable in the world/not of the world teachings gathered impetus with Abraham and his immediate descendants. Since, this paradoxical assertion in a large way always bears directly on the troubling history of Christ’s Church, also now throughout the drawn-out ages of the Millennium, the ascended Lord Jesus’s one thousand-year reign. The provocative measures of this paradox—in the world/not of the world—marks all post-Abrahamic Scriptures with its currents of anguish in the covenant community everywhere, worldwide.
Obviously, this inescapable paradox constitutes more than a platitudinous obfuscation.
1–4
John 15:1–27 (18–19)
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.
If you were of the world, the world would love its own;
but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world,
therefore the world hates you.”
IN THE WORLD/NOT OF THE WORLD
A LOVE-AND-HATE PARADOX
New generations in Christ, attentive to this paradox, start reflectively, caught by increasing awareness of living in the world, yet not being (a part) of this world. The Lord Jesus in clear language commanded that all his honor this uneasy process to the fullest. The disciples, however, seated at table after the Passover celebration, John 13:1–20, struggled with this quandary, searching out in quiet obedience its hidden distinctions and growing marvels of relevance.
After the solemn commemoration of this Passover, the Christ created the lengthy teaching moment recorded in four unwinding chapters throughout which he, sovereign, claimed undivided attention. By this liberating instruction on love and hate, he communicated the uncomfortable in the world/not of the world environment, contrasting thereby the sweeping commandment to the Twelve18 for loving one another to overcome the world’s animosity. To flex the beating heart of this paradox: Jesus called for love to oppose the malice of the world against him and his own. Thereby, throughout his ministry, he proceeded to instill agapic life within the Twelve as children of God, John 1:12, that is, to his own, the foundational members of the New Church and leading citizens of the Kingdom. In fact, by means of this paradox, he summoned the charter members of the ongoing Church out of a sorry existence to the covenant promise of life. Once more, then, the Lord and Savior pushed the covenant community and the world farther onto contrary trajectories. To the disciples at table with him he prohibited conformity, incremental and/or reckless assimilation, to the world, thereby to diminish pains of rejection imposed by anti-Christian authorities.
CHRIST HATE
To the unified instruction inscripturated as chapters 14–16, the Twelve listened intently; they sensed, without pretending to understand Jesus’s prophecies with respect to the Crucifixion and Resurrection, tremendous events and immediate dangers in the making. In these unknown regions of tension, they nevertheless applied themselves to this complex question, this seemingly contradictory divine injunction, which the Teacher claimed to be true. How could and should the gripping in the world/yet not of the world dividing-line sanctify them as the company of Christ followers? For approximately three years to gain apostolic formation, they walked about Canaan following the Messiah through the well-fed hates of Pharisees and Sadducees. Simultaneously, they were sharply aware of Roman contempt as well as Hellenist scorn for Jews. Yet, they had not made this paradoxical distinction. In that solemn hour after the Passover, however, they slowly absorbed with vexation of soul that they were not of the world. More specifically, the Twelve had crossed a line: Christ headed them as the first of the New Testament generation out of the world. This shared understanding that Jesus commissioned them the point men of the Recreation bonded that company for laborious apostolic work ahead.
The observable world Jesus identified consisted of three concentric circles, which the Teacher with prophetic instruction located as unsatisfiable acrimonies of hatred. The broadest, Hellenism, circumambient polytheistic religions and cultural forces ancient in wickedness, promised with many smiling faces a self-serving life—satisfaction, enjoyment, gratification, in short, a life pulsing with all sensual pleasures of hedonism. Hellenists had no love for the God destructive of all gods. Closer in and present everywhere, Caesarism, brute military might, frowning, on the prowl, far too prone with the cold forms of repression—occupation, tribute, and death threats. Rome’s governors had no love for an all-conquering king.19 Third, the worst, Judaism imposed the unprecedented dominance of the Oral Law. Fearsome with the wagging finger of excommunication—loneliness, hopelessness, worriedness—Judaism largely enacted arrogant powers of damnation. Together these three enemies Jesus called the world, in the Fourth Gospel the Jews the foremost. At that toxic stage in history, all Jews still constituted the Church—corrupt, treasonous, gathering momentum to kill the Lord and Savior.
For emphasis, of these open enemies the Jews exerted on Jesus and the Twelve the most censorious authority. They were the Church coming out of the Old Testament dispensation.
• Only, long before the Incarnation, they had replaced in worship the LORD God with a monotheistic deity.
• Only, they had over the intertestamentary centuries exchanged the Decalogue for the Oral Law.
• Only, they had unreasonably altered righteousness in the hope upon the Messiah for a pagan illusion of self-righteousness.
With a passion they resented the Lord Jesus for beginning the New Church in their hyper-competitive midst; therefore, he shunted them with finality off to the sidelines of history. Over some three years, Jewry’s jealousy and wrath burned hot and high—against their only Messiah.
Christ’s three chronologically immediate enemies—Hellenism, Caesarianism, and Judaism—envisioned