Paul's Apocalyptic Gospel: The Coming Triumph of God

Needed an outline. Hard for me to follow at times. Very good case why pre trib rapture isA no go!

I'm not a theologian but Martyn (above) is one of the leading non-traditionalists --the traditionalist interpretation is the Augustinian- Lutheran position which denies under the name of "grace alone," any human participation in the redemption of the earth-- and Martyn's asssessment of Beker is high, in stark contrast to the smug denigrating review by the reader below. Even Richard Hays notes his debt to Beker. Giving Beker one star is an act of ignorance and blasphemy that would have shocked N.T. Wright himself. Beker was in the theological avant-garde, picking up on themes that Wright and Crossan later approached from the historical angle.Beker cut right through not only Bultmann's mystifications, but those of Luther and modern evangelicals who individualized and privatized salvation and inveighed against progressive political activism. The Augustinian idea of loss of free will combined with Luther's polemic against "works-righteousness," reduces human beings to inert objects-- who remain unworthy even when they're "saved." Beker had no truck with this kind of misanthropic reading of Paul, which diminished to virtual insignificance the scope of Christ's victory. In the traditional interpretation everything is reduced to predestination--"grace" for the elect-- and there is no summons to humans to participate in process of redemption. But this was antithetical to St Paul's vigorous effort to create a counter-cultural Christian community--a beachhead in the struggle for salvation. Both Hauerwas and Yoder's emphasis on corporate salvation was prefigured by Beker. Beker was a politically progressive but "postliberal" theologian before the term had caught on. He was ecologically aware and had a broad cosmic vision of salvation--a giant thinker who forged his own path based on Paul, clearing a space for the rest of us to folllow. Although in one way Beker DID diverge from the postliberal school, violating one of their theological but non-Biblical taboos: He was not a Christomonist. God's promise as revealed in Jesus' resurrection is fulfilled when the last enemy is defeated, when we too have become like Jesus,and when the knowledge of the Father is known in all corners of the earth. PS See my latest book on Amazon, THe Spiritual Gift of Madness.

Reading Beker's work from 1982 reminds me of reading anything from Rudolf Bultmann's corpus - it reflects the academic assumptions of its time and place and has not worn well at all. Beker's approach is that basically he knows what Paul means to say, and rather than providing detailed exegesis, he will simple assume away works like the so-called deutero-Pauline letters (Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians) that undermine his thesis that Paul has nothing to say about the timing and the events of the parousia. Especially after so much work has been done by people like N.T. Wright on the question of what exactly the "day of the Lord" was that Paul was waiting for (and whether it actually came in the 1st century in the form of the Jewish war and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD), Beker's treatment of the parousia delay is totally unconvincing at this point.

Although I haven't read The Triumph of God it is more often referred to by Biblical scholars. This book is more of a defense of Paul's apocalyptic perspective rather than a critique of how Paul uses the apocalyptic framework.