First Principles and Last Things for a Theology of Work

The faith-and-work conversation has turned with some frequency to the topic of last things. Here we do not suffer lack, theologically speaking, and yet we may still suffer. An eschatological shape to the life of work and to culture-making and culture-forming activities is not necessarily the same as a good or sufficient eschatological shape to those things. The sort of attention paid will prove decisive. Paying productive attention to the end will actually demand that we turn prudently to the beginning, considering first principles of theology if we wish to make headway regarding last things in Christian doctrine.

Protocols for Theology’s Work

I suggest that four principles should mark any account to think theologically about reality, whether that’s regarding work or rest, our selves or this world, or anything else that might be considered in light of God and his deeds.

First, Christian doctrine inquires as to the wholeness of God’s revelation regarding any topic. Like the apostle Paul, we are only free in conscience when we have tended to the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27), rather than leaving a congregation or Christian only partially or immaturely developed. Indeed, God’s Word means to prepare us for maturity. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The divine aim in instruction is nothing less than total equipping (“for every good work” or “deed”). Unless we tend to “all Scripture,” however, we have no confidence that we shall be so equipped. The whole Word forms the whole Christian and whole church. We cannot be content merely to have a prophetic approach to matters. We will not reach maturity if only we tend to the red letters of Jesus’s instruction. We must search out these and other elements of God’s Word, so that its sum forms us whole and complete.

Second, Christian doctrine searches for God’s own priorities, refusing to insist on its own interest or on the urgencies of the day. It is quite possible for the squeaky wheel to demand oil and for the anxious presence to set the tone of theological inquiry. Some big questions seem to loom today. But they may actually be a flash in the pan, a distraction from the center, or only explorable in the wake of more elemental and fundamental concerns. We need to search out God’s Word not only for answers to our questions, but even for guidance as to which questions are foundational and central. Think of the host of issues faced in Corinth. Paul contended with schisms and social strife, with a failure to discipline truly egregious sexual misdeeds, with issues of money and of power, of worship wars, and the like. Yet for all his wide-ranging instruction, Paul still could identify that which mattered most: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…” (1 Cor. 15:3-4). We might think the sex or the issues of social identity are dominant, and we might personally have a hankering for discussions of charismatic gifts. We are called nonetheless to submit our emphases to the education given by Scripture alone.

Third, Christian doctrine tends to language and, in particular, works to distinguish the uniquely Christian usage of especially widespread terminology. The Bible is not penned in Holy Ghost Greek, dropped down singularly for this purpose alone. The Bible conveys eternal truths in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek, languages foreign to most today but quite accessible in their own day. Not just the language itself but the very terms and images employed by the Bible come from a host of ordinary spaces. Even more shocking, ordinary terms convey the most extraordinary and even singular of events. The singularly saving work of Christ will be described using the language of the slave market redemption or of the law court adoption. These terms may seem spiritual or especially Christian today, but that’s hard-won cliché and in no way marks out their actual usage. They were images from various spheres of life put to work in explaining how Christ saves. Other terms are also put to use in Scripture which matter much and which, simultaneously, mean many a thing in their varied usages around our lives. Words such as justice and love, freedom and responsibility, agency and nature do particular work in Christian doctrine, even as they are invoked by a whole litany of thinkers and leaders in the wider cultural marketplace today. Though theology cannot absent itself from ordinary language usage, it must therefore double down on the task of distinguishing its usages and defining its particular inflections.

Fourth, Christian doctrine finally calls its practitioners to integrity and coherence, to seeking out how this element here relates to that concern over there. The unity of Scripture relates to its claims about a unity to reality, one not found empirically in its parts so much as in its theological roots. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). All things being united in Christ means that we are duty-bound to ask how this teaching relates to that practice and how this text coheres with scores of other sometimes seemingly divergent texts. It will not do to treat doctrine like a stream of pearls, gathered only by way of aggregation. No, Christian truth involves a deep cohesion and unity that is mutually constitutive of each and every element. Paul wrote to the Galatian Christians: “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” (Gal. 3:3). Just as it would not do then and there to rely on the Spirit for conversion and then to turn to fleshly power for continuance, so every doctrine must be integrated and connected fittingly to others adjacent to it.

These four protocols mark the work of theology. They can be posed in the form of diagnostic questions: what is the full range of scriptural teaching on a subject? what priorities does Scripture itself model for us? how does Scripture use language or concepts in distinctive ways? where are scriptural teachings interconnected? Each question could be inverted as well: which scriptural teachings have we not yet encountered? which priorities need to be crucified and reordered by the Word of God? where do presupposed uses of language need to be baptized more fully? and how have we not yet perceived the interconnections of Christian faith and practice?

These protocols do not simply occur at some inception point. Rather, they are constant disciplines meant to shape the theological project. Each of them plays a role in putting to practice that ultimate theological principle: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 111:10; Prov. 9:10). Each protocol seeks to be mindful of God – to all he has for us, to his own revealed priorities, to his deputized use of language, and to the way all these varied things hold together in him, for they come “from him and through him and to him” (Rom. 11:33).

So far, the method of thinking theologically.[1] While these methodological concerns are a needful beginning, we must press on to the end. Now it remains to operationalize these principles in thinking about work and in doing so by means of the doctrine of last things. In what follows, I suggest ways in which imbalance needs to be redressed as part of the goal of fleeing fragmentation and seeking greater wholeness, both in terms of personal and churchly wholeness (that we would act with greater integrity) and of biblical wholeness (that we would increasingly bear the formative influence of the entirety of the Word of God). To that end, I will be analyzing four claims about how eschatology can and should better shape the integration of faith and work. After doing so, I will conclude with thoughts on what has made these principles seem problematic.

Principles for Eschatology

1. Eschatological Wholeness: over against the anti-dispensationalist polemic, a satisfactory eschatology aim must be spiritual and not merely cultural or physical.

Christian hope involves God “making all things new” (Isa. 43:19; Rev. 21:5). In so doing, newness strikes the heavens and the earth and Jerusalem itself within them. People and their bodies, places and their society – these and many other categories are given new promise and renewed hope.

For many recent Christians, the pertinent word has been a world-affirming one. All things made new involves our bodies and this earth being restored and renewed. Given the way that nineteenth and early twentieth century dispensationalism often influenced American Christianity, these emphases seem apposite to many Christians.

Dispensationalism did not, strictly speaking, say that bodies, work, nature, or society matter not at all. Further, dispensationalism did not even suggest that they were of little religious consequence or of precious little significance biblically and theologically. Such descriptions would be strawman characterizations. What dispensationalists did convey in that formative time period was a hermeneutical posture that treated such material concerns as part of the millennium and as terminating in the millennial reign of Israel, over against the eternal dispensation of the church, which finds more spiritual description in classic dispensationalist literature.[2]

The resurrection of the body and the restoration of the new heavens and new earth are both pivotal in more than New Testament eschatology. They are more central to Old Testament teaching than has been appreciated as of late. For as much as N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God rightly commends the fundamental nature of bodily resurrection to early Christian teaching and does so over against the backdrop of second temple Jewish expectations, it massively undersells the Old Testament’s commendation of a resurrection hope to come.[3] Ironically, the Jewish scholar Jon D. Levenson’s The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son more capably takes in the range and repetition of such hopes for life where none could be expected.[4]

For all the importance of commending such bodily or earthy hopes, the Bible also fixes attention upon the promise of life evermore with God. The parables convey a wedding feast (Mt. 22:1-14). While the guest list may be noteworthy, at the root of the teaching is the idea of a union to be celebrated wherein God pledges himself intimately to another. The Apocalypse bestowed by Jesus upon John frames its final vision with the pledge: “Behold, I am coming soon” (Rev. 22:7; 22:12; 22:20). Already God has announced that “the dwelling place of God is with man” (Rev. 21:3) and that he will be with them as Father to Son (21:7).

2. Eschatological Imagination: over against the impulse to project and idealize the known, a serious eschatological must register the imaginative shock of apocalyptic irruption.

The shape and not merely the substance of Scripture instructs us. Kevin Vanhoozer has prompted consideration of the theological value of the Bible’s literary forms in their variety in his essay “The Semantics of Biblical Language.”[5]

Eschatology comes in a range of forms: promissory declaration, epistolary address, parabolic analogy, and apocalyptic sketch. That last genre has gained a mass interest, even if it has also meant a missed opportunity. Attention has been paid (in dispensationalist circles especially) to apocalyptic texts like Revelation, yet too often the interpretative approach has foisted alien expectations upon that text. Whereas apocalyptic is meant to overwhelm and to convey the excess of a revelatory truth, too many generations have perceived a chronological road map in the images of the Revelation. That Apocalypse ought to convey the invasion of God and, thus, the interruption of our presumed imagination, whether of the good or the true or the beautiful. That vision, then, ought to startle its recipients into awareness of the bounds of our theological awareness.

Biblical episodes of note regularly claim to reveal much, albeit in overwhelming media, so as to convey the dual reality of true divine self-revelation even amid the incomprehensibility of divine being. When Moses had successfully prayed for the survival of the Israelites and their divine preservation on the far side of the golden calf episode, his last prayer request was to be shown the glory of the Lord, his very face. When God revealed himself to Moses atop Sinai, the event had been described visually, though its unpacking was all verbal (Exod. 34:6-7). When Jesus was transfigured atop the mountain, alongside Moses and Elijah and before Peter, James, and John, the vision was conveyed as luminous, yet the event terminated or found fulfillment again in speech: “this is my beloved son – listen to him” (Mt. 17:5). Even more than these episodes, overt eschatological texts (such as the Olivet Discourse of Mt. 24/Mk. 13/Lk. 21) convey that which cannot be contained or uttered whole. Through excess, through pyrotechnic, through paradox, we are meant to be jolted and thus silenced.

This second concern relates to the previous one. While eschatology needs to take in the full range of biblical concerns, it also needs to acknowledge when one runs to the end of biblical instruction. As the late John Webster said, “because Holy Scripture is sufficient, holy reason finds there its limit.”[6] Undue speculation occurs when curiosity is not constrained by data and by divine divulgence. We are, indeed, on something of a need-to-know basis, and we do not have a God’s-eye-view of all future eventualities.

The bounds of our perception surely come to blunt notice when Jesus tells us that we shall not be married in the heavenly hereafter (Mt. 22:30). Try imagining a society without marriage in some form. While taking varied forms through the centuries and in diverse locations around the globe, marriage persists as a basic building block of human society. Yet the New Jerusalem will apparently not be marked by that sort of social stratification. It will be perfect, fulfilled, satisfying, and yet they “will neither marry nor be given in marriage.” I mention this example less because I want to address a theology of marriage, but rather for its epistemological and imaginative connotations. If the New Testament’s eschatological imagery conveys the absence of marriage, which marks out such a fundamental transformation, then we are led to wonder what else might be transfigured as well. And we are reminded how much we might presume to take for granted, imaginatively speaking, and how very much we ought to walk softly and carry a big dose of epistemic humility.

3. Eschatological Hope: over against the hum-drum notion of aiming to progress and seeking to be upwardly mobile, an ethical eschatology will generate a confidence of transformation and completeness given from on high.

Final things will also be finished things. That need not mean that dynamism is gone in every respect, and it does not constitute a static existence (at least as we might imagine such a calm today). It simply means to convey that God himself graces and glorifies so as to give this reality whole and complete. He does not offer or suggest. He does not initiate or provoke. He completes, fulfills, and perfects.

Christian postmillennialism has had theological reasons it offers for the hope of human projects reaching an intended culmination through God’s providential action. The value of such frameworks is that it can rightly promise hope to this world and, for instance, to our species (though not only to our species). In other words, continuity of identity will be honored by such schema. And yet the matter of discontinuity suffers mightily in the postmillennialist vision. Does it allow for intervention? Does it promise apocalypse? Does it cause us not only to run ahead but also to look up?

This third concern also relates to the previous one. That much (though surely not all) eschatological instruction comes through apocalyptic imagery provokes thought regarding its nature and its momentum. The Lutheran theologian Carl E. Braaten says that “apocalyptic is both a genre of literature and an entire worldview.”[7] As noted above, apocalyptic speaks of heavenly invasion and makes use of a range of overwhelming aesthetic depictions.

The cosmic and human future is not up in the air. However much scientific and political discourse may sketch our fate as very much contingent, Christian eschatology reminds us that we live in a world marked by promise just as much and more than in a world shaped by the precarious. We don’t know all the particulars. Again, we are on a “need to know” basis in many respects. And yet we are given promises that all shall be made new and that this involves the divine provision of a place, a space, a time, and a temple-less presence. The takeaway of the Revelation is meant to be confidence and assurance, a sure and certain sense that Christ will win and God will make all things anew. Our eschatology ought not only to convey the contents of that text, but it also ought to aim at the very effect of that text’s rhetoric.

The market, the family, the neighborhood – empirical observation suggests that these realities – these particular and specific examples – all rise and fall. Fate is no longer in our stars, it seems, but very much in the shifts of untold forces (perhaps mostly unknown) swirling around each of us. Like fractal geometry, the contemporary imagination heightens awareness of downstream effects from unseen players and powers. Despair or depression may seem the natural implication. Suicide, as Sartre said, may seem the vital question. Opioids, on the one hand, or consumeristic distraction, on the other hand, may appear the viable way out. And yet Christians have hope and a bold confidence, not because we are any less limited or finite but because we are alert to the power from above, to the intervention yet to come, to the enthronement just around the eschatological corner. Eschatology gives calm and poise, even as it speaks its most intrusive of statements. And that’s very good news, precisely because we experience seemingly rampant intrusion and are very much in need of poise and calm.

4. Eschatological Life: over against a worry that one might be too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good, a civic eschatology will suggest how serious Christian service – particularly of the costly sort – has always been and will always be tethered to and energized by a posture of heavily-mindedness.

Teaching not only conveys content, which cannot be divorced from its form (at least not wholly so), but it also has an intended effect or response. Talk of an ideal audience or reader may be employed in some contexts to name those qualified or capable to understand the meaning of a discourse, as some instructions demand any number of prerequisites or a certain level of rhetorical and linguistic training. But an ideal audience or reader may also be depicting the right posture responding to such message receipt. A posture of remorse or of hope, of lament or of exultation might mark various instructions just as much as it might pair with a range of musical pieces.

The ideal recipient of this eschatological teaching, that which commends the whole hope of Christians and that centers on their eternal life which is nothing other than to know God, will be one who has “living hope.” The apostle Peter addressed the recipients of his epistle with that blessed aim: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet. 1:3). Peter goes on throughout his epistle then to call the people of God to that life, an active and engaged life of sacrificial service and abiding mission.

C.S. Lewis long ago addressed the worry that one might be so heavenly-minded as to be of no earthly good. Yet history belies this depiction. Inept persons can exist, but there’s no sign that heavenly-mindedness fits one for such a fate. On the contrary, heavenly-mindedness frames one for the vocation of self-sacrificial service, which alone constitutes the habit of love. “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next… It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”[8] Why? If we need counter-intuitive love, the kind of self-displacing agency that selflessly aims to enhance others by means of one’s own diminishment, then a fixation upon that heavenly object of confidence will play a vital role. It will be vital not only because its object is alive but because its perception gives and grows liveliness in its seer. A higher hope will inspire our lowering ourselves through regular, at times painful sacrifices. Only such sacrificial investment will truly build up the downtrodden and lift up the weary.

Persistent Pathways Otherwise: Lessons Learned from Paths Otherwise Taken

These four principles ought to help keep the faith-and-work conversation wrestling with the full register of eschatological teaching. In each case, I have named threats or temptations that seem to befall the conversation. It is perhaps worth reflecting on why that has been the case.

The faith-and-work conversation has been heavily influenced by notions from the Neo-Calvinist movement begun in the late nineteenth century under the leadership of figures such as Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. It might be better to say that the contemporary faith-and-work conversation has been influenced by more late-stage Neo-Calvinist or Neo-Calvinist influenced figures, such as Albert Wolters, N. T. Wright, and James K. A. Smith, along with a host of other lesser-known figures.

In a real sense, uncertainty has been viewed as hindering investment while a short life span for culture-making has been perceived as potentially stymieing commitment to such endeavors. In other words, work products need to endure into the eschaton for women and men to throw themselves into their production today, at least with any spiritual conviction. Confidence about continuity from this side of the great transformation to the hereafter is viewed as essential to generating conviction regarding the vitality of such vocations now. The yearning for a return on investment (ROI) makes sense in all sorts of ways, but we might need to examine what return Scripture centers and what returns it leaves underdetermined.

What do I mean and why linger at just this point? Richard Mouw influentially directed attentions to the Isaianic promise that the ships of Tarshish will be present in the divine hereafter (Isa. 60:9). That passage speaks of a coming glory for Israel which is the Lord’s own glory risen upon her (v. 1).[9] Mouw’s exposition is meant to exclude a presumption, namely, that only souls persist. And yet the implications have been taken much more widely (in hints from Mouw but more fully from the next generation of Neo-Calvinist-inspired thinkers), as if we can confidently commit ourselves to the notion that this or that product will persist. It is one thing to say that something persists, quite another to speak confidently of this or that, much less every thing persisting.

I have elsewhere referred to this tendency as bound up with a general theological approach that might be termed “eschatological naturalism.”[10] With that term I do not mean to suggest the notion of a thoroughgoing metaphysical naturalism as if God were absent and all were matter. No, eschatological naturalists tend to be Augustinians and have strong thoughts not only on God’s existence but on his sovereignty over history. I invoke the language of eschatological naturalism to convey the imagination of the heavenly hereafter. God sovereignly delivers an earthy and naturalist inheritance, construed largely as humans might do so apart from any Christian baptism.

Will this product perdure? Will that practice continue? Mouw rightly reminds us that continuity and discontinuity mark this great transformation. But I suggest he undersells the nature of discontinuity, precisely in as much as his eye – his very polemical eye – is watchful of the dispensationalist threat of sheer discontinuity. Has he registered the absence of marriage, for Jesus conveys that we shall (in that regard) be like unto the angels (Mt. 22:30)? If the city and people exist minus that seemingly fundamental of society organization, what else will transformation bring?

Does that mean that we return simply to the spiritualist approach of some dispensationalists? No. We simply need to start with the center and resist speculation. More may continue than we know, but this we can say: what continues will be God and humanity in an ordered relationship. Humans will endure as resurrected, even glorified beings in trusting relationship with Almighty God revealed in Jesus Christ. I may not be teaching any more (a possible result of Jer. 31:34), but the virtue and character instilled in me through my decades-long vocation as a teacher will in fact endure and even exist in its fullest form. We are God’s workmanship, and his labor is not in vain. As for my work product, well, that may be less clear.

Might we think of something rather different than either suggesting we should be identifying the ships of Tarshish or that we shouldn’t shine the brass on a sinking ship? We seem to be on a need-to-know basis, eschatologically speaking, but we do know that God will be there at its heart and that we, in our finally Christ-formed glory, shall be with him. So we should invest ourselves fully in loving devotion to God and to the love of neighbor and self. At the end of the day, perhaps eschatological thought ought not lead us anywhere other than where Jesus says the divine law was always meant to lead, to following the great commandment and the second that it is like unto it. Perhaps here – as in theology more broadly – we can seek to honor the breadth of biblical teaching (not least by refusing to run beyond it), to reorder our priorities to match that which scripture centers via repetition and a host of other literary and canonical features, to pause and allow our vocabulary to be baptized by the distinctively Christian use that terms like “treasure” receive (reading Isaiah alongside the warning of Matthew 6 about setting one’s heart on earthly treasures), and to unite more and more our basic Christian convictions and our theology of work and investment.

[1] For further articulation of these protocols in the discipline of theology, see Michael Allen, The Living and True God: Systematic Theology 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, forthcoming), ch. 1.

[2] See Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023).

[3] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God 3; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 108-128. On the centrality of bodily resurrection to early Christianity, see not only Wright but also Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), part 1.

[4] Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), esp. 198-199.  See also Donald E. Gowan, Eschatology in the Old Testament (2^nd ed.; Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000).

[5] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms,” in Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon (ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge; Leicester: IVP, 1986), 53-104.

[6] John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 20.

[7][7] Carl E. Braaten, “The Recovery of Apocalyptic Imagination,” in The Last Things: Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Eschatology (ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 15. See now Philip G. Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018); cf. Michael Allen, “On Apocalyptic Theology,” in The Fear of the Lord: Essays on Theological Method (London: T & T Clark, 2022), 103-116; and Wesley Hill, “Apocalyptic Theology,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (ed. Michael Allen; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 315-329.

[8] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 134.

[9] Richard J. Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).

[10] See Michael Allen, Grounded in Heaven: Recentering Christian Life and Hope in God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018). 38.