29 July 2018

Prophetic Idiom, Perspective and Isaiah 65


Isaiah 65 is a problematic passage for many and yet their struggles with it are actually rooted in fundamental misunderstandings of how prophecy is to be read. For chiliasts of both the pre- and post-millennial variety the 'New Heavens and New Earth' passage necessarily refers to age longevity in that 'the child shall die an hundred years old' suggesting a lifespan far in excess of our present 70-80 years.


Amillennialists point out that New Testament references of the 'New Heavens and New Earth' which are found in 2 Peter 3 and Revelation 21 clearly refer not to a chiliastic intermediate manifestation of the Kingdom, defined in a political and cultural sense but the final eschatological Kingdom, heaven itself.
At this point literalists will cry out that people don't die in heaven as the Isaiah passage seems to suggest and of course they're right but this is where we must rely on the New Testament to understand and decipher the way in which the prophets spoke. Their prophecies find literal fulfillment but they do not speak in a hyper-literal, categorical or technical fashion. Their words often defy exact and meticulous scrutiny and attempts to read the prophets as one would a code or scientific manual is a mistake.
The New Testament makes this clear as it references the Old Testament. Acts 15's use of Amos 9 is my favourite example of this principle and one of the most poignant. When Amos 9 is read in light of how James uses it, one's understanding of Old Testament prophecy is transformed. An Old Testament prophetic passage which seems to reference Jewish Israel's dealings with the nations in light of captivity is instead applied to the Church and in James usage the land, temple and even eschatological expectation are transformed in light of Christ and His Body, the Church.
The Old is filled with prophecies but they are often contained in layered metaphor, hyperbole and masked in poetic language that defies narrow and unequivocal readings and certainly the stringent hermeneutical literalism that chiliasts seem to rely on.
This upsets some because it seems to hint of sloppiness, ambiguity, and subjectivity and for some such a way of reading seems caught in a trajectory that can only end in theological liberalism. Their concerns are well meant but misguided as this way of reading the Old Testament was in fact employed by Christ and the Apostles. Once this is grasped the New Testament expositor is able to reflect the Christocentric and Redemptive-Historical way of reading the prophecies of the Old Testament focusing on often layered themes, development and symbols as opposed to those who get bogged down in what can only be described as hyper-systematics concerned more with the technicalities of etymology, denotative grammar, syntax, ordered logic and other philosophical concerns. Words are of course central to how Scripture is given and doctrine is framed and understood and yet the Scriptures tend to focus on themes, imagery of type and fulfillment, and transcendent concepts that often defy our technical dissections but instead must be grasped by placing them in a larger context, a Christocentric one at that.
The prophets employ idiom, speaking of the Kingdom in terms their audience will understand and relate to and yet at the same time their physical and temporal descriptions (as it were) are blended with the prose of eternity, the language, diction and concepts of the Kingdom.
They also employ prophetic perspective, a way of conflating and compressing chronology in which events are combined and fulfilled in seemingly multiple stages. And yet in reality the New Testament teaches us that all the promises point to Christ and so the 'fulfillments' that occur prior to His Coming are in fact typological, imperfect and symbolic fulfillments (in-part) that actually point to the larger (ultimate) realisation. All the prophecies of the Old Testament find their fulfillment in Christ. He is the centre of the entire Scriptures, something many will intuitively acknowledge but then in practice deny.
This seems confusing to some and they're left with a lack of clarity. This prophetic perspective almost seems to distort and obscure God's plan for the ages. That may be and in fact there are reasons to argue this is somewhat deliberate on God's part. Christ's teaching regarding the parables and the Kingdom come to mind. And yet, the real problem is when the exegete gets bogged down in dates, narrow definitions and tight philosophically coherent reasoning when in fact the prophets don't speak or function that way. They point to Christ and the road to Him is layered, impossibly complex, riddled with symbols, types and images. The New Testament has all the answers and only in its light can we return to the passages in Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah and elsewhere and develop a clear understanding of what is being said.
Both Pre-millennial Dispensationalism and Postmillennialism despite their claims to literalism and Biblical fidelity are in fact guilty of Judaizing inversion, flipping the Bible on its head, in using the Old Testament to define and even restrict the New Testament. In doing so they fall into a series of pitfalls and traps and in the end are hopelessly lost and completely misread and misunderstand the New Testament's teaching regarding not only the 'end times' but the whole of its eschatological-kingdom structure.
What does all that mean? It's this. The New Testament teaches us how to read the Old. The prophets spoke of Christ and He is the key to all the prophecies. Paul says this explicitly in 2 Corinthians 1 verse 20. All secondary fulfillments, whether referencing land promises, earthly temples, military victory or political dominion are all but shadows and symbols pointing to Christ's ultimate victory, through His Body the Church and the consummated Kingdom that is heaven itself.
So then what about Isaiah 65? The passage is about heaven. That's what the New Testament teaches. Is there death in heaven? Not at all. Doesn't that make Isaiah a liar? No. The problem is Isaiah is being read wrongly. He's employing idiom. He's trying to convey something of the wonder and awe of eternity. Time is perhaps endless or it might be understood as something utterly transcendent, a type of timelessness in which minutes and seconds won't even have relevance anymore. Even if eternity is described as endless time, clearly the complete change in scale and scope will render our familiar time markers and sense of 'passing' in a quite different way. While a hundred years seems very long to our present paradigm of existence, a scenario in which we live thousands and millions of years will render millennia as but a moment. Again it's quite possible that concepts such as hours, days and years will be all but meaningless in the context of eternity.
That's what Isaiah is trying to convey. Heaven is like this.... imagine this.... it's as if.....
He's not presenting a passage that's meant to be technically dissected in which we can form mathematical ratios and argue that if a child lives to be 100, then it follows that adults will live to be 1,000 and the like. The passage points to a reality that comes to pass in history but it is not couched in a way that will accommodate a Baconian scientific method of reading the text.
Just because he references sinners does not mean that it cannot be heaven (or eternity) and must therefore refer to a temporal pre-eschaton Golden Age in which sinners and righteous mingle.
The passage is about heaven and eternity but describes them in idiomatic, metaphorical and hyperbolic terms, something quite common in the prophets. The passage is fulfilled by Christ's Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. All too often the advocates of hyper-literalism in order to avoid pitting Isaiah against the Apostles find a solution in multiplying the category and creating 'another' New Heavens and Earth. This saves their system but also generates yet another layer of confusion. The Eschatology of Scripture is complex on certain levels but in terms of a basic scheme and chronology, it's pretty straightforward.
Isaiah 65 is not fulfilled in Jewish Israel which was but a shadow and type, a flawed proto-type of the ultimate Kingdom. Earthly Israel was itself a tutorial and didactic symbol fulfilled in Christ... who is the embodiment of heaven itself.
Likewise in Isaiah 66 we find references to the Sabbath and yet the Sabbath is of course fulfilled in Christ and is also an expression of heaven itself as Hebrews 4 makes clear. The land of Old Testament Israel was but a picture of the heavenly Sabbath rest and was fulfilled and as a promise abrogated with the coming of the Messiah. And yet Isaiah is speaking to his 8th century BC audience in the context of the Old Covenant. Referring to heaven as like the Sabbath is something they would have understood. Telling them that the seventh day Sabbath will in the future be eliminated would have generated confusion and for some distress. The language of the prophecy points to heaven but speaks of it in terms that mankind can understand and relate to. This does not mean it's not real, nor does it imply a principle of doctrinal accommodation in our own day. By no means, but at the same time the concepts are limited by the context of the hearers. They were still in the Old Testament. We are able to understand a lot more on this side of the cross.
But such language and conceptualisations are also limited by our finite understanding, something Paul hints at in 1 Corinthians 2.9, a passage which suggests that we are not fully able to comprehend what heaven will be like. It defies our empirical and conceptual categories, a concept very important to understanding human cognitive limitation and the boundaries of exegetical and theological inquiry.