Christian Suffering, Spirituality and Eschatology (revised 5/28)

This is the first post of what may be an occasional series of posts on the interrelationship of Christian Suffering and Eschatology.  

The basic thesis of these posts, which I will try to support over time, is this:  The age-long continuance of Christian Suffering is such a significant emphasis in the New Testament, that a view of the progress of this age which sees a gradual end to suffering by the time of the Second Coming of Christ must be an eschatology which is seriously at odds with the New Testament.

A few points are:

1)  The general cast of the New Testament is opposed to gradual entrance of conditions of such spiritual and experiential peace and plenty such that the transition to the eternal state is not catastrophic.  Put another way, the eternal state does not come by a process of development, or spiritual evolution, in either extent or quality.  I do not deny by this that the current age has a path of spiritual development, and that that development tends to the sharpness of the distinction between good and evil, nor do I deny that the preponderance of Christianity, and its effects, increases.

2)  The experimental suffering which is put forth as the norm in the Bible as a whole, and especially in the New Testament, must be the experience of all believers in this age, until the end of the age.  The maintenance of Christian spirituality depends on this.  Therefore, a view of the end of the age in which spiritual conditions approach conditions in the Eternal State is inimical to the New Testament vision of the spiritual value of the suffering that characterizes the present age.

3)  The whole Bible narrative of the believers' experience shows that an easy life is spiritually harmful to those still in the un-resurrected flesh.  Our fidelity to God is only guaranteed through spiritual struggle.  Christ, the perfect man, learned obedience through suffering.

4)  The spiritual purity and "separation" of the church from the world, so important in the text of the New Testament, is at stake.  The only way to maintain our testimony and actually have an effect on the world is to maintain this separation.  The liberal churches have simply identified their eschatology with popular political and social progressivism in all its methods and results, and thereby demonstrate the result of this kind of "postmillennialism."  A theonomic replacement of the world's carnal "law" with God's Law will not fix this problem, because the problem is spiritual in a way which transcends "law."  The Church is a New Creation, not simply a renovation of the Original Creation.

5)  Finally, the "proof-texts" for the evolution of gradual spiritual perfection do not support this picture.  Any sustained argument built up from the full revelation of the New Testament will show the continuing threat of apostasy -- even a final apostasy, and the spiritual warfare between the wheat and the tares will not end until the harvest.

Good and evil will "come to a point" at the harvest at the end of the age in such a manner that Christian suffering will remain the Christian lifestyle until the end of the age.  Our hope is in the Eternal State, not some near-perfect manifestation of God's Kingdom before that time.  To focus attention and hope on the pre-Eternal State as capable of containing the near-full manifestation of God's Kingdom is to lose the eschatological vision, and potentially to fall into the trap of worldliness which is condemned in the New Testament.

Our expectations in this age must be properly focused, lest the spirituality and separation of the Church from the World be lost.  If the spirituality and separation of the Church is lost through some kind of "gospel reductionism," and if the central focus of the hope of fulfillment in an Eschaton which transcends the current aeon and its ways of life is lost, the result will just be "liberalism" again.