Luke: apocalyptic historicized
It seems to me that (no doubt influenced by Conzelmann) most discussion of Luke’s relationship with apocalyptic has been to do with eschatology, to what extent it is realized, and how it is or is not transmuted into salvation history. I’d be grateful if anyone could point me to discussions on Luke and apocalyptic that are more wide-ranging.
The question is prompted by reflecting on two verses that seem to be overlooked, but might be quite fruitful to ponder on. The first comes in Luke’s mission of the seventy(-two):
The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. (Luke 10:17-18 NRSV)
Now there are doubtless many ways to take this, but I wonder if the most natural is as a vision of how events on earth (the disciples’ mission) find their heavenly correspondence in the fall of Satan. This is, admittedly, a kind of reverse apocalyptic in that the determinative events take place on earth. But it fits both the understanding of the spread of the church in Acts, and ties in very well with the verses that follow about revelation. Luke’s insertion of story of the missionaries rather transforms the subject of this revelation from Matthew’s woes on the cities. Now the heart of the revelation is in fact the submission of the demons to the disciples, and the fall of Satan.
The second verse comes as part of a pair:
Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!” (Luke 2:14 NRSV)
As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” (Luke 19:37-38 NRSV)
This is the acclamation that Jesus insists that, were the disciples silent, the stones would cry out. Whereas both the first verse of this pairing (the nativity verse) and the mission of the seventy fall within specifically Lukan material, this last verse is part of Luke’s shaping of a narrative common to all the gospels. Again, I am forced to wonder whether this verse too might be best explained by the kind of reverse apocalyptic suggested above. Isn’t the most natural reading of “peace in heaven” to take it against the background of the cosmological spiritual conflict? In which case perhaps it has rather more to say about Luke’s soteriology than is generally granted.
What Luke seems to me to be doing is historicizing apocalyptic mythology. The whole point of the incarnation and then the church is that the determinative events that settle the world’s reconciliation to God are played out in history and not in the heavenly places. What happens on earth settles the fate of heaven.
I’m no expert on either apocalyptic or Luke. But it seems to me there might be rather more here than is normally granted, and I’d be grateful if anyone can point me to further discussions of this.
January 26th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
It’s not a specialized discussion of Luke per se, but I’ve just been reading Gregory Boyd’s “God at War”, and he makes a very convincing argument that there is a pervasive apocalyptic spiritual warfare motif running through all the Gospels’ depiction of Jesus’s ministry. The corollary of ushering in the Kingdom of God is binding up and overthrowing the Kingdom of Satan. Jesus came to ‘destroy the works of the Devil’. As for the idea of events on Earth influencing events in heaven, Jesus promises his disciples in Matthew that “whatever you will bind on Earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you will loose on Earth will be loosed in heaven”, which definitely seems to suggest that.
January 26th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
James Alison’s ‘Living in the End Times’ might be what you’re after. “Luke takes care to distinguish the comings. He does not remove the coming on the cross, which is for him the central watershed of history and opens the time of the nations, but he does begin to give clearer signs of a final coming in glory at the end of history, which is to be public and notorious, as a distinct happening. And this coming takes the form of the revelation, the disclosing, of the Son of Man.”
(I have a sneaking suspicion you don’t like Girard, though, in which case it definitely won’t be what you’re after!
January 26th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Thanks for some interesting references. I’m kind of after some info about discussion of these verses among historical exegetes and specialists in apocalyptic and/or Luke, but no disrespect to other writers is intended.