It's been a pleasure to read through "Law and The Bible: Justice, Mercy and Legal Institutions" (Robert Cochran, Jr. & David VanDrunen, eds. 2013) and this marks what I expect to be my final post. (For the next most recent one go here.) A plus for blogging about a book is the discipline it requires. One can't simply skim whole pages if one is to make any intelligent comments about the chapter that is comprised of them.
Chapter 9: Expectation and Consummation: Law in Eschatological Perspective by John Copeland Nagle and Keith Mathison does a credible job of placing the Bible's two most apocalyptic books--Daniel and Revelation--in a plausible theological perspective. It does an excellent job of teasing contemporary legal significance from texts where law functions in the background and in the dark shadows of lived human experience at that. Unlike torah, neither Daniel nor Revelation teach law. Unlike the Wisdom literature, they don't show law in action. Unlike most of the other prophetic literature, Daniel and Revelation do not apply law to God's people. And unlike most of the corpus of the New Testament, they don't address even implicitly how torah relates to believers under the New Covenant. Instead, both apocalyptic texts show (1) the limits of law and, even more importantly, (2) how believers should live when law is inverted to bless vice rather than virtue and to exalt man rather than God.
Several quotes should substantiate my observations. "The civil law is not a force for good in Daniel or in Revelation." Indeed, both books are valuable in part "because they give us insight into what it is like to live under the laws of wicked tyrants." In other words, in a particularly apt epigram, "they describe human kingdoms governed by the antilaw of the anti-Christ." Law can be a force for evil as well as good. Law should be oriented to justice but can (and has been--and certainly will be) perverted toward injustice.
How should Christians live under such a state of affairs? Picking up a theme from the preceding chapters, Nagle and Mathison observe that even when the law does not threaten to put to death those who profess Christ the possibility of civil disobedience remains. When do a nation's laws fall to that level? A rather uncomfortable reminder from the authors: "In making that decision, we do well to remember Revelation's admonition that 'for the cowardly, the faithless,' and those who choose the side of sin, 'their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.' (Rev 21.8)."
A fittingly apocalyptic remark to conclude the book and my comments about it.
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