D. S. Russell

D.S. Russell, a baptist biblical scholar and erstwhile General Secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, spent a great deal of his life writing in the field of apocalyptic. In this little work, (the Hayward and Nodernhaug Lectures) one of the magificent series of SCM Book Club publications (rarely matched by any series since) he summarises the meaing and place of apocalyptic in a (more or less - 35 years have now passed) contemporary world.

Apocalyptic, that weird and wacky inter-testamental genre beloved by sectarian idiot fringes and sensationalist self-seeking authors the likes of Hal Lindsey (of The Late Great Planet Earth infamy), has a place in contemporary theological language. That is the basic premise that drove Russell's academic career, and he makes meaningful defence of the premise. He notes the unprecedented rise of apocalyptic imagery - even of the words 'apocalypse/apocalyptic' - in the late Cold War period in which he was writing, noting 'It is with reference to violence and the use of violence that the word ‘apocalyptic’ is perhaps most widely (and most loosely) used at this present time' (20). Ironically the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now was released the year after this book was published. Too often however in the hands of Christians (did I mention Hal Lindsey?) apocalyptic becomes a form of self-satisfying soothsaying. While the secular images of a violent end to our race and planet share the urgency of biblical-era apocalyptic, the pseudo-Christian sooothsaying misses the point of Jesus' own prohibitions against speculative reading of signs and times.

Jesus' warnings against speculative vacuity - the hypocrisies of Christian sooth-saying - reflect his own immersion in, if not total subscription to, the ideology of apocalyptic. The message of apocalyptic, with its 'obscure imagery' (25) and readiness to cast 'the present into the future, giving it at times an air of unreality' (25), was not primarily a message of personal survival or a game plan of divine exit strategies, but the simple affirmation 'God wins'. Written for persecuted and oppressed underdogs, apocalyptic spoke a word of hope and encouragement. Becuase of its reliance on 'allusions to people and places [that] are often cryptic and tantalizingly obscure' (25) it could and did become timeless.

The danger an apocalyptic worldview is that it can generate, when no longer in the hands of the oppressed but of oppressors, an attitude of nonchalance to humankind and creation. Russell steers through this troubled sea, making clear that the reader of biblical apocalyptic is challenged to profess and live the values of the Reign of God embodied in Christ, values that are fundamentally this-worldy at least as much as they express hope in an other-cosmos future; '[The followers of Jesus] … were to preach the gospel to every creature. His church was to proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. No longer were they to search the scriptures, in the manner of the apocalyptists, to find signs and portents and to record them as sealed writings for generations to come. By the power of the Holy Spirit they were to speak the word of eternal life which can become for every man and woman an immediate and personal possession' (54-55). That 'word' forces the hearer to a crisis of decision, 'to commit themselves to Jesus Christ and his way of life' (56), with the unambigious rider that the way of Jesus' life is not one of self-indulgent cosmological speculation ('occult prediction').

The book was published in 1978, and so it has inevitably - yet surprisingly slightly - dated. There are some moments of uncanny prescience: as he writes of Hal Lindsey's dangerous distortions of apocalyptic Russell observes 'One rather frightening by-product of this process of interpretation is that it is so easy to create the very situation which is being described so that the interpretation given brings about its own fulfilment. Russia, for example, is to be destroyed by nuclear attack - and scripture must be fulfilled!' (64). These words, alluding to Lindsey's infamous interpretation of Russia as 'Gog' (Rev. 20.8, see p. 63) were written before Ronald Reagan accidentally left a microphone open as he pretended to intiate Armegeddon with a nuclear attack on Russia. They were written, of course, even longer before the Bushes exercised what they each saw to be a religious crusade against Saddam Hussein, believing their actions to represent a 'just war' or 'crusade'.

This is a simple but profound book. Language and current affairs have changed too rapidly since 1978, so re-publication is not an option. But it is to be hoped that D.S. Russell's life work, as summarized in this small volume but expressed in greater depth in others, is not lost. The only weakness - and suprise - this reader found was in Russell's journey into individual post-palliative survival in his closing pages. Making clear that 'life and after-life' are a backwater theme in the significance of apocalyptic, Russell nevertheless turns to the question of individual afterlife in closing. N.T. Wright and others have done a far better job of this discussion in the years since Russell wrote. It was surprising and confusing that Russell turned to sociological apocalyptists such as John Hick, and an uncharacteristic John MacQuarrie passage to address this, the unanswerable question.

Sadly Russell died in 2010: the peculiar and unapocalpyptic New Testament passage, Luke 16.19-31, makes it clear that we can't invite the writer back to review his final chapter. It's a pity: he could I think have made more of Pannenberg, Moltmann (though Moltmann's own speculative writings on life after death came later than this volume) and Cullmann's assessments of the logic and meaning of individual post-thanatos survival.… (mehr)