Eschatology, suffering and the wholeness of human life

Eschatology concerns the completion and wholeness of creaturely life, what is covered under the heading of novissimum – the newest new thing proper to a creature beyond which no further ‘new things’ obtain.Footnote ⁷ What does this ‘new thing’ do with suffering, which speaks against the wholeness of human life? That is, if redemption entails ‘wholeness’, it seems to require the full presence and completion of a life; but suffering implies a loss or diminishment of wholeness. This could be put in biblical terms concerning that which ‘passes away’ – e.g. ‘this age’ (2 Cor 5:17; Eph 1:2), this present darkness (Eph 6:12), the conditions of suffering and oppression (Rom 8:18–25; 2 Cor 4:16–18; Rev 21:4). To what extent does such ‘passing away’ entail loss?Footnote ⁸ Would ultimate redemption require the loss or rejection of persons’ experiences of suffering? In his recent argument for universalism, David Bentley Hart understands any ontological loss as a moral challenge to the goodness of creation and its creator.Footnote ⁹ He is not merely concerned with annihilationism, which would entail massive loss with the total destruction of innumerable people. But he is also concerned with more subtle forms of loss inherent in dual-outcome eschatologies: the loss that results when a creature – which qua God’s creation is good – is damned to an eternal state of privatio boni. For such creatures, there is a loss of external access to the good proper only to the saints and an internal ontological loss through an eternal privation of the creature’s proper goodness. This external and internal loss compromises the integrity of God’s act of creation, insofar as God’s act fails to achieve completion and is marked by the loss of creaturely goodness. So, Hart argues for universal restoration as the only outcome for creation that can coherently avoid ontological loss.

However, there are further kinds of loss relevant for eschatology. For instance, in noting the limits of eschatological speculation, McFarland is concerned that our present existence might be rendered null or insignificant in relation to the eternal ‘weight of glory’ (2 Cor 4:17).Footnote ¹⁰ The intensity of this concern comes to light when we consider the ways human suffering ravages the wholeness and integrity of personal identity.Footnote ¹¹ It is difficult to see how lives marked by such suffering may be redeemed without excising the experiences of suffering or drastically minimising their significance, and yet that strategy would seem to compromise an integrated selfhood – it would seem to entail internal loss. I call this ‘diachronic loss’ – loss internal to a life story that compromises its narrative integrity.Footnote ¹² This seems to be a form of loss that eschatological redemption needs to reflect on, even though its character and redemption seem irreducibly mysterious.Footnote ¹³ What I am calling diachronic loss is similar to Eleonore Stump’s understanding of the lack of internal integration that results when one’s willing is conflicted.Footnote ¹⁴ On Stump’s account, a person lacks internal integration in having a divided will, because this alienates the will from God as the ultimate good, and because it prevents a person from having a unified act of willing with which they can identify themselves.Footnote ¹⁵ As she argues, such a lack of integration compromises one’s ability to be close to others and to love another in a way that seeks real union.Footnote ¹⁶ What distinguishes diachronic loss is the emphasis on the unity of the person across time (rather than the unity of willing) and a concern for how a person’s past is remembered and integrated in the present. However, Stump’s argument that a lack of integration compromises personal intimacy seems applicable to diachronic loss as well. When one’s own past – e.g., the memories that constitute one’s identity in the present – is fractured or distorted, as documented with memories associated with trauma, one experiences a lack of internal integration.Footnote ¹⁷ And where such internal integration is compromised, one is less able to give oneself entirely to a beloved – even to God.

In this framing, diachronic loss seems partially a function of one’s own inability to integrate the whole of one’s life, including and perhaps especially events of suffering or trauma. St. Augustine understands the restless distension of our fallen experience of time in a similar way. Using a musical metaphor, Augustine notes that a person can only sing in tune at any given moment insofar as they correctly remember the previous parts of the song and anticipate future parts. However, this is lacking in our present temporal existence – we do not know the whole ‘song’ for which any present-tense singing is but a part, and consequently, we are cut off from the past and the future by which such singing might be made intelligible.Footnote ¹⁸ Distended and fragmented temporal experience isolates the first-person perspective in ways that compound diachronic loss. The beatific vision is especially suited to this first-person vantage because, in seeing God, the human comes to see themselves by means of God’s sight. Or: in seeing God, one understands one’s whole life in a single glance, and so one can finally integrate that whole into a meaningful ‘song’.

The Spirit’s unitive activity

To consider how the beatific vision can accommodate this participatory vision and redemptive event, I turn to three movements of the Spirit’s work: the unitive, particularising and diachronic. First, the Spirit’s unitive work highlights the relational intimacy both amongst human participants and between the human person and God. The Spirit’s unitive work is a function of the eschatological action of the Spirit, by which the Spirit incorporates creatures into the triune life (Rom 8:14–17; 2 Cor 3:12–18).Footnote ¹⁹ Incorporation into the triune life consists in conformity to God’s love (appropriated to the Spirit, but also characteristic of the triune relations as such) and in christomorphic existence or ‘cruciformity’, drawing persons into a particular position within the triune life. Some biblical texts have been taken to suggest that the Spirit acts in precisely this way in the beatific vision. For instance, Gregory of Nazianzus interprets Psalm 36:9 as referring to the Holy Spirit (‘the Lord, the giver of life’, as the Nicene Creed confesses), ‘For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light’. As the ‘fountain’ or giver of life, the Spirit is also the light by which we see (God’s) light. Gregory explains, ‘We receive the Son’s light from the Father’s light in the light of the Spirit’.Footnote ²⁰ That is, we come to see God by being incorporated into the divine light. God as seen is God the Son, the image of the invisible Father (Col 1:15)—‘true Light from true Light’, per the Nicene Creed. The activity of seeing this light is effected through God the Spirit. Therefore, our incorporation into the glory of divine light is a Spirit-led event, the work of the Spirit of truth in whom the Son’s fullness is presented in having been handed over to the Father (John 16:13–16).Footnote ²¹

The Spirit’s role in the beatific vision is more explicit in Acts 7. In his martyrdom, Stephen has a vision of the glory of God and of Christ in the Spirit: ‘But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”’ (Acts 7:55–56). The Spirit enables this visio Dei, and in this event Stephen is conformed to Christ’s own death and so united to God in Christ. Acts depicts this cruciformity by narrating Stephen’s final words as a near exact repetition of Jesus’s words from the cross: echoing Luke 23:46, Stephen says, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my Spirit’ (Acts 7:59), and echoing Luke 23:34, he says, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them’ (Acts 7:60).Footnote ²² Interestingly, Stephen’s own utterance of these two sentences inverts the order of Jesus’s own, which might suggest that in order to forgive as Christ had (Luke 23:34; Acts 7:60), Stephen first had to ‘commend [his] spirit’ (Luke 23:46; Acts 7:59) in union with Christ’s death.

The Spirit, then, is uniquely connected both with the visio Dei and with a unitive movement in relation to God/Christ. In the scene with Stephen, this culminates in a cruciform union with Christ. And this culminating moment is the outworking of Stephen’s vision of the glory of God, which enables him to see his enemies with the same vision by which Christ saw his own. The unitive movement proceeds in this way: First, Stephen has already been filled with the Spirit (Acts 7:55), which refers back to the Pentecostal gift of the Spirit to the church (Acts 2:1–4).Footnote ²³ Second, by the Spirit, Stephen beholds God’s glory with Christ (Acts 7:56). Third, Stephen hands over his spirit (Acts 7:59), which appears to be a Spirit-enabled participation in Christ’s commendation of his spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46). And then, fourth, Stephen seeks the forgiveness of his attackers as had Christ (Luke 23:34; Acts 7:60). The Spirit empowers a vision of God whereby Stephen is united to Christ and thereby enacts cruciform love.

The spirit’s particularising activity

Second, the Spirit’s particularising work highlights the ongoing distinctness of the human participant in the beatific vision. The Spirit’s particularising work is a function of the role the Spirit plays in creation, by ordering creatures to their distinctive perfection. The Spirit joins the person to God by bringing that person to their creaturely fulfilment, enacting divine hospitality by giving (and perfecting) life for the created other.Footnote ²⁴ Creaturely fulfilment can be understood both as perfection and as fruition. In this context, by ‘perfection’ I mean the narrative-historical unity of life coming to a meaningful conclusion, and by ‘fruition’ I mean one’s full identification with the distinct vocation enacted in that life. McFarland provides a tantalising hint at what such fruition might consist in, something like an inversion of the ontological constitution of personal identity. Whereas in our present experience, the operation of one’s particular human nature seems to be what sustains one’s hypostasis, in glory, the Spirit empowers one’s hypostasis to support and sustain one’s nature.Footnote ²⁵ This is an outworking of the kind of shift Jesus’s resurrection involves:

Perfection and fruition affirm the particularity of the creature. If Jesus’s resurrection is the paradigm, then our hypostatic particularity is intensified through eschatological glorification and becomes more determinative for our existence.

As the Spirit brings the creature face to face with God, the creature is comprehended entirely (and their life fulfilled) in God’s act of vision. They are thereby able to see their whole self in and through God’s sight.Footnote ²⁷ One’s hypostasis – one’s concrete personal identity throughout life – is brought to completion. This can be brought into fruitful dialogue with the role the visio Dei plays in Job’s narrative.Footnote ²⁸ While engaged in debate with his companions, Job professes a confidence that he will face God, that he will see God in his own flesh: ‘For I know that my vindicator lives and that in the end he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another’ (Job 19:25–27). At this early moment, Job professes an eschatological hope, but it also seems to be grounded in an excessive self-confidence in his own impeccable character and a certainty in his own vindication before God. After God finally speaks to Job – a speech that reminds Job of the limitations of his finite perspective – his understanding of the significance of seeing God changes, but his conviction of vindication in the vision of God only becomes stronger. The conviction is so strong, in fact, that Job understands it to have already happened, perhaps in his already-destroyed flesh: ‘Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me that I did not know. … I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes’ (Job 42:3b, 5–6). Job confesses to have been ‘uttering what [he] did not understand’ and exclaims that ‘now my eye sees you;’ in this moment, Job is ‘restored’ in the flesh (Job 42:10–17).Footnote ²⁹

The account of Job ‘seeing God’ and McFarland’s suggestion that resurrection positively inverts personal ontological constitution offer ways of imagining perfection and fruition. In Job’s vision of God, we see Job brought to an understanding and relation to God that is proper to his finite particularity: he no longer operates with an inflated sense of self-justification, but humbly addresses God in second-person intimacy – even in moments of the decay of his flesh – culminating in repentance. This is something like the perfection I introduced above: a conclusion to one’s life that offers a narrative-historical meaning to the whole life as actually lived. Importantly, though, this does not mean that the evil and suffering experienced by Job is given some kind of theological justification – it retains an element of the absurd within the whole narrative, but the absurdity of the evil does not render his life itself absurd in the end.Footnote ³⁰ McFarland’s ontological inversion provides a way of imagining what I called ‘fruition’. If one’s own hypostasis – the whole personal identity (across time) – becomes the ground of one’s human nature, then one is finally in a position to actively identify with the life lived. Such fruition would be a fitting culmination of the Spirit’s groaning in believers and all creation in anticipation of the new creation (Rom 8:18–25).

The Spirit’s diachronic activity

Third, the Spirit’s diachronic work highlights the continuity between present life in the Spirit and the eschatological vision, or between creation and restoration. In my initial framing, I emphasised the significance of diachronic wholeness for final eschatological redemption. In that context, the beatific vision is the locus of this final healing through which one’s whole life is redeemed without diachronic loss. Focusing on the Spirit’s diachronic action helps both to emphasise the newness of eschatological redemption (novissimum) and to contextualise this eschatological dimension in continuity with the Spirit’s work more broadly. While eschatological redemption is not always construed in the overtly ‘diachronic’ sense that I am developing here, the diachronic work of the Spirit is a consistent element in recent pneumatologies. For two examples, Robert Jenson understands the Spirit to be the eschatological freedom of God who brings the future into the present and thereby enables the rhyming of history and hope.Footnote ³¹ Second, it has become increasingly common to understand scripture’s inspiration by the Spirit in historical-diachronic terms. To speak of the ‘inspiration of scripture’ in this perspective is to shift from a singular causal role for the Spirit at the time of authorship to an affirmation of the non-competitive agency of the Spirit from authorship to canonisation, translation and beyond.Footnote ³²

This view of the historical-diachronic work of the Spirit has been called ‘pleonastic logic’.Footnote ³³ As a form of speech, ‘pleonasm’ means using more words than required to convey the message; the Spirit’s communicative work is excessive – pleonastic – because the Spirit incorporates more and more witnesses throughout time, like endless, ‘superfluous’ variations on a theme.Footnote ³⁴ Ben Quash uses the idea of pleonastic logic to articulate the Spirit’s activity as nonlinear but dynamically generative.Footnote ³⁵ The Spirit, in Quash’s view, takes the ‘givenness’ of revelation and endlessly inspires new ‘findings’, so that what exists (and what is known of God) is never reducible to the deliverances of past reasoning and perception. Rather, the Spirit is found in the unexpected, opening up a horizon for new ventures without thereby superseding the ‘old’ (viz., without diachronic loss).Footnote ³⁶ In this case, the Spirit’s generativity transfigures and fulfils the ‘old’ so that the given and the found are integrated.

Such ‘pleonasm’ – or diachronic integration – is evident in the narratives of Stephen and of Job, which suggests that the vision of God is an occasion for the integration of the old and the new. In Stephen’s case, the Spirit is explicitly invoked as the principle of diachronic unity, for it is the Spirit’s givenness in the event of Pentecost that serves as the narrative precondition of the surrender of his spirit and his vision of God’s glory (Acts 2:1–4; 7:55–59). As Stephen’s life has become centred around Christ’s promise of Spirit-enabled witness (Acts 1:8), the final moment of his life becomes, in that very Spirit, an integrative event. He sees God and offers his own spirit to the ‘Lord Jesus’, itself a non-identical repetition of Jesus’s commendation of his spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46). In this moment, Stephen’s life is drawn together in diachronic wholeness – though Stephen’s first-person experience of that integration remains opaque from the third-person perspective.

Job’s narrative displays both diachronic integration and leaves open certain questions about diachronic loss. Integration is demonstrated in Job’s repentance (Job 42:5–6), the Lord’s acceptance of his prayer (42:9), and when the Lord ‘restores the fortunes of Job’ (42:10). This restoration is more than just new material wealth replacing the old, represented in verse 11 when Job’s brothers, sisters and former friends join him and feast together. Job’s restored wealth consists partly in tokens of restored fellowship for relationships from his past (42:11b), so that in the end, Job ‘died, old and full of days’ (42:17). The condition of being ‘full of days’ seems not only a euphemism of death in old age but also refers to the restoration of ‘all who had known him before’ (42:11), so that the old and the new are integrated. In this restoration of family, friendship and wealth, we can see an affirmation of diachronic integration. And yet, diachronic loss persists to the end of Job’s narrative, and it is not clear how this might be eschatologically redeemed. The prime example of such unintegrated loss is the death of Job’s ten children, who cannot be ‘restored’ to Job simply through the gift of seven new sons and three new daughters (42:13). That initial loss persists, remaining a mystery for which the biblical narrative itself provides no direct resolution.

Together, this reflects the traditional view that the Spirit is the creator and sanctifier and further suggests that, in these activities, the Spirit brings about wholeness across time – that is, diachronic unity. As in the case of Job, the final integrative work of the Spirit is not always transparent, but it seems clear that the Spirit works in this way. The Spirit knits us back together so that deification is in part a function of the restoration of memory. The failure of memory is constitutive of the broken, sinful and wounded self. In trauma studies, for example, memory is central, for trauma resides as uninterpreted and so unintegrated memories. The memories have not disappeared; on the contrary, traumatic memories spontaneously overwhelm the present in often violent ways, precisely because they are uninterpreted and unintegrated.Footnote ³⁷ The Spirit’s diachronic work heals by reintegrating memory so that memories of wounds are no longer overpowering and over-determinative. The visio Dei is the event of this reintegration. Finally, in possession of the whole of their life, the person can participate in the final event of settling the meaning of that life.Footnote ³⁸

Seeing God in the Spirit

There remain several matters for synthesis and an array of questions beyond the scope of this essay. The majority of this section synthesises the outline of the Spirit’s threefold work in connection with the question of diachronic loss, but first, I address a point of tension in my use of the concept of the visio Dei. The eschatological vision is often understood purely in terms of the beatific vision, which, by virtue of its ‘blessedness’, is the face-to-face encounter with God proper to those who have already been glorified.Footnote ³⁹ However, I have invoked the vision of God as a means of that final redemption – and implicitly as a means of glorification and of eschatological judgement.Footnote ⁴⁰ While my use of the visio Dei as both the means and end might stand in tension with other accounts of the beatific vision, I think the impasse can be overcome with two points.

First, one of the main reasons the beatific vision might be reserved for the already-glorified is that ‘no one shall see [God] and live’ (Exod 33:20). Consequently, the vision of God is the goal and not the means of redemption, because the vision of God would mean death prior to ultimate glorification. However, in my account, the beatific vision is a means of ultimate redemption at or after death. Consequently, to whatever extent the human person ‘lives’ before the face of God in the eschaton is already a gracious act of vivification by God for one whose ‘life’ is otherwise already over.Footnote ⁴¹ In a sense, then, they see God ‘in death’, and in the same event, God gives new, eternal life.Footnote ⁴² Second, as hinted in the first concern, the transformation of the human seems a prerequisite of the divine vision – that is, humans must be renewed and purified in order to receive the gift of the visio Dei (Matt 5:8). But the prerequisite is the infilling of the Spirit, as Stephen’s martyrdom makes clear. His vision takes place in the moment of martyrdom, which suggests that his final eschatological glorification is still to come. So, his experience at that moment was certainly not unqualified bliss. The only prerequisite hinted at in Acts 7 is the gift of the Spirit – ‘filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God’ (7:55). Stephen is (already) filled with the Spirit by virtue of the Spirit’s outpouring on the apostolic church at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). Consequently, by rooting the event of the beatific vision in the work of the Spirit, my account already includes sanctification as presupposed in treating the visio Dei as itself redemptive.

Nonetheless, these points might warrant a conceptual distinction between a broader usage of the term ‘visio Dei’ (referring also to the means of glorification) and the beatific vision proper (the content of the glorified life). I have argued that the vision of God is an irreducibly first-person event in which the person actively participates in God’s redemption and vindication of the whole of their life, at minimum by assenting to the meaning made out of their experiences of suffering. To that extent, it seems that the final consummation requires the visio Dei as the means of glorification (as with Stephen, who sees God in the midst of his own martyrdom). And yet, this is not the same concept as the unqualified bliss of seeing God in glory beyond all suffering and loss. So, a more general experience of the visio Dei, we could say, is intrinsically linked to the resurrection of the body insofar as it is the participatory process by which the whole of one’s fleshly existence is raised. The beatific vision, on the other hand, is the form and content of resurrection life, logically subsequent to the telos of redemption.Footnote ⁴³

Now we can synthesise the three aspects of the Spirit’s work (unitive, particularising and diachronic) to show how a pneumatological construal of the beatific vision enables some response to the concern framing this essay. The concrete reality of human suffering threatens the wholeness of one’s lived life – the unity and integrity of life throughout time. Hence, ‘diachronic unity’ is compromised by the experience of suffering.Footnote ⁴⁴ There are two crucial features that I raised above. First, accounts of redemption that make histories of suffering negligible are inadequate to the depth of suffering and to the diachronic form of human existence. Second, the person being redeemed must play an active role in the means by which a history of suffering is integrated into a redeemed life. These two come together to suggest a vital place for a pneumatological construal of the beatific vision because the first feature concerns the life-giving and perfecting work of the Spirit, and the second concerns the active, first-person contribution of the human in ‘seeing’ and participating in their life’s redemption. The above account of the three movements of the Spirit’s work, with explicit attention to the visio Dei, has prepared a way to address these issues.

The mystery of redemption without diachronic loss has a direct relationship to the limits suffering places on eschatology.Footnote ⁴⁵ Recognising this both confirms the coupling of pneumatology and the beatific vision and establishes boundaries for speculation. There is no third-person, generally accessible account of how in the face of suffering ‘all will be well’. This is rooted in the irreducibly first-person quality of suffering – suffering’s ‘meaning’ (and redemption, when redemption involves a meaning-making subject) depends on the assent of the suffering person.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is a necessary condition for the redemption of suffering that the suffering person actively ‘own’ the purported means of redemption; they must find it adequate to the concrete reality of their own suffering because it is they who will ‘go on’ in the wake of the suffering.Footnote ⁴⁷ Here, the beatific vision has a crucial role to play, precisely because it does not purport to specify how God redeems suffering in concrete cases. Rather, by centring the person-to-person encounter in which humans will see God and see themselves in God’s vision, the beatific vision involves first-person activity in concerted attention with God to the reality of their own suffering. Only through direct attention and active re-integration of one’s life can diachronic loss be dealt with at this final, ultimate level, though from the ‘outside’ (third-person perspective) the means or manner of that redemption is unknowable.Footnote ⁴⁸

In order for the beatific vision to provide an occasion for redemption without diachronic loss, it needs to effect a union between God and the person, so that the person’s active involvement is a function of their attention being joined to God’s. At the same time, it must maintain the integrity of the human person in their particularity. If such ultimate redemption requires the active involvement of the person, then they must persist in their particularity so that they can have personal ‘ownership’ of the redemption – which affirms that this particularity will ultimately involve what I call perfection and fruition. If our eschatology can accommodate these two conditions, it produces an account of eschatological redemption as the glorification of the whole human life, from beginning to end. And this, I have argued, is the way the Spirit works. A pneumatological beatific vision affirms: (1) genuine union with God by participating in God’s vision while (2) upholding and perfecting human particularity so that (3) redemption enables diachronic wholeness, or the glorification of the whole human life with the active first-person involvement of the human creature.Footnote ⁴⁹

The upshot of this essay has been that the Spirit’s activity is unitive, particularising and diachronic. When acknowledged in the event of the beatific vision, the Spirit’s activity ensures the continued particularity of the human person without compromising the deifying union. Additionally, the beatific vision can then be seen as a redemptive event, both the means and end of eschatological redemption. In that event, the person comes to see God the Father imaged forth in the Son, thereby seeing God in the Son’s humanity while also seeing themselves in the vision by which God embraces all in the creative act. It is the Spirit who is the light in whom ‘we see light’ (Ps 36:9), so that the Spirit is the illumination of the Father and Son, and the condition of the possibility of a creaturely beholding of God and self-in-God. In this event, the Spirit empowers the person to comprehend their whole life ‘in a single glance’ (as Aquinas puts it, ‘non successive, sed simul omnia contempletur’) and thereby enact, through participation in God, a completion of that life.Footnote ⁵⁰ In that final deifying moment, the human actively shares in bringing meaning out of the life lived, as seen in God, so that the possibility of eschatological completion and perfection does not violate the mystery and absurdity of suffering. As in Job’s account, there is no claim that the suffering itself will be made ‘meaningful’, but rather that the life is re-membered as meaningful in the face of suffering and its absurdity.