4. Structure And Ministry In The New Testament
3.3. The Escbatological Framework
The net result of Jesus’ death and resurrection followed by the advent of the Spirit was that the early church understood itself to be an eschatological community, “upon whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11). Their citizenship was already in heaven, from whence they were awaiting Christ’s return to bring the final consummation (Phil 3:20-21). With the resurrection of Christ God set the future inexorably in motion (1 Cor 15:20-28), so that the form of this present world is passing away (1 Cor 7:31).
Thus the early church understood the future as “already” but “not yet”107 and its own existence as “between the times.” At the Lord’s Table they celebrated “the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). By the resurrection and the gift of the Spirit they had been stamped with eternity. They had been “born anew to a living hope ... to an imperishable inheritance preserved in heaven for them” (1 Peter 1:3-5). They already “sat in the heavenlies” through Christ (Eph 1:4). In their present existence, therefore, they were living the life of the future, the way things were eventually to be, as they awaited the consummation. It is thus in light of the eschatological realities of their existence that Paul tries to shame the Corinthians by trivializing both the need to redress one’s grievances and the secular courts in which such litigation took place; in light of eschatological realities such things count for nothing (1 Cor 6:1-6).
As much as anything, it is this sense that Christ’s death and resurrection marked the turning of the ages, and that the Spirit in/among them was God’s down payment and guarantee of their future, that marked the crucial point of discontinuity with what had gone before. With Christ and the Spirit they had already begun their existence as the future people of God. And it is precisely this new, eschatological existence that transforms their understanding of being his people. The future has already begun; the Spirit has come upon all of the people alike, so that the only differences between/among them reflect the diversity of the Spirit’s gifts, not a hierarchy of persons or offices. There can be no “kings” or “priests” in this new order, precisely because this future kingdom, which was inaugurated by Jesus and the Spirit, is the kingdom of God, and thus a return in an even grander way to the theocracy that was God’s first order for Israel.