I am currently in a doctoral program, studying semiotics—cultural symbols—which requires a great deal of reading. Probably the greatest benefit of an education is the wise guide (teacher) who can give a curated tour of the best there is in any given subject, and such is the case with this program. Dr. Leonard Sweet has opened the door to an entire world of scholars and theologians who look beneath the surface of things and reveal mysteries. Now I would like to open that world to you.
Τέλος
“Telos” is a Greek word meaning “consummation,” positioning it as apposite to eschatology, which studies those things which will occur at the end of time.
Below seems like an apt image for Telos: The Hope of Heaven Today
Our Stories Shape Us
As a lay counselor, I resonate with Telos’ claim that
The stories we tell ourselves shape our destiny, for good or ill. Stories tell us who we are and bind us to one another. They are the heart of our identity as humans.
Leonard Sweet and Len Wilson, Telos: The Hope of Heaven Today, 16
In fact, based on Dan Allender’s work, and in conjunction with the Lay Counselor Institute, I created a video to help people know and tell their story that has, indeed, “departure, initiation, return” punctuated by events that “shake us out of our stupor” (p. 14).
So to understand Jesus as the author of our story, of our lives, of our identity, makes complete, intuitive sense. Jesus is the author of all that is and Jesus is the word that sustains all that is.
What Drives Us
I am willing to accept the premise that much of what drives humanity is both curiosity and an image of the future, either hoped for or dreaded (pp. 32, 57). We make decisions grounded in our assessment of the present and our interpretation of the future. Based on this, two themes emerge:
- “The idea that God will destroy the existing order to create a new one is poor theology,” and
- where Jesus is, is heaven, not vice versa, and God is heaven (pp. 60, 327, 340, 345, 348).
By saying so, these two themes position us in heaven right now, and whatever is being dismantled, or deconstructed, will eventually pass away, but we will become more of who we are until we are complete/accomplished/Telos.
The Six False Endings
In Summary
Apocalypticism hopelessly resigns itself to a destruction to come, and therefore pays no heed to today.
Utopianism seeks to escape from and cordon off the seemingly hopeless realities of today.
Traditionalism, having lost hope in any of the current trends, seeks to pull today back to an imagined utopia set in the past.
Millennialism has no hope in Jesus’s power today, but rather awaits a day when Jesus might come into power.
Ahistoricism takes a bleak view of all that makes us who we are, and seeks instead to rewrite our beginnings, somehow thinking that will change us.
Messianism has no hope in the Christbody, but rather seeks a glorious hero to make all well.
At Length
Apocalyptism
The world really is headed for complete destruction.
The first- to third-century church was premillennialist, thinking Jesus’s return would certainly happen in their time, considering all the disasters they were suffering. But by the fourth century, Augustine of Hippo lived in a remarkable and unexpected era in which there was peace, and Christianity was mainstreamed. He came up with another idea: postmillennialism, which holds that because Jesus is reigning from heaven, the millennium began at his ascension.
Just goes to show how much our world and culture shape our theology!
Two thousand years later, we actually can know that apocalypse is certainly in our future. Either we will do it to ourselves, or the sun will become a red giant. But will it be God’s “plan” to destroy what is to make room for what will be? Telos says “no,” even though that is exactly what God did do in Genesis 6–9 (which, to be fair, is addressed in Telos) and what Peter and John appear to avow in 2 Peter and the book of Revelation.
Telos sees apocalyptic thinking as self-defeating. I get the point that knowing this will all one day end can plunge us into apathetic despair. Christians are called to joyful hope instead.
Ahistoricism
I definitely agree that human resilience, and capacity for hope and joy, is remarkable (p. 60). If we are not wiped out dinosaur-style one day, or the earth is not vaporized by the expansion of the sun, certainly we will prevail.
Utopianism
I think USAmerican utopianism perhaps at least partially sprung from the very thinking promoted in Telos: a desire to live the Jesus way, and to exist as it were in heaven while yet on earth. That said, there certainly also was and is the thinking that if we can but establish the millennium now, we shall hasten the Lord’s return. There is no question eschatology drives how we live our lives today.
To understand that we receive and enter into the kingdom by grace in real time means we must view who we are and how we live not through the lens of some Elysian future, nor of our surroundings, nor even of the people in our lives, but by the one relationship we have in Jesus and how that bonds us with others who are bonded with God.
In this out-of-the-dominion-of-time relationship we no longer keen after a one day, someday millennium. We are in it already, just only partially realized.
Traditionalism
I think this section is encapsulated in the saying that “Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire” (p. 95). What helps us preserve the fire is good tradition, what becomes the worship of ashes is traditionalism.
Millennialism
To the contention that traditionalism is a false narrative which asserts we can go backwards “without having to go through the crucible of change that leads to a changed end” (p. 103): the reality that represents the glorious past had within it people who were formed by their past and were ready for the changes their current reality represented. But we are profoundly different from those people.
For us, we are going back to what for them was the future becoming present. We don’t have the enculturation they had to be able to live their reality the way they did. It will be a hollow glory for us due to how different we really are from them.
Part of what is missing is the newness, the not-knowingness of how this will all work out. Instead, what was for them living and vibrant and mysterious becomes for us controllable, sans risk, sans anticipation, sans that sense that we can change as we go, as we discover what it all means. It’s like rereading a book. Not without its pleasures, but the sense of discovery is gone.
Telos contends this is a “get out of jail free” card (p. 112). It is certainly a shallow reading of what Jesus offers to us and to all people, and is also possibly an anachronistic understanding of what it means to live in two planes—that of the three-dimensional world we have been born into and the supernatural world we have been born anew into.
Telos speaks of three options for approaching history, with a thumbs up on the third (p. 163). The third option recognizes the present’s privilege to remember the past differently than those behind them who remembered the past in a particular way.
In other words, rather than a statue in the middle of the park, as though to make what the statue represents the heart of the city, the statue is moved to a new location with a new placard, one that explains why it was positioned where it was, and why it was moved. This too is history. Smashing the statue may feel good in the moment, in a sort of righteous way, to, as it were, purge the present of the past’s hubris, and to no longer labor under the onerous burden of celebrating a past we now despise, but it also denies future generations the privilege of remembering the past in a fresh way.
There are aspects of the past that have been ignored for centuries, even millennia, because those aspects did not matter to previous historians. It is also the present’s privilege to bring out those aspects and to lessen the seeming importance of aspects that have heretofore been celebrated. So another way of handling the statues is to erect others that celebrate or at least memorialize what wasn’t important before, or what those who came before wanted never to be remembered.
Messianism
There is a play, here, between what people think they need, and what people certainly do want. The feminist who “needs” a daddy, for instance, didn’t need one at all, but certainly did crave Professor Sweet’s presence (p. 170). We do not need messiah figures. But we do crave them. Cravings feel like needs but often they are not, they are desires that have been moved into the need category because of an over-weaning will to have them at all costs.
This is about craving and unselfawareness. It might also be about entitlement at some level, and disappointment mixed with aggravation that an expectation is being left unmet. An expectation is also not a need. And when expectations remain unspoken, even unacknowledged by unselfaware people, then they will treat that expectation as a desire moved into the goal pile.
Now yes.
When there is a perceived absence of authority, authoritarian figures will move in (p. 190). Do we not love heroes to come and do our work for us! And yes, human leaders are an awful lot not like God, but then, one of the things we really like about our human leaders is that they will get the job done more often than not without asking the people to change.
God wants whole-hearted devotion which is expressed in whole-life devotion, a complete change from self-centeredness.
Earthly kings do not really care about that.
The Nature of Truth and God’s Glory
Truth is more than facts and logic, it is a revelation (p. 205). Truth is understood by seeing the photo, knowing the story behind the photo, and the artistic reimagining of the photo and (I add) supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit at work opening our minds to the mind of Christ—which, by the way, is a great hermeneutic for reading the Bible (Telos p. 209; 1 Corinthians 2:6–16).
Because Jesus is the author of our lives, because Jesus is the revelation that makes everything make sense, I do not think the Westminster Catechism gets is quite right in explaining why we exist: “the chief end of humanity is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”
I would posit that the consummation of life, the fulfillment of life, the chief end of life, is to be for God’s pleasure.
This appears to be what God personally claimed of life, including human life, when God said it is very good, and God spent a day to take pleasure in and rest in God’s creation (p. 251).
To be for God’s glory only sort of has meaning, God’s glory is already complete, it needs no addition from us, and we cannot add to it. If we wonder what is in it for us, then we might also be able to say that we too can enjoy God for our pleasure. But that is not why we were created. It may be a necessary ingredient, but not the reason for the recipe .
I would further postulate that primitivism, restorationism, and other movements are seeking to reclaim a trajectory that got lost in traditionalism. The trajectory has movement, and seeks to bring back into practice a line that was abandoned for another path. Perhaps we can imagine a complex maze in which some paths end more quickly than others, and only a few paths (to be generous, rather than one sole path) bring the believer to telos (p. 261).
In Sum
I think, to make a point, Telos leaned hard in saying “not this but that.” But I think it is better to say “yes this, but more so that.” Was Jesus predicting the literal destruction of the temple? Apparently the early Christians thought so, and it saved them. But was Jesus more so speaking of the deconstruction of what the temple meant? I’d agree yes (p. 326).
So let us lean into the metaphysical while not having to let go of the physical. Let us live into the reality of heaven while also looking forward to the day of our own catharsis and metamorphosis from chrysalis to butterfly.
