106 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
so. And though, admittedly, later tradition has tended to take
these verses as referring only to two distinct divisions within
the limited company of the elect, Paul certainly says nothing
of the sort. If he really believed that the alternative to life in
Christ is eternal torment, it seems fairly careless of him to have
omitted any mention of the fact. In every instance in which
he names the stakes of our relation to Christ, he describes
salvation as rescue from death, not from perpetual torture. I
know it is traditional to take "death" here as meaning "spiritual
death," which really means not death in any obligingly literal
and terminal sense, but instead endless agony in separation
from God; but Paul would have had to be something of a cretin
not to have made that absolutely clear if that was indeed what
he intended his readers to understand.
II
I suppose one cannot really discuss New Testament escha-
tology without considering the book of Revelation. I have to
be honest, though: I tend not to think of it as a book about
eschatology as such. Admittedly, it is so arcane a text that any
absolute pronouncements on its nature or meaning are almost
certainly misguided. But, even so, I really do not think one can
make sense of it according to any simple division between his-
tory and eternity, or between time and time's ending, despite
all its extravagant apocalyptic imagery of a world destroyed
and restored. In fact, I regard it as a supremely foolish enter-
prise for anyone to attempt to extract so much as a single clear
and unarguable doctrine regarding anything at all from the
text (in the way that these days fundamentalist Evangelicals
especially like to do, but that Christians of every confession
have been wont to do down the centuries). The whole book is