120 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
of a final divine reckoning for creation to denounce the injus-
tices and follies of his age; and, as he was a first-century Jew,
the language he used necessarily included much of the terrify-
ing apocalyptic imagery and mythical topographies of Jewish
intertestamental literature and early rabbinic teaching. He was
telling his contemporaries, and most particularly those among
his fellow Jews who had forgotten the justice and the mercy of
the Law, that under God's reign it would be the poor and ne-
glected who would be vindicated by divine righteousness, and
their oppressors who would be cast down. To me, therefore, it
seems almost insane for anyone to imagine that such language
can be distilled into specific propositions about heaven and
hell, eternity and time, redemption and desolation. All it tells
us is that God is just, and that the world he will bring to pass
will be one in which mercy has cast out cruelty, and that all of
us must ultimately answer for the injustices we perpetrate. It
is a language that simultaneously inhabits two distinct ages of
the world, two distinct frames of reality, neither of whose ter-
rains or vistas it pretends to describe in literal detail: It at one
and the same time announces a justice to be established within
historical time by divine intervention and affirms a justice that
can be realized only beyond historical time's ultimate conclu-
sion. It is intended, it seems obvious, to move its listeners to
both prudent fear and imprudent hope. But, beyond that, only
the poetry and the mystery remain.
III
Then too, of course, so many serious exegetical debates coil
and roil around the question of whether Christ's teachings
about judgment can be said to concern the difference between
time and eternity at all, at least as a governing motif, rather