The End
The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. Romans 16:20 NASB
Will soon– syntríbō, in this case, a future, active, indicative tense. As Bertram notes: “The image of smashing Satan in Rom. 16:20 (cf. Gen. 3:15; Ps. 91:13) suggests both present victory over the powers of darkness and the imminent eschatological destruction of Satan.”[1] We acknowledge the vocabulary, but we typically ignore the meaning in usual Christian contexts.*
Here’s the historical reality. It didn’t happen! Two thousand years later, Satan has not been crushed under your feet, or under anyone’s feet, for that matter. He appears to be alive and well, wreaking havoc in the decline of the world as we know it. Whatever it was that Paul thought was going to occur, I am quite sure he didn’t have a two millennia wait in mind.
This isn’t the only place where Paul asserts his confident expectation that the Messiah will shortly return in power to establish God’s Kingdom on earth. In fact, if Fredricksen is correct, one can hardly understand Paul at all unless one reads Paul as a first century apocalyptic thinker. We may acknowledge that Paul wrote as if he expected the world to end, but we somehow pretend he wasn’t mistaken. Why, then, do we pretend that he wrote anything applicable to us? If he really expected the world to end within a few short years, isn’t all of his instruction and theological perspective colored by this apocalyptic eschatology? Aren’t all of his instructions for community framed by the assumption that the End will momentarily arrive? Doesn’t it make more sense to read his comments about marriage, social equality, ethnic diversity, Jewish and gentile relations, and even evangelism as saturated with “end of the world” thinking rather than attempting to explain away his apparently fallacious eschatology? Perhaps the only reason we do our best to pass over these difficulties is doctrinal, not historical. In other words, we pretend that Paul wasn’t wrong because we have a doctrine of inerrant inspiration that prevents us from admitting that he was wrong, because if we admit that he was wrong, then the claim that the Bible is God’s eternal truth is in serious jeopardy.
But Paul was wrong, as yesterday’s news clearly shows. While “apocalyptic eschatology corrects history, [promising] a speedy resolution of history’s moral dissonances: good triumphs over evil, peace over war, life over death,”[2]our real history is, as Heschel notes, “a nightmare.” Evil was not defeated in a messianic return. Religious history was rewritten to accommodate this “mistake.”
“Paul’s legacy itself shifted and changed as later followers, writing in his name, updated his message to newer contexts. Thus the ‘Paul’ of 2 Thessalonians explained the reasons for the Kingdom’s evident delay, adding a punch-list of necessary further events before the final apocalyptic scenario could unwind (1 Thes 2.1-11). The author of Ephesians trumpeted a new universal humanity, undoing the distinction between Israel and the nations upon which the historical Paul had staked so much (Eph 2.11-16). In Colossians, the cosmic ‘principalities and powers’ are already disarmed (Col 2.15); the believer is already ‘raised with Christ’ (Col 3.1; cf. Paul’s careful deferral to this ‘resurrection,’ Rom 6.4-5). And the ‘Paul’ of the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) establishes church organizations, offices, and structures: this is a community settled within time, not one glowing with charismata on time’s edge.”[3]
Maybe it’s time (while it’s not yet the End-time) to rethink Paul, the man who believed what he wrote to the Corinthians and the Romans:
“‘It is upon us,’ he tells his assembly there, ‘that the ends of the ages have come’—and therefore they should not worship demons [by which he means the lower gods of paganism]. ‘Soon the god of peace,’ he tells the Romans, ‘will crush Satan under your feet’ (en texei, in the Greek final emphatic position; 16.20).”[4]
It was “soon” for Paul. It’s been a very long time of waiting for us. Does that change how to read this man of the first century?
Topical Index: Paul, apocalyptic, inerrancy, 1 Corinthians 10:11, Romans 16:20
*There are some exceptions, but they aren’t in the evangelical theological fold.
[1]Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Abridged (p. 1124). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.
[2]Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (Yale University Press, 2017), p. 9.
