Alpha, not Omega

In his recent book on resurrection in Judaism, Jon Levenson notes that the objections to resurrection in the modern world usually came from outside religious traditions. Some took an “extreme” position that presupposes “atheism and thus regard nature and its laws as eternal and absolute.” “Religious liberals” take a more modern view: “the modern objections to resurrection associate God with the alpha point, creation, but disconnect him from the omega point, the messianic end-time, which, it is respected at all, is reformulated as a product only of human beings following moral law and thus ushering in a perfect world.” Deists, for instance, would credit God with setting up the order of nature, but would deny Him a role in its fulfillment.

Two comments: First, this highlights the revolutionary importance of the twentieth-century recovery of eschatology. And, second, this perspective on modern thought highlights the primary continuity between modern and postmodern, that is, the hostility of both to eschatological closure. Postmodernism is, from this angle, only the belated recognition of the consequences of affirming Alpha while denying Omega.