In other words: you don’t want to take Ro 2:16 as it stands, but want to reinterpretate it because it shares a “motif” with texts that say otherwise. But the same motif does necessarely not mean that Paul wants to express the same ideas! Your sort of argumentation is a non sequitur.

What I see in the Bible is a “mixing” of future historical events and apocalyptic events. Take the speech of Jesus about the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the ages (Mk 13p).

When Paul speeks about *a day* when God will judge what is hidden in *the* men, this is clearly an apocalyptic event. We may ask whether Paul mixes this up with other, historical events (or more to the point of our discussion: whether he does so in 1.Ts 1), but to deny the apocalyptic meaning altogether is no sound exegesis, it looks like eisegesis.

Also, I think that the coming of the Son of Man motif describes a historical event—the public vindication of those who suffer for and in Christ.

Obviously, when Paul wrote 2 Timothy, this “resurrection” and vindication had not yet happened.

This is not to say that the NT does not envisage a final judgment. It’s just that I think the NT also has important things to say, through apocalyptic language, about critical foreseen historical events.

You mention Ro 1.18, but this is not the only verse where this wrath is mentioned in Romans. In Ro 2:5ff the wrath is mentioned again, with some more “details”, and the paragraph endes with God, who “judges everyone’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.” (Ro 2:16).

You cannot reduce the wrath of God mentioned in Roman to an immanent event, it is connected to the time when our universe is vanished and the coming aeon will bring a new world, to the time when everyone will appear before the throne of Christ, or (to return to 1.Ts 1; 2.Ts 2) when the son of man will come down from heaven to judge the world.

We should not reduce the coming of the new world to anything within this world, as those did who claimed that our resurrection has already happened (2.Tm 2:17-18).

Or to take a slightly different angle, in Romans 1:18 Paul says that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”. The way the argument is worked out in Romans 1-2 suggests to me that he is thinking of a two-part “judgment”—directly analogous to the situation that Habakkuk describes—first on the Jew, then on the Greek, that will come at some point in the foreseeable future. I presume that this is the same “wrath” of which he speaks of in 1 Thess. 1:9-10. The Thessalonians have abandoned the worship of idols because they are convinced that the wrath of God is coming on the pagan world. That is, they are delivered from the wrath to come on the Greek by the same means that Paul has been delivered from the wrath to come on the Jew—by their faith in Jesus.

So there are, arguably, two ways in which we may make sense of 1 Thess. 1:9-10. Paul may mean that they will be delivered from the suffering that the righteous will inevitably face in the course of the coming upheaval—that is, they will be saved from persecution. Or he may mean that they are saved from an obsolescent civilization in the same way that Paul has been saved from an obsolescent second temple Judaism. The Thessalonian Christians will not be swept away in the coming wrath; they will not become collateral damage; they will survive to be part of the life of the age to come. Perhaps both are relevant.

Obviously, what this means in practice for individuals and what it means for the community are not exactly the same. There is a good deal of eschatological detail in Paul that is intended to account for this difference. But it seems to me entirely coherent, both eschatologically and historically, to say that the wrath from which these believers were saved was the wrath that was coming on the pagan world at this time of massive eschatological transition, when the God of Israel was laying concrete claim to the civilization that for so long had opposed his people.

Der zeitliche Abstand ist an sich kein Problem, er wird es nur durch die Überlegung: inwiefern wurden die Leser von 1.Ts durch ihren Glauben vor dem (bzw. im) Untergang des römischen Reichs bewahrt? Darauf müsste es eine sinnvolle Antwort geben, wenn in 1.Ts 1,10 der Untergang des römischen Reichs gemeint ist. Und wie gesagt: ich würd auch nicht protestieren, wenn gesagt wird, dass er mitgemeint ist. Nur eben mit-gemeint – mit einem Ereignis, das tatsächlich als Erfüllung von 1.Ts 1,10 verstanden werden kann.

So when I read that Paul predicts a wrath the readers of his letters will be saved from, an event like the fall of the Roman empire or the ovterthrow of Diocletian by Constantine is no such event, because it is meaningless to say the readetrs of 1.Ts were saved from it by their beleif in Jesus. Therefore, it cannot be claimed as an fulfillment of the predicton in 1.Ts 1:10.

If you can point to an event that can legitimately called the fulfillment of 1.Ts 1:10, we may talk about the possibility to lump it together with other events (like the “overthrow of the pagan imperial aggressor”) to a broader eschatological picture, but if you cannot tell such an event, talking about these other events is just a maneuver to escape the conclusion that this sort of eschatological interpretation turns Paul into a false prophet.

Having said that, the “overthrow of the pagan imperial aggressor” is an important aspect of the wrath or judgment of God against the Greek-Roman oikoumenē. Whether Paul was thinking of a generic emperor, a particular emperor, or the whole system of divinized imperial power, or some other construct, is difficult to say. But I would certainly conclude from 2 Thessalonians 1-2 (if the Letter is Pauline) that he foresaw a decisive antagonism between Christ and a blasphemous pagan ruler.

It seems to me best to speak in quite general terms of a whole belief system being swept away, effectively because of the witness of the churches to Christ. The extent to which matters beneath that general conception need to be understood in terms of affliction, suffering, punishment, torment, etc., I’m not sure. Perhaps Paul envisaged greater social disorder than was actually the case, but if his language is symbolic, it is very difficult to know what exactly he had in mind.

Clearly, though, for the churches the coming time of wrath would mean intense suffering—”wrath”, as the concrete outworking in history of divine judgment, is directed against the unrighteous, but we see from Habakkuk 2:4 and Daniel 7 that the righteous may suffer collateral damage in the process.

Paul had a message for his time. If he predicted an immanent salvation, we have to look for an fulfilment within the life span of his listeners. Apart from the fall of Jerusalem, I can’t see an event that could be linked to God’s wrath Paul spoke about. So either Paul predicted something that didn’t happen (and it is off topic that something similar happened to happen some centuries later), or the wrath of God has to be interpreted “transcedental”, e.g. as a final judgement in the third stage of resurrection hinted at in 1.Cor 15:24.

@Andrew:
In the article linked at top of this page you claim that wrath is always
>> some historical event or process by which a people or a nation or a civilization is “judged”
Now if you don’t include the overthrow of the Roman emporer into “the list of occurrences that I associated with the parousia”, what other historical event is (in your view) the wrath of God predicted in 1.Ts 1:10? In this verse, it is crystal clear that the target of this wrath includes the pagans, and the same can safely assumed for other verses as Ro 1:18.

As Peter suggests, it seems to me that the list of occurrences that I associated with the parousia did take place. I didn’t actually include the overthrow of the Roman emperor. It is pagan imperialism insofar as it is violently and blasphemously opposed to YHWH and to his Christ that is overthrown.

So it seems to me entirely plausible to differentiate between this highly significant historical event, given the natural perspective of the New Testament, and the hope of a final cosmic renewal, which is our eschatological horizon.

As to your “three eschatological horizons”, there are several possibilities to sort the eschatalogical predictiions in the New Testament into a coherent picture. These horizons are not facts, but a matter of interpretation.

More to my point: You describe Paul’s in rather immanent terms, as an event that has not taken place. I wonder how one can draw such a picture and escape the consequence that Paul was a false prophet who predicted an overthrow of the Roman Emporer that never happened?

I’m convinced that your “third” horizon (the final judgement and new creation) is the same in essence as the “second” horizon.

Whether this final judgement leads to eternal damnation on some men (i.e. “hell”): you are right in that Paul doesn’t say much of it (and nothing directly), hell is mainly taught in the first and the last book of the NT, in the sayings of Jesus and the Revelation (apocalypsis) of Jesus Christ.

Lest you get a wrong notion: I strongly believe that the love of God is far more important than the teachings about hell. But I can’t neglect what I find in the Bible.