Roland Chia: Hope for the World
As a positive example of Roland Chia’s approach please note his study of death. Rather than merely asking “What happens when we die?” or even “Why do we die?” he goes farther and develops a theology of death deeply probing the purpose and meaning of human existence and life as the gracious gift of our Creator God. Death, therefore, rather than the expected outcome of finite being becomes a contradiction to the character of God. Thus death is an enemy to be overcome—and, in fact, it has been overcome. Believers, who now enjoy eternal life, still presently experience death, but through Christ are assured of resurrection hope. However, Chia does not fail to venture what happens at death and why. In the process he addresses distinctions between physical, temporal death and spiritual, eternal death, and the nature and reality of the intermediate state and the bodily resurrection for holistic existence as unified human beings.
Discerning Pentecostals will discover disturbing trends in Chia’s treatment of cosmic eschatology. Most notably missing is constructive teaching on the rapture and the millennium. Eventually this is explained: Chia confesses advocacy of amillennialism. In short, Chia rejects a literal millennium altogether, spiritualizing it away as a symbol of an age beyond time when the reign of God is finally fully consummated, and relegates the rapture to a mere moment in the movement toward a general resurrection immediately prior to the last judgment. Without outright denial, he downplays eschatological imminence and urgency. Fortunately, throughout the book opposing positions are fairly presented, and this generally includes treatment of distinctions between pre-, post-, and a-millennialism. However, all is not ideal either. While Chia briefly notes “historic premillennialism,” he focuses almost exclusively on “dispensationalist premillennialism.” The former builds on the apocalyptic literature of the Scriptures and the patristic teaching of the early Church, the latter on an ultra-literalist hermeneutic of Scripture shaped by a prefabricated paradigm popularized by J. N. Darby and C. I. Scofield around the turn of the twentieth century. Increasingly, informed classical Pentecostals are identifying irreconcilable differences with such fundamentalist versions of dispensationalism. Dispensationalists are chiefly strong advocates of cessationism (insistence that spiritual gifts have ceased), and often entrenched opponents of Pentecostalism. Understandably, many Pentecostal scholars are dispensing with dispensationalism while retaining belief in the chronology and reality of rapture-great tribulation-millennium (e.g., Hollis Gause, Revelation: God’s Stamp of Sovereignty on History, Pathway, 1983). But Chia fails to note these important distinctions at all, and seems to assume his critique of dispensationalism automatically includes all pre-tribulation millenarians. That is simply inaccurate and unacceptable.
Another cause for concern is the absence of any explicit eschatological pneumatology. With only a few oblique and opaque references from Chia to the Holy Spirit one would never imagine our inspired and authoritative account emphasizes the eschatological Spirit so abundantly (Joel 2:28; Acts 2:17; cf. 2 Co 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:14). Oddly enough, Chia’s adherence to an “already-not yet” eschatological paradigm provided an excellent but ignored opportunity to explore the Holy Spirit’s role in the present in-breaking of God’s everlasting Kingdom (cf. Gordon Fee, “The Spirit as Eschatological Fulfillment,” God’s Empowering Presence, Hendrickson, 1994). Perhaps here is observed a continuing need for an ongoing critique by contemporary Pentecostalism of Evangelicalism’s tragic tendency to deny or diminish the distinctive significance of the Holy Spirit not only in individual experience but also in the overall intellectual development of Christianity?
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