I’ve been enjoying reading through Ezekiel lately with Robert Jenson’s Brazos Commentary. For any modern Christian reader, one of the problems presented by a text like Ezekiel is that of delayed prophecy. Ezekiel speaks to the exiles in Babylon, who have grown cynical. In Ezekiel 12:21-28, this discourse reaches one of many points at which God instructs Ezekiel to announce that judgment will no longer be delayed:
Mortal, what is this proverb of yours about the land of Israel, which says, “The days are prolonged, and every vision comes to nothing”? Tell them therefore, “Thus says the Lord God: I will put an end to this proverb, and they shall use it no more as a proverb in Israel.” But say to them, The days are near, and the fulfillment of every vision. For there shall no longer be any false vision or flattering divination within the house of Israel. But I the Lord will speak the word that I speak, and it will be fulfilled. It will no longer be delayed; but in your days, O rebellious house, I will speak the word and fulfill it, says the Lord God. (Ezekiel 12: 22-25 (NRSV)).
From the perspective of the New Testament, and of Christian theology, however, Ezekiel’s prophecies were delayed, initially until the coming of Christ, and subsequently until Christ’s future return. The premodern Christian interpretive strategy was to view such passages as prefiguring Christ. One modern strategy, which Jenson calls neo-Protestant, has been to de-historicize all Biblical eschatological hopes within a metaphysical view that negates any possibility of any teleology in history. Another modern strategy, represented by dialectical theologians such as Karl Barth, was to render the Bible’s eschatological hopes as expressions of an immanent crisis to which each person is subject. Yet another modern strategy, represented by dispensational theology and fundamentalism, was to render the ancient texts as code books for deciphering contemporary events.
Against such modern trends, Jenson argues for a return to premodern exegesis, although in sympathy with dialectical theology, he is content to let the ambiguity and lack of resolution do its own work. I appreciate Jenson’s comments here:
Let us suppose that we find neither neo-Protestantism’s nor dialectical theology’s resolutions satisfactory. What then?
We should — in my view — begin by retrieving the church’s premodern construal. The New Testament does in fact think that all the promises of God are fulfilled in Christ (e.g., Rom. 15:8), and so should Christian theology. It is becoming even more obvious: modern scholars’ insistence that the original sense of Old Testament anticipation cannot be christological or ecclesiological is not itself a scholarly result but an antecedent ideological construal of how history works. There is no need to share this construal.
We must, to be sure, be very careful not to suggest that, because the promises have been fulfilled in Christ, they no longer apply to the Jews as a people. But a nonsupersessionist construal is indeed possible and in some part already achieved.
If we go on from the fulfillment of the Old Testament in Christ, the problems of delay devolve into one: the so-called delay of the parousia. And here the first thing to say is that the failure of primal Christianity’s expectation of Christ’s immediate advent is a plausible reason not to believe the gospel that proclaimed it. If after nearly two millennia we find that gospel so compelling that we continue to hope, we should acknowledge that such a hope speaks a great “nevertheless.”
Finnally, if we ask why the Lord is so slow, we may indeed adapt 2 Peter’s answer. Those who write an dread this commentary should not complain that God did not end history millennia ago; he lingers to make room for us.
Jenson, Ezekial Commentary, 109-110.