Apokatastasis.wiki

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Enoch

Typological treatment in the corpus

Enoch, the seventh from Adam who walked with God for three hundred years and was taken without dying, is identified by Warnock and Noordzij as a type of believers who fully appropriate the victory over death in Christ. His translation without death is for both authors not a historical exception but a prophetic sign of future bodily redemption.

Biblical anchoring

ReferenceContext
Gen. 5:21-24Enoch walked 300 years with God; “he was not, for God took him”
Heb. 11:5”By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death”
Jude 14-15Enoch prophesied concerning the coming judgment of the Lord
1Cor. 15:54”Death is swallowed up in victory” — Enoch as type of this fulfillment

Typological interpretation by author

Warnock

Warnock discusses Enoch in the context of his teaching on the manifestation of the sons of God and the conquest of the last enemy — death. In The Feast of Tabernacles he states:

“God is perfectly free to raise whom He will any time He chooses… Enoch did it. So did Elijah. And so shall the sons of God.”1

This statement is programmatic for Warnock’s eschatology: Enoch and Elijah are not untouchable exceptions but foreshadowings of what will be available to a company of overcomers at the close of the church age. The victory over death — the fulfillment of the Feast of Tabernacles — begins not with the general resurrection but already in mortality, through the appropriation of the resurrection life of Christ.

Noordzij

Noordzij treats Enoch in multiple works as the most explicit type of bodily redemption without death. In The Ark of Noah he writes concerning the meaning of Enoch’s name and his typological function:

“Enoch (=‘initiated one’) knew complete redemption, including from ‘the body of this death’ (Rom. 7:24). His whole being obeyed the Spirit. He did not die, but the Lord took him up, as a sign of those who will fully know Jesus as the ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ (John 11:25).”2

The phrase “as a sign of those” makes the typological application to future believers explicit. In Moses and the Way to Sonship Noordzij places Enoch alongside Elijah as an eschatological foreshadowing:

“Death is the last enemy, which is ‘swallowed up in victory’ (1 Cor. 15:54). What happened to Enoch and Elijah was a foreshadowing of this.”3

In The Inheritance of Jabez Noordzij states most precisely what Enoch as a type has attained:

“Enoch did not die. He obtained the true inheritance: complete redemption of the flesh into a new resurrection body in the kingdom of God (cf. Rom. 8).”4

Enoch represents for Noordzij not only eschatological hope but also the norm of the sonship type: complete obedience of spirit, soul, and body to the Spirit of God, resulting in an unbroken communion with the Lord that renders death powerless.

  • Connected: feast-of-tabernacles (the fulfillment of the Feast of Tabernacles as context for the victory over death)
  • Via glossary: sonship

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Warnock, b1 (The Feast of Tabernacles, 1951), ch. 12 — manifestation of the sons of God. ↩

  2. Noordzij, b2 (The Ark of Noah), section “Enoch”. ↩

  3. Noordzij, b1 (Moses and the Way to Sonship), section 5 — “Victory over death / immortality”. ↩

  4. Noordzij, b4 (The Inheritance of Jabez), section “GOD’S ANSWER” — glorification as the goal of sonship. ↩

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