10 - Eschatology

Summary

In line with the meaning of the Greek word from which it is derived, eschatology deals with eschata: the last things. Yet because this way of speaking can easily suggest a future that is indefinitely distant (and thus less than pressing), the import of the doctrine is arguably better conveyed by the traditional Latin phrase de novissimis: literally, the newest things – the definitive revelation of God’s lordship as something that has drawn near and is already breaking in upon the world. Such language appropriately echoes Jesus Christ’s own proclamation that God’s kingdom is “at hand” (Matt. 4:17 and pars.). For although the kingdom is not included among the four “last things” – death, judgment, heaven, and hell – that are the traditional topics of eschatological treatises, the hope of the kingdom does summarize their collective content: the end of the present order of creation and the inauguration of a new order of redemption, in which God’s will is done “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10 and par.). Moreover, because for Christians the realization of this promise is defined by Jesus’s return in glory, the Christian hope for the kingdom is identical with hope for Jesus, who for this reason is rightly called (in the words of Origen of Alexandria) the autobasileia – God’s kingdom in person. The life of the kingdom is just the communion of creation with the Creator that has been made possible by God’s assuming a creature’s life in Jesus of Nazareth. It follows, as Karl Barth famously declared, that, “if Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology, there remains in it no relation whatever with Christ.”¹