Eschatology and Politics

Extract

THE outlook implicit in eschatology — that worldly events are moving toward a climax in which history will be terminated, and its trends overruled or fulfilled, according to a divine determination — is dim and implausible in the modern mind. The Biblical and Augustinian pictures of the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, and the Last Judgment, are likely to seem the most outworn vestments of religious faith; and even without these particular vestments, many find it difficult to conceive soberly of an ordained end of the world and history. This is especially clear in the case of the nonreligious. Their main ideologies during the past century or more, such as liberal progressivism, socialism, and communism, have all, in their typical forms, presupposed the finality of earthly developments. But even among religious people, the weakness of eschatology is manifest. It is true that there are some theologians, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Rudolf Bultmann, who have been concerned with eschatological ideas. But outside of small, intellectual circles eschatology has been largely monopolized by popular sects tending to specialize in lurid visions of “hellfire and brimstone.” The enfeeblement of eschatology even among the religious is apparent in the political outlook which is perhaps more intimately connected than any other in recent times with religious faith — conservatism. Burke and his followers have had remarkably little concern with the question of history's being ended and overruled. One can feel that in his attack on the French Revolution Burke was thinking less of God's judgment on all of history than he was of what he believed to be His manifest presence in history's residue of traditions and institutions. Thus, neither on the “left” nor on the “right,” and neither among the irreligious nor among the religious, are men today very much inclined to envision their history as subject to any sort of climactic interruption and judgment.