The Last Things

David Höhne

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780830815395
• eBook ISBN: 9780830888788
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

There is no shortage of books on eschatology—the study of the last things and the end-times. Many arise out of incoherent or superficial readings of the Bible that detract from the "once and for all" achievements of God through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Others fail to consider the manner in which God reveals himself through the Lord Jesus and by the power of his Spirit. Too many fail to distinguish sufficiently between the genuine hope provided by the gospel and the superficial aspirations of culture.In this final Contours of Christian Theology volume, David Höhne offers a trinitarian theological description of eschatology that is at once systematic, generated from the theological interpretation of Scripture, and yet sensitive to essential elements for Christian practice. His reading of the Bible is shaped by the gospel, informed by the history of Christian thought, and dedicated to serving the church in a world that is frustrated by sin, death, and evil, yet longing for the return of our Lord and Messiah.Contours of Christian Theology, edited by Gerald Bray, is a series of concise introductory textbooks focused on the main themes of Christian theology. The authors introduce the perennial questions and their time-tested solutions while moving forward to explore contemporary issues and rework evangelical formulations of the faith.

1

LIFE IN THE MIDDLE?

In response to the Brownshirts building the Third Reich on piles of burning books outside his lecture hall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged the ability of any modern culture to understand history:

Humankind no longer lives in the beginning; instead it has lost the beginning. Now it finds itself in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning, and yet knowing that it is in the middle. It knows therefore that it comes from the beginning and must move on toward the end. It sees its life as determined by these two factors, concerning which it knows only that it does not know them.1

According to Bonhoeffer, modern German culture was adrift in a history that had lost its foundational markers. Modern science had divorced European culture from its traditional Christian beginning – the creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2. Meanwhile the growing shadow of National Socialism menaced the Weimar Republic with a future described as a putative thousand-year reign of the Third Reich. To Bonhoeffer, the beginning had been lost and the end was unthinkable. Hence the world was marooned in the middle of history. More than seven decades after the Second World War, after the Cold War, and even after the second millennium, is the world, or just the liberal Western part of it, still in the Middle? Surely the current global threats of terror and of ecological crisis mean that The End is nigh. Even if these ends do not prove to be The End, was it reasonable for Bonhoeffer to assert that the world knows nothing of its end?

Of course, according to our modern scientific culture the answer must surely be, no! Since 1850 exponents of thermodynamics have discussed the possibility of the universe succumbing to an eventual heat death. Based on the principle of ‘closed systems degenerat[ing] from order to disorder’ some scientists somewhat pessimistically predict the far-future dissolution of life as we currently experience it.2 Naturally the timescale being referred to as The End here is too long to have any meaningful connection to the average individual’s end after roughly three-score-and-ten years. Consequently, many in our Romantic Western culture are optimistic about what lies ahead and are happy to accept that the world is in the Middle of history or at least at a turning point prior to a brighter future. For example, Yuval Noah Harari opines that since ‘the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at McDonald’s than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack’,3 we should strive ahead with ever empowered imagination. Harari backs up these startling claims with an impressively broad sweep of human history as a series of famine, disease and warfare to show that in the early twenty-first century the average Western person (at least) could and should be more optimistic than is in fact the case. When these disasters occur, we need only marshal the considerable resources available to our globalized culture, address the problem and look to a better future that we shall make for ourselves.

In this modern context the Christian gospel comes to us as a promise from the past and for the future, a future with a very definite end – the return of Jesus the Christ to receive his inheritance from God the Father and the establishment of a new creation. From the perspective of the gospel the world is in the Middle between the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead and his return that will mark The End of a dysfunctional creation ruined by sin, death and evil.

What is more, our place in the Middle of this gospel history also has a spatial aspect. Bonhoeffer described it well: the Lord Jesus meets us as the ultimate truth about the reality of God and the world,4 and its future, amid the everyday activities of the community, the church.

I hear another human truly proclaim to me the Gospel; he hands me the sacrament; you are forgiven; he and the community pray for me and I hear the Gospel, pray with and know myself in the Word, sacrament and prayer of the community of Christ, the new humanity, be they here now or elsewhere.5

In this book these everyday experiences of Christian living will serve as a starting point for developing a description of eschatology. My proposal is that life in the Middle consists of hearing God’s promises and responding with a hope that is embodied in our prayers. Praying together in response to God’s promises will serve as the most basic experience of life in the Middle. This is to ensure that, from the outset, the theological description of eschatology that emerges is not ‘simply a plausible intellectual vision but more importantly, a compelling account of a way of life’.6 Each of the three proposed elements of life in the Middle – hearing God’s promises, responding in hope and embodying that hope in our prayers – needs clarification, but first we must define what is meant by the term ‘eschatology’ in Christian doctrine.

What is a Christian doctrine of eschatology?

For most of the last 2,000 years, when Christians spoke of eschatology they described the sequence of events surrounding the return, or second coming, of Christ to the earth. These events included (with some additions and variations) a general resurrection of the dead, a final judgment of the living and the newly resurrected, with the blessing of heaven for the elect and the curse of hell for the reprobate. However, the social and political turmoil of the twentieth century was matched by parallel theological upheaval in the way Christians understood eschatology. Cardinal Ratzinger described it as the shift of eschatology from ‘the quiet life as the final chapter of theology’ to ‘the very centre of the theological stage’.7 This was the work of biblical scholars and systematic theologians alike. Their common theme was a call for Christians to expand their understanding of eschatology from the events of the end of time to the arrival of God’s reign in the world, but how much of that do we have now and how much is still to come? At the risk of oversimplifying, the key theological question changed from ‘What happens when the world ends and when will that be?’ to ‘What effect should the world’s approaching end have on our everyday existence?’ How should life in the Middle be affected by, from or for The End?

The twentieth-century revisionists of eschatology wanted a more theologically driven ‘self-control’8 in the manner with which Christians discussed history. Throughout the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a combination of factors and ideas led liberal Protestant theologians to speak of history as the process of divine education through reason and for the sake of human freedom.9 The concept of a cataclysmic end to history was abandoned. Instead, Christianity (read, the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth) was held to contribute to ‘the moral and cultural progress of humanity’.10 As Jesus himself taught, ‘the kingdom of God is within you’ or ‘in the midst of you’ (Luke 17:21).11 Modernist ideas of progress via human achievement abounded, whether these were the increasingly ambitious claims for the supremacy of human reason in all human affairs or ‘a belief in, if not the perfectibility, then at least the improvability of mankind’.12 These ideas in turn rested on Hegel’s philosophy of history, which saw ‘the movement of Absolute Spirit through the various points of transition that are the existence of finite beings on the way to the Spirit’s absolute fulfilment’.13 The net effect was the transformation of Romantic Europe’s understanding of the kingdom of God with a liberal Protestantism filled with a cultural eschatology of heaven being realized on earth in the form of rational and free individuals establishing modern nation states.14

Against this popular tide, at the turn of the twentieth century, Johannes Weiss argued, ‘actualisation of the Rule of God by human ethical activity is completely contrary to the transcendentalism of Jesus’ idea’.15 Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God was thoroughly futurist and instituted exclusively by God. Jesus, according to Weiss, ‘had hoped to see the establishment of the Kingdom’ but realized that he must ‘make his contribution to . . . the Kingdom in Israel by his death’.16 Albert Schweitzer later added chidingly, ‘Men feared that to admit claims of eschatology would abolish the significance of His [Jesus’] words for our time.’17 Schweitzer applauded Weiss’s work and added, ‘With political expectations this Kingdom has nothing whatever to do.’18 The tragic irony is, of course, that both of these scholars considered that the failure of God’s kingdom to arrive on the earth, either in the life of Jesus himself or by the time the first generation of followers died out, meant that God had been defeated. Jesus of Nazareth too, it would seem, was lost in Bonhoeffer’s ‘Middle’.

The idea that Christian eschatology is primarily a theological question – what God does in and with history – returned to prominence via the early writings of Karl Barth. After the horrors of the First World War, the idea of God’s judgment as a catastrophic end to the world, previously dismissed by liberal Protestants as archaic, returned as a transcendent reality that overshadowed the present. Christians began again to focus on the relationship between time and eternity, as the resurrection became ‘the model for the confrontation of time through the eternal’.19 Full of sensational and distinctly existential rhetoric, Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans proclaimed of Romans 8:11:

We cannot question Truth [the Spirit] as to why it is what it is; for it has already asked us why we are what we are; and in the question has provided also the rich answer of eternity: ‘Thou,’ it says, ‘art man, man of this world; thou dost belong to God, Creator and Redeemer’ . . . Because Truth is eternally pre-eminent over all that we have and are, it is our hope, our undying portion, and our indestructible relation with God.20

The Spirit’s action of giving life to our mortal bodies is at once wholly future and yet secretly present. The confirmation of such a promise was not to be in the advances of Western culture – now lost in the quagmires of Europe’s battlefields. Instead, the Middle is history bounded by God’s transcendent and eternal apocalyptic incursion. In the gospel we hear, ‘By hope we are saved – inasmuch as in Jesus Christ the wholly Other, unapproachable, unknown, eternal power and divinity (i.20) of God has entered into our world.’21 Barth too advocated the thoroughly eschatological nature of the ministry of the Lord Jesus: ‘If Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever with Christ.’22 Yet, unlike Weiss and Schweitzer, Barth insisted that Jesus could not be left behind in history, because he is the Lord of history. A thoroughly eschatological Christianity must understand the Middle as the time between the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and the earthly consummation of his kingdom – his defining of our history.

Barth’s revision of modern eschatology renewed the discipline of understanding the pre-eminence of God’s freedom over creation and the gracious nature of his saving actions within it when discussing history. Consequently, there is a distinctly ‘now’ emphasis on God’s kingdom – we understand eschatology based on what he has revealed of his actions already completed. The extent to which life in the Middle should be affected by, or even effected from, The End became an acute matter amid the social and political upheaval of the 1960s. The importance of the future hope in Christian theology was the subject of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope. Broadly influential on both sides of the Atlantic,23 Moltmann’s work argued for what he saw as a distinctively Christian theology shaped by the future:

From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionising and transforming the present. Thus eschatology is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day.24

Moltmann’s dedication to the centrality of hope for eschatology was, in his mind, an attempt to return Christian theology to a biblical emphasis on the importance of promise and fulfilment – especially in the exodus and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series preface
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Life in the Middle?
• 2 Praying for the Perfection of Life in the Middle
• 3 The Name Above All Names
• 4 God's Kingdom All in All
• 5 The Father's Will for One and All
• 6 Good Lord, Preserve Us
• 7 Good Lord, Forgive Us
• 8 Good Lord, Deliver Us
• Notes
• For Further Reading
• Scripture Index
• Names Index
• Subjects Index
• About the Author
• IVP Academic Textbook Selector
• Copyright
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press