Hi Richard:
Out on vacation last week; just noticed this. I suppose first of all I’m intrigued by the breadth of your personal musings about life and theology!
I mean, why this, why now…
Within my denomination of upbringing (and where I currently reside; very Historicist! eg see sturmy’s notes…) there is this inside joke among the more bold… We Adventists (ie the SDA) have no need for hell; (we - though not me! - are annihilationists as you may recall…) we do however have a perfect substitute: the fear engendered by our own particular eschatology – which renders our Second Coming scenarios (and up-leading events) just as fearsome as any hell!
I’ve no fondness for the subject myself. It’s been nothing but a source of fear and trembling and uncertainty. So my bias is inherent and frightfully strong. I’ve found discussions of eschatology mostly as negative; ie quite counter to any notion of gospel (GOOD news folks!!) one might have.
In my experience then, Eschatology serves merely to select and empower a certain enlightened few with, you know, the “special knowledge” that can make one feel so smug and certain and (let’s just admit it) self-righteous… Because, you know, we “know” (wink wink! what those other less insightful bible readers don’t “know”. It was, in short, a mechanism of exclusion, and control (he with the secret knowledge rules!) and (in retrospect) frightfully manipulative… Little wonder then that for me, my dawning realization of the true God (for me, in ’94…) involved a heavy dose of reworking of my understandings of …. Eschatology.
But to cut through a whole lot of anguish and questions and thought, my response to this question of your’s Richard is, (apologies for sounding crude or irreverent…) so what? All biblical eschatology culminates/is realized in 70 A.D. So what? Jesus came again… Final Judgement… Hell… All over and behind us… So what?? Or, with a nod to my Historicist upbringing (yes, the very one which left me in a tetanic fear…) Most, or maybe NONE of it was fulfilled — it’s ALL going to happen sometime… out there… in the future… gotta “be ready” … Again I’d ask; so what?
For, it seems too obvious to even need to mention, and just think of all to whom this has applied over the ages since the Cross, here we are. Still. Looking, waiting, suffering, yearning, and asking - over and over again until we faint of exhaustion - Why? Oh God? and… How Long Oh God?? The majesty & victory of the Cross simply fades away into the very thing faith always was… waiting out the storm, catching fleeting glimpses and glimmers of the (all too often far off) Kingdom, and then, we die… Die just like those other hero’s of faith. (Heb 11) Die in hope – not having received the promise… still waiting for that heavenly country…
Eschatology fulfilled? So what… Life goes on. And we find ourselves asking the same questions, facing the same dilemmas also faced and asked by vast throngs who’ve trod the way before us.
And no, we’re not leaving Him; we affirm, as did Peter so long ago, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal Life… we know You are the Holy One of God…”
Of what use, then, is eschatology? What happened, and when? … what will happen, and when? So what? Why do we need to know with such specificity??
I’ve known many who hold that eschatology exists so that, when it happens (is fulfilled) we can all say “see! - God really does know the future!” which I suppose is to generate confidence in God. Except, as you’ve noted, we can’t even agree that “it” has even happened! To see eschatology as indication of God’s complete foreknowledge, or as refutation of open theism, misses the point – or so it seems to me…
The only way I can even begin to make a coherent place for eschatology is to find a place for it within the overarching narrative of God. God – origin of everything, thus a personal being, the Creator ‘invested’ in His creation. But something’s amiss; call it the ‘fall’, or call it the painful journey towards freedom and right doing from our initial condition of ambiguity, self-centeredness, delusion. Thus, the central actions of God involve redemption. Of not just us, but of the entire creation.
Whether the process of redemption, or “re-creation”, is itself part of, or necessary to the overarching goals of God’s creation I cannot say for sure. (ie following Talbott’s suggestion that we are born into ambiguity, ignorance, and prone to delusion…)
Necessary to this process – and surely we should be able to all agree that it’s mostly a process, not just an instantaneous churning out of perfected beings – is time. Things just need to work out, evolve; cause and effect becoming ever clearer even as the revelation of God’s way’s & means become clearer. (ie without the dark glass; knowing even as we are known etc) This lack of complete clarity however, even as we learn and grow and move, can be extremely anxiety producing as we are tempted to despair, lose hope; our faith shudders.
Into this setting then, this narrative, eschatology begins to make perfect sense when seen as an indispensable part of God’s redemption. It is a framework of history, part and parcel of our narrative, which serves to remind us, over and over as necessary, of the truths on which our hope rests. God is there; God is cause; God is personal; God is involved; we are not alone; God is compassionate; God is redeeming; and most of all, God is victorious. Any eschatology that doesn’t end with a completely victorious God is no eschatology at all.
The point of an eschatology then is not to raise our predictive IQ so we can just plug correct events in with correct dates. Rather, it is to encourage the despairing, rekindle their hope, rebuild courage and strengthen faith. The point is, God stands astride all of history… As we all should be painfully aware, there are those who follow Christ today whose loyalties are costing them their lives. We argue finer points of theology; they’re getting killed. I should think that an eschatology that speaks to God’s current intimate involvement in our Redemptive drama would be rather more pertinent, and powerful, than one which only affected “them” way back “then”. If belief in complete fulfillment “way back then” fosters confidence today (and why wouldn’t it?) then that is fine too of course and that eschatology will also have served its useful purpose.
Or something like that…
Thanks for the thoughts Richard!
Bobx3