Let’s Talk About Eschatology

“Destined for adoption”

“Destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will”

“A plan for the fullness of time.”

I knew I was going to have to talk about eschatology, which is a branch of theology that studies the eschaton, the “last things.” In other words: what is the destiny of all things on heaven and earth? What is God’s plan for the end of time? Eschatology has been made into more frightening of a topic than I believe it needs to be...perhaps in part due to the fact that it’s an academic sounding Greek word, but also due to the fact that it deals with our being “chosen” for forgiveness, salvation, and redemption which are all elements of final judgment. And it deals with "the end"...which no one really likes thinking about.

Where eschatology has been made unnecessarily scary is when people try to think about what happens to those who aren’t chosen, or elected, by God for salvation. Ralph Martin is quick to point out in his commentary on this passage from Ephesians that the “negative elements of election (sometimes referred to as ‘the doom of the damned’)...are not much in evidence in the New Testament text and are not found at all in this text.” [1]

Much of our “popular” understanding of eschatology, of the “end times”, has largely been influenced by non-scriptural texts, in particular Dante’s classic The Divine Comedy, “which narrates the travels of a Christian pilgrim from hell, through purgatory, to heaven.” [2] It's an upward and spatial journey which places heaven far above the cosmic spheres...far away from the earth...far away from here, from us, from being real. This transcendental eschatology, as it is termed in Plantinga, Thompson, and Lundberg's An Introduction to Christian Theology, has dominated the Christian tradition, yet stems from one of the earliest heresies of the faith, Gnosticism. Gnosticism (from the Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge) believes in a “secret instruction...open only to a privileged few", understood heaven to be a purely spiritual realm, and saw creation and nature and physical bodies as prisons which trapped our spirits. [3] Gnostic teachers “drove a wedge between heaven and earth and taught that God had contempt” for all things physical. This is definitely not the picture we get from Genesis 1, in which God delights in all elements of God’s good creation. [4]

These non-scriptural influences in addition to certain Scriptural scenes of the “last-judgment” have created eschatologies of terror which sustain theologies of fear and a God of wrath, which, again, are nowhere to be found in this text from Ephesians. Paul talks about a plan for the fullness of time which includes forgiveness, salvation, and redemption...it is an eschatology of hope, and this is the plan that God has had all along.

God created all things good and appointed humankind with a vocation of tending to creation. We messed up, rebelled a bit and took things into our own hands; we made our own plans for the future and constructed a rival kingdom. “In the midst of this self-destructive history, [God] takes the initiative of setting things right.” [5] This is the eschatology revealed to us in Scripture: God’s plan to set things right at last, not God’s plan to exact revenge on us for messing things up in the first place.

God starts small, claiming a “slice of creation, a chosen people in a special land”, but God promises to Abraham, at the very start of his journey, that God will use him to bless ALL nations. God has already planned to “reinstate God’s blessing of the earth, which was originally intended to take place through humanity’s general vocation as inscribed in the [image of God we bear].” [6]

“According to Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel, Judaism was unique among the ancient near-eastern religions because it put a premium on time--consecrating, for example, the sabbath and the historical festivals--more than it did on space or place, as in a sacred mountain, river, or rock. This makes human history--the drama of time--meaningful on the stage of the good earth, propelled principally by God’s promises for the future and the expectation of their fulfillment.” [7] Speaking of drama, and getting away from all of this academic stuff, I’d like to suggest an actually helpful way to conceptualize the importance of eschatology using a popular piece of literature.

Now, I’ve never actually read Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, but I have watched the Muppet’s reenactment of it more times than I can count, so I feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp of it. The story tells of a supernatural trip in which three spirits take the stingy and curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge through scenes of Christmases past, present, and future. And it is the Ghost of Christmas future which gives us, I believe, a good way to think about how eschatology ought to influence our faith and our life.

Scrooge stands face to face with this spirit of the future, “I fear you more than any other Spectre I have yet met,” he says to the spirit, “but I am prepared to follow and learn with a thankful heart.” Scrooge is then taken into town where folks are all laughing and joking. They are laughing and joking about a man who has died, some wealthy cheapskate who doesn’t seem to be very well liked by anybody. It doesn’t take long until Scrooge is brought to a graveyard and shown his own freshly dug grave. It was his death in which the townsfolk took such delight, and his life which stirred up such disdain and ridicule.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the ending of this tale. Scrooge awakens from this nightmare with a different outlook on life: an attitude of compassion and hospitality, an overwhelming sense of gratitude for what he has.

This is the impact of eschatology at it’s best. Eschatology is not so much a destiny set-in-stone, but a projection of what will be if the way things are now carry on. The literature which tells of these eschatological projections is known as Apocalyptic. In modern society this word, in its noun form, Apocalypse, carries implications of doom and destruction...but these are eschatologies of human plans, of human negligence, of human revenge and violence, of human greed. But apocalyptic Scriptural texts, which engage the aforementioned eschatology of hope, the end times in which God’s plans come to fulfillment, tell a different story. In the Old testament:

1. In the Psalms and the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah we see the growing expectation that Yahweh’s kingdom would be ushered in by a special agent, an “anointed one” or messiah...a king in the image and likeness of David. There also developed...expectations of an ideal priest, an eschatological prophet [that is one who tells the story of God’s plan for creation’s redemption], and an apocalyptic “Son of man”--a supernatural heavenly agent who would come on the clouds to judge and vindicate Yahweh’s kingdom.

2. Ezekiel speaks of how this kingdom expectation included hope of restoration of Israel to its land.

3. Jeremiah speaks of the promise of a new covenant, written on the human heart, a covenant of forgiveness in which God would remember sin no more.

4. The prophet Joel tells of an outpouring of the Spirit whereby all God’s people would become anointed and inspired by God’s Spirit.

5. Daniel made prophecies of a resurrection of the dead.

6. Both Joel and Isaiah make mention of a final judgment.

7. And Isaiah speaks, finally, of a new heaven and earth, a blossoming of life beyond the curse of the fall into sin, where the whole world would experience shalom--the fullness and completeness of well-being and right relations--the longed for peaceable kingdom. [8]

Is this where we’re actually headed, toward shalom, completeness, peace, reconciliation? If our current way of doing things, the way we treat our neighbor, our enemy, our planet, our own bodies, persists...what will our eschaton be?

Exactly...not great.

But here’s the good news, God foresaw this “not greatness” and did something about it. In Jesus of Nazareth, God’s eschatological hopes have broken into human history making it possible for us, who are destined for not-greatness, to be adopted by God and inherit a new eschaton, built upon the incarnation of God’s love for us.

Contrary to the Gnostic and Danteian claims that heaven is far away from here, the incarnation of the Christ binds “heaven and earth together into a unity.” [9] God’s plan for forgiveness, salvation, and redemption is taking place here. God’s Spirit engages us in this plan, and wakes us from this nightmare of human plans being fulfilled in the fullness of time: selfishness, greed, violence, revenge, war, pollution.

“Christianity is eschatology,” writes Jurgann Moltmann, “[Christianity] is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day.” [10]

“With all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

Wake, O sleepers, and greet the new day with hope. Live with gratitude for what you have, and look through the lens of faith for those places where the Kingdom of God is already breaking into our now. Do not live to escape, but rather live to make the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God inevitable. May your life endorse a future in which the Lordship of God’s love is brought to fulfillment for all of creation! This is our vocation, our privilege, our joy.

Praise be to God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! Amen.

1) Martin, Ralph. “Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon” from Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. (1991, Westminster-John Knox) Louisville, KY. 15.

2) Plantinga, Richard J., Thomas R. Thompson, and Matthew D. Lundberg. An Introduction to Christian Theology. (2010, Cambridge University Press) NY, NY. 395.

3) Ibid. 395.

4) Martin. 18

5) Plantinga et al. 390.

6) Ibid.

7) Ibid. 391.

8) Ibid. 391-392

9) Martin. 18.

10) Moltmann. Theology of Hope. 11.