As if it were planned

Few areas of theology have been as ridiculed in modern times as eschatology. Antichrists, dragons, beasts, final judgments – it’s all superlatively mythological for modern rationalists.

Sometime in the early part of the twentieth century, however, New Testament scholars began rediscovering the centrality of eschatology in NT theology. For some, this deepened skepticism about the authority of the apostles – they expected the end of the world, and they were clearly wrong. Others recognized the “eschatological tension” of now and not-yet that is so much at the heart of the apostolic gospel.

As it happens, the revival of eschatology happened just in time.

As something like a scholarly consensus was developing, no one, I suspect, anticipated just how central eschatology would become in the cultural conflicts of late modernity. But it is central.

In his recent From Nature to Experience , Wheaton’s Roger Lundin highlights eschatology as a crucial difference between the pragmatism of Fish and Rorty and Christian orthodoxy. Pragmatists invite us all to an endless aimless egalitarian conversation. Final words are prohibited, not to mention final judgments.

But of course Christian creeds include professions about final judgment. The notion that the conversation of history will end is radical enough. The notion that we will all have to give an account of our interventions in that conversation is alarming.

Yet, there’s more. If there is an end, Christians are creedally committed to confession that history has direction; for if it has an end, it is heading toward that end. Christians believe not only in an end of history but in an aim to history.