The Biblical Background
The Greek word eschaton means “the end” or “the end-time.” Thus, eschatology deals with doctrines about the last things: the end of individuals and the whole cosmos.
What does the Bible say about eschatology? The earliest literary prophet, Amos, speaks of a coming Day of the Lord (5:18).
Belief in the Day of Yahweh was common before the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B. C. Most Hebrews looked forward to the Day of Yahweh because they felt it would bring them great happiness. Amos, however, warned that the Lord's Day would be a time of terrible judgment upon Israel for its many social sins.
Belief in the Day of Yahweh seems to have resulted from two factors in the Hebrew experience:
1) the contrast between what is and what ought to be; and
2) the decline of the Davidic monarchy, the division of the nation, and the rise of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, which threatened the continued existence of the Hebrew kingdoms.
Many longed for a second David who would restore Israel to its former glory. This hope was not realized.
Instead, came the Assyrian conquest and the Babylonian exile. During the exilic period, the eschatological faith blossomed. Jews conceived of the coming Day of the Lord as a time when God would take revenge on Israel's enemies.
During this exilic period, apocalyptic literature appeared, first Ezekiel and then Deutero-Isaiah ( 40-66).
The most important Old Testament apocalypse is the Book of Daniel, written in the 2nd century B.C., after Israel had become part of the Hellenistic empire of Alexander the Great. During the intertestamental period (200 B.C.-100 A.D.)
Jewish apocalypticism flourished. Many Jewish apocalyptic writings have come down to us from this time: the Book of Enoch, Jubilees, the Apocalypse of Moses, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.
The intertestamental period was an age of persecution for the Jews. A righteous remnant refused to become assimilated into Hellenistic civilization; many suffered martyrdom for their faith, and some became fanatical rebels. Conditions worsened; the Maccabean dynasty provided only a brief period of political independence for Israel.
Finally, in 63 B.C. Palestine came under Roman control. Judaism no longer had prophets of the stature of Amos, Isaiah, or Jeremiah. With the voice of prophecy stilled, apocalyptic writers attempted to explain why God's kingdom was delayed.
Apocalyptic ideas vary from writer to writer, but there are certain general features they all share:
l) All apocalypses interpret history from a dualistic perspective. This age is all bad; the age to come will be its opposite.
2) The transition from this age to the kingdom of God will be sudden; it will be brought about by a dramatic supernatural change.
3) All apocalyptic writings are philosophies of history that claim to be revelations from God.
4) Apocalyptic literature is deeply pessimistic about man. In this life, the pious must expect nothing but trouble. Salvation is possible only in the age to come when God will reassert His sovereignty over the world.
5) The course of history has been predetermined. Each writer describes definite periods through which history must pass until the end of time. He also lists signs that show when the kingdom of God is about to appear.
6) Most apocalypses teach a purely passive ethic. They try to comfort the faithful, but they also insist that men cannot improve their situation. God alone can destroy evil when He sets up His rule. Meanwhile, the faithful can only wait and pray.
There is also a considerable amount of Christian apocalyptic literature. Most of it, however, did not become part of the New Testament canon. Revelation is the one major New Testament example of apocalyptic writing.
Yet even the Book of Revelation is different from the older Jewish materials:
1) For the New Testament, prophecy is not dead;
2) Revelation is not ascribed to an ancient. Titled like Enoch or Moses, but is the work of a living Christian named John the Elder;
3) Revelation is not pessimistic, but optimistic about the immediate future; and
4) the book does not teach a passive ethic, but rather is filled with the spirit of moral urgency.
Thus, even in Revelation, it is obvious that Christianity has transformed the nature of the eschatological hope. Was Jesus an eschatological prophet? Yes. Was he an apocalyptic preacher? Yes.
Jesus came preaching, “The time has come; the kingdom of God is upon you; repent, and believe the Gospel” (Mk. 1:15). He also uses the Son of man language, which comes out of the eschatological tradition.
So Jesus did belong to the Jewish eschatological movement. But he differs from the usual apocalyptic preacher.
He does not use the bizarre imagery of Daniel or Revelation beasts rising out of the sea, animal-faced angels, etc. Nor does he stress the signs of the times, which are supposed to herald the approaching end-time.
Jesus accepted the idea of the kingdom's imminence, but he refused to speculate on the exact timetable for its arrival.
Eschatology in Modern Times
Since 1900, theologians have looked at eschatology differently. For example, Albrecht Ritschl and his disciple Adolf Harnack emphasized an ethical interpretation of eschatology.
For them, God's kingdom is a moral community created by men who obey the divine commandments. Ritschl interpreted religion as the struggle of man to establish the kingdom of God through following the moral law based on universal love. Harnack taught that the kingdom would come gradually when men believed in the fatherhood of God and practiced the brotherhood of man.
However, when the Ritschlians explained Christian ethics, there seemed to be very little difference between Christianity and secular middle-class morality. Being a good Christian was the same as being a good bourgeois, or so it appeared to critics.
Hence, liberal Christianity was condemned by Barth as “cultural Protestantism” because it identified religion and culture so closely. Even so, liberal Christian theology was dominant in Germany until 1918, and remained influential in America until the l 930's.
A second theological school was that of the consistent eschatologists. William Wrede pointed out that the message of Jesus bore the stamp of late Jewish apocalyptic.6 Albert Schweitzer insisted that Jesus tried to force God to intervene in history to inaugurate His kingdom.
Thus, the ethic of Jesus, as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, was an interim ethic, suitable for the brief period before the kingdom arrives.
Other prominent advocates of consistent eschatology are Fritz Buri and Martin Werner. In reaction against Schweitzer, C. H. Dodd, a British biblical scholar, founded the school of realized eschatology. As he pointed out in his book The Parables of the Kingdom, the eschaton did come. 8 Christianity was not based on a mistake;
The kingdom did arrive-Jesus introduced it. As Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is among you” (Lk. 17:21).
His healings and parables were intended to show the present reality of the reign of God. Still, another group combined the views of Schweitzer and Dodd. Oscar Cullmann and Joachim Jeremias taught that Jesus inaugurated the kingdom, but the full meaning of this eschatological event is still in the process of realization.
So God's kingdom is already present, although it is not yet completely manifested. Cullmann used an example from World War II to illustrate his meaning. Jesus' coming, ministry, and cross were like D-Day when Allied armies invaded Europe. In a real sense, that event marked the final defeat of the Nazis.
But the culmination of the kingdom is like V-Day, when Germany surrendered. Jesus defeated the powers of evil; from that time until the parousia, all we are doing is conducting mopping-up operations, Cullmann believes. Bultmann and his disciples advocated an existentialist eschatology.
Salvation history is usually thought of as a linear, horizontal movement from creation to the millennium. Bultmann turned salvation history on end, it is said. For him, the eschaton is a vertical happening. He calls Jesus the end of history, meaning that he reveals God's vertical relationship to the man of faith.
The kingdom arrives in an existential moment: eternal life is now. So the eschatological event refers to the moment of crisis and justification for each individual in their life. It is not something in the future. The kingdom comes when a person has to decide between an authentic existence and an inauthentic one.
The kingdom will not come because of supernatural miracles and natural catastrophes, as the apocalypticists believed. No, it comes in a moment of existential decision and commitment.
Thus, every moment or any moment. , has the possibility of being an eschatological event. Bultmann's views are expressed in his book The Presence of Eternity.
Dialectical eschatology of the early Barth is still another interpretation. In his Commentary on Romans, Barth contrasted God and man. There is a dialectic between time and eternity. This made Barth disinterested in what will occur at the end of history. All generations are equidistant from eternity.
We are no closer to the end-time than Abraham or Paul. Eschatology refers to the ultimate significance of each moment. The end-time signifies the quality of eternity breaking into time, judging everything.
Since the divine and human are entirely different, man faces a crisis whenever the eternal breaks into time. God says “No” to man's ethics, philosophies, social orders, and cultures.
Later, Barth's views altered greatly. Once he started to construct his theology on a Christological foundation, he recognized that God enters history and stays in history through Christ and his Church. This is the meaning of the incarnation: God and man are joined, time is filled with eternal significance.
Therefore, in his Church Dogmatics, Barth maintains that in Jesus Christ the kingdom was established ontologically. All that the future will bring is greater recognition by men that God's kingdom is here. There were always two sides to Tillich's teaching.
On the one hand, he was a social critic and reformer. He believed in a historical manifestation of the kingdom; that is why he joined the religious socialist movement.
On the other hand, Tillich resembled an ancient mystic. As time went on, he began to reinterpret the kingdom in transhistorical terms, as the Eternal Now.
The kingdom, he said, is the mystical presence of the New Being. Teilhard de Chardin was an unusual combination of scientist and theologian. Besides being a French Jesuit, he was a well-known paleontologist who worked in China for many years.
At a time when conservative Catholics denounced Darwin, Teilhard worked out an evolutionary interpretation of man and the universe. The evolutionary process has developed through three stages and will be completed in a fourth stage. Creation has moved from a purely physical universe to a biological stage to a human level.
In Teilhard's language, the “cosmosphere” has changed into a “biosphere,” and the biosphere is gradually becoming a “noosphere.” Teilhard predicts that our present human stage will develop and improve until the universe becomes a “Christosphere.”
Evolution is God's way of gradually achieving the Christification of the universe, Teilhard believes. Since everything will ultimately become one with Christ and in Christ, there is no need to worry about the vast changes that are taking place.
Social upheavals are merely part of the process of unifying and personalizing society. From Teilhard's perspective, the apocalyptic warning about a coming end of the world is false because God would not allow a series of catastrophes to destroy His plan for fulfilling the purpose of the cosmos.
The theology of hope is another post-World War II reinterpretation of eschatology. Neo-orthodox theologians lost faith in society because of Nazism and Stalinism.
They saw little promise in history, so they preached the need for an individual encounter with God. World War II and its aftermath caused many to lose faith in capitalism, industrialization, and the Western way of life.
Out of this time of social criticism and revolutionary turmoil, the theology of hope was born. Theologians of hope reject the individualistic theology of encounter and personal decision. For them, Christians should stress not the inward or upward aspects of faith, but rather the outward and onward Gospel of God's kingdom.
Eschatology is not the entrance of eternity into time, as Barth thought. Eschatology refers to the future of our world. Christianity proclaims the promises of God for the future of this earth.
The Corning kingdom implies a necessary revolutionary transformation of the social order. Hence, Moltrnann and Pannenberg interpret eschatology as social reconstruction, rather than apocalyptic events. Related to the theology of hope are the various theologies of liberation-Black theology, African theology, Third World theology, and Feminist theology.
Liberation theology has taken an especially dramatic form in Latin America because of its dialogue with revolutionary Marxists. According to Liberationists, since Augustine, Christianity has been distorted by the doctrine of the two kingdoms of Caesar and Christ.
The first is earthly, political, and collective; the second is heavenly, individual, and ecclesiastical. Liberation theologians deny this two-kingdom theory. There is or should be one kingdom: God's. God is interested in man's total history, from the religious to the economic.
Christian faith, therefore, should provide the dynamic motivation for transforming our world into God's kingdom. Liberation theology is right to insist on the social implications of the Gospel.
However, there are dangers in this approach. Liberation theology appears to be vulnerable to use as an instrument of Marxism. Furthermore, political and economic revolution alone will not bring about the kingdom.
There must be a radical transformation of man himself before the kingdom can be realized. Unificationists hold that the final consummation of history will be the realization of God's original intent for mankind. In other words, what God started in Genesis will be concluded by the realization of Revelation's promise of a new heaven and a new earth.
Since God began His providence with one man, Adam, its consummation requires the appearance of a new God-anointed central figure, whose task is to pay indemnity for the unfulfilled missions of all the key figures in salvation history.
When his mission is accomplished, he will be given the authority to break the power of original sin and establish a new family as the foundation for a new world.
Individual Eschatology
Eschatology refers to the doctrine of man's final destiny; it deals with the goal of mankind as a whole and the fate of each individual after death. In the previous sections, we have discussed the Judeo-Christian belief in a coming kingdom of God on earth.
This section will concentrate on the afterlife -that is, the continuation of the individual's consciousness after death. The New Testament doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh is not to be taken literally: the physical body will not be brought back to life.
However, the physical body is not all there is to a person; each of us has a spirit as well as a body, and it is the spirit that survives death.
Every person inhabits two worlds: a physical realm which we know through our ordinary senses, and a spirit world which can be experienced through the development of special psychic senses. These two worlds interpenetrate and interact at all times, even when we are not aware of their interrelationship.
However, awareness of the spirit world becomes especially vivid through mediums and in dreams, trances, visions, and out-of-the-body experiences. In the early Church, the division of reality into two realms, physical and spiritual, or natural and supernatural taken for granted.
Augustine, for instance, developed a theory of two types of knowing, which were adapted to the two realms of reality. But since the Enlightenment, awareness of the spirit world has often been ignored, or has simply faded away because of a this-worldly attitude to life.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, scientists concentrated exclusively on the physical world. While this limited focus upon material things greatly increased our scientific knowledge and improved our technological mastery of nature, it impoverished man's understanding of his inner world and atrophied his mystical senses.
Furthermore, a mechanistic and materialistic worldview was formulated, which dismissed spiritual realities as primitive superstitions and antiquated myths.
The noted psychologist-philosopher William James has pointed out the lack of justification in the materialistic scientist's ignoring of spiritual data; experience of fact, he says, is an expansive field, and the experimenter who labels spiritual phenomena as nonsense excludes a mass of raw fact which has just as much right to be acknowledged and studied as the facts of physical experience.
To suppress or ignore the personal and spiritual elements of experience and say that only material objects are real is like offering a printed menu as a substitute for a solid meal.
Fortunately, during the l 960's this trend began to reverse. For one thing, the new physics undermined the old materialistic science by discovering that matter consists of fields of energy, and this concept softened the sharp contrast between matter and spirit.
Then, rigorous scientific studies of parapsychological phenomena revived interest in spiritual experience. Furthermore, the youth counterculture turned to Asian religions and philosophies, which emphasized the primacy of spiritual wisdom and mystical experiences.
Finally, several New Religions appeared on the international scene and attracted numerous converts among educated young people who had found conventional churches uninspiring or irrelevant.
All of these factors combined to create a widespread spiritual Renaissance, especially in Europe and America. Thus, public opinion was prepared to reaffirm the existence and importance of the spirit world.
Many examples of encounters with discarnate spirits have been collected by scientists recently. Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson are two psychologists who have studied over one thousand cases of afterlife experiences reported by doctors and nurses who were present at the events.
In their book, At the Hour of Death, they cite many instances. For example, a business executive, age 80, was found by his nurse just staring at the ceiling, speaking with someone who was not there, and smiling like a child gazing at a Christmas tree. He called the name of a youthful sweetheart, saying, “I waited and waited, knew you were going to come to me!”
Later, he told the nurse that he saw her and that he was sure she would return. Many years before, the girl had been killed in an accident. 20 Often, the spirit visitor is Jesus, Mary, one's patron saint, or an angel.
For example, a Pennsylvania housewife, suffering from a heart attack but expected to live, suddenly told her nurse, “I see an angel coming for me.”
The woman died the next day. Such incidents are not uncommon. Many dying patients and those who recover from near-death experiences report that their entire lives are repeated before their eyes, as if they were seeing a movie. This naturally evokes feelings of remorse and repentance as they realize how often they have made mistakes or committed grievous sins.
This supports the common religious teaching that death brings a person to a time of judgment. Discarnate spirits who speak through mediums often talk about various levels in the afterlife.
When the well-known writer Arthur Conan Doyle (author of the Sherlock Holmes mystery stories) spoke through the psychic Eileen Garrett, he confessed that he was not in heaven but on some intermediate plane, which is only the beginning.
Many dying individuals also mention that the afterlife resembles this world; there are trees, gardens, and especially beautiful flowers. This confirms Swedenborg's teachings that a correspondence exists between life in this world and the next. Furthermore, one does not change radically upon dying.
There is no sudden transformation of one's personality and character. Rather, a person finds himself in a place appropriate to his status here on earth. Hence, some people do not realize for a time that they have died.
The afterlife exists to allow the individual soul to reach perfection. This process of spiritual growth begins here on Earth. The spirit develops by understanding divine truth and doing God's will, maturing as His children through the three stages of formation, growth, and perfection.
No one reaches the highest level until they unite with God and become perfect through complete harmony with the divine heart. Spiritual growth is easiest to obtain here on earth, and some can achieve the goal of spiritual perfection before they die.
Eastern Orthodox theologians refer to this process of perfection of the soul as deification (thesis); Schleiermacher termed it total God-consciousness. In the spirit world, every aspect of the human personality persists and is as real as it was on the earthly plane.
There is no loss of sexual differences and interests. A man is a male and a woman is female forever. We keep our identities according to the moral character we have realized on earth and how closely we have walked with God in loving Him and serving others. In the afterlife, the best spirits appear wonderfully clear, dean, bright, and radiant.
As for those who lived selfishly, immorally, greedily, and arrogantly, especially those who denied God or obstructed God's special providence of building the kingdom-they appear as deformed, dirty, smelly, and repulsive monsters.
Each type of wicked person finds spirits like himself, which live together and form their society, which is hell. Good, humble, and noble souls who served humanity and suffered for righteousness, truth, and God are led to higher realms of blessedness where they are welcomed by God. This is heaven.
It is important to correct the mistaken notion that God judges men. Everybody judges themselves and suffers or is rewarded accordingly. God never consigns any soul to hell. Those who end up in hell are self-judged. Their fate is decided according to the love that ruled their life on earth.
Spiritual beings are of two kinds: those who have never lived in a physical body (angels), and those who once existed in the physical realm (the spirits of human beings continuing to exist after death). Demons are spiritual beings of either type who serve evil rather than good, Satan rather than God.
Some spirits are assigned to work as police, restricting the activities of the wicked and maintaining the peace of various regions. Each good soul finds some useful place where he employs his talents with enthusiasm on behalf of God's kingdom.
In the afterlife, discarnate spirits can communicate directly and instantaneously by thought and feeling.
Therefore, it is impossible to hide one's deepest sentiments. Those who are hypocritical and deceptive suffer greatly. The spirit world is a spacious and vast place, yet no distance separates one spirit from another.
The spirit world contains none of the barriers of space and time which we experience here. One is as close to or as far away from others as the intensity of his love allows. If you wish to see someone, he will appear immediately. By the same law, those who love God with their whole heart and mind find themselves close to Him.
It should be noted that, just because spiritual phenomena do not come to us through the physical senses, and are rarely public phenomena, one should not be naively credulous in accepting all reports of spiritual experiences; to do so would be to make just as great a mistake as the materialist who rejects such reports out of hand. Spiritual phenomena, just as much as material phenomena, should be scrutinized, analyzed, and integrated into an intelligible system.
A system such as Swedenborg's, described briefly above, which integrates spiritual reality into a coherent worldview by Christian theology and moral teachings, is dearly to be preferred to random reports of spiritual experiences with no moral content or no comprehensible connection with the individual's understanding of the world as a whole.
Belief in the spirit world need not encourage a return to the asceticism and other-worldliness of the Middle Ages; Jesus' ideal was to establish God's reign on earth. Our physical life has great value as a training ground for spiritual maturation.
Therefore, to commit suicide is a tragic mistake, for it deprives a person of never-to-be-repeated opportunities to transform his defective and flawed nature-and the privilege of working for God's kingdom.
Nor should one live merely to obtain the rewards of heaven or escape the pains of this would be a purely utilitarian ethic. We should believe in God and act in conformity with His will because this philosophy of life is profoundly true.
We should love divine truth and seek divine goodness for their intrinsic value. Do not believe just to go to heaven or simply out of fear of dying. Rather, take advantage of this present life. Use every opportunity to grow in wisdom and stature, in favor with God and man, as Jesus did.
Spirits communicate with earthly men and women either directly or indirectly through mediums, prophets, and seers. Good spirits are always eager to help us.
One or two guardian spirits remain close to every person, encouraging, protecting, and warning him as he travels the upward path to God.
While on Earth, one is never alone. On the other hand, people are also often influenced by evil spirits that lurk about. Such demons, as the New Testament calls them, are filled with hatred, resentment, lust, and malice, which they vent on their victims.
These low spirits prey on the unwary and are constantly in search of humans who are open to temptation or share the same violent and destructive impulses.
Thus, Paul advises us to protect ourselves with the shield of faith and the armor of righteousness (Eph. 6:11-16). As you can imagine, the next world is far more complex, vaster, and more fascinating than this one.
It is impossible to fully describe its heights and depths. But my final remark is that in the heavenly world, all adults remain in the prime of life and exist in a most beautiful and vibrant state.
Those interested in more details about life after death may consult the books listed in the notes to this chapter.