How to Think About the Eschaton II

A Guide for the Perplexed

In the previous entry, I began by addressing the problem fundamental to any discussion of eschatology: whether the “extreme” or “farthest” or “end” (Grk: eschaton) is conceived of as something absolute, the singular goal of a linear sequence that begins from the beginning and ends at the end, or whether it should be understood as the next rung of a cyclical turning in an endless temporal series. In a popular twentieth century way of describing the Ancient Israelite and Judeo-Christian approach to time, the Heilsgeschichte, eschatology deals with the former, an absolute future time (Endzeit) corresponding to an absolute past (Urzeit) in which the conditions of the original creation are reestablished, but this time permanently.

But as I attempted to show, in dialogue with more recent scholarship, this way of framing time in the biblical tradition is fundamentally incorrect. The Hebrew Bible assumes as its norm implicitly, and in its very late literature argues explicitly, that time is an endless series of cycles in which there are many beginnings and many ends, and in which God’s role as creator and sustainer includes also a role as destroyer and re-creator, of which humans are patients. These cycles are intrinsic to the natural world; they happen in the seasons; they happen in the individual lives of creatures, including human beings; and they happen in the world of international politics, as different nations, kingdoms, and empires rise to prominence and fall into oblivion.

The late prophetic and apocalyptic streams of Jewish literature, in which seismic divine intervention is expected in either the foreseeable or immanent future that will result in definitive change, is eschatology not in the sense of providing a coda to world history—God’s Kingdom came, and then nothing ever happened ever again—but in the sense of beginning the next in the cycle of ages. The language of “this age” and “the age to come” is real, and integral to the apocalyptic tradition, but it should not be immediately absolutized as the basic division in all world and salvation-historical time. Instead, it is the currently most relevant division of time. That shapes how we read, and what we focus on, in the apocalyptic eschatology of the New Testament especially.