Something I find fascinating about the study of eschatology, the theology of last things, is that it is always changing. The Church has wrestled with the idea of the end of the world since Jesus preached about the “consummation of the age” in Matthew’s Gospel. But we’ve also never agreed on how best to think about our end.
Throughout church history, Christians have been captivated by images of an apocalyptic in-breaking of God’s grace, and by the idea of a millennial reign, with various schemes for calculating when these things might fall on a human calendar. We have written epic poems about heaven and hell and contemplated how the idea of an immortal soul (which was originally a pagan, and not a biblical idea) could be understood in constructive conversation with the gospel truth of the resurrection of the body.
Through most of Christian history these various themes were often grouped under the subheading of Novissima, which means “Last Things,” when theologians wrote about them. The word “eschatology” itself is actually quite modern. It was first used by Lutheran theologians in the seventeenth century and didn’t become standard until the nineteenth century. In other words, Christian eschatology is not one neat and tidy doctrine. It is a collection of developing and often conflicting ideas that try to grasp what it means for us to expect the coming Kingdom of God.
Today our beliefs about the end of the world have only become more variegated, and some would argue, more “secularized.” The proliferation of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and more recently the growing public awareness of the climate crisis are both (rightly, I think) understood in eschatological terms. This world as we know it is a fragile place and bears within it many possibilities for its self-destruction.
On any streaming service we are now bombarded with post-apocalyptic films, ranging from new fungal re-imaginings of the zombie motif in The Last of Us to post-pandemic encounters between Shakespearean troupes and enigmatic prophecies in Station Eleven. There seems to be a deep cultural pull toward stories that allow us to wrestle not just with our own mortality, but also with the eventual death of the world as we know it, and with what world might come next.
Initially it seems odd that the end of the world has generated so many theologically rich accounts, given that we don’t know anything about it (“you know neither the day nor the hour” Matthew 25:13). But I think that the human tendency to contemplate and imagine our end plays an important role in shaping our understanding of the world and our place in it.
I am currently working on a book project that unpacks the role eschatology plays by trying to answer the question, “What exactly are we doing when we think about the end of the world?” This is maybe an odd approach to writing theology, but I find that asking questions like this allows us to appreciate the many different theologies that are available to us in various Christian traditions.
The conclusion I’ve come to is that thinking about the end of the world offers us closure: the sort of closure that defines the meaningful extent of our world. As we think theologically about the end of the world, we are able to see the world that we face every day as a story that coheres for us.
A world can be personal and end in one’s death. It can be cultural and end in revolution, or genocide, or accommodation. It can be biological and end in extinction or adaptation. Traditionally eschatology concerned itself with a few particularly important world ends: the return of Jesus Christ at the end of the Church’s waiting for him, the Kingdom of God at the end of the age, or the human body resurrected to its end in blessedness and judgment. But even supposedly “secular” ends of the world can have a theological significance.
During the spring semester of 2024 I taught an advanced seminar titled “Eschatology in a Secular Age.” This was a good opportunity for me to dive into some important texts with a small group of talented North Park seminarians as I began the process of writing my book. (I still feel like I am at the beginning of this process! Finally finishing the book one day is also something of an eschatological hope.)
In the course we engaged with mostly theological, but also a few important non-theological accounts of the end of the world. For instance, we read David Wallace-Wells’ famous 2017 New York Magazine article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was the most-read article in the magazine’s history. What does a piece like this, which embraces an extremely pessimistic and dystopian climate future, tell us about the wages of human sin and our fear of a creation that is not life-giving? In the same week we read and discussed theologian Barbara Rossing’s essay “Reimagining Eschatology: Toward Healing and Hope for a World at the Eschatos.” How does reimagining the end as a healing of the earth allow us as believers to see the world, in all its precarity, through the lens of God’s saving work?
Eschatology is not everyone’s cup of tea. There are many examples of Christians who have abused their witness by speculating or scaremongering about the end of the world. And let’s face it: the end of the world is not a particularly uplifting topic. What continues to draw me to theological questions about eschatology, though, is the way that thinking about endings clarifies the work of divine love and wisdom in this world. A world that ends offers us closure, and purpose. A world with limits can inform our faith in the one who is eternal.
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