Last Things Last

For many of us, "eschatology" is one of those fancy words that theologians toss around to intimidate the uninitiated. A plain English definition of eschatology is intimidating enough. It means the study of the "last things."

Eschatology is usually concerned with the biblical themes of the end of history, the return of Christ, the final judgment, and the establishment of God's reign. Activist Christians tend to concentrate on the important task of shaping a faithful discipleship around more immediate issues and concerns. As a result, any talk of the last things is often labeled the kind of abstract theological exotica that only serves as a way to avoid more concrete questions of commitment.

But eschatology is not just an obscure subdivision of Christian theology. From the time of the earliest prophets' vision of the messianic age of righteousness and peace, eschatology has been at the very center of biblical faith. Jesus' first message, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand," and his many parables about the coming of the kingdom, were deeply concerned with eschatology.

Confidence in Christ's ultimate victory animated the witness of the early Christians as they sought to live as the first fruits of what the apostle Paul called the "new creation." The allegory of Christ's ultimate triumph over the powers of sin and death contained in the Revelation of John recalled and rekindled that confidence when it began to flag in a later era of severe persecution.

The whole of the biblical witness tells the story of God's efforts to redeem human history and bring it to fulfillment. The role of the people of God in this story is to be both the agent of God's redemptive activity and a living model of the new creation. We are called to live in the kingdom here and now even as we await its fulfillment and spread its good news.

A full understanding of biblical eschatology is central to Christian faith; therefore, distortions of the biblical witness around these themes are especially dangerous. One such distortion that has recurred persistently in the past century is the liberal tendency to believe that the kingdom of God evolves naturally as a result of human effort. We have seen repeatedly how easily this line of thought can lead to a form of idolatry as some human undertaking comes to be worshiped in place of the God who judges all our efforts. The liberal view can also lead to bitter disillusionment when our favorite human projects inevitably falter.

Today the most prominent and probably the most dangerous distortion of biblical teaching about the last things comes from the theological and political Right. The worldview that has become popular in those circles sees the war, hunger, and injustice of our age—even the threat of nuclear war—as the necessary prelude to the end of history. This view reads the apocalyptic writings from various eras of biblical history as referring directly to our times. Key passages are given a simplistic interpretation that conveniently fits a right-wing, American, nationalist view of current events.

We and many of our friends have increasingly confronted this distorted apocalypticism in the churches, especially in our work concerning the nuclear arms issue. Some varieties of this popularized eschatology portray nuclear war as the fire God will use to destroy the earth in the last days. Thus the prospect of killing hundreds of millions of innocent people becomes not something to be avoided and condemned, but a fate that the redeemed will avoid and that the unsaved apparently deserve.

When you are convinced that things are foreordained to get worse until the Lord returns within the next decade, there is little incentive to be a peacemaker or to act on any other moral concern. The rage for end-time prediction is becoming widespread and having a destructive impact in many parts of the church.

As Christians, we believe the promise of Scripture that the last things will indeed come. But Scripture also teaches us that all we can know with any certainty about the last things is that they will come last, as an unearned and unexpected gift from God. In the meantime our jog, as seen in Jesus' parable of the bridesmaids (Matthew 25:1-13), is to keep the light of God's love for this world shining no matter how long or dark the night.

Danny Duncan Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.