Constructive and Critical Functions of Christian Eschatology

Abstract

The last two decades witnessed a boom of eschatology in theological discussions. It emerged mainly from the impact of Jürgen Moltmann's theology of hope. But a recovery of the eschatological concern in systematic theology has been due for some time, since Johannes Weiss' successful thesis of 1892 that Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God was not primarily a program for moral or social action, but had its roots in Jewish apocalypticism and envisaged a cosmic catastrophe that would occur when God in the imminent future would replace this present world by the new creation of his own kingdom without any human ado. Three decades later, in 1922, Karl Barth wrote in the second edition of his commentary on Romans: “A Christianity that does not thoroughly and without remainder consist of eschatology, would be thoroughly and totally devoid of Christ.” Strong words. And yet it proved difficult to reappropriate to modern theology the new exegetical insight concerning the basic importance of eschatology within the framework of Jesus' message and teaching. There was too deep a chasm separating the evolutionary outlook of the modern mind from the otherworldliness of apocalyptic expectations that focused on the imminent and catastrophic end of the present world. Thus it was no accident that Barth and Bultmann recovered the apocalyptic urgency of Jesus' message at the price of stripping it of its temporal prospect of a final future of this world. In 1964, Jürgen Moltmann aptly criticized such a detemporalization of eschatology for removing its very core. But the restoration of the apocalyptic outlook towards future fulfillment in Moltmann's own work turned out to focus more on certain political consequences, which he and his followers derived from the eschatological hope, than on the transcendent content of the biblical hope itself. Concerning the basis of eschatological faith in Moltmann's work, John Hick could pass the somewhat harsh verdict: “that basis is in practice relegated to the periphery of his thought and reduced to a mere uncritical use of biblical mythology” to the effect that “all the problems facing Christian eschatology in the twentieth century are systematically ignored.”

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