Eschatology

Last things, already begun

The word comes from the Greek eschatos (ἔσχατος), ‘last’. Eschatology asks where history is going and what awaits each of us. It has a personal side, what happens when we die (the intermediate state), and a cosmic side: the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the body, the last judgment and the new heavens and new earth.

Yet the New Testament does not push the last things into a distant future. With Christ the end has already broken in. God has spoken to us by his Son "in these last days" (Hebrews 1:2), and at Pentecost Peter announced that the outpoured Spirit was the gift Joel had promised for "the last days" (Acts 2:17). The kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed has come near, and his resurrection is the first instalment of the resurrection of his people.

But each in his own turn: Christ the firstfruits; then at His coming, those who belong to Him. Then the end will come, when He hands over the kingdom to God the Father after He has destroyed all dominion, authority, and power.

1 Corinthians 15:23-24

So Christians live between the times. Death still comes and evil still works, and the church waits for "the blessed hope and glorious appearance of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13). Many theologians sum up this tension as ‘already and not yet’. John Wesley, reaching the day when God will be all in all, stops there: "This is the end. Even an inspired apostle can see nothing beyond this." Wesley

The church's hope

The creeds carry this hope from the beginning. The Apostles' Creed confesses that the ascended Christ "shall come to judge the quick and the dead" Apostles' Creed, and the Nicene Creed closes with it.

We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Nicene Creed

Medieval preachers gathered the subject under the ‘four last things’: death, judgment, heaven and hell. The name ‘eschatology’ is usually traced to seventeenth-century Lutheran theology, and it came into common use in the nineteenth century.

Where Christians differ

The centre is shared. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians confess together that Christ will return bodily and in glory, raise the dead, judge the world and make all things new. The differences lie around that centre. Evangelicals themselves read the millennium of Revelation 20 in several ways, premillennial, postmillennial and amillennial, and dispensational premillennialists expect a rapture of the church before the tribulation. The ecumenical creeds settle none of this, and no reading of it is a test of faith.

On the state of the dead, the Catholic Church teaches purgatory, which Protestants reject, and a minority of Christians hold that the dead sleep, unconscious, until the resurrection. The nature of hell, whether endless conscious punishment or final destruction, has also been debated.

Every tradition, though, has to reckon with Jesus' words: "No one knows about that day or hour" (Matthew 24:36). Eschatology is not given to feed curiosity or to fix dates, but to shape the way we live now: "everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as Christ is pure" (1 John 3:3). For more, see the lesson Christ’s return and the millennium and When will the end come?