the beginning and the end

In 1931, the Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper commented that

“The conflict (today) is not between faith and science, but between the assertion, that the cosmos as it exists today, is either in a normal or abnormal condition. If it is normal, then it moves by means of an eternal evolution from its potencies to its ideal. But if the cosmos in its present condition is abnormal, then a disturbance has taken place in the past, and only regenerating power can warrant it the final attainment of its goal. This, and no other is the principal antithesis, which separates the thinking minds in the domain of Science into two opposite battle-arrays.”

We’re wary of eschatology - it sounds like Tim Wahey’s retarded Left Behind series. But we’re all familiar with archaeology...

- Arche means ‘beginning’ so archaeology is about how things begin
- Eschaton means ‘final/end’ so eschatology is about how things end

John Gray says ‘our only real religion is a shallow faith in the future; and yet we have no idea what the future will bring’ (161). But everyone has an eschatology, and most of them are hopeless – what do you expect?

• Nihilism (nothing is God): things really do end. For better or worse, game over. The cosmos dies a heat death; history is literally heading nowhere. As Ecclesiastes put it, “Everything is meaningless”
• Pantheism (everything is God): things never end. History is cyclical, life and death, good and bad, Ying & Yang, just go on forever. As Ecclesiastes put it, “There is nothing new under the sun”
• Deism (God is nowhere to be seen): the end is escape. If you can, get out of this cosmos to wherever God is, but as Ecclesiastes put it, “God is in heaven, you are on earth, so…shut up”.

Hopeless eschatologies are miserable comforters, but hear Job’s song for the deaf:

I know that my redeemer lives, and in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself – my eyes shall behold and not another – how my heart faints within me! (Job 19:25)

The Old Testament's hope was resurrection, and the New Testament's Christian is someone who lives in the age to come. I remember being surprised when someone first showed me the vision the bible ends with - what does it remind you of?

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. (Revelation 21)

For me, Biblical eschatology stands out…the end is a new beginning. It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life…(sing it Simone!) What’s new? Hendrickson comments on this passage:

‘The word used in the original implies that it was a ‘new’ but not an ‘other’ world [the original has kaine not neos]. It is the same heaven and earth but gloriously rejuvenated…Nature comes into its own’

Its more than a cosmic mulligan: the sea's gone (NB Apocalyptic imagery pictures what you wouldn't immediately see, not what you would). This is OT picture language, where again and again the sea was a place of darkness, confusion, threat: of chaos over which God ruled and through which God saved. Revelation pictures beasts as coming out of the sea, and in the passage just before this one, the sea gives up its dead. But here it’s gone altogether. In other words, nothing will threaten God’s purposes any more, nothing will spoil God's new world. I guess biblical eschatology is kinda like a new architecture: same stuff, but a whole new order of things.

“Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away" He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21:3-4)

Commenting on 2nd century tendencies to see eschatology as primarily a retributive matter of legal rewards and punishment, Michael Green and Graeme Goldsworthy both lament that Gnosticism (spirit good/matter bad) and Marcionism (NT Good God/OT Bad God) were undermining the Old Testament theology of creation as cosmos, not chaos. Significantly, that theology underlies the biblical wisdom literature.

So Proverbs discern order: the wise/righteous flourish, but compare Psalms 1 & 73: the fool/wicked may flourish and (Job) the wise/righteous suffer. Ecclesiastes sees death make a mockery of all “wisdom”. God's created order has, in Goldsworthy's words, been invaded, hidden and confused...but is still found in all manner of places. Biblicaly, wisdom is both a response and a vocation: a response to a cosmos, a call to a new (but not another) cosmos. The first witnesses to the resurrection must have looked back to Isaiah 65-66 and looked forward to a future packed with hope: the death & resurrection of Jesus relativised the here and now.

‘We are citizens of a world which does not yet appear, and at the same time we must go on living in a world to which we have become aliens’ (Gospel & Wisdom)

That's why Christian faith is essentially believing a promise about the future, and...that's why it's hard.