The end times
Lustig, Andrew
OF SEVERAL MINDS ANDREW LUSTIG THE END TIMES Coming soon? An Advent reflection Christian mysticism has often proved confusing and divisive, hardly a surprise, according to one wag, since it...
...It also fails to resolve other uncertainties for those of us who toil in the vineyard of Christian ethics...
...We are called to do God's work as we await his coming in the fullness of time...
...As Jaroslav Pelikan observes, "Not merely death but all the major themes of eschatology...must be reckoned as unfinished business for many supposedly secularized moderns, for any public reference to them inevitably evokes a giggle...
...Eschatology, as the study of "last things" (from the Greek ta eschata), is obviously a serious subject, and well represented in the liturgical readings of this Advent season...
...the eschatological horizon of faith recedes apace with the passage of time...
...Linking "eschatology" with "humor," I found jokes aplenty, some of them amusing...
...A brief survey of several sites revealed a heady variety of perspectives about when Jesus will return and which current events are the portents of his coming...
...The eschatological thrust of Christian hope, the "already" but "not yet" character of the kingdom inaugurated by Christ, provides the central dynamic for social and political change...
...Scott Lewis, in his survey of recent scholarship on New Testament apocalyptic, concludes that the "consensus" of current thought affirms eschatology as central to Jesus' teaching...
...There can be no quietism, no reactionary traditionalism, no retreat from the world...
...Eschatology is surely a topic of real celebrity...
...Apocalyptic visions of an imminent eschaton were staples of early Christianity...
...Enough with levity...
...Schweitzer's account of Jesus' message as an "interim ethic" seems unduly dismissive by today's exegetical standards...
...The challenges to maintaining an active hope seem endless...
...Answers are not easy to come by, and fundamental differences of interpretation emerge, depending on whether one connects or separates eschatology and ethics...
...Still, we wonder about the applicability of Jesus' words to pressing practical concerns-to questions of pacifism and just war, social justice and human rights, political prudence and pluralistic accommodation...
...Granted, some of us who endured the cold-war years remember the duck-and-cover drills in our youth, and all of us who live after September 11 have weathered the rhetoric of fear at the heart of one party's message during the recent presidential campaign...
...In recent decades, the work of Protestant theologian Jiirgen Moltmann has been especially prominent...
...It is not that we hasten the eschaton with good works...
...Yet as (post)mod-erns, living two millennia after John baptized Jesus, how shall we make sense of such passages...
...And we are, of course, existentially aware of our individual last things...
...The list of scholarly contributors to that discussion includes a pantheon of twentieth-century theologians and exegetes from Schweitzer to Hans Kiing...
...I am natively skeptical of literalist blueprints (or perhaps anxious, apropos of Pelikan's point), so I sought laughter in my second search...
...Such laughter, as the truism goes, reveals deeper anxieties...
...Yet we are not to grow weary...
...That said, the puzzle remains for anyone interested in applying an eschatologically charged ethic to a world that has lasted long past the first generation of Christians...
...A single example: How many charismatics does it take to change a light bulb...
...This existential turn is one familiar to German New Testament scholar and theologian Rudolf Bultmann and his disciples...
...in Googling the term, I registered more than one hundred sixty-five thousand immediate hits...
...Soon enough, we'll shuffle off this mortal coil...
...The story of Christ's first coming is linked to visions of a second Advent...
...One, but he'll definitely have to alter his eschatology...
...From creation through the eschaton, grace always remains God's initiative...
...According to Moltmann, "[FJrom first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope...
...But as church, we proleptically anticipate and represent the universal character of God's saving will for all creation...
...The end that early Christians saw as imminent is indefinitely postponed...
...In familiar words from Luke, Jesus describes how "dreadful" will be the last days (21:23), with "signs in the sun, moon, and stars" (21:25), and the "Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory (21:27...
...An Advent reflection Christian mysticism has often proved confusing and divisive, hardly a surprise, according to one wag, since it begins in mist and ends in schism...
...Ever since the publication of Albert Schweitzer's The Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1906, scholars and activists alike have questioned the connections between eschatology and ethics in Christian thought and practice, between the notion that God will arrive in his own good time, and our own responsibilities in the world as we await the "new heaven and new earth...
...But for many of us, eschatol-ogy is an equally mysterious and off-putting term...
...soon enough, we'll know the afterlife...
...we feel compelled to attend to them, as such, to acccommodate them...
...But, in its individual focus, it lacks a corporate or ecclesial dimension...
...We understand the meaning and the power of "apocalyptic" language, that vague sense of foreboding about coming disaster, perhaps imminent, perhaps of global proportions...
...I know of no comparable barb directed at es-chatology, nor am I clever enough to invent one...
...Death and finitude prompt musings about the world to come...
...The world continues...
Vol. 131 • December 2004 • No. 21
