Eschatology is for the Curious

What happens to a person when someone dies? What will happen to the world as time marches on? These are the questions of eschatology, personal and historical or cosmic. Both elements of eschatology are found in the Bible. Yet the Bible has some interesting diversities about what it says about both.

One of America’s finest scholars on eschatology and apocalyptic is Greg Carey, and he turns to “public” theology in his newest book, Death, the End of History, and Beyond: Eschatology in the Bible. Greg Carey is an exceptionally clear writer who has honed his writing craft in order to speak to audiences broader than the academic guild. In reading this book I feel at times I’m listening in on his lectures at Lancaster Theological Seminary, too.

You will also discover that he does not have final answers on some of the questions that church folks ask, he’s not afraid to say he doesn’t know, and he loves to tap the note of the Bible and the ancient world’s diversity on all things eschatological. What you will also learn is that he knows his apocalyptic literature very well, and his specialty is the Book of Revelation. Because he grew up in the heartland of America’s conservative evangelical world, he knows the questions that provoke so many opinions today.

So eschatology deals with what happens to you and me when we die, or immediately after. It deals as well with whether the world is on an arc toward justice or whether, now more apocalyptic, God will step in, shake the world, and bring in new creation. Carey’s skill at thinking through eschatology is that he knows it also attends to the question about what is reality, what is ultimate. Eschatology ultimately then is about the nature and character of God. He’s got this so right. “Apart from God,” the God who bends history toward divine purposes and designs, “there is no eschatology.”

His angle is Christian, it is Protestant – he doesn’t label himself more than that so I will not either.

Think of funeral liturgies, as Carey does. Examine their language: are they literal? Evocative? Think too of biblical texts – like Matthew 27 where some came back to life at the death of Jesus. Or Paul, where sometimes he seems to suggest he’d be alive when Jesus returned (1 Thess 4:14-17) and other times that he would not be (Phil 1:21-23), and of course he knows not all agree with even those positions. Some believe in a future world because only then will justice be fully established for those who never experienced it. I admit this has been compelling to me at times.

What about the arc of history? Does not eschatology shape us to think that someday, somehow, some way God will make all things right? The God of the Bible, many of us believe, will not let history going in its injustice forever. God must bring things into the just world. What say you?

So there are millennial viewpoints. The premillennialist who thinks Jesus comes back and ushers in a 1000 year reign. The postmillennialist who operates more with a progressivism of justice achieved by humans and then Jesus will return.

Slipping into a lane or two over, Carey says neither of those are dominant in history but the majority think of eschatology not in millennial terms but in terms of inaugurated eschatology. I, too, don’t appreciate how many peg thinking in terms of the millennium. And, by the way, most people who talk about the millennium attribute to it features not at all found in the one passage about the millennium (Rev 20), and what is actually in that text is not at all found in those who talk about the millennium. Who is biblical now?

What is clear is that one’s eschatology can have a profound impact on one’s activism in this world. It is not true that premills vacate the public sector. But many are more pessimistic or skeptical than the postmills. ‘

Inaugurated eschatology, which I learned from George Ladd and Hermann Ridderbos, and I’d be keen to hear from whom Greg Carey first heard it, teaches that in the Jesus-event, in his resurrection, and in the Holy Spirit the future has broken into the present leaving a Now but Not Yet eschatology. Carey is right. More and more are landing here for how to frame their eschatology. Thank God.

And if you are looking for a brief introduction to apocalyptic, check out the end of his Introduction. You won’t find a much surer guide than Greg Carey.

In reading Death, the End of History, and Beyond, you will find that Carey respects Jewish Scripture for what it is and not for what it can be in the hands of Christian interpreters. He eschews what is typically called the theological interpretation of Scripture. How he works this out will be shown in posts to come. But, he wants to read the texts of the Bible theologically – that is, to mine them for what we can know about the Bible’s diverse ideas and how they can speak into our world, and not just into one’s own brand of Christianity. I don’t know many who do this better than Carey. He also engages wider literature on the themes he finds in the Bible – so the Bible is taken up into a wider discussion. His approach then is to offer suggestions rather than final answers. He will aim to make you curious.

Join us in reading this book.