Review: The Future as God's Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology - by Jürgen Moltmann
(from the Introduction) Retiring as professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, The Coming of God is Jürgen Moltmann’s final installment to his five-volume “Contributions to Theology” series. Divided into five main sections, the book seeks to answer four primary questions: how does hope relate to eternal life? What is hope in relation to God’s kingdom? How does hope relate to the new heaven and new earth? Finally, what is glory’s hope for God? The author ultimately aims to integrate individual, universal, historical, and natural eschatology into a unified whole. In the end, Moltmann’s eclectic eschatology provides wonderful insights and offers a much-needed reminder about the ecological and cosmic dimensions of eschatology. While not always defensible, his eschatological schema is an important corrective for those eschatologies that ignore social justice or focus entirely on future dispensations.
Reviews in Religion and Theology, 2006
0), xxxiv + 475 pp., pb £20.00 This important volume contains three reports published in the last two decades from the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England: We Believe in God (1987), We Believe in the Holy Spirit (1991), and The Mystery of Salvation (1995), together with an excellent foreword by Stephen Sykes, who chaired the Commission from 1997 to 2003, and a comprehensive index of all three texts. As productions of Commissions of the Church of England, these texts take their place in a series of such reports written since 1976, but are especially significant inasmuch as they are all unanimous reports and attempt to present a systematic teaching of their respective doctrinal loci. As such they represent significant documents for the Anglican Communion, and further, witness to an ecclesial body's attempt to address the fundamental question of the relationship of theology and church. Sykes' foreword contextualizes the work of the Commissions within Anglican teaching and theology, and the disciplines of 20th century philosophy and theology in general. Further, Sykes in particular takes up the position of the reports vis-à-vis contemporary problematics in theology-he mentions trinitarian theology, God's impassibility, and the use of scripture in particular-before considering their status as official publications of the Church of England. We Believe in God sets the tone for all three books, and it is important here to register their presentation: they are not given as technical theology texts; they do not attempt to be comprehensive; they are not confessions or 'articles'. They are instead explorations of the life of faith, a fact that is deeply germane, for they are explicitly pastoral in the attempt to speak to the church at large while at the same time attending to contemporary scholarly concerns. We Believe in God lays a broad foundation by discussing methodological and epistemological issues before turning to three chapters on God, Jesus, and the apostolic faith as found in the scriptures (the focus on the Bible alone is notable throughout the reports). The final three chapters then present a pastoral doctrine of God known through prayer and encounter, before finishing with 'The God in whom we trust'-a meditation on sovereignty, suffering, and faith. I highlight here the chapter on the Trinity-the report presents the doctrine of the Trinity as a subject to be considered through prayer, consonant with early
Th eology's future Readers who are familiar with the recent history of theology (and who know that there is nothing new under the sun) will recognize the title of this introduction as an echo of Harvey Cox's 1967 dictum: 'Th e only future that theology has . . . is to become the theology of the future. ' 1 Amid the heady atmosphere of the late 1960s, Harvey Cox's confi dent pronouncement had the aura of an axiomperhaps the only axiom that theology required. Th e mood of the times demanded theologies that made a clean break with the past, taking full advantage of 'the present Götterdämmerung of the divinities of Christendom' to make an entirely fresh start, interring the corpse of the 'dead God' of metaphysical theism and awaiting the emergence of the new God who would replace him. 2 Cox's reference to 'the theology of the future' was in part a gesture in the direction of the eschatologically oriented theologies of Wolfh art Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann, which had just begun to make an impact in the Englishspeaking world. 3 But it was also (and more basically) an expression of the perennial modernizing agenda of North American liberalism. Th e kind of theology that Cox and his contemporaries prescribed was a theology that surfed the waves of modernization and secularization, seeking to bring Christian faith into line with 'the mode of consciousness which mankind, if not as a whole at
This PowerPoint presentation on the sixth of the six loci (Biblical doctrines) of historic Christian systematic theology, Eschatology, is an Overview, an abbreviated version, of that section in the accompanying larger and unabridged PowerPoint (PPT) program, “Essential Christianity: Historic Christian Systematic Theology—With a Focus on Its Very Practical Dimensions, Including God’s Answers to Our Great Questions of Life—for Now and Eternity.” Ask the class to read the larger, unabridged, version; this Overview; or at least the accompanying Abridged Overview with highlighting prior to the class session. Provide opportunities for discussion of any of the subjects in the unabridged version, the Overview, or Abridged Overview, and/or related subjects, especially contemporary implications and applications of the Biblical content. The large unabridged, the Overview, and the Abridged Overview PPTs of Eschatology are for the eighth session of a nine-week course for adults and advanced youth classes (i.e., for all young people who want to seriously study the basis and content of their faith—the essence and most important part of their emerging adult identity—as formed by Biblical theology), which offers an introductory overview of historic Christian systematic theology with an emphasis on its many practical applications. This PPT introduces the doctrine of Eschatology, the doctrine of the last things, the sixth of the six doctrines, or loci, of systematic theology. This locus (doctrine) answers this basic question: What will occur at the end—the end of my life, and the end of history? For further information on each subject in this course, the teachers and students can access the unabridged PPT, Essential Christianity: Historic Christian Systematic Theology, on the Christian Theology page of the author’s general Website at https://fromacorntooak12.com/ or on his academic Website at https://seelyedward.academia.edu/research. Each of the PowerPoint presentations is written in an expanded sentence outline format in order to provide a stand-alone resource for teachers, students, and others, including those using it for independent study and/or devotional purposes. Week nine is for a review and discussion of matters the class wants to address. See also the related loci, doctrines, on this Website.
Eschatology Now: The Catholic Case
2020
Western Christianity takes many different forms. Within this diversity, the Roman Catholic Church maintains, arguably in defeasible ways, a particular continuity with the beliefs handed down, and reflected on, more or less from the beginning of Christianity. Denzinger's Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations of Matters of Faith and Morals provides a witness to that continuity. The current edition begins with a letter attributed to Clement of Rome (92 CE) and concludes with Benedict XVI's eschatological reflections in an encyclical letter on hope (2007). Considered as a case study, where does the Church stand now on questions about the last things? The largest and most centralised Christian denomination in the world, Catholicism is marked by a firm insistence on its conception of tradition grounded in Scripture, bolstered by a strong but dubious belief in an infallible authority vested in the Pope and general councils on matters of faith and morals. It has a powerful centralised teaching magisterium consisting of the Pope, assisted by the congregations of the Vatican Curia and by rare general Councils (a total of just three in the last 400 years). There are also many Catholic University Theology Faculties, especially in Europe and the United States, and numerous theologians whose research appears in scholarly journals. In considering eschatological themes since Vatican II, my focus will bear on official Church teaching in response to a crisis provoked by new ideas in the field. While not engaging directly in theological debate, * * * Joseph Ratzinger's Response Writing with reference to the 1979 CDF Letter, Joseph Ratzinger, hitherto Professor of Theology at Regensburg, maintained that the seeds of a crisis in eschatology, and Catholic theology generally, were sown as early as 1943. 9 His reference is to Pope Pius XII's encyclical letter (Divino afflante Spiritu) on the interpretation of Scripture. Denzinger's Compendium records the letter with an editorial note: After the painful controversies that preceded it, this encyclical affirms the theological suitability of the historical-critical investigation of Sacred Scripture. In this way, it provides modern exegesis with a legitimate home in the Catholic Church. (Denzinger, § §3825-3831, 779) Regarding the literary genres in the Bible, the letter observed, Let the interpreter, then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research, endeavour to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources P. CRITTENDEN