Anyone reading these on-line articles might wonder how the author has time and leisure to put them together. If they show signs of haste in their composition - that is entirely accurate! They have been pieced together at odd moments between other more pressing claims on my time. This particular conclusion to the series is hastily rattled out as my long-suffering wife prepares a meal in the kitchen, and before I must dash out to my evening, and she to hers.
This conclusion tries to summarise and draw together the main points of my theological travels in the previous four posts. I set the scene by looking at how eschatology has popularly, and more obscurely, been presented, and especially noted the rediscovery of an eschatological Christ with the (conjectured) rediscovery of the historical Christ.
I suggested that there is a broader backcloth against which we must view the historical Christ, who bore and spoke into not simply the concerns and expectations of 2nd Temple Judaism, but broader biblical themes to do with the renewal of creation, God’s covenant with creation, and that we must have regard for the unique operation of YHWH within the person of Christ.
I briefly enumerated the prevalent words and phrases which associate themselves with eschatology, and set these against the backcloth of Jesus’s entire history, which at each stage is presented as absolute, radical, and eschatological in character - before and beyond his death, reaching into times and events as yet unfulfilled.
I suggested that the particular eschatological phraseology so described was flexible and not used with any great precision by NT authors, so that it could be applied to any phase or stage of Jesus’s history, and was not confined to any one stage or event.
I looked in more detail at passages linking this phraseology with OT antecedents, and the presentation of Christ from the very origins of creation, through creation in history, to completion in and through himself. The coming of Christ was, in its broadest sense, the day of the Lord, spread out over his entire history. Diffuse OT promises and prophecy concerning Israel’s destiny were uniquely fulfilled in Christ and nowhere else, so that he alone provides a unifying key to the OT.
Christ was God’s plan for creation, and in Christ, creation is brought back onto the track intended for it by God. In Christ, creation’s destiny is fulfilled. In conjunction with creation’s destiny, I should have added that NT phrases in which the word "end" is included ("end of the age" etc) cluster around two Greek words: syntelia and telos. Both convey a sense of conclusion and goal. As such, both apply as much to Christ in his person, as to things he may have done in history. He is creation’s goal, towards which it is moving, and its end, or completion.
My conclusion is that eschatology, study of the eschaton, focuses uniquely on the person of Christ, ho eschatos, and finds its meaning in him. This is not to the exclusion of things that he did, and will still do, but we understand God’s purposes, and the story of the bible, if we understand Christ, and that all of God’s purposes were fulfilled, are being fulfilled and will be fulfilled in him.
Christ is the object and focus of God’s purposes, and the wisdom in whom the meaning of creation, its purpose and goal, are discovered. When we look to him, at whatever stage we may be considering his history, he is at that point the goal, and the end of creation. Creation finds its terminus in him. He is its apogee and consummation. He rules over it as Lord of creation. In him creation will be fulfilled, and find its purpose, and insofar as we find our identity and purpose in Christ, we also participate in God’s purposes for creation.
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