Applicability of Eschatology

Much ink, physical and virtual (including on this site), has been spilt discussing, making light of, or just plain despairing over the modern American obsession with the “end times”. An obsession American evangelical Christianity seems intent on infecting the rest of the world with.

Even if one discards the recent theology or paradigm of dispensationalism, it’s still easy to get hung up on, well the end of all things.

Whether or not the issue is even applicable to Christians can boil down into another one of those interesting divides of what we believe versus what we say we believe. One of the most profound experiences for me of the past year is coming to grips with the implications of things I had supposedly professed all my life.

With that preface, I’d point to a recent blog post by the exceptionally gifted Fr. Stephen Freeman. It’s long enough that I want to give an excerpt but short enough that it’s a bit hard to know where to select. I’ll take a stab and exhort to read the whole thing.

And yet, all of these events added together do not make for the time of the Apocalypse. Though it is always true that every day brings the end of history nearer to us, Christians are not bidden to live as the prisoners of history. Rather, having been translated from this world “into the Kingdom of His dear Son” (Colossians 1:13), we have transcended the prison of history and live increasingly in the freedom of the age to come. Every sacrament of the Church, and the Church herself, is a participation in the age to come. Thus the gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church because in Christ, we have already prevailed against those gates ourselves. Pascha cannot be undone.

Having said this, we cannot make the culture to cease its efforts to sell Christians fear and to market the Apocalypse like any other horror genre.

We are assured in Scripture that:

But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thess. 5:1-9)…

Modern evangelical tradition has taken this verse as an excuse to support its morbid fascination with constant wrangling over the meaning of various Biblical prophecies, with the idea that we are not overtaken as theives in the coming of our Lord, because we have grasped some rational scheme of Biblical interpretation.

In truth, we are not overtaken as theives because we are children of the light and children of the day - that is we already to an extent live in the age to come. It is only the light of that Day that can illumine in us the reality of its coming, which is why we may arm ourselves with faith and love and the hope of salvation, being assured by the brightness of that Day which shines in our hearts that God has not appointed us to wrath.

These things are spiritually (noetically) known and are not revealed by mere rationality.

If I were to offer an indictment of the failings of “growing up goddy” as expressed so often on this site, it would be, that on a core foundational level, the conceptual Christianity we grew up with was missing the point.