Futuristic and Realized Eschatology in the Earliest Stages of Christianity

Abstract

OF the most important results, full of consequences for the historical investigation of the New Testament, was the recognition, established toward the end of the nineteenth century, that the imminent coming of the rule of God and of the end of the world had been of fundamental importance for the thinking of primitive Christianity. Naturally this is not to assert that up to that point no one had been aware of the presence in the New Testament of an expectation of the imminent end of things. Numerous New Testament texts speak too clearly of this fact for it to have gone unnoticed. Hugo Grotius had already called attention to Paul's conviction that he would experience the final judgment even in his lifetime.? Granted, Grotius drew only chronological conclusions from this exegetical observation. A century later, however, the English deist Matthew Tindal, in his Christianity As Old As the Creation: Or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (1730), made the more inclusive observation that in almost all the writings of the New Testament the conviction existed that the end of the world was near, and that the early Christians had based their ethical admonitions on this conviction. "But, if most of the Apostles. .. were mistaken in a matter of this consequence, how can we be certain that any one of them may not be mistaken in any other matter?"2 Tindal therefore identified the expectation of an early end of things as the fundamental view of almost the whole of early Christianity and concluded that because this expectation was not fulfilled, the apostles could have been mistaken also in other points. When G. E. Lessing published Von Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jiinger (1778) by the Hamburg gymnasium professor H. S. Reimarus (taken from the unpublished Apologie oder Schutzschrift fiir die verniinftigen Verehrer Gottes), these deistic observations became known in German-speaking lands.3 Reimarus' point of view was that Jesus had proclaimed the nearness of the messianic kingdom of the Jews. However, both because Reimarus presented this point of view in the context of a historical construction that was fantastic and because it was so different from the traditional conception of the preaching of Jesus, that is, a teaching laid down for all time, Reimarus' contemporaries were not convinced that Jesus expected an early end of things. D. F. Strauss, too, considered it only probable that Jesus expected his own return.4 Even Albert Schweitzer did not notice that A. Schwegler in his presentation of the post-Apostolic age (1846) pointed to "the general expectation of the immedi

Dislocating the Eschaton? Appraising Realized Eschatology

“…The adjectives that have been used to qualify different varieties of eschatology are numerous. Aside from the commonplace 'apocalyptic eschatology', divisible into the 'eschatology of woe' and the 'eschatology of bliss' (Dodd 1936b: 71-72), further examples include the following: 'ethical eschatology' (Schweitzer 1914: 115;Crossan 1998: 287), 'futuristic eschatology' (Kümmel 1963), 'inaugurated eschatology' (Florovsky 1972: 36;Hunter 1973: 94-96), 14 'philosophical eschatology' (Dhavamony 1999: 255), 'potentially present eschatology' (Caragounis 2001: 130-131), 'present [or presentist] eschatology' (Ellis 1965;cf. Kümmel 1959), 'proleptic eschatology' (Martin 1939), 15 'sublimated eschatology' (Martin 1939: 88) and 'transmuted eschatology' (Dobschütz 1910: 150).…”