Defining Eschatology

I cannot claim any part of the following analogy. My wife stumbled upon it in a social media group. In it someone had compared reading the Bible through the eyes of one particular school of “end times” thinking to reading Orwell’s Animal Farm without ever realizing or accepting that the whole thing is about the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin, Trotsky and Communism. Reading it literally and thinking it to be about talking animals on a literal farm—indeed, reading it a thousand times, and even memorizing every word of the book—would all do you no good in understanding a single page of it.

Such an analogy is not meant to suggest that under some other approach everything becomes as easy as pie. In fact, eschatology is hard. It is not because it is the most profound area of Christian truth. Theology proper receives that designation. Nor is it because the Bible has nothing to say about it that is literal, or “main and plain.” However, in tackling a subject that comes last and about a future that is not yet here, we often get ahead of ourselves and even put too much stock in the wrong sort of things to know. In making the subject accessible, we must start simple. Let us begin at the level of definition. What does the word “eschatology” even mean?

Etymology of Eschatology

Where did this word come from? The word eschatology has been said to have made its first appearance in an 1845 work Anastasis; or the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body, by one George Bush. However, the word was located in its Latin form within the 1644 Dogmatics of Philip Heinrich Friedlieb.1 Kim Riddlebarger writes that, “Eschatology is a combination of two Greek words, eschatos, ‘last,’ and logos, ‘the word,’ meaning ‘the doctrine of last things.’”2

This already creates a few problems, not the least of which is a point of contention from the skeptic. One of the most popular objections to the Bible is from those who say that Jesus and the Apostles clearly believed that the return of the Lord would happen in their lifetime. It did not. Consequently, these skeptics charge the Scriptures with error. Some dimensions of this will have to wait for later on in our study. For now I would only draw the reader’s attention to the use of “last things” in Scripture.

In his book, The Bible and the Future, Anthony Hoekema explains:

“The words ‘in the last days’ (en tais eschatais hēmerais) are a translation of the Hebrew words ‘acharey khen, literally afterwards. When Peter quotes these words [of Joel 2:28] and applies them to the event which has just occurred, he is saying in effect: ‘We are in the last days now.’”3

What is more, “When the expression is found in the singular, however (‘the last day’), it never refers to the present age but always to the age to come, usually to the Day of Judgment or the day of resurrection.” The same pattern is observed about the word “end” (synteleia), so that “end of the ages” (epi synteleia tōn aiōnōn) indicates the same as “last days,” whereas when used in the singular, “end of the age” (tēs synteleias tou aiōnos), it is specifically its termination point.4 This gives us more than a few hints that there is a reductionism of the concept of “last” that can feed skepticism and impoverish our own doctrine.

This would be a good place to say that my own approach will not be to mix apologetics in with eschatology. Late dates for this or that book in the canon (or exclusion from the canon) on the basis of the inclusion of prophecies will be out of court. Why? It is because those are conclusions that derive from the naturalistic premise that predictive prophecy is impossible. It would require a separate work of apologetics to refute that premise. Likewise with the aforementioned claim that the New Testament is invalidated by the alleged dashed hopes of Jesus and the Apostles. This obviously assumes that all such language about the “last things” can be reduced to this surface expectation. While we will not be interacting with the skeptic—this is a study of the doctrine for the believer—we will nevertheless be setting aside that latter reductionism as we go along. As one New Testament scholar has put it, the idea of “last days” and “end of the age” and so forth, has a lot more to do with qualitative matters than quantitative.

Another problem that emerges from shrinking our view of “last things” is cultivating disbelief in the eternal world as it enters the temporal world.  We may run into models that either over-naturalize or else over-spiritualize, others that under-realize with respect to the promise of the kingdom, and others that over-realize. It is important in this doctrine, just as with any other, not to form our view in pure reaction.

Herman Hoeksema wrote about eschatology as a loci in this way:

“It does not refer to the eternal things whatsoever. It refers to the end of the world and to the things that immediately precede the end and must lead to the end, but it does not apply to the new and eternal creation of God where the tabernacle of God will be with men.”5

I almost wonder how much of this insistence was driven by Hoeksema’s polemic against Neo-Orthodox eschatology in which Karl Barth and others pit eternity against time, the latter being “swallowed up” by the former.6 We can grant that Barth’s mode of speech was mired in obscurantism. We can also shun any vision of the future state where creaturely experience is no longer creaturely. But we don’t want to throw out the baby of creaturely participation in eternity with the bathwater of confusing the Creator and creature. Sometimes “last things” just means last things with respect to the timeline. Other times “last things” means last things with the causal end (telos) of all things in view.

At any rate, the Bible speaks in this “end of history orienting” way. Consider just three phrases used (altogether) in five passages.

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty” (2 Tim. 3:1; cf. Heb. 1:2) 

“He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but wwas made manifest in the last times for the sake of you” (1 Pet. 1:20; cf. Jd. 18)  

“Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour” (1 Jn. 2:18)

What signals a reductionism is when the whole subject is collapsed into a study of “end times,” as if that is a self-contained doctrine. The over-reaction of Hoeksema to the obscurantism of Barth is only one example of attempting to isolate eschatology for the sake of precision or even biblical faithfulness to this or that set of texts. Such will only over-simplify. In fact, eschatology cannot be properly understood without seeing at least some of its connections to other main doctrines or even underlying concepts within systematic theology.

Elements of a Well-Rounded Eschatology

Let us begin with protology. That is not a word we usually find as a header in theology. It is what I would rather call one of those “underlying concepts.” This just means the study of “first things.” We can see that relationship well enough between protos and eschatos, two Greek words signifying what comes first and what comes last on a linear progression. But what if the very nature of theology demands that last things had been “built into” first things?

Theologians such as Irenaeus, and biblical scholars such as G. K. Beale, have also gone as far as showing various ways that even the pre-fall revelation is eschatological, whether about Adam’s foreshadowing of Christ or Eden’s foreshadowing of the Final Temple. We will explore some of this in more detail. For now simply consider that if God is omniscient and omnipotent, and if the divine decree is one, it must follow—even on a minimalist relationship between protology and eschatology—that God would at least have accounted for all eventualities of the end in His design of the original creation of the world and of mankind.

If we take things further (as I would argue for), then God not only “took things into account,” but even designed the world and human beings in such a way that there is continuity in their original natures and those natures which will be perfected in the future state. This will also be true of the first movements of redemption in history. Consequently to study eschatology is also to study teleology. This just means the study of “goal-directed things.”  If God made all things for His glory (Rom. 11:36) and our good (Rom. 8:28), then all things would already be designed as such.

Note that this does not imply an original design that runs on its own toward that goal without respect to the fallen, redemptive, and the restorative elements that follow. Those two are “designed” as aspects of one grander design that, remember, is one in the eternal decree.

This immediately signals why teleology does not logically necessitate universalism with respect to salvation, nor evolution or progressivism with respect to natural life or social spheres. This singular telos is also inescapable from the perspective of biblical theology. The Scriptures are always speaking of two ages: this age and the age to come. The implication is always that something cataclysmic must enter in to positively end a dark force driving things in the first age. But this is not a divine reaction. It is not a Plan B. Creation, fall, redemption, and restoration are all of one divinely ordered trajectory.

A third concept to factor into eschatology is hamartiology. This comes from the Greek word for sin (hamartia). If we consider the very nature of the fall of man as bad and the restoration of all things as the obvious goal—starting immediately at Genesis 3:15—it becomes clearer that everything in the Bible thereafter is eschatological. The age to come is always spoken of as the resolution of all that belongs to sin and the curse. Paul opens off his letter to the Galatians speaking of Christ “who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age” (1:4). Furthermore, the advance of Christ’s kingdom is described by Paul as a series of subjecting enemies to the Son’s reign: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26). If death is the result of sin (Rom. 6:23), then the ultimate banishment of sin is crucial to eschatology.

This naturally leads to another aspect, namely soteriology. This is the doctrine of salvation. Eschatology traces out, among other things, salvation being brought to its fulfillment. Reformed theology has rightly excelled in its soteriological emphasis. Torn from its classical foundations, however, more modern Reformed thought has suffered from what I call a soteriological Gnosticism. In other words nature and grace are placed in a universal antithesis, so that no further distinctions are ever considered between, say, divinely designed nature as opposed to the sinful nature, or fallen nature.

A reconciling concept will help us escape such soteriological Gnosticism. In the gospel, grace perfects nature. That is the way that Aquinas put it. Bavinck is said to have echoed this, but with the more restrictive formula: grace restores nature. In the latter idea, God makes everything that is wrong right again. Whereas in the former idea, God makes all that was good even better.

Comparisons between the exact expressions attributed to Aquinas and Bavinck can become an exercise in splitting hairs. What matters is that we do not lose sight of a balance here as well. On the one hand, perfection is not a “rewind” or “reset,” but everlasting and ever-increasing blessedness. On the other hand, while “better” signifies an element of discontinuity, the element of continuity is important as well. For example, it is important for a believer to have hope that they will recognize their loved ones in the Lord. That they will indeed recognize each other implies continuity between the old creation and the new.

Soteriology reminds us in our eschatology that this perfected grace must be saving grace in Christ for it to be good news. As salvation is particularistic, so eschatology must be. No orthodox view can hold that things naturally get better—whether by common grace, or evolutionary processes, or ideology, or even by the church seizing the reigns of any of these. The very last act by Christ is described as a “salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:5); and so for us “to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come” (2 Thess. 1:10).

Finally our eschatology must always be rooted in Christology. One cannot have a kingdom without its King. Naturally, proponents of the different views on the millennium will charge each other with minimizing Christ. We will come to all of that. Certainly we can all at least agree that no such minimization should be done. All of our ordering in this doctrine is hollow without Christ at the center. He is called “the end” (telos) of the law (Rom. 10:4), but also Paul speaks of “his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:9-10). The attempt to understand eschatology better through the other loci of theology will be futile without seeing Christ as the center of each of them, or their resolution.

When we put all of these together we arrive at what Geerhardus Vos saw, in Paul’s eschatology, as an antithesis between the first and last man, and between the first and last world.7 When once this category is established in the mind, eschatology is no longer a last point (or series of points) at the end of a left-to-right sequence; but the invasion of the most real world into the rebel shadowlands. And, if it is not already clear, this goes most of the distance in answering the skeptical misunderstanding about Jesus and the Apostles expecting the end of all thing in their own day.

Distinction without Divorce

In saying that our eschatology would be simplistic without reference to these, we are not embracing the opposite mistake of conflating any of these with eschatology. Last things are not first things after all. To apply a common principle, if everything is eschatology, then nothing is!

On the other hand, a great many errors in this doctrine occur by neglecting some fairly obvious truths that one has not yet considered how to apply. This does not even get into elements of biblical theology and interpretive principles which may be too laborious to review when the goal is to get on with the more interesting and sensational. Be that as it may, we must consider those very things at the outset. Failure to set eschatology in that wider context is to begin with a different definition. It is to look at texts through a different lens.

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1. cf. Kenneth Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion (Chesnee, SC: Victorious Hope Publishing, 2009), 4.

2. Kim Riddlebarger, A Case for Amillennialism (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003), 17.

3. Anthony Hoekema, The Bible and the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 16.

4. Hoekema, The Bible and the Future, 19.

5. Herman Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 2 (Grandville, MI: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 2005), 425.

6. Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, II:428-436.

7. Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1991), 11-12.