Abstract
Scientific pictures of the world’s future portray a definite endpoint to life as we know it. How do we think about this reality theologically in relation to Christian hope? What do these visions of “the end” mean in relation to our understanding of divine purposes (ends)? A robust Christian eschatology includes honest grappling with these difficult questions.
Introduction
There seems to be a general reluctance on the part of many theologians to take a serious look at the scientific picture regarding the end of the world. While Christian theology has regularly affirmed the finitude of the creation and its state of being “not God,” it has seemed to back away from scientific confirmations of creation’s finitude. From the scientific community we have learned that even if human beings do not themselves put an end to life on earth through environmental destruction or nuclear annihilation, and even if plate tectonics and asteroids do not disrupt the earth’s capacity to support life, there is still an inescapable endpoint in our future when the star that is our sun uses up its energy, and “heat death” consumes our solar system. Whether it all ends “with a bang or a whimper,” we face an ending to life as we know it.
Perhaps the reluctance among theologians to take up the scientific picture of “the end” is lodged in the threat to meaning that this picture seems to pose. However, even if we grant that the scientific picture may pose a threat to meaning, theologians are not thereby excused from regarding it with utmost seriousness. Apart from honesty and realism, Christian hope may appear to be little more than “a consoling fantasy that somehow death is an illusion.” 1 With the end of the world squarely in view, how do we think about the central Christian affirmation that “in life and in death we belong to God”? 2
The time is right for entering a genuine conversation about the “endings” science pictures and their theological import. Ted Peters observed some time ago that religion and science dialogues evolved from a “methodological phase” to a “physics phase” and are now moving into a “theological phase.” 3 In this “theological phase” we have recognized that both theology and science share in common a quest for truth and for more adequate ways of understanding and describing reality—seen and unseen. Each also has an interest in a “realistic” eschatology that may ground meaning and hope in the face of finitude—both personal and cosmic. This encounter may yield a much needed and most welcome mutual illumination. For a profitable interaction, both fields will be required to enlarge their perspectives. Theologians will need to open their claims to more public forms of evaluation, rather than engage in special pleading that might shield them from critique and investigation from science. 4 The sciences are similarly challenged by eschatological symbols to expand the scope of inquiry. Scientists may themselves ask questions regarding the “meaning” that may attend their discoveries. Furthermore, each field will need to acknowledge how it is caught up in a “hermeneutical circle” in which the “what” and the “how” of knowing are inextricably related. In this endeavor, we acknowledge that how we know things must accord with their nature, and that their nature is revealed in what we know of them. 5
This essay will review scientific accountings of the world’s demise, suggest a constructive way forward, and then engage ideas from several theologians. Karl Barth, Miroslav Volf, Jürgen Moltmann, and process theology all bring insights that illumine this inquiry.
Ends and Endings
As a first step in the discussion, I would like to propose a broader frame for this exploration. 6 Christian theology, it seems to me, does well to shift its eschatological discourse to include not only particular “endings” but also contemplation of divine “ends.” The distinction is between terminus (end as endpoint) and telos (end as goal or purpose), between destination and destiny. Inquiry into God’s purposes frames the discourse on eschatology differently. Theologically, the subject of eschatology may even be said to be less about the end and more about the beginning—the commencement of the new creation. In this sense, the end is the beginning (Endzeit ist Urzeit).
This broader frame recasts things, but it does not avoid the question at hand. What can new creation really mean in the face of the end of the world? According to the scientific community, life on this planet—if it survives long enough—will have a definite ending when the sun has completed its life cycle. The fact that there is such an endpoint must challenge and deepen our reflection upon divine ends. What is the meaning and purpose of it all? A sense of meaning and purpose is important for human flourishing; it engenders hope and a “zest for life.” The hope that is needed in our day is a hope that is greater than hope for a modest amelioration of our present circumstances. There is also a need for a hope that is closer at hand—more tangible and immediate than Teilhard de Chardin’s far off “Omega Point.” 7 It is within this wider horizon of divine ends and Christian hope that I turn to consider particular scientific pictures of “the end of the world.”
The End of the World
Scientific accountings project a whole range of scenarios that anticipate the world’s demise. Any one of these may mean the end of life as we know it. 8 Interestingly, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, all the way back in his 1970s book Choice of Catastrophes, catalogued the possibilities very accurately. 9 While there has been some revision of the details and timelines since then, the major prospects present themselves in this early work.
On the most immediate horizon historically and locally, there is the very real prospect that human beings will destroy life as we know it. With the development of the atomic bomb, the human situation changed overnight. All succeeding generations “now live out our lives under the Damocles sword of the bomb.” 10 With the proliferation of nuclear weapons—the non-proliferation pact has been largely ignored—more than twenty nations possess nuclear weapons. As nations arm themselves and tensions and terrorism mount, the threat is palpable. When an asteroid fell near the Chelyabinsk region of Russia in 2013, some people thought it was a nuclear attack. 11 We now live in a time when a large part of the human race can be destroyed in a few hours, so that the apocalyptic language of “living in the end times” takes on a quite literal cast.
Equally disastrous is the devastation evident from human ecological irresponsibility. The “ecological end time” is “the end time in slow motion.” 12 Pollution of air, land, and water, deforestation, habitat destruction, species extinction, and climate change combine to signal the ending of life as we know it, if we continue on our present course. Some scientists speculate that we have already passed the tipping point with global warming and are even now in an irreversible situation. Astrophysicist Martin Rees gives a fifty-fifty chance of human survival to the end of this century. 13 The most imminent threat he sees is ecological. Those who say we will relocate to another planet when we have destroyed this one are drawing huge blank checks on unknown accounts.
Climate change adversely affects all life on Earth. Photograph: Polar bear with two cubs. Photo Credit: Global Book Publishing/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.
The prospects of nuclear annihilation and ecological destruction are to a large extent in our hands and can and should be addressed. The scenarios that follow, however, are arranged in order of lessening possibility for human intervention. In the middle range are pandemic diseases resulting from viral or bacterial mutations including but not limited to Ebola 14 and HIV/AIDS. We cannot prevent their arising, but we can put in place strategies of prevention, containment, and medical remediation.
We have less control over various other natural disasters of global proportions. Recurring tectonic shifts can result in earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. Moving a bit farther out from earth itself, asteroids threaten. As of 1994 there have been 140 terrestrial impact craters. The largest, in Yucatan, Mexico, is a crater of about 180 kilometers formed about sixty-five million years ago by an asteroid of at least ten kilometers in diameter. When it crashed to Earth, it released more than one hundred million megatons of energy. There is good evidence that this asteroid’s impact caused or substantially contributed to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species. Of the five major mass extinctions in the fossil record, at least three of these may have had asteroid or comet impact as a contributing factor. 15
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is working on technologies for predicting and deflecting asteroid impacts. However, further out in time and space there exists a solar time bomb. Earth will not survive the coming cataclysm of solar changes. The sun is about five billion years old and has another five billion years to go. Once the hydrogen in the core burns up, the hydrogen at the shell will begin to burn. Then our sun it will become a “red giant” and expand to envelop the inner planets. This will result in “heat death.” 16 Thus, a move to another planet in our solar system (as a recommended remedy to ecological devastation) is not a realistic solution. It is a case of “you can run, but you cannot hide.”
On the largest scale of all there is the fate of the universe as a whole. At present, it seems that the competing effects of expansion and gravity are evenly balanced. 17 If either comes to predominance, the result will be an ending to the universe itself. If expansion predominates, the universe will eventually evanesce, growing steadily more dilute and colder. If gravity predominates, the universe will recoil and collapse in a fiery conflagration—a “big crunch” reversing the “big bang.” The prospect of a future imbalance between expansion and gravity suggests a “freeze or fry” future.
None of these scenarios bode well for the continuation of life as we know it. Polkinghorne’s comment is chilling: “However fruitful the universe may seem today, its end lies in futility. Whatever hopes there might be of human progress within history, they can amount to no more than a stay of execution.” 18 How do we think about this theologically? How are we to understand divine purposes (“ends”) in the face of the end of the world? If we take seriously the scientific picture of endings presented here, where do we find courage and hope to live a life that we know is transitory? If human beings and all other forms of life will be no more, is this the end of meaning or the end of God’s work with us? Or can we uphold the central Christian conviction that “in life and in death we belong to God”?
Theological Reflections
Christian hymnody sounds the notes of this discussion. One hymn laments: “Time, like an ever rolling stream, soon bears us all away; we fly forgotten, as a dream dies with the opening day.” Yet the very same hymn sings of hope in a God who is “our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.” 19
Theologically speaking, I want to approach this discussion by asking whether the threat to meaning that destruction on a grand scale poses is really qualitatively different from the threat to meaning that death itself already poses. Christian tradition has already acknowledged the reality of mortality. Is the prospect of “the end of the world” qualitatively different? Christian tradition has resisted the conclusion that human life is not meaningful because we are, as Heidegger observed, “beings toward death.” 20 The scientific description of the many scenarios of tragic ending on our horizon only confronts us with particular forms of what is an always already-present prospect. Death is ever before us: Media vita in morte sumus (“In the midst of life we are in death”).21
Christian tradition has acknowledged this existential reality without finding life meaningless or concluding that mortality puts an end to our relationship with God. The Christian claim is that, though death is real, it is not ultimate; only God is ultimate. We continue to affirm that “in life and in death we belong to God.” Is it possible that the theological insights and affirmations that have arisen in the face of death may also illumine our way in the face of “the end of the world?”
Karl Barth
Theologians differ in their views as to whether and to what extent death is a problem theologically. Karl Barth commends facing the reality and finality of death straightforwardly: “Man belongs to this world. . . . He is . . . finite and mortal. One day he will only have been, as once he was not.” 22 Barth insists, however, that it is not death itself that is problematic. Rather, it is our lives as we live them that make a problem of death, as the apostle Paul wrote: “The sting of death is sin” (1 Cor 15:56). Eberhard Jüngel draws out Barth’s view: “[T]he shadow cast by death (over human life) is no more than the haunting primordial shadow, now extended and magnified, which our life casts upon our ending.” 23 Barth insists that “finitude means mortality” and that death is the “natural end of limited human existence.” 24 Death may even place a “salutary limit to life.” 25 Mortality is only the “shadowside” of life and is not in itself genuinely evil; it is only a “semblance of evil.” 26 “If through faith in God’s grace people are freed from the fear resulting from sin and from the fear of death, they will also be freed for a natural death.” 27 Their finite life is “eternalized” in the memory of God: that is, their redemption, not physical resurrection and the abolition of physical death. 28 In this sense, for Barth, death is not a problem theologically.
With this understanding in place, Barth goes on to talk about eschatology in terms of the “here and now.” The eschaton is not the “temporal end of historical days,” but rather eternity breaking into time. In this light, “every moment in time bears within it the unborn secret of revelation. . . .” 29 In every moment, the end is near. Eternal life, Barth says, “is ours now, in this world that now is . . . a life that has become new in an earth that has become new under a heaven that has become new . . . in its relation to God its Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer.” 30 With these steps Barth renders both “death” and “the end of historical days” no longer problematic theologically and not even the proper focus of attention for Christian eschatology. Barth’s is a realized eschatology in the sense that eternity has already broken into time and made all things new. Objectively speaking, all things are already reconciled, and nothing new is needed. All that remains is the disclosure or unveiling of what is already the case. 31
Miroslav Volf
Miroslav Volf counters Barth by insisting that it is not only “transgression” (sin) but also “transience” (the passing of things, death) that is problematic. As he says, both “transience and transgression” overshadow us in life and death. 32 Transience keeps us ever in a state of disruption: “Our present is not at peace with our past and future. We feel anxiety about what we expect and carry the burden of what we remember, and are thus robbed of an unattenuated joy in the present.” 33 We need the assurance that in the resurrection of the body, death—“the last enemy” (1 Cor 15:26)—will be destroyed. A fuller exploration of the Christian symbol of resurrection will assist us at this point.
Discussions of resurrection in the New Testament are given in the context of a transformation of all things. The New Testament vision of resurrection is not one of simple continuation of the present order. Nor is the eschaton envisioned as a completely other and unrelated reality. The eschatological symbols of Christian tradition generally present a kind of ambiguity, a continuity-discontinuity that Polkinghorne and Welker have termed the “strange logic of eschatology.” 34 Symbols like “new creation” (2 Cor 5:17) and “new heaven and new earth” (Rev 21:1) signal this continuity and discontinuity. Anticipation of the resurrection of the body, as instanced in the stories of Jesus, has this quality as well. In these resurrection accounts, Jesus’s “spiritual body” (to borrow Paul’s language in 1 Cor 15:44) is a body that walks and talks and travels (Matt 28:8–20). The Gospel of John has Jesus cooking and eating breakfast (John 21:9–12), yet he passes through locked doors (John 20:19). He is not always recognized by the disciples. In her encounter with Jesus at the tomb, Mary thinks he is the gardener and only recognizes him when he calls her by name (John 20:11–18). In the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, they spend several hours with Jesus but do not know him until their eyes are opened in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24:13–32).
Reflecting upon the “strange logic of eschatology” with its vision of continuity-discontinuity, Volf adds a further insight: “The eschatological transition can be understood neither as an apocalyptic discarding of the old world and creation of a new one ex nihilo nor as a holistic integration of ‘everything’ into a ‘totality.’ Rather the eschatological transition must ultimately be understood as the final reconciliation of all things.” 35 This conclusion gives shape to his understanding of what resurrection must entail.
If there is to be a “reconciliation of all things,” resurrection must be about more than “a new beginning.” What is wrong must be put right, thus a kind of “judgment” is required. The past must be “redeemed.” As Volf insists, No fulfillment is possible if the past remains unredeemed; an unredeemed past will keep every present and future unredeemed. The eschatological transition cannot therefore be only about being given a fresh beginning, but must also be about having all of one’s failed beginnings, middles, and ends redeemed.
36
If this life is all there is, evils done and suffered will not have been seriously addressed and will stand as a final mockery of divine goodness. “Eschatological transition entails that the evil in human history be finally and unmistakably exposed and judged, and that the evil-doers themselves be transformed by God’s grace, so that they can be freed from all evil, reconciled to one another.” 37 A “reconciliation of all things,” such as Volf proposes, implies a continuing social history in the life of God. His approach directly addresses our sense that without judgment there is no justice. Another gift of his vision of the reconciliation of all things beyond history is its ethical imperative. The reconciliation toward which God calls all things is a beacon of hope within history and a sign of how we are called to live—even now.
Jürgen Moltmann
Jürgen Moltmann is especially helpful in drawing out the ethical dimensions of eschatology. In particular he takes up the matter of how we are called to live in the here and now. He calls to mind those end-of-the-world scenarios that are even now in human hands. He refers to these as “methods of mass extermination,” our “nuclear end times,” and “ecological end times.” 38 In the face of these “end times,” Moltmann commends reclaiming apocalypticism as a way of preserving Christian hope from facile optimism and countering “false prophets” who cry “‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jer 8:11). 39 Christian eschatology offers no optimistic guarantees of happy endings. Rather, Christian hope looks beyond all potential endings: “beyond the horizon of our own death to the wide space of eternal life and beyond the horizon of this world’s end into God’s new world.” 40 This cannot become an otherworldly escapism. On the contrary, living out this hope “means already acting here and today in accordance with that world of justice and righteousness and peace.” 41
Moltmann counters tendencies to anthropocentric and otherworldly eschatologies. The ends of God embrace the whole cosmos, not just human beings, or more particularly, the “souls” of human beings. As he says, “Because there is no such thing as a soul separate from the body, and no humanity detached from nature—from life, the earth and the cosmos—there is no redemption for human beings either without the redemption of nature.” 42 Unless our eschatology has this larger scope, it devolves into a gnostic myth of redemption. There must be a renewal of all things (renovatio omni).
In his focus on the restoration of all things, Moltmann’s eschatology is compatible with that of Miroslav Volf. Expressing a view similar to Volf’s, Moltmann speaks of the judgment as “the final putting to rights of the injustice that has been done and suffered, and the final raising up of those who are bowed down.” 43 He draws upon John Calvin’s image of a great waking and watching of the soul, 44 in which it perceives its healing and completion and experiences rebirth of the life of the world to come. 45
Both Moltmann and Volf gravitate to the text in Rev 21:5 that announces, “Behold, I make all things new.” Moltmann’s particular articulation of this vision draws upon biblical themes of Sabbath and Shekinah. He interprets Sabbath as the presence of God (eternity) in time and Shekinah in terms of the dwelling of God in the space of God’s creatures. God enters time and space, thus making all things new.
The Christian vision of the restoration of all things, Moltmann urges, includes aspects of three broad yet somewhat different visions: annihilation, transformation, and deification. Different streams within Christian tradition emphasize one or another of these. Moltmann associates “annihilation” with orthodox Lutheranism; the emphasis is upon how “the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). There is a reduction to nothing (reductio ad nihilum) that corresponds to the creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). The theology of the cross is prominent in this interpretation. Moltmann associates “transformation” with patristic and Calvinist traditions. This tradition relies upon God’s faithfulness to God’s creation. The creation will not be abandoned or annihilated, but rather transformed, “glorified” in a pattern likened to the resurrection of “Christ’s glorious body” (Phil 3:21, ceb). Greek Orthodox theology has emphasized theosis or “deification” of the world through union with God, as expressed in the famous axiom of Athanasius: “God in Christ became as we are that we might become as God is.” 46 Here the emphasis is upon resurrection and the anticipation of a union of all things with God: “God will be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). Moltmann finds limitations as well as profound insights in each of these orientations and suggests that they be held together. He sums up his own eschatological doctrine of the restoration of all things as having two sides: “God’s judgment, which puts things to rights, and God’s kingdom, which awakens to new life.” 47
Process Thought
Process thought is a particularly fruitful way forward for grappling with the scientific picture of the end of the world. From its beginnings, it has adopted a science-friendly posture and provided a ready bridge between theology and science. On the questions at hand it offers uniquely helpful insights as well as some echoes of the distinctive contributions we find in Barth, Volf, and Moltmann. We will see an incorporation of “eternity breaking into time” (Barth), an insistence that judgment is essential to the reconciliation of all things (Volf), and an ethical dimension of eschatological hope (Moltmann).
Process thought faces the reality of mortality straightforwardly, placing it within a wider framework of the tragic passing of all things. Process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observes, “The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a perpetual perishing.”
48
The sensibility expressed here echoes Volf’s insistence that transience (and not only transgression) is problematic. Moltmann concurs and laments, (E)very present passes, and what is past never returns. Expectations become experiences, and experiences turn into remembrances, and remembrances will in the end become the great forgetting that is death. Yet something in us rises up in protest: “Is that all this life has to offer?”
49
In relation to this tragic dimension, process thought refutes a view of God as unfeeling, viewing all our losses at a distance. Whitehead insists on the contrary that “God is the great companion—the fellow sufferer who understands.” 50
The tragedy of perpetual perishing, as pervasive as it may be, is not the only word or the final word about our existence, however. Process theology articulates a hopeful vision in which God is present and active in world process, working persuasively and everlastingly amid the “perpetual perishing” that is our reality. “God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force. . . . [God] is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.” 51 In the creative advance, God leads and lures the world out of “triviality and discord,” toward ever greater “harmony and intensity.” 52 When these divine “ends” are considered, “endings” become a relative thing.
In process theology a panentheistic vision emerges 53 as a way of understanding God as “the one in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). All things are “in God” and God is in all things. God’s internal relationship with the world is such that God continuously receives and experiences the world in its process, moment by moment, event by event. In this framework, both “objective” and “subjective” immortality find a place. “Immortality” is, in fact, a fundamental ingredient in the way the world works. The situation of the human being is simply a case in point of this more universal phenomenon. Objective immortality might be described as follows. All things are related; independent existence is an illusion. Each “actual occasion” (droplet of experience) in its process of “becoming” is responding to other actual occasions that precede it. As it becomes what it is, each occasion similarly affects every successor. In this way there is a continuing effect (objective immortality) for every actual occasion. All events have a lasting value and a kind of “immortality” through their trajectory into the future and their continuing effects. 54
What does haunt our imagination is that the immediate facts of present action pass into permanent significance for the universe. The insistent notion of Right and Wrong, Achievement and Failure, depends upon this background. Otherwise every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
55
Thus, despite our situation of perpetual perishing, our lives have meaning and value by virtue of their “objective immortality.”
When we consider God’s experience of the world, another dimension of meaning and value opens. In the process-relational view, everything we do (and are) affects God everlastingly. Our enjoyment and our adding to the enjoyment of others contribute to God’s own joy. The pain and sorrow we experience and inflict upon others are nowhere more felt than in God’s own being. Things do not simply perish. God acts with a “tender care that nothing be lost.” 56 Everything that happens matters, and we matter not only because of real effects we have in the actual world but because of our lasting significance in God’s experience and memory. Such a view highlights the ethical dimension of human action and lends support to Moltmann’s insistence that living out of eschatological hope “means already acting here and today in accordance with that world of justice and righteousness and peace.” 57
The process proposal also takes up a robust vision of divine judgment such as Miroslav Volf has commended. Process theology, however, places judgment in the framework of immediacy, and in that way is companionable with Barth’s notion of the in-breaking of eternity into time. There is a sense in which, as each event passes into the life of God, it is judged (and redeemed). Moment by moment God receives and judges worldly outcomes and presents back to the world new possibilities shaped by God’s creative and transformative love. Whitehead puts it this way: The revolts of destructive evil, purely self regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. . . . [God] saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.
58
Similarly, for Moltmann, God’s memory of events in the world is “a merciful, healing remembrance that puts things to rights.” 59 As the psalmist prays, “according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake” (Ps 25:7b, kjv).
For some process thinkers, objective immortality is a sufficient way of expressing Christian hope in the face of “perpetual perishing” and our ultimate demise. Other process theologians, however, insist that “subjective immortality” is an essential component in addition to objective immortality. 60 The argument is as follows: God experiences all things in their fullness and knows all things with “conformal knowledge” (that is, perfectly)—knowing things as they are. If this is the case, then human beings must be received into the divine life as they are—in the fullness of their subjective selves. As we, in the fullness of our subjective experience, are taken up into the divine life, the mortal “puts on immortality” (1 Cor 15:54). In this union with God we are transformed. Transformation is probably a better term than subjective immortality, since the latter seems to imply continuation of the self unchanged. Instead, as we are taken up into the divine life, and our finite subjectivity is incorporated into the divine subjectivity, we “know as we are known” (1 Cor 13:12). A transformed existence is possible; a continuing history with God is opened up. Just as we—even now—live life “in God,” so also we will be “in God” in our death. This is one way of elaborating the affirmation that “in life and in death we belong to God.” Everything that is finds its lasting significance in the divine life. In a sense, we already participate in God’s everlasting life, and so shall we, everlastingly—world without end.
Conclusion
Christian eschatology can come to terms with the “perpetual perishing” that shapes our reality now and “the end of the world” that the future portends. Polkinghorne and Welker issue a challenge: “We shall have to explore whether theology can take us further by being both humble enough to learn what it can from science and also bold enough to hold firm to its own sources of insight and understanding.” 61 In the present exploration, Karl Barth, Miroslav Volf, Jürgen Moltmann, and process theology point us toward a robust Christian eschatology that can indeed incorporate scientific views of the end of the world without abandoning central Christian convictions of the meaningfulness of our lives and our belonging to God—in life and in death. When divine ends take center stage, all “endings” are reframed. Moltmann’s image is helpful: “Death is the boundary of our lives, but not the boundary of God’s relationship with us.” 62 Even now in the context of history, amid the perpetual perishing, events are judged and transformed and redeemed according to divine ends. Central affirmations of faith include believing that God is the source, companion, and the end of all things, and that in whatever comes to be, God will be working for good.
Finitude and freedom necessarily accompany any creation that is “not God.” Finitude entails the prospect of mortality and perpetual perishing (transience). Freedom entails the prospect of shaping our own destinies and even stepping outside the divine intentions for good (transgression). Nevertheless, divine ends are at work everywhere and always with a “tender care that nothing be lost”—an ongoing judging and redeeming of the “wreckage” that we make. Neither transience nor transgression has the last word in our ongoing relationship with God. Eschatological hope is a motivating hope that, as Kathryn Tanner puts it, overcomes all “hopelessness in the face of present trouble, complacent inactivity regarding suffering and injustice, and irresponsible self-concern.” 63 We live in the light of the “reconciliation of all things” that is God’s purpose. Even now, we work for it “with an urgency born of this hope.” 64
Footnotes
1
John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker, “Introduction: Science and Theology on the End of the World and the Ends of God,” in The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, ed. John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 1–13 (12).
2
“A Brief Statement of Faith,” in The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part 1: The Book of Confessions (Louisville: Office of the General Assembly, 2004), 267–75 (267, §10.1). This creedal statement resonates with Rom 14:9: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (see also Deut 7:6–11; Pss 100; 139:1–12; Isa 43:1–7; Jer 31; Rom 8:31–39).
3
Ted Peters, Science and Theology: The New Consonance (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999).
4
Polkinghorne and Welker, “Introduction,” 2.
5
Ibid.
6
Anna Case-Winters, “Ends and Endings,” in World Without End: Christian Eschatology from a Process Perspective, ed. Joseph Bracken (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 177–96. Some of the ideas expressed here and at several points in this essay are developed more fully in my earlier article. Content from that article is used with permission.
7
Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 122.
8
For a fuller treatment, see William Stoeger, S.J., “Scientific Accounts of Ultimate Catastrophes in Our Life-Bearing Universe,” in The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, ed. John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 19–28.
9
Isaac Asimov, A Choice of Catastrophes: The Disasters That Threaten Our World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).
10
Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 205.
12
Moltmann, The Coming of God, 208.
13
Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century—On Earth and Beyond (London: Basic Books, 2003).
15
Richard A. Grieve and Eugene M. Shoemaker, “The Record of Past Impacts on Earth,” in Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids, ed. Tom Gehrels, Space Science Series (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 417–64.
16
William J. Kaufman, III, Universe, 4th ed. (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994), 385–88.
17
John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 9.
18
Ibid. 9, 11.
19
Isaac Watts, “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past,” in The Presbyterian Hymnal (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 210.
20
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962; repr. 2008), 279–304.
21
A Latin antiphon written around 740
22
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. G. T. Thomson, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–1975 [1960]), III/2, 362.
23
Eberhard Jüngel, Death: Riddle and Mystery, trans. Iain and Ute Nicol (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), 74–75.
24
Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, 625.
25
Ibid., 625, 629.
26
Barth draws a distinction between the “shadowside” of creation (die Schattenseite), which corresponds to the conditions of our finitude (such as mortality), and “nothingness” (das Nichtige), which is genuinely evil as that which God does not will. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/3, 236–39.
27
Ibid.
28
This is Moltmann’s way of summarizing Barth’s position (“Is There Life After Death,” 241).
29
Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. E. C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 498.
30
Karl Barth, Credo (New York: Scribner’s, 1962), 170.
31
Karl Barth, The Faith of the Church (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 120.
32
Miroslav Volf, “Enter Into Joy! Sin, Death, and the Life of the World to Come,” in The End of the World and the Ends of God, ed. Polkinghorne and Welker, 256–78 (274).
33
Ibid., 275.
34
Polkinghorne and Welker, “Introduction,” 12.
35
Volf, “Enter into Joy,” 278.
36
Ibid., 262.
37
Ibid.
38
Moltmann, Coming of God, 204.
39
Ibid., 235.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid., 260
43
Ibid., 252.
44
John Calvin, “Psychopannychia,” in Tracts and Treatises: In Defense of the Reformed Faith, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 3:419–89.
45
Jürgen Moltmann, “Is There Life After Death?” in The End of the World and the Ends of God, ed. Polkinghorne and Welker, 238–55 (253).
47
Moltmann, Coming of God, 255 (emphasis original).
48
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 517.
49
Moltmann, “Is There Life After Death,” 238.
50
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 532.
51
Ibid., 346.
52
This phrasing comes from Charles Hartshorne, “A New Look at the Problem of Evil,” in Current Philosophical Essays: Essays in Honor of Curt John Ducasse, ed. Frederick C. Dommeyer (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Townes, 1966), 32.
53
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 351.
54
“Value is saved from the futility of abstraction by its impact upon the process of Creation.” See Alfred North Whitehead, The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941), 686.
55
Ibid., 698.
56
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 535.
57
Moltmann, Coming of God, 235.
58
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 346.
59
Moltmann, “Is There Life After Death,” 245.
60
Perhaps the best treatment of this proposal is Marjorie Suchocki, The End of Evil (New York: SUNY Press, 1988). Other resources include Joseph A. Bracken, “Subjective Immortality in a Neo-Whiteheadian Context,” in World Without End: Christian Eschatology from a Process Perspective, ed. idem (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 72–90; and Case-Winters, “Ends and Endings.”
61
Polkinghorne and Welker, “Introduction,” 27.
62
Moltmann, “Is There Life After Death,” 246.
63
Kathryn Tanner, “Eschatology without a Future?” in The End of the Word and the Ends of God, ed. Polkinghorne and Welker, 222–37 (226).
64
“Confession of 1967,” in Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), 254–62 (262, §9.55).