(3 parts and a coda)
- Eschatology situated – death, judgement, heaven, hell / doctrinal interactions with creation and salvation / the general shape of Christian theology, of the story (Christianity is an eschatological religion) The phenomenon of eschatological expectation – church, oppression, Constantinian power. A variegated universal concern
- Modern Eschatologies: Between Consummation and Catastrophe
Secularised eschatologies in the modern era: What happens when there is a despair of the theological answers but not of the universally posed questions? Folk eschatologies elicited by modernism. Most of these social outworkings take the form of utopias. “I would go so far as to claim that eschatological expectations do and always will form part of the way we understand and experience the shape of the world and our place within it, even though they may remain implicit or inchoate. They function as the horizons within or towards which movement becomes possible and intelligible.” - The imago dei in Christian Eschatology
“Martin Heidegger is one of the most sophisticated secular eschatological thinkers of the twentieth century, partly because he confronts this antinomy uncompromisingly, not denying but embracing it: Human existence, for him, just is to live not towards fulfilment but towards its impossibility.”
Coda: Theology and Religious Studies in the University
RESPONSE FROM BUKI FATONA
The role of imagination in theology and the natural sciences. Both depend and are predicated upon present circumstances.
A question concerning transhumanism. According David Pierce (co-founder of Humanity Plus) “If we want to live in paradise we will have to engineer it ourselves… compassion alone is not enough” – How does a transhumanist vision compare with Christian eschatology?
Even physiological perfection doesn’t mitigate against corrupting human potentialities such as creed.
Questions of time – dynamic and absolute.
WOLFE’S RESPONSE
Conditions of the possibility – does this simply reveal the point of failure of our imagination regarding the eschaton – C.S. Lewis “Time is the only lens through which we can see eternity”
The Bible gives us ‘a panopoly of images’ to consider what the end may be like, as opposed to a system. Seeds sown, embryos not yet born. ‘We have only the metaphorical or the analogous’
Transhumanism – Utopian thoughts conceive sin differently – Sin, as a response to scarcity – if only we could eradicate the conditions of scarcity then we could eradicate sin.
In the garden a wrong way of being like God (autonomy) is posited. There is a right way of being like God, in being drawn into the life of Another
QUESTIONS
- The world comes to bear a weight that it simply can’t bear if we seek to find the key to the eschaton in it. The Christian should give due weight to the hope of plenitude and divine love over scarcity whilst not trying to bring the circumstance about.
- James Walters of LSE – The ends of the university. What can these conversations in theology about eschatology contribute to this situation? W – The world is not yet finished so there are engagements – both to discover and make – which consitutes an open invitation. Newman said that theology is part and parcel of what it means to be a university, viz. an organisation which has /everything/ as it’s purview. Theology is in a situation where it must collaborate with other subjects and should do so hopefully.
- Hegel and an absolute end – Hegel scholars are divided on this. Does the system have a logically necessary end-point or is it eternally open.
- Aaron Edwards, Cliff College – the Eastern Orthodox author Paul Kingsnorth writing about people electing to become pure mind, transcending the irritation of the body. W – Tolkein – What we make as makers will be taken up graciously by God into the new world. Forming beyond ones own will.
- John Bradbury URC – Christological move to root the eschaton in the cross and resurrection. What does this move mean when expanded into a cosmological register? It seems to imply an unwanted annhiliationism, such that new creation would be in discontinuity with the old. W – Given that our most common images of resurrection are given by the natural world, no.
- The role of faith or trusting God in human eschatology – is it being able to imagine that someone has a better imagination than us? W – I don’t think that God has imagination in the way that we do, God is pure act. The key role of faith is faith in the ressurection: It gives the paradigm. The role of faith is also towards whom and in whose image we are. The resurrected life will be a seeing of God face to faith, that we are mirrors or opposites of God who will only come to be themselves when in that circumstance – not now when God is hidden. Faith in Somebody who is yet unseen but whose vision will constitute our eternal blessedness.
- Alan Morton, Nottingham – You lean hard into the death and resurrection motif to break up secular antimonies (which I am on board with). In using the imago dei, there are various readings which can end up losing the human, losing Christ etc. Do you see these secular antimonies playing out in Christian contexts. W – It is not my fault that people have bad views of the image of God! Self-subversion of most motifs of idolatry.
- The dynamic life being brought into some static vision of the end. W – Greg Nyssa and Origen – epektasis.
- What is the role of church and sociable dersires. W – The church as the summum bonum rather than the individual. Sociality or church is irreducible in our expectation of fulfilment, because we are and know ourselves – if at all – as in the love of God. It is harder in this life because God is hidden. The responsibility of church is to be, to some extent, Christ to each other in expectation of what will be.
- Eschatology is the resounding affirmation that we are human, by being turned outwards. The idea of theology as the defender of the humanities is interesting – if theology had its crisis moment in the C19th (receding sea of faith in God), then humanities might be having its crisis now (receding sea of faith in man)
- The eucharist is a central point in how Christians are to live imaginatively. The mass is named for its dispersible – being sent into our oridnary lives to outwork what it is that we are given, having been taken up in to Christ to be digested by him even as we digest him.
Buki mentioned a book she is reading by Carlo Rovelli on physics which spends time discussing the Eucharist.
The Bible makes it hard to map the putative end on to geo-political events. It is a feature, not a bug. Hope is not utopianism, it hopes in an unspecified end.