Christian eschatology

Christian eschatology is the doctrine of the last things: death, judgement, resurrection, the return of Christ, and the final state. Its creedal core is short and almost universally shared, that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead", and that the church looks for "the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come". Nearly everything beyond that has been disputed.

The scriptural material is concentrated in the synoptic apocalypse (Mark 13 and its parallels), in Paul's letters to Thessalonica and in 1 Corinthians 15, and in Revelation, with Daniel standing behind them all. The question that governs every other is how far this language is meant as a description of a future sequence. Historical-critical scholarship since Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer has emphasised that Jesus preached within a Jewish apocalyptic framework and expected an imminent end, and has treated the delay of that end as one of the formative pressures on early Christianity. C. H. Dodd argued instead for a "realised eschatology" in which the decisive events had already occurred in Jesus' ministry. The widely adopted mediating position describes an eschatology inaugurated but not consummated, already and not yet. Confessional treatments and historical-critical ones diverge sharply here, and the divergence is worth naming: the second asks what the texts expected and whether it happened, the first asks what the church should confess, and they are not the same question.

Individual eschatology adds its own divisions. Whether the dead are conscious between death and resurrection or "sleep" has been argued since the Reformation. Purgatory is defined doctrine in Catholicism, affirmed at the Second Council of Lyons and at Trent, was rejected by the Reformers as unscriptural and as entangled with indulgences, and has no Latin equivalent in Orthodoxy, which prays for the dead without the developed doctrine. And the nature of hell divides those who hold everlasting conscious punishment, those who hold that the lost finally cease to exist, and those who hope or hold that all are saved, a position with a patristic advocate in Origen, condemned in the sixth century, and a persistent minority presence ever since.

Revelation 20 describes a thousand-year reign of Christ with the saints, and the timing of that millennium relative to Christ's return has produced the four positions that organise the subject. They cut across denominations rather than defining them, and each has serious exegetical defenders.

Amillennialism holds that the thousand years is not a future period at all but a symbol of the present age between the resurrection and the return, during which Christ reigns and the departed saints live with him. Augustine set the pattern in the City of God by reading the millennium as the era of the church, and this has been the majority position of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Lutheran and Reformed confessions ever since.

Postmillennialism holds that Christ returns after a long period in which the spread and success of the gospel produces a golden age. It was widespread in Reformed and evangelical thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where it supplied much of the energy behind missionary expansion and social reform, and it declined sharply after the First World War, though it has been revived in some Reformed circles since.

Historic premillennialism holds that Christ returns before the millennium and then reigns on earth. It has genuine patristic advocates in Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian, was displaced by the Augustinian reading, and has modern defenders, George Eldon Ladd among the most careful.

Dispensational premillennialism was developed by John Nelson Darby in the 1830s and spread widely by the Scofield Reference Bible from 1909. It distinguishes God's programmes for Israel and for the church, and adds a rapture of the church before a seven-year tribulation that precedes Christ's return in glory. It became dominant in much of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism, drives a very large popular literature, and has had measurable political consequences in shaping attitudes toward the modern state of Israel and toward international affairs. It is much the most recent of the four; its critics regard it as a nineteenth-century novelty imposed on the text, and its defenders as the recovery of a consistently literal reading that allegorising had suppressed.