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DOCTRINE 3: ESCHATOLOGY
HOEKEMA SUMMARY
From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology.

OLD TESTAMENT ESCHATOLOGY

At the very beginning, there was an expectation of a coming redeemer

who would bruise or crush the head of the serpent. As time went on, there
was a growing enrichment of eschatological expectation. The various
items of this expectation were certainly not all held at once, and they
assumed various forms at various times. But if we may think of these
concepts in a cumulative way, we may certainly say that at various times
the Old Testament believer looked for the following eschatological realities
in the future:

(1) The coming redeemer (prophet, priest, king, suffering servant)

(2) The kingdom of God (son of Man, son of David)
(3) The new covenant (Jeremiah)
(4) The restoration of Israel
(5) The outpouring of the Spirit (Joel, Ezekiel)
(6) The day of the Lord (Joel)
(7) The new heavens and the new earth (including resurrection, Isaiah).

NEW TESTAMENT ESCHATOLOGY

The nature of New Testament eschatology may be summed up under three

observations: (1) the great eschatological event predicted in the Old
Testament has happened; (2) what the Old Testament writers seemed to
depict as one movement is now seen to involve two stages: the present
age and the age of the future; and (3) the Spirit bridges these two
eschatological stages and is the pledge and guarantee of greater blessings
to come.

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND ESCHATOLOGY

1. The Holy Spirit, it is said, will prepare the way for the inbreaking of the
final eschatological age by certain prophetic signs (Joel 2).
2. The Spirit is said to be the One who will rest upon the coming redeemer
and equip him with the necessary gifts.
3. The Spirit appears as the source of the future new life of Israel,
including both material blessings and ethical renewal.
4. The Spirit is an eschatological downpayment, as sons and therefore
heirs.
5. He brings transforms us progressively into Christ's likeness.

In the possession of the Spirit we who are in Christ have a foretaste of the
blessings of the age to come, and a pledge and guarantee of the

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resurrection of the body. Yet we have only the firstfruits. We look forward
to the final consummation of the kingdom of God, when we shall enjoy
these blessings to the full.

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THE TENSION BETWEEN THE NOW AND NOT YET

1. The signs of the times occur throughout the end times between Christ's
coming.
2. The church lives in tension between the two and is therefore imperfect.
3. This tension should be an incentive for responsible Christian living.
4. Our self-image should reflect this tension. We are imperfect new
people.
5. This tension helps us to understand the role of suffering in the lives of
believers. We still live in a fallen world. God will remove suffering, in
the mean time he uses it.
6. Our attitude toward culture is related to this tension: continuity and
discontinuity.

Summing up what has been developed in this chapter, we conclude that

our entire Christian life is to be lived in the light of the tension between
what we already are in Christ and what we hope some day to be. We look
back with gratitude to the finished work and decisive victory of Jesus
Christ. And we look forward with eager anticipation to the Second Coming
of Christ, when he shall usher in the final phase of his glorious kingdom,
and shall bring to completion the good work he has begun in us.

1A. ISSUES & METHOD

o Eschatology is all about hope and its impact on the present.
o God is the subject and object of hope – he gives us hope for himself.
o Does eschatology give foundational shape to the rest of Christian
thought?? YES! (Coz everything gives shape to everything else in Doctrine)
Church practise and architecture – esp. Communion
Purgatory – example of how eschatology effects soteriology
o Some issues
Difference between Apoloclyptic (breaking in of future into the
present) and Prophetic (an extension of the present experience into the
future) literature.

1B. HOPE SHAPES LIFE

o Auschwitz – Psychologically without hope we die!!
o Hope Shape who we are, how we live.
o 4 Views of hope
1. Materialism (Marxist)
An undoing of class structure for equal distribution of wealth
2. Western Hedonism
Search for sensual experience for fully gratified experiences
3. Postmodernism

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No real hope, no real truth, no real justice.

Self focussed.
4. Christian Hope – ours and God’s
What God has planned for the future
Key Verses: 1 Peter 1:3-5; Eph 1:15-23; Rev 21
Catholicism: hope = virtue (movement of our soul). Predisposes
us to action.

2A. SCRIPTURAL RESOURCES AND DEFINING THEMES

o Statements of theology are recognition and confession of hat the Bible
says: Thinking God’s thoughts after him. Theology is after the fact.
o Main themes: Consummation & Judgment
o Judgment means to rule: Rev 20:4.

HELL
1. The presence of God in holy love, not absence (1 Thess 1:7-10)
2. Cannot expect annihilation (as Stott) because not supported by Bible.

UNIVERSALISM?
1. Palingenesia means regeneration. Only believers will be made new
creations.
2. Apokatastasis menas restoration. The universe will be restored.
3. Anakephalaiosis means recapitulation. Everything is place under Christ's
headship.

How universal is the work of Christ?

- All Resolution is Christological.
- Eph 1:10, Col 1:20. There is a realignment of the universe which takes
place in Christ (things in heaven and on earth).
- However, the expression of God's love and rule in Christ is not expressed
in the same way toward the forgiven and the unforgiven.
- That is because God's love is holy.

ESCHATOLOGY AND HISTORY

1. The Bible is eschatological from its beginnings (Gen 2:15).
2. It concerns the historical realities through which God brings about his
kingdom.

MEDIATORIAL KINGSHIP OF CHRIST

3. Eschatology is all about Jesus (Rev 22:13 - I am the first and the last (Gr.
prwtoj kai o` evscatoj)
a. His rule (He is the ruled and the ruler (1 Cor 15)
b. His mediation
c. His victory

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4. It is revealed progressively.

THE PAROUSIA
- The last appearance of Christ will be visible, bodily, unexpected and
climactic.
- It will bring resurrection of the dead, end of the old age.
- It gives hope for Christians in the present.

RESURRECTION
- Develops in the OT as an Eschatological hope/promise (Dan 12, Psalm 16,
Eze 37).
- Is the grounds of our eschatological hope (1 Cor 15), the firstfruits of our
salvation.
- Gives bodily content to our hope.
- In some sense we have already been raised with Christ (Eph 2:6, Col 3:1,
Romans 6).
- Christian ethics consists in exhortations to live in accordance with the new
shape of reality.

DOUBTS ABOUT THE RESURRECTION

- 18th C enlightenment considered it ridiculous to believe in resurrection -
spiritualised it.
- Wolfhart Pannenburg set out in the 50s with some friends set out to think
about the importance of history to the Christian faith. He insists on the
actually physical resurrection. Hume had said that skepticism is the right
default position. But Pannenburg points out, not when the event is a one
off, unique event. How should historians think about unique events? You
cannot pre-judge the historicity of dissimilar events. They need to be
judged on their own terms. Further, it is the dissimilar events which shape
history. History is meaningless if everything that happened was the same
as everything else. Further again, trans-historical criteria are needed to
understand history. To understand history, you need to know where things
are going – what they point to and where they are headed.

2B. LIFE SHAPED HOPE

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TIME & ETERNITY (AUGUSTINE)

o Augustine is extremely influential for both Catholic and Protestant
traditions.
o Most influential contributions are: grace/sin, trinity, sacraments, worldview
and creation of the new human consciousness (Neoplatonic Mysticism).

ESCHATOLOGY

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o Key: The distinction between time and eternity

o Temporal and corruptible things exist in this world, but ideas exist
unchangeably in the realm of eternity.
o 3 Perspectives on time:
1. Metaphysically: Time is created and of this age. It will finish on the
last day. Eternity is changeless and incorruptible.1
2. Christologically: Jesus brought humanity into the eternal and
incorruptible by his resurrection from the dead.
3. Believer’s viewpoint: ‘First resurrection’ = conversion (raised from
death of sin, perhaps could be called ‘spiritual resurrection’?).
Second resurrection is bodily and escorts us into the goal of eternity
– eternal vision of God.
(Eternity releases us from space and time)
(God is the source of our creation and our goal)
o Millennium – the time of the church between Jesus’ 1st and 2nd comings –
church reins yet struggles with militancy against sin until resurrection.
o Souls of the dead still belong to this age (Rev)…souls are judged when we
die then await our bodily resurrection.
o Emphasises bodily resurrection (against the Manicheans and Platonists).
o Spiritual body in 1 Cor 15:44 is the incorruptibility of the risen body and
perfectly subject to the human spirit – battle between inner and outer man
is overcome.2
o In heaven we will actively and tirelessly praise God not be passive.

RELIGIOUS NEOPLATONISM
3 Metaphysical structures borrowed from Neoplatanism (which lead to his
understanding of grace):
1. Cosmology
- ‘Only the intelligible really is’.
- Fiercely monistic (the One or the Good). Multiplicity less than
perfect.
- Metaphysically hierarchical – reality extends from (in increasing
complexity) and returns to the One (by means of conversion
through desire and knowledge).
2. Epistemology
- Distinction between temporal world of images and eternal world of
forms.
- Faith, like reason and knowledge, only operates on earthly realities
and so is the way we apprehend Jesus in his earthly ministry.
- Because Jesus is revealed to us in his earthly ministry, he drops out
of view as we pass to the heavenly, direct vision of God...(although

1
How does this square with Satan and the demons becoming corrupt in eternity?
2
This does not account for the fact that the ‘inner man’ is still sinful on earth. It's not just
a war being waged between inner and outer man but between sinful nature and new
creation. These both form part of the inner man….

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Augustine does say that Jesus unites the heavenly and the
temporal, therefore we access the heavenly through the
incarnation).
3. Doctrine of God (Theology)
- Incorporeal and unknowable God. “God is known better in not being
known”.

JUSTIFICATION
o ‘God makes a person righteous’. Our loving obedience of God’s law is an
expression of God’s righteousness in us and an integral part of
justification.3 A collapsing of justification and sanctification.

NEOPLATONISM, IMMUTABILITY AND ESCHATOLOGY

o “Only like can know like”
o Rom 5:5 – objective genitive – our love towards God.
And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love
into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
o Salvation, eschatologically understood, is a process of illumination until
the culmination of the final vision.
o Augustine tries to protect God’s immutability at the point of creation.

Eschatological salvation is the transfer from change and corruption of time to the
immutability and perfection of eternity.

MEDIEVAL ESCHATOLOGY
Skipped.

MARTIN LUTHER’S ESCHATOLOGY

PREACHING JUDGMENT

3
It seems that Augustine is getting justification and sanctification confused or collapsing
them into one thing.

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CHAPTER 7: CALVIN
Three keys to Calvin:
1. Biblical theology. He added to the advances of the middle ages and the
reformation with the tools of humanism, moving from a four-fold approach
(literal, allegorical, typological, analogical) to a literal-prophetic model
fulfilled in Christ.
2. Trinitarian focus. He understood Christ as the ground of theology and
therefore of eschatology, and the Spirit as the one who applies Christ's
benefits to us via union with him. It is reflected in the structure of the
institutes.
a. Book 1 - father / creator
b. Book 2 - son / redeemer
c. Book 3 - Spirit / unifier
d. Book 4 - Church
3. Integration and application to society and the believer

CALVIN’S THREE CONTROLLING EMPHASES

(1) The Kingdom of Christ and God.
(2) Promise and fulfilment
(3) Outpouring of the Spirit

THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST AND GOD

- The kingdom of God is Christ’s kingdom. As king, he does two things:
1. He restores righteousness in God’s people.
2. He restores right order in God’s creation.
- The kingdom of God is both rule and realm. In this sense Christ is epitome
of both. He is perfect king and perfect subject.
- The kingdom of God is dynamic, unlike scholasticism, for it can be prayed
in and it grows numerically.
- Union with Christ is the purpose of this restoration, which in turn unites us
to the father.

PROMISE AND FULFILMENT

The meaning of history is derived from the movement between promise and
fulfilment. Christ's rule is the locus of eschatology. It is anticipated in the OT, but
suspended until the new, then installed in the new, suspended until his return.
The ultimate fulfilment of God’s promises are in suspension until that time.

The now / not-yet tension

The central problem in eschatology is this tension between the kingdom of God
as partly realised in us now but not yet.
Calvin's Solution:
- He is not physically present with his people. Our location is earthly, whereas
his incarnate humanity is in heaven. He is only present with us ‘in a manner’.
- We receive the benefits of Christ by his Spirit. (Book 3): “All that Christ has
done remains useless to us unless we are united to Christ by faith in the
Spirit.” The role of the Spirit is then, to make us partakers, in real /
experiential terms, of Christ. (His pneumatology was Christological).

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- For many of the passages which speak of Christ there are other passages
which say the same thing of the Spirit: for example: wisdom, justification and
reconciliation. The spirit functions christologically and eschatalogically in the
same way that Jesus does.

The Spirit has two roles in Calvin’s understanding of eschatology:

1. He enacts Christ’s direct and personal rule over us.
2. He bridges the now/not-yet gap.

ESCHATOLOGY APPLIED
Calvin is historical and optimistic about the progress of the kingdom of God. It is
advancing. Secular history runs parallel to the growth of the kingdom of God,
who uses secular empires to do his bidding. Secular history is therefore to be
read theologically. God is restoring order via the gospel. However, he
acknowledges that this progress is hidden behind suffering. It is a modified
version of Luther’s brinkmanship: brinkmanship with progress. How does
eschatology touch history? Two ways: election and church history.

ELECTION
Is the personal and beneficial beginning of God’s final purposes, not fuel for
speculation.
1. Christ is the ‘elect one’, the chosen. He is the mirror of election.
2. Is to faith, which is itself the bridge between predestination and glory. Acts
13:48. For Calvin, election explains the miracle of anyone coming to
believe. They are elected to believe in Jesus.
3. Is greater than the individual. The goal of election is the restorative
reordering of the universe.

CHURCH HISTORY
Eschatological restoration is tied to the course of the church by the nature of
God’s rule – he rules by his Spirit and his Word. The complete rule of all becomes
a metaphor for the church. The world is embraced by the eternal condition of the
church. The history of the church re-enacts the death and resurrection of Christ.
She dies and is resurrected over and over again. Therefore the church must
be reforming and reformable.

SUPRA-HISTORY
Christ rules from heaven. The ascension is important to Calvin for these reasons:
1) It keeps their hopes in suspense and therefore alive in the face of
adversity.
2) It means Christ’s personal, spiritual presence with all believers to the end
of the world.
3) It means Christ’s heavenly session on our behalf so that we
a. Already possess heaven
b. Are reconciled to the father and have access to him
c. Are the beneficiaries of Christ’s victorious rule

LIVING IN THE LAST DAYS

There are two conditions of the kingdom of God, by analogy to the two conditions
of Christ’s humanity. The church's condition now is that of the manger – one of

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humility, but it will be one of resurrected glory. The kingdom and its fruits are
present but they are hidden behind the veil of our suffering.

EVALUATION OF CALVIN
1. He heals the divide between word and spirit. He rejects the scholastic interest
in God ‘as he is in himself’ in favour of God ‘as he is toward us’.
2. The nature of the kingdom of God in Christ means we can expect personal
progress in the Christian life.
3. The spirit is the bridge between the two ages.
4. The dialectic between the two ages is critical to a proper understanding of
eschatology. Our experience of the kingdom of God is tied to the two
conditions of Christ’s humanity – one of suffering the other of glory.
5. Against Catholic mysticism, life is indeed heavenly now because we are
united to Christ at the right hand of God. However, it leaves us open to
thinking that the kingdom may be advanced by secular government.

MILLENNIALISM

HOPE & SUFFERING

ESCHATOLOGY AND OTHER DOCTRINES

- Revelation / Scripture (unlikely to come up)
- God / trinity (unlikely to come up)

ESCHATOLOGY AND CREATION

ESCHATOLOGY AND SALVATION (JUSTIFICATION / SALVATION)

ESCHATOLOGY AND CHURCH

ESCHATOLOGY AND THE STATE (KINGDOM OF GOD V. SECULAR GOVERNMENT)

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