Historicist Eschatology Quotes

Like the Church the individual Christian will not be able to escape the deep ambiguities of this-wordly existence whether in its cultural, social, political or other aspects, and he too will inevitably be a mixture of good and evil, with a compromised life, so that he can only live eschatologically in the judgment and mercy of God, putting off the old man and putting on Christ anew each day, always aware that even when he has done all that it is his duty to do he remains an unprofitable servant, but summoned to look away from himself to Christ, remembering that he is dead through the cross of Christ but alive and risen in Him. His true being is hid with Christ in God.
The whole focus of his vision and the whole perspective of his life in Christ's name will be directed to the unveiling of that reality of his new being at the parousia, but meantime he lives day by day out of the Word and Sacraments. As one baptized into Christ he is told by God's Word that his sins are already forgiven and forgotten by God, that he has been justified once for all, and that he does not belong to himself but to Christ who loved him and gave Himself for him. As one summoned to the Holy Table he is commanded by the Word of God to live only in such a way that he feeds upon Christ, not in such a way that he feeds upon his own activities or lives out of his own capital of alleged spirituality. He lives from week to week, by drawing his life and strength from the bread and wine of the Lord's Suppe ~ Thomas F. Torrance

Sometimes silences are pregnant and sometimes not. It is hard to know what to make of the silence of much of the New Testament about the Lord's Supper. Perhaps it is simply an accident of time and circumstance. There was not a felt need to address the matter. What we should not likely conclude is that it was not seen as an important matter in the latter part of the first century A.D. What we can observe is that the Lord's Supper continued to be an in-home ceremony taken in the context of a fellowship meal. We also now know it was important in both Gentile and Jewish contexts in the church in the second half of the first century, and beyond. We see no evidence anywhere in this material that clerics of any kind are in charge of the meal and its distribution. Even in the Didache, prophets, who were mouthpieces for God, are only allowed to say the thanksgiving prayer as often as they like. The low ecclesiology, coupled with the ever-present eschatology, suggest that the Didache does indeed go back to the end of the first century A.D. But one precedent in the Didache does stand out: the Lord's Supper is for baptized Christians, and in particular for those who repent of their sins. We are on the way to the church of the Middle Ages in some respects, but we have not begun to localize or confine grace to the elements of the Lord's Supper itself and then have it controlled by clerics. ~ Ben Witherington III

Problem is, a lot of Christians who believe the world is headed for imminent destruction don't use their eschatology to motivate altruism. Some, in fact, use their belief in the coming apocalypse to justify negligence and destruction. Critics of pretrib theology point out that rapture obsession can make Christians overlook glaring social needs in the present, like genocide, disease, and abject poverty. ~ Kevin Roose

Paul connects faith and hope. Rather than saying young people have faith if they believe without doubt, it might be better to say they have faith if, up against doubt, fear, and struggle, they hope. ~ Andrew Root

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

Communism is Utopia, that is nowhere. It is the avatar of all our religious eschatologies: the coming of the Messiah, the second coming of Christ, nirvana. It is not a historical prospect, but a current mythology. Socialism, by contrast, is a realizable historical system which may one day be instituted in the world. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

How many times have you struggled with the interpretation of certain Biblical texts related to the time of Jesus' return because they did not fit with a preconceived system of eschatology? Russell's Parousia takes the Bible seriously when it tells us of the nearness of Christ's return. Those who claim to interpret the Bible literally, trip over the obvious meaning of these time texts by making Scripture mean the opposite of what it unequivocally declares. Reading Russell is a breath of fresh air in a room filled with smoke and mirror hermeneutics. ~ Gary DeMar

Blake's song isn't really a song for England alone," said Dym. "It's a song for every land. We're all building the unseen Jerusalem together. But the powers of darkness don't want to see a time when the earth shall be filled with the glory of the God as the waters cover the sea. ~ Constance Savery

And of course the reason the Enlightenment has taught us to trash our own history, to say that Christianity is part of the problem, is that it has had a rival eschatology to promote. It couldn't allow Christianity to claim that world history turned its great corner when Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again, because it wanted to claim that world history turned its great corner in Europe in the eighteenth century. "All that went before," it says, "is superstition and mumbo-jumbo. We have now seen the great light, and our modern science, technology, philosophy, and politics have ushered in the new order of the ages." That ~ N. T. Wright

Surprisingly now, over a half a century later, time symmetric approaches to electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology might be consonant with the kind of eschatology that a theist such as Pannenberg supports. ~ Robert John Russell

Bold courage is paralyzing fear after humble prayer. ~ Kenneth E. Nowell

I thought I was growing wings
it was a cocoon.
I thought, now is the time to step
into the fire
it was deep water.
Eschatology is a word I learned
as a child: the study of Last Things;
facing my mirror - no longer young,
the news - always of death,
the dogs - rising from sleep and clamoring
and howling, howling ...
("Seeing For a Moment") ~ Denise Levertov

I know your job's to channel the bleeding divine, and when have I ever stood in your way? Aren't I the bloke puts "Do Not Disturb, Eschatology Being Revelationed" on your door? EH? But you're supposed to keep me in the loop, and turn up when I need you, and do me the sheer minimum modicum of salutage and whatnot, right? ~ China Mieville

I am not a Kant expert and no Kantian but, I should say, a Kant sympathizer - especially where conflicts between Kantian and so-called historicist thinking are concerned, both in epistemology and in ethics. ~ Leszek Kolakowski

Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Don't most astrophysicists now predict some "end of the line" - an end to it all? Not just the death of things, but the annihilation of everything. Some great contraction, or collapse. Or, perhaps, some vast dissipation into eternal emptiness. Maybe it's all swallowed up by an immense black hole, which then swallows itself. But, whatever the case, their extinction is inevitable and absolute. So complete as to erase any and all evidence that this reality - this existence - ever took place. So complete that, perhaps, for all intents and purposes, it never really did.
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson) ~ Mort W. Lumsden

[Faith] sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands. It sees in him the future of the very humanity for which he died. That is why it finds the cross the hope of the earth. ~ Jurgen Moltmann

New Testament authors all may have been premillennialists, they may all have been amillennialists, or some may not have had a particular worked-out conviction. But all were oriented to the idea of fulfillment in Christ and then in his people, in both his first and his second comings. This central motif rather than the Millennium as such dominated teaching about the future. ~ Vern Sheridan Poythress

Culture cannot be a monolithically universal phenomenon without some kind of demonic imposition of one culture over the rest of cultures. Nor is it possible to dream of a universal "Christian culture" without denying the dialectic between history and eschatology which is so central, among other things, to the eucharist itself. Thus, if there is a transcendence of cultural divisions on a universal level - which indeed must be constantly aimed at by the Church - it can only take place via the local situations expressed in and through the particular local Churches and not through universalistic structures which imply a universal Church. ~ John D. Zizioulas

I was a false convert breeding other false converts; a spiritually dead sinner praying for others to be reborn, when I was just as lost as they were. The price of my foolishness has cost me dearly." Pastor Jim Simonton - "Chaos In The Blink of An Eye - Part Three: The Unveiling." #christianfiction #eschatology #end times #rapture ~ Patrick Higgins

I am not in full alignment with Preteristic theology per se, however I could say that I may be a 'partial preterist'."

~R. Alan Woods [2012] ~ R. Alan Woods

The Word of God is a seamless garment, and men who deny its law deny its eschatology also, and are deprived of God's power. It is not surprising, therefore, that this is an era of impotence for the church. ~ Greg L. Bahnsen

She seems to give a respectful credence to the statement that "God is love"only to hurry on to explore with real interest the possibility that "God is wrath." She can read from the book of Revelation with a ringing conviction in her voice that can make the creation seem only a stage setting for the triumphant thunderation of end. ~ Wendell Berry

Simon Greenleaf's Masonic work documents the relationship between defining the Patriarch Enoch as a Pythagorean figure while linking the Druidical priestly presence through Phoenician exploration from Egyptian source. Thus Enoch brought the content of Masonic knowledge to a greater mystical perfection as he was deemed to have caused the emergence of the restoration of learning from the vault into solar Apollonian radiance through the application of Pythagorean learning to the inspiration of the new Republic through mathematics and the laws derived from it. The result was for Greenleaf a pre- critical logic of unfolding of the Logos envisaged by Salem Town along lines delineated in the L'Enfant-Latrobe District of Columbia template from the national capital into districts of Masonic Grand Lodge administration was devolved into districts, paralleling judicial and congressional districts, symbolically as an extension of the Latrobe-L'Enfant template just after the moral and political defeat of Jedidiah Morse and the Federalists in 1800 and theological attacks on Masonry and before the onset of the Morgan fervor in 1826. This period enables the historian to see a sequence of Masonic and mythic legal unfolding from legendary history which linked the emergence of Enochic design to civil religion through monumental architecture which also links the dynamism of a Third Age of Masonic "Aquarian" millennialism rooted in third age eschatology within its Tudor derivative of an articulat ~ Robert W. Sullivan IV

The Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voices the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. ~ Marcel Proust

The Kingdom of God is the already but not yet".

~R. Alan Woods [1998] ~ R. Alan Woods

Eschatology is the dustbin into which we sweep everything we don't want. To believe. We believe that the Lord will manifest Himself to men, but He'll do it tomorrow, or the day after, or the next millennium. ~ A.W. Tozer

There's something about patience that God deems necessary for our life in the age to come and so, whether through agriculture or discipleship or bodily development or eschatology or procreation, God makes us wait ~ Russell D. Moore

God's Kingdom is present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

I'm not sure how far Derrida's later 'theological' interests are really rooted in post-structuralism or whether they don't rather reflect a kind of Kantian-Marxist trajectory - with a French twist on the centrality of liberty, equality and fraternity (cf. Politics of Friendship). Not to mention the role of Levinas and, behind Levinas, Judaism's twinning of eschatology and the call for justice. ~ George Pattison