'Until He Comes': Towards an Eschatology of Church Membership

This article is a critical consideration of Robert Jenson's understanding of the church as the Body of Christ in the light of 1 Corinthians. Jenson is understood to be claiming that the church is the presence on earth of the eschatological kingdom. This is based on a variety of faulty presuppositions. But Jenson's view of the church as a social political reality is found not to allow for a distinctive ethic. 1 Corinthians is shown to assert the priority of the Word, creating the church, and to have an eschatological morality, relating worship and church polity.     

The Ethical Eschatology of the Kingdom of God Movement

Books reviewed in this article:
John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering what Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus     

The Writing of the Kingdom: Thirty-Seven Aphorisms Towards an Eschatology of the Text

Starting from the question of the identities—in a given text—of author and reader, subsumed under the broader (Hegelian and post-Hegelian) question of "self" and "other" in exteriority, this essay attempts a theological response in three critical moments: the first follows the transcendental tradition of Western thought from the (Cartesian) turn towards transcendental subjectivity to the collapse of the dialectics of subjectivity in "postmodern" thought; the second moves the problem of exteriority from the realm of recognition that of promise and expectation (eschatology); and the third formulates a Trinitarian ontology of distance that accommodates this eschatology.     

Baptism and the Kingdom: lessons from Luke-Acts for a post-Christendom Church

Attempts to reform baptismal practice are characteristic of both dual-practice and credobaptist churches. Such reforms of baptism are frequently discussed within contours shaped by the concept of sacrament and the discourse it has generated. This article proposes, with reference to Luke-Acts, that the meaning of baptism can be illuminated in alternative ways by reference to its relationship to the kingdom of God. Whilst not an anti-sacramental argument, it proposes that elements of the theology of baptism can be constructively pursued by reference to the explicit and implicit links Luke makes between baptism and the kingdom. By so drawing on Luke-Acts, the agency of the Church (in addition to that of the baptisand and God) can be given particular attention. This leads, in turn, to a proposal for an ecclesial posture of both intentionality and vulnerability to attend baptismal practice.     

Visionary Eschatology: Piers Plowman

In its later versions Piers Plowman is a long, complex poem of extraordinary formal, theological, and political complexity. It is one of the greatest Christian poems. Written in a period of unprecedented conflict in English polities, including the Church, it was passionately involved in exploring many of these conflicts while seeking to imagine projects of Reformation. The poem includes fascinating reflections on diverse eschatological traditions within the late medieval Church, including neo-Joachite ones. Subjecting both the contemporary Church and such eschatologies to sustained critique, the author evolves a profoundly Christocentric vision in the light of which triumphant narratives of the Church would emerge as among the opiates threatening the Church at the poem's close.     

The Church and the Trinity I: The Church of the Spirit

We are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of the outstanding young preacher Geoffrey Preston by publishing this trilogy. It was written not very long before he died and has not appeared in print before. Its other two parts, 'The Church of the Son' and 'The Church of the Father', we will be publishing in our July/August and September numbers.     

The Church and the Trinity II: The Church of the Son

The second part of the trilogy which we are publishing to mark the tenth anniversary of Geoffrey Preston's death.     

Eschatology: some Muslim and Christian data

The introduction discusses briefly the usage and the meaning(s) of the term ‘eschatology’, the affirmation of the finality of the revelation granted and the reality of the ‘not yet’, and the recognition of the interrelatedness of eschatology and ethics. A short survey follows of some regularly recurring topics in Islamic eschatological literature, with a few cross‐references to Christian data: barzakh, the coming reign of justice and peace, and the bliss of the Garden. More substantial cross‐references are found in the discussion of the relation between individual and collective eschatology, of the anticipation of the ultimate realization of God's intentions for the whole universe, and of the question of how far both traditions postulate a ‘final exclusivism’. The essay ends with some remarks on God's justice and mercy, with brief comments on the notion of theodicy and the testimony that ‘mercy prevails over wrath’.     

Love and Eschatology

Abstract : This article reflects on the connection between Christian hope for salvation and Christian praxis today. Following a discussion of Christian approaches to hope, salvation, and reconciliation, the eschatological potential of love is explored in conversation with significant theologies of love in Western Christianity. It is argued that love, properly understood, offers the most adequate and dynamic horizon for approaching God's coming reign and for being transformed in the process.     

The Church: Intransit and Intransigent

In this essay, I revisit James E. Dittes' first book, The Church in the Way, and discuss its most salient points. Of particular interest is the view that parish ministers should adapt concepts from psychoanalysis for their ministry, especially as concerns the phenomenon of resistant behavior on the part of parishioners. Dittes' central claim is that resistance is a sign of vitality and thus should be embraced and exploited as a resource for ministry. Evaluating that claim alongside the enduring value of the book as a whole, I suggest three ways the work remains contemporarily relevant.     

The Relative Importance of Anticipated Test Format and Anticipated Test Difficulty on Performance

In this investigation, the relative importance of the effects of anticipated test format and anticipated test difficulty on performance was examined by simultaneously manipulating both. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that test performance was affected more by anticipated test format than by anticipated test difficulty. This suggests that the superior performance of subjects who had anticipated a recall test versus those who had anticipated a recognition test, reported here and in previous studies, is more likely to be due to anticipating a recall format than to anticipating a more difficult test. Experiment 2 showed that subjects who had anticipated a recall test studied longer than subjects who had anticipated a recognition test, even when recall tests were less difficult than recognition tests. One explanation for this finding is that subjects inaccurately monitor the relative difficulty of tests across test formats. Subjects rated recall items as more difficult than recognition items, even when recall items are actually less difficult (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that a priori metacognitive knowledge may reduce the accuracy of on-line metacognitive monitoring.     

Heaven on Earth: The Mind Uploading Project as Secular Eschatology

This paper addresses the greatest aspiration of the transhumanist movement: achieving immortal life through a procedure known as mind uploading. This procedure consists in keeping our minds fully and indefinitely operative after death by transferring them to a non-biological substrate that allows man to be liberated from his bodily confinement. My main thesis is that the mind uploading project presupposes a secular eschatology, consummating the Promethean utopia according to which human beings could redeem themselves, expelling God definitively from their existential horizon. On this basis, the paper offers meaningful contrasts between the uploading as secular eschatology and the Christian tradition.     

Pannenberg,Particularity and Eschatology: Shifting the Debate

Wolfhart Pannenberg's account of the eschatological transition in his Systematic Theology describes how human beings are transformed by passing through a purifying fire that destroys whatever in them is incompatible with the life of God. I argue that this representation of human transformation renders individual existence too discontinuous between life as it now is and the life to come, makes redeemed interhuman sociality unimportant, and transforms access to salvation for non‐Christians into a matter of works. As a result, Pannenberg cannot preserve the kind of particularity he needs for his own theological aims: ensuring the significance of history, affirming finitude and developing a non‐oppositional understanding of the relation between the finite and the infinite.