On Eschatology

New Emphasis on Eschatology

RATZINGER BEGINS HIS Eschatology¹ by noting that this subject, long treated as a relatively minor feature in the theological landscape, is now regarded as lying in the very heart of theology. Why such a change in theological perspective? In significant part, he explains, this is because of the influential work of theologians like Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, who noted that, in Jesus’s preaching, the message about the imminent end of the world and the coming of the Kingdom is central (1–2).²

The particular character of this new focus on eschatology cannot be accounted for only by the new exegetical methods employed by Scripture scholars. Rather, Ratzinger says we must notice the influence of two currents in European culture: existentialism, which interpreted Jesus’s message about the end according to its own philosophical canons; and Marxism, which uprooted from its theistic context the promise of a life of future happiness and applied it to the future life of the present world, thus claiming to make it more real than the “pie in the sky” offered by theism in general and Christianity in particular. The effect of these cultural currents on theology is that “the classical themes of the doctrine of the last things—heaven and hell, purgatory and judgment, death and the immortality of the soul—are conspicuous by their absence.” Ratzinger avers that, while the study of eschatology rightly concerns itself with the way the future is related to our present life, we cannot ignore “these omitted topics,” since they “belong intrinsically to what is specific in the Christian view of the age-to-come and its presence here and now” (4).

I will not recount Ratzinger’s exposition and critique of the views of the various theologians who would minimize and even deny the importance of those topics, but it is worth attending to the two sets of reflections he offers after considering their views. In the first, he insists on courage and modesty: the courage to see the latest theories in historical context and “the modesty of not claiming to have just discovered what Christianity is all about by dint of one’s own ingenuity.” Humility is required of one who “submits to reality.” Instead of “inventing Christian truth as a newly discovered ‘find,’” he says one should truly find it “in the sacramental community of the faith of all periods” (60). Here the theme that serves as the backdrop for his entire treatment of eschatology (namely, the Church as the subject and “inner living context” of doctrinal development) moves into the foreground (270). Unless we turn to what he calls “the plenary authority of the communitarian history of faith, that is, in the Church,” we are bereft of the all-important subject (260). Ratzinger speaks of a “succession of phenomena (of texts)” that lack “the binding power of internalization” and leave us with “a mere succession of contradictory stages in faith and ecclesial life” (270).

He explains that, when texts are only partly reconcilable, “contemporary theology has no other option save to fall back on the most ancient of its texts,” the Bible itself. Sacred Scripture is, of course, the text par excellence, but if we attempt to interpret it apart from the Church, understood as the authoritative subject that perdures throughout history, we are, in effect, attempting to “attach to whatever one takes to be primitive and Jesus-like a self-illuminating philosophy one has concocted for oneself” (270). This is hardly a promising enterprise. As we shall see, our author finds it at work especially in the dispute about the immortality of the soul and resurrection, which he treats at far greater length than any other topic in his book.

Ratzinger’s other set of reflections about the new emphasis on eschatology concerns the significance of the Christian transformation of Jewish assumptions about salvation history. Oscar Cullmann had pointed out that, as Ratzinger puts it, “Jewish thought knew only one decisive demarcation of time after the creation”—namely, “the moment of Parousia with which the new aeon is to begin.” From the perspective...