Christian Dogmatics: Volume 2

Introduction

Introduction Eschatology, or the doctrine of the last things, has long been regarded as a dubious enterprise.1 Martin Luther claimed that as little as a child knows in the mother's womb about this life, so little do we know about life eternal. Yet Luther himself and most of his contemporaries did not doubt the heavenly reality. The story was different during the Enlightenment. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, in particular, became famous when he denounced the resurrection ofJesus as a deliberate fraud designed by the disciples. This alleged fabrica­ tion enabled them to proclaim Jesus as Savior and to become his apostles instead of returning on his death to their drudgery as fishermen. When a generation later Immanuel Kant in his Critique of PracticalReason called the immortality of the soul a postulate of pure, practical reason, he did not endow the doctrine of an afterlife with new credibility. It was simply necessary to his metaphysical system to ensure that at least in eternity we could fulfill the highest good, which he thought was demanded from us. It also enabled him .to discern a resolution of the tension between the direction of our existence (attaining the highest good) and the actual content of our ex­ istence (not completely attaining the highest good). Before Reimarus, Herbert of Cherbury had claimed in his book De veritate (1624) that the notion of reward and punishment after this life is both reasonable and consonant with the biblical teachings. This twofold founda­ tion of an afterlife on reason and revelation bore the seeds of potential con­ flict, reason eventually gaining the upper hand. Thus frequently, only that part of eschatology has been asserted that is defensible by reason. The death blow to eschatology, however, came in the nineteenth century when Karl Marx, a student of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, claimed that the hope in a better hereafter only serves to suppress the desire for change of the economic conditions of this world. He advocated a dissolution of the belief in the hereafter in order successfully to tackle the problems of this life. Theologians too became more and more hesitant to portray the Christian hope in otherworldly imagery. In the late nineteenth century, Albrecht Ritschl depicted the kingdom of God mainly in social categories, as did Walter Rauschenbusch, the main representative of the social-gospel movement at the dawn of the twentieth century. Though Rauschenbusch did not renounce belief 475 1 2 / ESCHATOLOGY in the hereafter, much more important for him was the social and communal dimension of the Christian faith. Adolf von Harnack, in his famous lectures What is Christianity? (1899/1900), told his audience that Jesus shared with his contemporaries the idea of the coming of the kingdom with outward signs but that the distinctive center ofJesus' proclamation was not the final apocalyp­ tic battle that this idea implied. It consisted rather in the Fatherhood of God and the infinite value of the human soul. The trend indicated in Harnack's position was clear. All speculations about heaven, hell, or an afterlife were suspect in an age governed by reason and nascent technology. A change occurred when Albert Schweitzer published his small booklet The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret ofJesus' Messiahship and Passion (1901). Schweitzer rejected the liberal alternative that had reigned supreme in the latter part of the nineteenth century, that Jesus was to be praised as the moral teacher of the Sermon on the Mount, while the eschatological world view he espoused had to be rejected. Schweitzer proposed that Jesus' message and world view had to be understood either in totally eschatological terms or in totally noneschatological terms. Schweitzer himself opted for a completely eschatological picture. According to Schweitzer, Jesus realized at his baptism that he had to work as the unknown and hidden Messiah until the messianic age appeared. Though Jesus put much effort into preaching, there were only meager results, which made him realize that the coming of the kingdom would be delayed. Then Jesus discovered that John the Baptist was Elijah reincarnate. WhenJohn was beheaded and the kingdom did not come, Jesus faced the prospect that he too had to suffer a violent death. He finally went to Jerusalem with his disciples, determined to bring about the kingdom of God. When he entered the city claiming to be the Messiah, the Jewish authorities accused him of blasphemy and put him to death. He died, but nothing happened. Though Schweitzer presented a unified picture ofJesus, interpreting him...