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Introduction
method—suffered a long eclipse in the Church’s history. With the prolonged delay of the Parousia the Church began to settle herself in the world, building cathedrals that would last for centuries and mak- ing long-term plans for the future while often reconciling herself to social and secular influence and power. Eschatology was, thus, pushed to the end of history or, more commonly, to the end of the individ- ual’s life and the state of its future existence. As a result, Christian theology devoted to eschatology the last chapter of dogmatics (de novissimis) referring specifically to death, the state after death, the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, the consummation of the world and life everlasting. The only relevance left to eschatology for history and the present life was the fear of God’s final judgment and its ethical implications, or the desire for reward and “happiness” in the future state through the fulfilment of certain conditions in the present life (moral, ascetical, sacramental, etc.).
All this gradually led to the marginalization of eschatology in relation to the essence of the Gospel and of Christianity itself. Prot- estant liberal theology in the nineteenth century placed the “essence of Christianity” in the proclamation of ethical principles,4 while theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, following traditional lines, relativized the doctrine of the last things in comparison with other doctrines.5 All this led Ernst Troeltsch to declare at the end of the nineteenth century that “today the bureau of eschatology is usu- ally closed.”6
Things, however, underwent a radical shift in the following cen- tury. As Hans Urs von Balthasar, writing in 1957, observed, “if Tro- eltsch’s comment that ‘the bureau of eschatology is generally closed these days’ was true for the liberalism of the nineteenth century, it is on the other hand true that the same office has been working over- time since the turn of the century.”7 This historic shift had already begun around the end of the nineteenth century when the biblical
4 Thus, e.g., Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity, trans. T. B. Saunders (London: Ernest Benn, 1958,), passim and p. 54.
5 F. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, eds. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edin- burgh: T&T Clark, 1928), p. 703.
6 E. Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, ed. M. Troeltsch (Munich and Leipzig: n.p., 1925), p. 36.
7 H. Urs von Balthasar, “Eschatologie,” in Fragen der Theologie heute, eds. J. Feiner, et
al. (Einsiederln: Benziger, 1957), p. 403.
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