The Good Place <\/em>(which we all should be!) will have spotted the theologian\u2019s name, indeed this book title, on the chalkboard of Chidi\u2019s red-booted friend.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/956\/2019\/02\/IMG_20170831_183936-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
In his Preface, Moltmann makes the point that eschatology really should not be thought of as the end of all things, but as rather, finally, our true beginning: \u201cIn the end is the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n
And, it\u2019s true, eschatology taken as settling the books yet minus the reason tortured humanity has endured it all would be to get it backwards. But we have such poor capacity to imagine a world in which love actually reigns without opposition. Unless we remember that future as our true beginning, for what exactly are we hoping?<\/p>\n
The world to come is not the end of all things, except as the very point of all things: finally to begin, to begin creating after the apprenticeship, to begin loving after selfish incapacity has been wrestled down, to begin celebrating after all the betrayal, pain, and death.<\/p>\n
Moltmann: what eschatology \u201cis about is the new creation of all things. Christian eschatology is the remembered hope of the raising of the crucified Christ, so it talks about beginning afresh in the deadly end.\u201d<\/p>\n
And this all sent me back to The Four Quartets<\/em> of T. S. Eliot, especially \u201cEast Coker,\u201d which opens, \u201cIn my beginning is my end,\u201d but concludes with, \u201cIn my end is my beginning.\u201d Without Moltmann I didn\u2019t really have a good purchase on what Eliot was doing in this second of the quartets (and, indeed, in the work as a whole).<\/p>\nEliot moves through entropy and ruin into a newness of life in \u201cEast Coker,\u201d concluding with:<\/p>\n
Love is most nearly itself
\nWhen here and now cease to matter.
\nOld men ought to be explorers
\nHere or there does not matter
\nWe must be still and still moving
\nInto another intensity
\nFor a further union, a deeper communion
\nThrough the dark cold and the empty desolation,
\nThe wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
\nOf the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.<\/em><\/p>\nNeedless to say, Eliot remains indispensable for living, because so much living is dying, and we have to remember, we must hope, that dying is somehow a way to start living.<\/p>\n
Moltmann: \u201cThat is how Dietrich Bonhoeffer took leave of his fellow prisoner, Payne Best, in Flossenb\u00fcrg concentration camp, as he went to his execution: \u2018This is the end\u2014for me the beginning of life.\u2019 That is how John on Patmos saw the Last Judgment of the world\u2014not as annihilation, a universal conflagration, or death in a cosmic winter. He saw it as the first day of the new creation of all things: \u2018See, I am making all things new\u2019 (Rev. 21.5). If we perceive it in remembrance of the hope of Christ, what is called the end of history is also simply the end of temporal history and the beginning of the eternal history of life.\u201d<\/p>\n
If your body or your mind or your heart bleeds, please remember that we decline only to dawn. If you follow Jesus, then feel His Holy Spirit, the Lord of life, whisper what Moltmann expresses so well:<\/p>\n
\u201cWherever life is perceived and lived in community and fellowship with Christ, a new beginning is discovered hidden in every end.\u201d<\/p>\n
A new beginning is discovered hidden in every end.<\/em> Please try to remember that, as I try to remember.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"J\u00fcrgen Moltmann\u2019s book on eschatology, The Coming of God, came to my hands again recently. Fans of The Good Place (which we all should be!) will have spotted the theologian\u2019s name, indeed this book title, on the chalkboard of Chidi\u2019s red-booted friend. In his Preface, Moltmann makes the point that eschatology really should not be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3455,"featured_media":1159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[201,340,306,334,17,337],"class_list":["post-1153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-david-franks","tag-east-coker","tag-eschatology","tag-moltmann","tag-t-s-eliot","tag-the-four-quartets"],"yoast_head":"\n
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