Beale on Eschatology and Biblical Theology

I a handful of weeks, I will be giving a special lecture on “New Creation, Resurrection, and the Mission of God” at a church. I found this quote from Greg Beale right on the money:

…the apostles understood eschatology not merely as futurology but as a redemptive-historical psychology of the present. They understood that they were already living in the end times and that they were to understand their present salvation in Christ to be already an end-time reality. Hence every aspect of their salvation was to be conceived of as eschatology in nature. Just as when one puts on green sunglasses, everything seen is green, so Christ had placed eschatological lenses on his disciples, so that everything they looked at in the Christian faith had an end-time tint…Every doctrine should be viewed through a latter-day lens.

See “The New Testament and New Creation” (essay by Beale) in Hafemann’s Biblical Theology, p. 162.