12 Christoph Schönborn, O.P., From Death to Life: The Christian Journey, trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 14. Schönborn's book, in its retrieval of the Fathers and its focus on resurrection and eternal life, inspires my own.
13 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 57, a. 1. Here and throughout this book I use the 1920 translation by the English Dominican Fathers, reprinted as Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 5 vols. (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1981).
14 See Douglas Farrow, "Eucharist, Eschatology and Ethics," in The Future as God's Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology, ed. David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 200; cf. 213. Farrow warns against "the platonizing tendency" in Christian eschatology (202), by which he means the tendency to move away from the covenantal/priestly particularity of Jesus (and of the Eucharist). See also Oscar Cullman's point that "[i]t is, then, the present Lordship of Christ, inaugurated by His resurrection and exaltation to the right hand of God, that is the centre of the faith of primitive Christianity." Cullmann, The Earliest Christian Confessions, trans. J. K. S. Reid (London: Lutterworth Press, 1949), 58.
15 Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, Hope against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 169. Without much comment, Bauckham and Hart accept the view that Platonic philosophy, with its emphasis on the immortal soul and on contemplation of the eternal forms, compromised patristic and medieval eschatology by promoting "a more purely intellectualist and individualist understanding of the vision" as opposed to "a more holistic understanding of human destiny" (170-71; cf. 128-29, 178-79).
16 See Richard B. Hays, The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), esp. the first essay in this collection, "The Conversion of the Imagination: Scripture and Eschatology in 1 Corinthians," 1-24. Cf. Garrett Green, "Imagining the Future," in Fergusson and Sarot, The Future as God's Gift, 73-87.
17 Pope Benedict XVI, "Intervention at the Fourteenth General Congregation of the Synod (14 October 2008)," in Insegnamenti IV, 2 (2008): 493-94.
Notes to pp. 2-4 • 133
18 Pope Benedict XVI, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2010), §47.
19 For the text of the Apostles' Creed, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 49.
20 In strongly affirming that Scripture should be "the soul of theological studies," I am not advocating a "sola scriptura" approach to catechesis or to theology. With Dei Verbum, I affirm that "Sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture, then, are bound closely together, and communicate one with the other. For both of them, flowing out from the same divine well-spring, come together in some fashion to form one thing, and move towards the same goal. Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit. And Tradition transmits in its entirety the Word of God which has been entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit. It transmits it to the successors of the apostles so that, enlightened by the Spirit of truth, they may faithfully preserve, expound and spread it abroad by their preaching. Thus it comes about that the Church does not draw her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone. . . . Sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture make up a single sacred deposit of the Word of God, which is entrusted to the Church. By adhering to it the entire holy people, united to its pastors, remains always faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and the prayers (cf. Acts 2:42)." See the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, §§9-10, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, vol. 1, new rev. ed., ed. Austin Flannery, O.P. (Northport, N.Y.: Costello, 1998), 755.
21 Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 211e, 563.
22 N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 153. For similar views, see C. Kavin Rowe, World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 122-23; Murray J. Harris, "Resurrection and Immortality in the Pauline Corpus," in Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 147-70, esp. 165-68.