GOD AND THE FUTURE

CHRISTIAAN MOSTERT, God and the Future. Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrine of God (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 262pp.

God and the Future is among the impressive works dealing with eschatology in terms of exploring the doctrine of Christian faith. It presents Wolfhart Pannenberg’s understanding of eschatology which shapes the structures of every theological doctrine. This book presents an important insight that the idea of the reign (kingdom) of God and the understanding of God as Holy Trinity explain God as an eschatological ruler over all creation.

In order to explore these ideas of Wolfhart Pannenberg, the author, Chistiaan Mostert, organized the book in six chapters. In the first chapter the author explains the eschatology in the twentieth-century theology. Taking the idea of Pannenberg, Mostert points that any theology must be about God, whether God is mentioned as such or not. In his view, the Christian doctrine about God must be an unfolding of the divine ‘economy’ of creation and redemption. It is an elaboration of the biblical statement that God is love. This divine love is expected finally to reach its fulfillment in the eschatological consummation of this finite, temporal creation and its participation in God’s eternal life.

Mostert shows how Pannenberg presents the Christ-event as the finality of the message of Christ, eschatological revelation of God and thus one with the very essence of God. For pannenberg, as the author puts it, the essential eschatological idea of God is his self-revelation in the person of Jesus who brought about the idea of the kingdom. In this view, the kingdom of God is no longer the spiritual community of the people joined together by obedience to the will of God, but rather an eschatological reality where the Christian hope is not the details of ‘last things’, the eschata, which will follow this world and this age, but to the whole process of the history of the world, especially its future.

While following his way of understanding Pannenberg’s eschatology, Mostert in the second chapter of this book, discusses the question of theology and apocalyptic. It is an understanding of Jesus’ message and his resurrection in the closest relation to the second Temple Jewish apocalyptic thought. Jesus’ message can only be understood within the horizon of apocalyptic expectations because, when Jesus is confessed as son of man, the bringer of the last judgment, we are in the realm of apocalyptic. In Jesus the world is confronted by ultimate promise, the promise of the kingdom which breaks the power of death and brings in new age of freedom.

Pannenberg’s conviction is that Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom of God was radically eschatological. His own idea is that the starting point of theology has to be ‘the kingdom of God understood as the eschatological future brought about by God himself. This imminent kingdom of God, the central idea in the message of Christ, has to become the key to Christian theology as a whole.

In the third chapter Mostert shows how Pannenberg marries theology and philosophy. He discourses the ontological questions, in particular noting the effect of the eschatological grounding principals. It goes without saying that Pannenberg is emphatically a theological thinker, as he wants to relate his theology to philosophical reflection on the nature of that which ‘is’ in its totality. He says that the eschatological understanding of the kingdom of God has ontological implications which cannot be left unexplored. What he really wants philosophers to do is to speak of the absolute or the infinite as a condition of the finite itself. Pannenberg argues that the very idea of the finite logically implies something beyond it.

According to Mostert, Pannenberg’s intention is to elaborate here the ‘ontology of the whole’. He starts with the philosophical understanding of reality as temporality. For him, time is an indispensable part of metaphysics of reality as a whole because ‘being’ cannot be discussed in isolation from ‘time’. In the same line, human essence is not above time, it is a historical essence where the future will not be a return of the ‘first things’, but a new experience that surpasses everything that has been till now. This is where he founds his belief in God as the absolute or the infinite; because God is not exhausted by causing the world to come into being at the beginning. Rather, this God breaks into the course of his creation and initiates new events in it in an unpredictable way.

The ontological priority of the future is the question of the fourth chapter. In this section Mostert considers the nature of the eschatological ontology. What he seeks to articulate more adequately is the unity of identity and difference between being (or essence) and the form in which it appears. He turns to theology for example that, Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom of God, makes it already a present reality, yet without abolishing its futurity. The kingdom of God is expressed in the present but not exhausted by its presence in that time and space. He establishes a relation between being and appearance in a way that the ‘appearing’ reality can be understood as the ‘appearance’ of something that always is. Appearance is better seen as an anticipatory arrival of the future.

It is a real search for ‘an alternative’ to an understanding of the real which is concentrated entirely upon what is existent. What is ‘real’ is not restricted to what exists at present. Both the past (which has existed) and the future (which is not yet existent) are ‘real’, because they are effective in the present moment. What belongs to the future is not yet existent, and it already determines present experiences, at least the present experience of beings who are oriented towards the future and always experience their present and past in the light of the future which they hope for or which they fear. This is how he shows that the future is a real priority because it has an effect on the present and the present could not come into being without its determination by the future.

In his logic, Pannenberg continues saying that the present is the ‘anticipation’ of the ultimate future as the eschatological rule of God in which all things will have their right relation to God. According to Mostert, Panneberg is convinced that it is not a question of realized eschatology, but rather the concept of anticipation has its meaning in the framework of the Christian experience of the already and the not yet. Christian experience is that salvation is already truly experienced, but not yet in its fullness.

How does the eschatological perspective shape the doctrine of God? This is the big deal in these two last chapters. Without exaggerating, these chapter are very important to understand the ideas of Pannenberg in the sense that they show what he means by the idea that God is the power of the future or that the future is God’s mode of being, and what this means both for God’s being and God’s action in the world.

This is where Pannenberg formulates his doctrine of God. He tells us that the question of God arises primarily in the religious experience of a power that can bring human existence to its wholeness and grant it coherence and meaning. He argues from the biblical context of the God of promises, the God who leads history into a new future, the God of the coming kingdom. Pannenberg wants to emphasize the idea of God’s futurity in order to move from a static to a dynamic conception of God.

God is God only in the accomplishment of his lordship over the world, leading it to a new future. In this sense, we cannot think of God’s being apart from God’s kingdom. God’s being is God’s rule or God’s kingdom. As Mostert puts it, God’s rule is the explanation of God’ power and the idea of power is implicit in the very idea of deity. In other words, if the kingdom of God does not come God cannot be God.

Finally, Mostert presents Pannenberg’s Trinitarian articulation of his eschatological doctrine. The major point is to articulate Trinity in relation to the principal that God’s being is God’s rule. He states that the Son reconciles us with the Father by drawing us into his sonship and making us open to God’s future, God’s coming rule, which the Father establishes through the Son and the Holy Spirit. This study culminates in the logic that the doctrine of the Trinity becomes the theological framework for understanding the eschatological completion of the divine project of creation.

The present work is much more a theology of the future. It offers valuable insights to current theology as far as it focuses on eschatology which should take the central place in Christian faith and ends with the doctrine of Trinity. This book can be an important tool for theologians of today in the sense that it begins with theological issues, move to the ontological and returns to theological structuring the unity of eschatology and Trinity.

FOR INDEED, THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS ‘WITHIN YOU’ (Lk17:20)

            The Catholic Church teaches us that on the last day all people shall rise in the flesh; the just to be rewarded with eternal life, and the wicked to be punished with eternal death[1]. At the last day, the glorified body will be reunited to the soul. The biblical-Christian vision tells us that Christ’s resurrection is the foundation of the resurrection of his followers on the last day.

Our reflection in this exercise is toward the idea of the kingdom of God in our midst. We will try to read through the teaching of the Church and the preaching of Jesus in order to understand Christian hope in relation to the idea of the kingdom among us. To understand better this biblical-Christian vision of the “kingdom” in today’s world, we have to think properly about the meaning of the Christ-Event and to build a relevant contemporary eschatological language. In other words, we need to promote the Biblical-Christian and contemporary languages so that the doctrine of the “kingdom” may be relevant to the Christian hope in today’s world. We need to help our fellow men and women to understand Christian Eschatology as the Theology of Hope in a better life, not only at the end of time but starting here on earth.

The Contemporary Eschatological Language

            The question of the eschatological language is unavoidable because eschatology deals with human destiny in relation to God and the world to come. What language should we adopt in speaking of “kingdom of God”? What language should we use to speak about the future which does not yet exist? In other words, if the future is, by definition, something which does not yet exist, how can we know anything about it and build our hope on it?

            This is not a question of knowledge, but rather of faith that Christ’s death and resurrection have made us children of God experiencing the fulfillment of our full humanity here on earth. As Saint John says it in his gospel, the creation was in darkness, and the Word of God descended into the darkness, taking on creatureliness and bringing light in himself, and that light was the life that was in him (Jn1:4).

 Jesus descended into the darkness of a finite, mortal creation, and he offered himself to that world in order to overwhelm the death of creation with his eternal life. The kenosis of God means the theosis of creation. In Jesus, God’s life is poured out, and the creation is filled by it. The death of Jesus is not simply about ‘paying a penalty’ for sin to a cosmic Judge, but is the very reason for which the Son of God incarnated—to bring God’s life into the world in order to bring the world into the life of God where his kingdom is manifest.[2]

            Our contemporary eschatological language is a language of faith which comes from the experience of grace given by God through Jesus Christ. The Christian is conscious of the grace he/she has received through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other words, the eschatological future has been opened to us through the mystery of Christ. This is why Edward Schillebeeckx says that, “the Christ-event in all its dimensions becomes normative for any understanding of the eschatological future”.[3]

The kingdom is at hand

            In the preaching of John the Baptist we find it clear that the kingdom of God is at hand (Matt3:1-2). Jesus came using the same words of the baptizer preaching also the gospel of the kingdom, saying: ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel’ (Mk1:14-15). These two passages show that the message of the kingdom was preached as imminent in the life time of people. The missio Dei (mission of God) through Christ was to bring about his Reign. And this becomes clearer in the conditions Jesus puts in order to be members of this Reign of God: ‘He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me. And he who loves me will be loves by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. If anyone loves me, he will keep my word; and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. (Jn14:20-24).

            From what is said, it goes without saying that when Jesus preached, healed and tought he made present the kingdom of God. He admonished us to seek first the kingdom of God, and all will be given to us; to not fear like little flock for it is our Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom (Lk12:31-32).

            In this line, God’s promise and Jesus Christ’s resurrection raise in Christians the well-founded hope  that a new and eternal dwelling place is prepared for every human person, a new earth where justice abides (Cf. 2Cor5:1-2; 2Pet3:13). “with death conquered, the children of God will be raised in Christ and what was born in weakness and corruption will be clothed in incorruptibility: charity and its work will remain and all the creation, which God made for man, will be set free from its bondage to vanity.”[4]

            The new creation begins with the resurrection of Jesus, and by this we see the eschatological hope of creation: God’s eternal presence in the creation. We may even call this panentheism. The human God remains human forever, is called ‘Son’ for all eternity, inextricably woven into the creation and yet is forever uniquely, holy God. With the resurrection of Jesus, new creation lives in the real and present kingdom with the filling of God’s presence and the subjection of God’s enemies to Jesus, which will reach its climax at his appearing in the last time. Creation moves from being forsaken to blessed, from death to life because of God’s presence.[5]

The transformation of the world is a fundamental requirement of our time also as it is preached by Jesus. To this need the Church’s social Magisterium intends to offer the responses called for by the signs of times, pointing above all to the mutual love between human beings, in the sight of God, as the most powerful instrument of change for the life in the present kingdom. Mutual love, in fact sharing in the infinite love of God, is humanity’s authentic purpose, both historical and transcendent.[6] It is the perfect sign of the manifestation of the kingdom on earth.

God, in Christ redeemed not only the individual person but also the social relations existing between men. As the apostle Paul teaches, life in Christ makes the human person’s identity and social sense emerge in a new manner: “For in Christ Jesus you are children of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ” (Gal3:26-28). In this perspective, the church communities, brought together by the message of Jesus Christ and gathered in the Holy Spirit around the risen Lord (Mt18:20; 28:19-20; Lk24:46-49) offer themselves as places of communion, witness and mission, and as catalysts for the redemption and transformation of social relationships[7] where the kingdom of God is manifest.

This is how Jesus redefined the kingdom of God; he defeated death and sin by taking them into himself, so that those in sin and death could take him into themselves. The kingdom of God then becomes the “kingdom of [the] beloved sons”, brought about by Jesus sent by the Father to overcome the domain of darkness. No longer is participation in the kingdom contingent upon nationality or circumcision for covenant membership, because the crucified Christ was that flesh that was ‘cut off’ for the whole human race: (John 1:4, 5, 9-11, 14).

To sum this up, taking into account the contribution of Jesus’ preaching in the bible and the doctrine of the Church, we tried to describe Christian hope as a belief in the kingdom of God in our midst, but which will be fulfilled in the future. For this to happen on earth, Jesus tells us that ‘unless we are born again, we cannot see the kingdom of God… unless we are born of water and Spirit, we cannot enter the kingdom of God (Jn3:3-6).

Eschatology accordingly is not simply what will take place in the Last Days in heaven and on earth; it is what took place in God’s essential nature when he took the initiative to redeem the world through his incarnated Word. [8] With regard to this theology of hope, people of our time will be able to think about their destiny and be more responsible in their lives.

 

 THE ANTICIPATION OF THE FUTURE AS MOTIVE FOR CHRISTIAN HOPE

            In the New Testament it is clear and unanimous that Jesus in no less than the long-awaited Messiah, and that in him all the hope of Israel has found its fulfillment and the kingdom of God has become present fact. Here is our task to inquire in what sense this is so. Our concern is primarily with a fundamental question: Who is this Christ and what did he come to do?

            A distinction has to be made between the ordinary sense of the key concepts we are using (anticipation and future) and our theological understanding of them. In the ordinary sense, anticipation is an expectation that something might happen in the future. Giving this word a deeper meaning, Pannenberg’s view is that the idea of anticipation involves the one of appearance.

We want to agree with him that anticipation includes both ‘the act of coming-into-anticipation’ and the ‘the “something” that is anticipated’, which is not exhausted in the act of anticipation.[9] Being (or essence) and anticipation may not be separated, for they belong together; nor may they may be equated, for there is a difference between them. What guides Pannenberg’s thinking is the point that what is anticipated or what appears is not exhausted in the anticipation; the anticipation is only a partial realization of the possibilities of what is anticipated in it. What he wants to articulate is the unity of identity and difference between being (or essence) and the form in which it is anticipated.

Ordinarily, the future is seen as the extension of the past and the present. It exists only in thought or imagination since it has not happened yet. In this exercise we want to argue for a view of the future that is concrete and existential. The future is not simply the prisoner of the past and the present. Rather, one must understand the ‘unpredictable new thing that is hidden in the womb of the future by means of which we experience now in anticipation.’[10]

Our starting point is that we hope for our fulfillment in the last days and this hope comes from what we live now. We project what we long for onto the future, but there is a metaphysical correlate of this projection, which is at once utterly mysterious and real in our life.[11]

According to Zachary Hayes, “We know the present in itself; we do not know the past in itself, but we remember it in the images of memory; we do not know the future in itself, but we anticipate the future in images drawn from past and present”[12]. For Hayes, we cannot know the future in the way we know the present. The language and images by which we speak of the future, whether a purely human future or the eschatological future promised by God, can be drawn only from the present experience of humanity, which is rooted in the history of the past.

Here the key issue is to understand the future in relation to the present in the dialectic of anticipation. The sources from which the eschatological language is drawn are to be found in the past and present experience of humanity, and particularly in the history of revelation, which opens a specific hope to humanity.[13] This is why Zachary Hayes conceives the present experience of faith and grace as the now from which the believer looks at the future for the fulfillment of that grace experienced in the present. It is from the present experience of grace that the believer knows what is to come.

Pannenberg establishes a relation between being and appearance in a way that the ‘appearing’ reality can be understood as the ‘appearance’ of something that always is. Appearance is better seen as an anticipatory arrival of the future.[14] In his logic, he says that the present is the ‘anticipation’ of the ultimate future; and the future is the eschatological rule of God in which all things will have their right relation to God. According to Mostert, Pannenberg is convinced that it is not a question of realized eschatology, but rather the concept of anticipation has its meaning in the framework of the Christian experience of the already and the not yet. Christian experience is that salvation is already truly experienced, but not yet in its fullness.[15]

To understand this point we want to take Teilhard’s idea of the Omega Point Theory (OPT) which claims that the universe is evolving towards a godlike final state. He says: “evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of God, although never reaching this ideal”. For him, the cosmogenetic process has both purpose and meaning because it is moving toward an ultimate goal, which he terms Omega. In this respect his version of creation story once again diverges from Darwinian account by incorporating eschatological elements from the Christian tradition. It is only at the end that creation will attain completeness. Teilhard presents the already long history of complexification of matter and consciousness of spirit as evidence of the purposeful pertaining present in the evolutionary movement and as proof of final meaningfulness.[16]

He talks of the Omega not simply as a center born of the fusion of elements which it collects, or annihilating them in itself like a drop of water in an ocean or like a dissolving gain of salt in water, but its structure, the Omega can only be a distinct Center radiating at the core of a system of centers; a grouping in which personalization of the All and personalizations of elements reach their maximum.[17]

      Trying to understand Teilhard de Chardin, one can get the meaning of what we call anticipation of the future. Grounded in agapology and centrology, Teilhard's interpretation of evolution claims that the human layer of consciousness engulfing our earth is becoming a collective brain and heart that will, in the future as a single mind of persons, detach itself from this planet and, transcending space and time, be immersed in God-Omega; the end-goal of evolution is a final creative synthesis of humankind with the universal God-Omega.

Like Teilhard, Pannenberg’s ontology of the future is a kind of evolution from the anticipation of the kingdom to its fullness in the future. The major strength of his position is its emphasis on the openness of being to the new or the movement towards the anticipated. It is immensely liberating, for example, to think of human persons as not simply the outcome of their past history but as the anticipation of their future identity. It is a movement in both directions forward and upward to reach a mystical union with God-Omega (the beginning and end of cosmic evolution).

This links us to the eternity of the biblical God which is God’s presence to every time; his actions and power extend to everything past and future as to something that, for him, is present. God’s eternity is God’s omnipresence. The biblical God allowed the boundless diversity of his creative possibilities to take form in creation, and remains the unity of this richness.[18]

            At this point Teilhard founds his understanding of Christianity. He focuses on finding the true religion which will incorporate the evolutionary movement. For him, Christianity appears as a central phylum of human evolution and as conscious of finding itself in intimate relation with a spiritual and transcendent pole of universal convergence.[19] He understands the Christian God not as a center, fusing and dissolving whatever reaches him, but, as a focus of personalization. He is like love which brings two beings together where one does not absorb the other, but rather, is united to produce a more fulfilling relationship between two separate entities attracted by its power. The essence of Christianity, as Teilhard points it out, is a belief in the unification of the world in God by the Incarnation. This is the basic idea of the Gospels.

            In summary, we have many reasons to read and understand the works of Wolfhart Pannenberg. In this exercise we have tried to highlight the idea of the anticipation of the kingdom on earth as motive for Christian hope. This was nourished by the key issue of understanding the future in relation to the present. Our argument was that the kingdom of God which will be fulfilled in the future is anticipated in the present and experienced in our life. It is not a question of realized eschatology, but rather the concept of anticipation has its meaning in the framework of the Christian experience of the already and the not yet. Christian experience is that salvation is already truly experienced, but not yet in its fullness.

           

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[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church. Revised Edition (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2008), p. 132.

[2]  http:// mburdette.com/2010/2/17/ universal-salvaton-the-kingdom-of-God-and-christian-hop-part-3

[3] Edward Schillebeeckx, “The Interpretation of Eschatology,” in Concilium 14 (1969), 53.

[4] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 39: AAS 58 (1966), 1057.

[5] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 8.

[6] Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace p.31

[7] Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the social doctrine of the Church (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2004), p. 30.

[8]   Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl p92.

[9] WOLFHART PANNENBERG, Theology and the Kingdom of God, p. 132.

[10] WOLFHART PANNENBERG, Theology and the Kingdom of God, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), p. 56.

[11] MOSTERT Christiaan, God and the Future. Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrne of God (London:T&T Clark, 2002), p.90.

[12] Zachary Hayes, Visions of a future. A Study of Christian Eschatology (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1989), p. 89.

[13] Zachary Hayes, Op. cit, pp. 90-91.

[14] MOSTERT Christiaan, God and the Future, pp.96-97.

[15] WOLFHART PANNENBERG, “Can Christianity Do Without an Eschatology?” in G.B. Caird et al. The Christian Hope. Theological collections n⁰ 13 (London: SPCK, 1970),  P. 29.

[16] Arthur Fabel and Donald St John (eds), Teilhard in the 21st Century. The Emerging Spirit of Earth (New York: Maryknoll, 2003), p. 29.

[17] Teilhard de Chardin Pierre, The phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper Torch book, 1965), p. 262.

 

[18] WOLFHART PANNENBERG, What is man? Contemporary Anthropology in Theological perspective, Trans. Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), p. 74.

[19] Robert L. FARICY, Teilhard de Chardin’s theology of the Christian in the world (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), p. 82.