The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology

by Jürgen Moltmann

Publisher:

Fortress Press

, 2004

Overview

In this remarkable and timely work—in many ways the culmination of his systematic theology—world-renowned theologian Jürgen Moltmann stands Christian eschatology on its head. Moltmann rejects the traditional approach, which focuses on the end, an apocalyptic finale, as a kind of Christian search for the “final solution.” He centers instead on hope and God’s promise of new creation for all things. “Christian eschatology,” he says, “is the remembered hope of the raising of the crucified Christ, so it talks about beginning afresh in the deadly end.”

Yet Moltmann’s novel framework, deeply informed by Jewish and messianic thought, also fosters rich and creative insights into the perennially nettling questions of eschatology: Are there eternal life and personal identity after death? How is one to think of heaven, hell, and purgatory? What are the historical and cosmological dimensions of Christian hope? What are its social and political implications?

In a heartbreakingly fragile and fragmented world, Moltmann’s comprehensive eschatology surveys the Christian vista, bravely envisioning our “horizons of expectation” for personal, social, even cosmic transformation in God.

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Interested in more? Be sure to check out Jürgen Moltmann Collection (22 vols.).

Key Features

• Presents an eschatological view of hope and God’s promise of new creation
• Provides creative insight into various questions of eschatology

Contents

• The Transposition of Eschatology into Time
• The Transpoition of Eschatology into Eternity
• The Eschatology of the Coming God
• The Rebirth of Messianic Thinking in Judaism
• Loved Life and Death
• The Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Body?
• Is Death the Consequence of Sin or Life’s Natural End?
• Where are the Dead?
• Death, Mourning and Consolation
• The Apocalypse of History
• Messianic Eschatology: ‘The Thousand Years’ Empre’
• Political Millenarianism: ‘The Holy Empire’
• Ecclesiastical Millenarianism: ‘The Mother and Preceptress of the Nation’
• Epochal Millenarianism: The Birth of ‘Modern Times’ out of the Spirit of Messianic Hope
• Is Millenarian Eschatology Necessary?
• End-Times of Human History: Exterminism
• ‘The End of History’: Pos-historic Prophets
• Is Apocalyptic Eschatology Necessary?
• The Restoration of All Things
• The Future of Creation—Sabbath and Shekinah
• The Annihilation of the World or its Consummation
• The End of Time in the Eternity of God
• The End of Space in the Presence of God
• The Cosmic Temple: The Heavenly Jerusalem
• The Self-Glorification of God
• The Self-Realization of God
• Interactions between Divine and Human Activity
• The Fulness of God and the Feast of Eternal Joy

Praise for the Print Edition

[Moltmann’s systematic work] thrives on the cutting edge of Christian theology as it nears the twenty-first century. . . It will challenge and stimulate a whole generation of theologians to work at theology in different and more comprehensive ways.

—M. Douglas Meeks, Religious Studies Review

His theme is not the end but rather the new beginning of all things-in personal life, in humanity's communal historical life, and in the whole life of the cosmos. So, for Moltmann, ‘the true creation stands beside us and, primarily, before us.’

—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Product Details

• Title: The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology
• Author: Jürgen Moltmann
• Translator: Margaret Kohl
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication Date: 2004
• Pages: 368
• Christian Group: Reformed
• Resource Type: Systematic Theologies
• Topic: Eschatology

About Jürgen Moltmann

Jürgen Moltmann studied Christian theology in England and, after his return to Germany, in Göttingen. He served as a pastor from 1952 to1958 in Bremen. Since 1967 he has been Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Tübingen and retired there in 1994. Among his many influential and award-winning books are The Theology of Hope (1967), The Crucified God (1974), The Trinity and the Kingdom (1981), The Spirit of Life (1994), and The Coming of God (1996), winner of the Grawemeyer Award in 2000, all published by Fortress Press.

Contents

Top Highlights

“The Coming of God. In God’s creative future, the end will become the beginning, and the true creation is still to come and is ahead of us.” (Page xi)

“But if the Christian hope is reduced to the salvation of the soul in a heaven beyond death, it loses its power to renew life and change the world, and its flame is quenched; it dies away into no more than a gnostic yearning for redemption from this world’s vale of tears.” (Page xv)

“He finds expressions for God’s time: ‘suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye’ (1 Cor. 15:52). The Last Day is the Day of the Lord, and God’s time is the time of the eternal present. If the dead are no longer in the time of the living but in God’s time, then they exist in his eternal present. So how long is it from a person’s death in time to the End-time raising of the dead? The answer is: just an instant! And if we ask: where are the dead ‘now’, in terms of our time?—the answer has to be: they are already in the new world of the resurrection and God’s eternal life. So Christ said to the man dying with him on the cross: ‘Today’—not in three days—not at the Last Day—but: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23:43). And that today is the eternal today of God.” (Page 102)

“In this resurrection dialectic, human beings don’t have to try to cling to their identity through constant unity with themselves, but will empty themselves into non-identity, knowing that from this self-emptying they will be brought back to themselves again for eternity. Human beings find themselves, not by guarding themselves and saving themselves up, but through a self-emptying into what is other and alien. Only people who go out of themselves arrive at themselves.” (Page 67)

Product Details

• Title: The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology
• Author: Jürgen Moltmann
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Print Publication Date: 2004
• Logos Release Date: 2013
• Era: era:Contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subject: Eschatology
• Resource ID: LLS:CMGODMOLTMANN
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-02-11T17:41:17Z

About Jürgen Moltmann

Jürgen Moltmann is a German Reformed theologian. He is professor emeritus of systematic theology at the University of Tübingen and the 2000 recipient of the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion. He studied Christian theology in England and in Göttingen, and served as a pastor from 1952 to 1958 in Bremen. Among his many influential and award-winning books are The Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, The Trinity and the Kingdom, The Spirit of Life, and The Coming of God.