The end times: coming soon? An advent reflection.

Christian mysticism has often proved confusing and divisive, hardly a surprise, according to one wag, since it begins in mist and ends in schism. I know of no comparable barb directed at eschatology, nor am I clever enough to invent one. But for many of us, eschatology is an equally mysterious and off-putting term. As Jaroslav Pelikan observes, "Not merely death but all the major themes of eschatology ... must be reckoned as unfinished business for many supposedly secularized moderns, for any public reference to them inevitably evokes a giggle." Such laughter, as the truism goes, reveals deeper anxieties.

Eschatology is surely a topic of real celebrity; in Googling the term, I registered more than one hundred sixty-five thousand immediate hits. A brief survey of several sites revealed a heady variety of perspectives about when Jesus will return and which current events are the portents of his coming. I am natively skeptical of literalist blueprints (or perhaps anxious, apropos of Pelikan's point), so I sought laughter in my second search. Linking "eschatology" with "humor," I found jokes aplenty, some of them amusing. A single example: How many charismatics does it take to change a light bulb? One, but he'll definitely have to alter his eschatology.

Enough with levity! Eschatology, as the study of "last things" (from the Greek ta eschata), is obviously a serious subject, and well represented in the liturgical readings of this Advent season. The story of Christ's first coming is linked to visions of a second Advent. In familiar words from Luke, Jesus describes how "dreadful" will be the last days (21:23), with "signs in the sun, moon, and stars" (21:25), and the "Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory (21:27)." Apocalyptic visions of an imminent eschaton were staples of early Christianity; we feel compelled to attend to them, as such, to accommodate them. Yet as (post)moderns, living two millennia after John baptized Jesus, how shall we make sense of such passages? The world continues. The end that early Christians saw as imminent is indefinitely postponed; the eschatological horizon of faith recedes apace with the passage of time.

Granted, some of us who endured the cold-war years remember the duck-and-cover drills in our youth, and all of us who live after September 11 have weathered the rhetoric of fear at the heart of one party's message during the recent presidential campaign. We understand the meaning and the power of "apocalyptic" language, that vague sense of foreboding about coming disaster, perhaps imminent, perhaps of global proportions. And we are, of course, existentially aware of our individual last things. Death and finitude prompt musings about the world to come. Soon enough, we'll shuffle off this mortal coil; soon enough, we'll know the afterlife.

This existential turn is one familiar to German New Testament scholar and theologian Rudolf Bultmann and his disciples. But, in its individual focus, it lacks a corporate or ecclesial dimension. It also fails to resolve other uncertainties for those of us who toil in the vineyard of Christian ethics. Ever since the publication of Albert Schweitzer's The Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1906, scholars and activists alike have questioned the connections between eschatology and ethics in Christian thought and practice, between the notion that God will arrive in his own good time, and our own responsibilities in the world as we await the "new heaven and new earth." Scott Lewis, in his survey of recent scholarship on New Testament apocalyptic, concludes that the "consensus" of current thought affirms eschatology as central to Jesus' teaching. That said, the puzzle remains for anyone interested in applying an eschatologically charged ethic to a world that has lasted long past the first generation of Christians. Schweitzer's account of Jesus' message as an "interim ethic" seems unduly dismissive by today's exegetical standards. Still, we wonder about the applicability of Jesus' words to pressing practical concerns--to questions of pacifism and just war, social justice and human rights, political prudence and pluralistic accommodation.

Answers are not easy to come by, and fundamental differences of interpretation emerge, depending on whether one connects or separates eschatology and ethics. The list of scholarly contributors to that discussion includes a pantheon of twentieth-century theologians and exegetes from Schweitzer to Hans Kung. In recent decades, the work of Protestant theologian Jurgen Moltmann has been especially prominent. According to Moltmann, "[F]rom first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope." The eschatological thrust of Christian hope, the "already" but "not yet" character of the kingdom inaugurated by Christ, provides the central dynamic for social and political change. It is not that we hasten the eschaton with good works. From creation through the eschaton, grace always remains God's initiative. But as church, we proleptically anticipate and represent the universal character of God's saving will for all creation. The challenges to maintaining an active hope seem endless. Yet we are not to grow weary. There can be no quietism, no reactionary traditionalism, no retreat from the world. We are called to do God's work as we await his coming in the fullness of time.