IB World Religions 3.4.3. Eschatology: the Second Coming, Judgment, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory Notes

3.4.3. Eschatology: The Second Coming, Judgment, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory

The last things

1. Christians use eschatology (from the Greek eschatos, last) for teaching about the end. It covers the end of one human life and the end of history together.
2. The subject splits in two. Individual eschatology covers death and what follows it for one person, while general eschatology covers Christ's return, the raising of the dead and the renewal of creation.
3. Older Catholic manuals gathered the topic under the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. Preaching in Advent and Lent still works through that list.
4. The New Testament sources are few: Mark 13 with its parallels, Paul's letters to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, and the book of Revelation.
5. Christians of every denomination describe the present age as already and not yet. They hold that the Kingdom of God has begun in Jesus and has not yet arrived in full.
6. That tension governs everything below. Claims about the future are held together with claims about what Christians say happened at Easter.

The second coming

1. The second coming or parousia (Greek for arrival or presence) is the belief that Jesus will return openly and in glory. Christians hold that history has a destination rather than simply a stop.
2. Acts 1:11 supplies the classic text, where disciples watching the Ascension are told that this same Jesus will come back in the same way. Matthew 24 and 1 Thessalonians 4 add the imagery of clouds, trumpet and gathering.
3. The expectation is repeated weekly in worship. Many congregations sing that Christ has died, Christ is risen and Christ will come again.
4. The first generation seems to have expected it soon. Paul closes 1 Corinthians with the Aramaic prayer Maranatha, our Lord come, and 2 Peter 3 answers people already asking why the promise is slow.
5. Denominations weight it very differently. Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses build their identity around the expected return, while Catholic, Orthodox and mainline Protestant churches keep it liturgical and warn against prediction.
6. Advent gives the belief a season. Its four weeks rehearse waiting for a first coming that has happened and a second that Christians say has not.

Apocalyptic and the millennium

1. Apocalyptic writing (from the Greek apokalypsis, unveiling) works through visions, beasts and numbers. Christians meet it in Daniel, in parts of the Gospels and above all in Revelation.
2. Most churches read that imagery as symbolic address to first-century congregations under pressure. Others read it as description of events still to come.
3. Revelation 20 speaks of a thousand-year reign of Christ with the saints. Christian readings of that millennium fall into three broad families.
4. Premillennialism holds that Christ returns before the thousand years and establishes it. Its dispensationalist form, spread by the Scofield Reference Bible and the Left Behind novels, adds a rapture of believers before a time of tribulation.
5. Postmillennialism holds that the gospel will gradually transform the world and that Christ returns after that golden age. It was widespread among nineteenth-century Protestants and fed campaigns against slavery.
6. Amillennialism reads the thousand years as a symbol of the present church age. Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Reformed teaching mostly follows this line.
7. Groups that have named dates are the sharpest test cases. The Millerite expectation of 1844 ended in what its own members called the Great Disappointment, and Jehovah's Witnesses have revised published expectations more than once.

Judgment and its two stages

1. Christians hold that God judges human lives. The Gospels' central picture is Matthew 25, where the nations are sorted like sheep from goats by what was done to the hungry, the sick and the prisoner.
2. Catholic and Orthodox teaching distinguishes two moments. The particular judgment meets each person at death, and the general judgment at the end of history makes the verdict public.
3. Reformation churches put the accent elsewhere. Lutheran and Reformed teaching holds that a believer is justified by grace through faith, so judgment declares a verdict already settled rather than weighing an account.
4. Catholic teaching answers that faith works through love. The Council of Trent held that good works are the fruit of grace rather than payment for it, and the Lutheran and Catholic Joint Declaration of 1999 narrowed the old dispute.
5. Orthodox writers often describe judgment as an encounter rather than a courtroom. The same divine love is then experienced as light by those open to it and as fire by those closed against it.
6. The doctrine shapes ordinary practice. Examination of conscience, confession, prayers at a deathbed and the reading of Matthew 25 in social ministry all rest on the belief that lives are answerable.

Heaven, hell and purgatory

1. Heaven is described as life in God's presence rather than as a place. Catholic theology calls it the beatific vision, Orthodox theology speaks of theosis or sharing God's life, and Protestant writing speaks simply of being with Christ.
2. Christians are cautious about picturing it. Revelation 21 offers a renewed heaven and earth, and the Gospels prefer images of a banquet, a homecoming and rest.
3. Hell appears in the Gospels as Gehenna, the name of a valley outside Jerusalem. The Catholic Catechism defines it as definitive self-exclusion from communion with God, and traditional teaching describes separation rather than torture ordered by God.
4. Christians disagree about its scope. Some evangelicals, Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses hold annihilationism, that the lost cease to be, while the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar argued that Christians may hope all are saved.
5. Purgatory is Catholic teaching that those who die in God's friendship but still imperfect are purified before heaven. It was defined at Lyons in 1274, Florence in 1439 and Trent in 1563, and argued from 2 Maccabees 12, where prayer is offered for the dead.
6. The other branches part company here. Orthodox Christians pray for the dead but reject the Latin definition, and Protestant churches reject purgatory outright because 2 Maccabees sits in the Apocrypha and because the sale of indulgences provoked Luther in 1517.

Hope in Christian practice

1. Funerals are where eschatology is heard most plainly. The Anglican burial service commits a body to the ground in sure and certain hope of the resurrection, and Orthodox funeral hymns address the dead person directly.
2. The doctrine also disciplines speech. Catholic and Orthodox teaching both refuse date-setting, and churches warn members away from prediction after each wave of end-time publishing.
3. Care of the dying carries the belief into medicine. Cicely Saunders founded Saint Christopher's Hospice in London in 1967 on Christian grounds, and the modern hospice movement grew from it.
4. Some Christians press the Kingdom into the present. Liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez argue that hope for God's future obliges work against poverty now, as the earlier Social Gospel movement did.
5. Others answer that this risks losing the future altogether. The debate runs through Catholic, Anglican and evangelical writing rather than dividing neatly between denominations.
6. Recent writing has revived interest in a renewed creation. The Anglican scholar Tom Wright argues that Christian hope points to a remade world rather than escape from it, and the case is widely discussed.