The Coming of God

Book excerpt: Winner of Grawemeyer AwardIn this remarkable and timely work in many ways the culmination of his systematic theology world-renowned theologian Jurgen 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 fragment world, Moltmann's comprehensive eschatology surveys the Christian vista, bravely envisioning our horizons of expectation for personal, social, even cosmic transformation in God.