116 - The Eclipse of Christ in Eschatology: Toward a Christ-Centered Approach

The Eclipse of Christ in Eschatology: Toward a Christ-Centered Approach

By Adrio König

Grand Rapids, Eerdman's. 1989. 248 Pages. $16.95.

Because of my fears for the fate of the earth's creatures, I pay attention to the strategies of eschatology. I was glad to hear Adrio Konig proclaiming a new approach to the "last things," one that steps beyond "traditional battles between chiliasm and antichiliasm, premillennialism and postmillennialism." Instead, he proposes a radical Christocentrism, defining "eschatology" as "teleological Christology." He succinctly criticizes mainstream eschatology (mostly this century's great Germans) for focusing eschatology in the future. Even Barth is too much of a futurist, initiating eschatology only at the resurrection. "The New Testament knows of the last days only in the past and present tense." For Konig, Jesus, or Christ (no distinction here), is "the End"; his history, beginning with "the Incarnation," is "end time," including Jesus' present work among us in the Holy Spirit and his ultimate judgment and revelation at the end of time. "Without or apart from Christ creation's end would be aborted, for Christ is its purpose." But while pushing the end backwards, Konig stops abruptly at Jesus' birth: it turns out that "there is no eschatology in the Old Testament... The Old Testament is on the whole a miscarried history in which the covenant failed." Indeed "the Jews are lost." My gladness did not long survive this futurelessness that cannot even claim Christianity's own past, this anti-Judaic christo-triumphalism with its utter unconcern for the real threats to the world's survival, or the chilling silence of this Afrikaaner on any, even the most abstract, matter of justice. It discloses the danger of making "Jesus" the mono-criterion, in indifference to Jesus' own criterion: the fate of the earth's creatures.

Catherine Keller, Drew University, Madison, N.J.