One last thing, from Surprised by Hope, at page 122:
The word
eschatology, which literally means “the study of the last things,” doesn’t just
refer to death, judgment, heaven, and hell, as used to be thought (and as many
dictionaries still define the word). It also refers to the strongly held belief
of most first-century Jews, and virtually all early Christians, that history
was going somewhere under the guidance of God and that where it was going was
toward God’s new world of justice, healing, and hope. The transition from the
present world to the new one would be a matter not of the destruction of the
present space-time universe but of its radical healing. As we saw in the last
chapter, the New Testament writers, particularly Paul, looked forward to this
time and saw Jesus’s resurrection as the beginning, the firstfruits of it. So
when I (and many others) use the word eschatology, we don’t simply mean the
second coming, still less a particular theory about it; we mean, rather, the
entire sense of God’s future for the world and the belief that that future has
already begun to come forward to meet us in the present. This is what we find
in Jesus himself and in the teaching of the early church.
