Rom. 8:24—“in hope were we saved: but hope that is seen is not hope: for who hopeth for that which he seeth?” 1 Cor. 13:10—“when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part will be done away.” Original sin is not wholly eradicated from the Christian, and the Holy Spirit is not yet sole ruler. So, too, the church is still in a state of conflict, and victory is hereafter. But as the Christian life attains its completeness only in the future, so with the life of sin. Death begins here, but culminates hereafter. James 1:15—“the sin, when it is full grown, bringeth forth death.”The wicked man here has only a foretaste of “the wrath to come” (Mat. 3:7). We may “lay up ... treasures in heaven” (Mat. 6:20), but we may also “treasure up for ourselves wrath” (Rom. 2:5), i. e., lay up treasures in hell.
Dorner: “To the actuality of the consummation of the church belongs a cessation of reproduction through which there is constantly renewed a world which the church must subdue.... The mutually external existence of spirit and nature must give way to a perfect internal existence. Their externality to each other is the ground of the mortality of the natural side, and of its being a means of temptation to the spiritual side. For in this externality the natural side has still too great independence and exerts a determining power over the personality.... Art, the beautiful, receives in the future state its special place; for it is the way of art to delight in visible presentation, to achieve the classical and perfect with unfettered play of its powers. Every one morally perfect will thus wed the good to the beautiful. In the rest, there will be no inactivity; and in the activity also, no unrest.”
Schleiermacher: “Eschatology is essentially prophetic; and is therefore vague and indefinite, like all unfulfilled prophecy.” Schiller's Thekla: “Every thought of beautiful, trustful seeming Stands fulfilled in Heaven's eternal day; Shrink not then from erring and from dreaming,—Lofty sense lies oft in childish play.” Frances Power Cobbe, Peak of Darien, 265—“Human nature is a ship with the tide out; when the tide of eternity comes in, we shall see the purpose of the ship.” Eschatology deals with the precursors of Christ's second coming, as well as with the second coming itself. We are to labor for the coming of the kingdom of God in society as well as in the individual and in the church, in the present life as well as in the life to come.
Kidd, in his Principles of Western Civilization, says that survives which helps the greatest number. But the greatest number is always in the future. The theatre has become too wide for the drama. Through the roof the eternal stars appear. The image of God in man implies the equality of all men. Political equality implies universal suffrage; economic equality implies universal profit. Society has already transcended, first, city isolation, and secondly, state isolation. The United States presents thus far the largest free trade area in history. The next step is the unity of the English speaking peoples. The days of separate nationalities are numbered. Laissez faire = surviving [pg 982]barbarism. There are signs of larger ideas in art, ethics, literature, philosophy, science, politics, economics, religion. Competition must be moralized, and must take into account the future as well as the present. See also Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis.
George B. Stevens, in Am. Jour. Theology, Oct. 1902: 666-684, asks: “Is there a self-constituted New Testament Eschatology?” He answers, for substance, that only three things are sure: 1. The certain triumph of the kingdom—this being the kernel of truth in the doctrine of Christ's second coming; 2. the victory of life over death—the truth in the doctrine of the resurrection; 3. the principle of judgment—the truth at the basis of the belief in rewards and punishments in the world to come. This meagre and abstract residuum argues denial both of the unity and the sufficiency of Scripture. Our view of inspiration, while it does not assure us of minute details, does notwithstanding give us a broad general outline of the future consummation, and guarantees its trustworthiness by the word of Christ and his apostles.
Faith in that consummation is the main incitement to poetic utterance and to lofty achievement. Shairp, Province of Poetry, 28—“If poetry be not a river fed from the clear wells that spring on the highest summits of humanity, but only a canal to drain off stagnant ditches from the flats, it may be a very useful sanitary contrivance, but has not, in Bacon's words, any 'participation of divineness.'” Shakespeare uses prose for ideas detached from emotion, such as the merrymaking of clowns or the maundering of fools. But lofty thought with him puts on poetry as its singing robe. Savage, Life beyond Death, 1-5—“When Henry D. Thoreau lay dying at Concord, his friend Parker Pillsbury sat by his bedside. He leaned over, took him by the hand, and said: ‘Henry, you are so near to the border now, can you see anything on the other side?’And Thoreau answered: ‘One world at a time, Parker!’ But I cannot help asking about that other world, and if I belong to a future world as well as to this, my life will be a very different one.” Jesus knew our need of certain information about the future, and therefore he said: “In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2).
Hutton, Essays, 2:211—“Imagination may be powerful without being fertile; it may summon up past scenes and live in them without being able to create new ones. National unity and supernatural guidance were beliefs which kept Hebrew poetry from being fertile or original in its dealings with human story; for national pride is conservative, not inventive, and believers in actual providence do not care to live in a world of invention. The Jew saw in history only the illustration of these two truths. He was never thoroughly stirred by mere individual emotion. The modern poet is a student of beauty; the O. T. poet a student of God. To the latter all creation is a mere shadow; the essence of its beauty and the sustaining power of its life are in the spiritual world. Go beyond the spiritual nature of man, and the sympathy of the Hebrew poet is dried up at once. His poetry was true and divine, but at the expense of variousness of insight and breadth of sympathy. It was heliocentric rather than geocentric. Only Job, the latest, is a conscious effort of the imagination.” Apocalyptic poetry for these reasons was most natural to the Hebrew mind.
Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 66—“Somewhere and for some Being, there shines an unchanging splendor of beauty, of which in nature and in art we see, each of us from his own standpoint, only passing gleams and stray reflections, whose different aspects we cannot now coördinate, whose import we cannot fully comprehend, but which at least is something other than the chance play of subjective sensibility or the far-off echo of ancestral lusts.” Dewey, Psychology, 200—“All products of the creative imagination are unconscious testimonials to the unity of spirit which binds man to man, and man to nature, in one organic whole.” Tennyson, Idylls of the King: “As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry, Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice Around a king returning from his wars.” See, on the whole subject of Eschatology, Luthardt, Lehre von den letzten Dingen, and Saving Truths of Christianity; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:713-880; Hovey, Biblical Eschatology; Heagle, That Blessed Hope.