Sunday, May 21, 2006

'In the end is the beginning'

'And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.'

-C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, 173.

cf. The Preface to Jürgen Moltmann's The Coming of God:
But Christian eschatology has nothing to do with apocalyptic ‘final solutions’ of this kind, for its subject is not ‘the end’ at all. On the contrary, what it is about is the new creation of all things. Christian eschatology is the remembered hope of the raising of the crucified Christ, so it talks about beginning afresh in the deadly end.

1 comments:

byron smith said...

In case you hadn't noticed, the first quote is the final paragraph of Lewis's Narnia Chronicles (however you order them: I vote publication); the second quote is the very first paragraph of Moltmann's book. Apt.