Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Welcome to the end

I thought I might jump on the proverbial paradewagen and start a blog.
Eschatology is the name of the game, but theological reflection more broadly is the goal.
There may be a particular focus on certain figures: Jesus, the four evangelists, Paul, Peter, & the usual canonical crowd, but also the catholic crew from Irenaeus through to Moltmann, Augustine to Barth, Luther to Rahner. Nietzsche & Wittgenstein, Heraclitus & Levinas, et al. are also welcome, as is anyone with a mind awake & an eye to where we might be going.
If you have thoughts, quotes or reflections of your own, feel free to comment.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sure this is not the sort of comment you're after, but nice choice of font, Byron. I assume it's a mac thing.
Also, to not be completely I-went-to-the-shops banal, I like the idea of the end being the beginning. Doesn't CS Lewis comment on that in The Last Battle?
Philip

byron smith said...

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 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.