eschaton [és-kuh-ton]:
the consummation of history at Christ’s Second Coming
when the Kingdom of God will be fully realized
in the reconciliation of all humanity with God
and the creation of a new heaven and earth
The most fundamental revelation of the Christian Bible’s two Testaments is that God, out of love for humanity, is active in human history for reconciliation.
God created the world, says the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures), as a garden of unity and communion, of love and peace between God and humanity, between human beings themselves and with the whole cosmos. God’s Garden of Eden represents the goodness and harmony that was always meant to be. The Garden reveals God’s deepest, loving motive for creating the universe. But the rupture of human relationship with God by the disobedience of Adam and Eve had divisive consequences not only for the heart of the individual person, but also for the human community as a whole, and even for the cosmos.
The Bible is God’s Word. It is the story of the beginning of all things and of God’s loving guidance of human history after the alienation of the Original Sin. The Bible is God’s Word about the divine initiatives to finally bring about the full and glorious reconciliation of all in God again.
God inspired the human authors of the Torah, the Historical Books, the Prophets and the Wisdom Literature, to tell the story of God’s rescue of the good creation through a series of Covenants initiated by divine love and continuously thwarted by human sinfulness. God works to saves humanity from disaster after the fall of Adam and Eve through Noah and the Ark. God calls a Chosen People, Israel, to a vocation for final reconciliation in the world through Patriarch Abraham and his sons. For the sake of its mission, God leads the People out of slavery in Egypt, giving them the Law in the desert of Sinai under the leadership of Moses. God establishes a kingdom through Saul and sends the Prophets to reform a rebellious people during the reigns of David and Solomon. God brings back the People from the punishment of exile in Babylon to restore their life for the sake of their call in the world. God inspires wisdom for the people to live by as they await the Messiah who would bring about God’s definitive reconciliation on the “Day of the Lord.”
Through the Four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline and other Letters and the Book of Revelation, the New Testament identifies the Messiah as Jesus Christ. The New Testament continues God’s rescue story, relating through its divinely inspired authors how God finally sends the Son out of love into a sinful world. In his very person as the Son of God- become-human, divinity and humanity are brought into unity. Jesus preaches and does miracles to reveal this. It was through his saving death that the rupture of the human world with God is healed, and reconciliation achieved. Jesus rises from the dead in glory, with power to change human hearts and human history. “The Kingdom of God is among you” (Lk 17:21). Christ ascends to the Father after his Resurrection to send the Spirit on his disciples, his Body, the Church, “entrusting to [it] the message of reconciliation” (2 Co 5:19). It is the mission of the Church to be sign and instrument of that reconciliation by the practice of reconciling Love, the first law of the Gospel, in imitation of Jesus himself.
The New Testament reveals that the final reconciliation already accomplished in Jesus’ death and resurrection is not yet completely realized. It will be brought to completion only at his Second Coming, when human history will come to its end. History now finds itself to be in the “in-between time,” the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection and his Second Coming. The human world is now making its way to full reconciliation with God under the guidance of the Jesus’ Spirit until he returns.
The Christian theological term for ultimate reconciliation is the Parousia or Eschaton, the final event in history at the Second Coming of Christ. It is then, in the “new heavens and the new earth,” that full reconciliation with God will be realized, the ultimate communion so desired by the Creator. Reconciliation (“salvation”) in the Christian Scriptures is not just a personal experience. It engages the whole of humanity and the cosmos. The Eschaton is the culmination of God’s saving activity, re-establishing the intention of creation, frustrated by the Original Sin. It is the moment of final and eternal reconciliation of the human world with God, the “Day of the Lord.” Thus, for Christians, the Trinitarian God, Who is Father, Son and Spirit, continues the rescue of the world until the end of time, according to God’s “plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth” (Eph 1:8-10).
