EARLY
PATRSITIC VIEWS OF THE ESCHATOLOGY
The insights of the late Pauline
notion of the redemptive presence (Παρουςία) of the risen Christ were developed
by the patristic writers as a way of bridging the tension between, on the one
hand, the promise of Jesus that God’s vindication was to be fully realized when
the Kingdom came in all its fullness, a time of final judgement when evil would
be decisively ended and the righteous would enter into their reward; and on the
other hand, that in his Resurrection Jesus had somehow or other transcended time
and entered into a permanent presence for, and to, his church. The prayer
Maranatha, or ‘Come Lord Jesus’ represents the first; the theology of the
Fourth Gospel represents the second, where Jesus ‘corrects’ Martha’s
future-related conceptions at the tomb of Lazarus and asks her to believe in a
resurrection already present in himself.
By the end of the first century
this disparate approach operative in the foundational texts had already started
to be synthesized. Pope Clement is one of the first to speak of individual
Christians (here Peter and Paul) having already entered into heaven (like the
confessing thief ) as their reward for their martyrdom on earth: not for them
the wait until the general resurrection of the dead and the final judgement.
The idea of an immediate realization of vindication for all the martyrs was
also strong in the early church. The elders of Smyrna confess that the martyred
Polycarp has already received ‘the crown of immortality’. Hermas speaking about
the destiny of the church in his book The Shepherd depicts it in the
late first century as a tower almost nearing completion. When it is finished
the end will come. In the early second century Barnabas thinks the last days
are already upon the church. He takes clues from the six days of creation to
argue that this is already late in the seventh age, and the eighth is the
dawning of the ‘New Age’ of the Kingdom. From the symbolic Genesis chronology
of ‘seven days’, several writers correlated that seven thousand years since the
creation meant that the end of the first century would be the appointed
end-time. This idea endured, in the West, even into the fourthcentury writer
Lactantius, who adjusted it to fit Constantine’s Golden Age. However, apart
from the special dispensation offered to martyrs, who gain a speedy entry to
paradise, most of the early church envisaged the general resurrection taking
place as the immediate prelude to the Second Coming. In the Didache this is not
for all (ὀυ πάντων δέ) seemingly only for the righteous. But the more accepted
view was that all human souls would resurrect in the flesh to face the
universal judgement. Like much else related to Christian thinking about the
church in the earliest centuries, the stance taken was collective more than
individual.
By the middle to end of the
second century this simpler form of the Christian eschatology, turning around
the poles of resurrection of the flesh and universal judgement, had come in for
a good deal of serious criticism both from the Hellenistic philosophers such as
Kelsos, who mocked it as unbelievably crude compared with the Greek
philosophical concept of the immortality of the soul, and from Christian
Gnostics who used mythic schemes to advance similar ideas of the ascent of the
purified soul. The temptation simply to replace biblical eschatology with
Hellenistic metaphysics was resisted in the main. Justin Martyr, for example,
is sure enough that the Platonic doctrine of immortality is incompatible with
the Christian concept that God brought the soul into being by His word and
will. Conditional immortality might be as far along that road as the fathers
were willing to go. The general insistence of the Apologists (especially
Irenaeus, Tertullian and Hippolytus) in their struggle with gnostic-type
‘spiritualisms’ (the flesh is evil or at best irrelevant in terms of salvation
which must be solely a matter of spirit) is that God created matter as a holy
thing and, through the Incarnation of the Logos, has willed salvation to be a
bodily as well as a spiritual matter (as such unavoidably historical):
involving the resurrection and judgement of the soul in its own flesh. Their
core arguments are based primarily upon the testimony of the scriptures. (John A.
McGuckin, “Eschatology in the early Christian thought-world,” in T&T
Clark Handbook of The Early Church, ed. Ilaria L. E. Ramelli; John Anthony
McGuckin; Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski [London: T&T Clark, 2022], 148-50)
