Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, The

The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology. By Jurgen Moltmann. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996. xiv + 390 pp. $28.00 (paper).

Moltmann returns in this volume to the topos with which he began his career over thirty years ago: eschatology, now not as a work in fundamental theology [Theology of Hope (New York, 1967)], but in the fourth of a projected five-volume series which will comprise his Dogmatik. This is a wonderful, dense, and ambitious book. Most impressive is the goal it sets itself of holding together different aspects or horizons of Christian eschatology which have been too often sundered in the history of Christian faith and theology. Even where it fails fully to integrate the diverse themes it broaches, it never fails in suggestive and provocative power, and in providing important stimulus to further work.

To the methodological horizon of eschatology, upon which Moltmann insisted in his first work, he adds themes from his Trinitarian theology, from his appropriation of ecological concerns in his work on creation, and, of course, from the theology of the cross worked out in The Crucified God. The substance of the book is spread over five chapters. The first is an overview of the past 100 years of eschatology, covering much of the same ground as Theology of Hope, although giving a much fuller treatment of Moltmann's indebtedness to Jewish thinkers, above all, Franz Rosenzweig. The next four treat successfully more integral symbols: eternal life (personal eschatology), the kingdom of God (historical eschatology), the new heavens and new earth (cosmic eschatology), and the coming glory of God (divine eschatology). Holding these diverse horizons together is his elaboration of the final goal and end of creation: the eternal perichoresis between God and creation, which he calls "the cosmic Shekinah of God" (p. xiii, cf. 319, 335-39).

It is a challenge to keep one's bearings through this rich and demanding book. Moltmann himself admits that while the final chapter (divine eschatology) must be noetically last, it is ontically prior to the others (p. xvi). This, along with other structural characteristics, suggests that one might well read its five chapters as a chiasm-A, B, C, B', A'. The middle chapter, on historical eschatology, receives the greatest emphasis (it makes up 37% of the book, over half again as much as any other chapter), as we might expect from this political theologian. Separated by this central chapter, the second and fourth chapters give extended treatments of the vexing theoretical problem of time: in the second chapter with a discussion of the "interim time" of the dead; in the fourth in the context of the "end" of time, in which creation temporality will fully share, by a sort of communicatio idioniatum, in the eternity of the triune God. Read together, the first and last chapters frame the issue of eschatology in its full poignancy and scope for today's world, suggesting that in our "post-historical" age we can only hope without naivete if hope's final object is God's giving glory to Godself, in a renewed heaven and earth in which there is a perichoresis of mutual indwelling between the triune God and creation (p. 45f., 330-39).

Moltmann treats many "disputed questions," from purgatory to ecofeminism to apokatastasis, and no doubt each reader will find things to admire and to contest in these discussions. The problem of time is a guiding theme, as well it should be for any eschatology. Moltmann shows that eschatology cannot but be distorted when it is read against the distinctively modern (scientifically grounded) horizon of time as a homogeneous linear continuum. He also argues that we must move beyond Neoorthodox eschatologies, which attempted to avoid such distortions, as well as arguments with science over the future history of the natural cosmos, by means of an eschatology focusing on "the eternal moment" or on a kairos that interrupts time. Does he himself succeed in this? His solution is broken up into two long discussions which, separated by the long third chapter, cry out for interrelation, and which even individually are so involved and difficult that they are almost impossible to follow. What, for instance, is the relationship between the interim time of the dead, which is framed as the time (nonlinear, nonscientific) that God has "for" creation and Christ has "for" human beings (chapter 2, 105f,), and the various "times" discussed in chapter four, like "aeonic time," grounded in God's "primordial self-restriction" (p. 281). These suggestive ideas, still drawn largely from the conceptualities of German idealism and existentialism, need further elaboration before they can provide an account of "being and time" that can dialogue creatively (albeit critically) with the scientific-technological understanding of time that so dominates (and damages) our modern world.

Another virtue of the book which at times threatens to be its undoing is Moltmann's ecumenicity. He ranges far indeed in order to find language and imagery appropriate to his needs. He continues his incorporation of Jewish Shekinah theology, and in the last hvo chapters of the book he is fascinated by Orthodox images of the deification of the cosmos. Indeed, the centerpieces of the very last section are t,vo hymns from the Orthodox Easter liturgy. Nonetheless, he insists that everything in eschatology must finally be rooted in christology, and that means his christology of the crucified God. These are potent symbols, coming as they do from different faith traditions, and implicating diverse theologies. At times, however, the conceptual structure of the book strains to hold them together.