ESCHATOLOGY & SALVATION

Eschatology & Salvation



Eschatology & Salvation

Although we will not understand the future, we absolutely try. Knowing what the future beholds that fascinates us. Not amazingly, prophecies about the end of the world captivate even postmodern minds. Simple curiousness attracts us to biblical prophecies. In our eagerness to foresee future happenings, we often overlook the powerful attachment that lives between biblical eschatology and soteriology. As a outcome, we may go incorrect to realise both.

 

Definitions

Let us first address what the phrases “eschatology” and “soteriology” mean. Eschatology, literally entails the doctrine of the last things. As a theological control and esteem, eschatology seems as the last part of the creeds and methodical theologies. Soteriology literally entails the doctrine of salvation. As such, soteriology is “the part of Christian theology which delicacies of the keeping work of Christ for the world.”

Problem

Usually, Christian theologians glimpse the relative of soteriology with eschatology from the edge of soteriology. For them eschatology is the consummation of the kingdom of God and Christ's work of salvation inaugurated at the cross. In this outlook, the comprehending of salvation is unaligned from and a status of prophetic interpretation. Eschatology supposess soteriology.

Is the relative of eschatology to soteriology so simple? Should we realise soteriology from the edge of eschatology instead? Can we correctly realise Christ's work of salvation (soteriology) in isolation from prophetic interpretation? Could the study of biblical prophecies (eschatology) supply the very broad context from which Christians should realise Christ's work of salvation (soteriology)? More expressly, can our prophetic understanding leverage or status our comprehending of salvation by belief in Jesus Christ? Does soteriology suppose eschatology?

Late Emergence of Eschatology

Early Christians did not evolve schemes of eschatological comprehending likely because “when the end of the world did not arrive as anticipated in the early Church,” Eschatology “became peripheral to most Christian theology.” However, dispensationalism and historicism as up to designated day schools of prophetic understanding find representatives in early Christian thinkers. Using the identical neoplatonic ontological assumptions in soteriology and eschatology, Augustine made a important move in prophetic interpretation. He asserted that prophecy mention to religious other than chronicled realities. Consequently, for him the Church is a emblem of the kingdom of God and the millennium a emblem of the Christian era.

As Protestant reformers gradually turned from custom and beliefs to scripture a millennium after Augustine, they utilised historicism as the procedure of prophetic interpretation.

However, they did not attach eschatology with soteriology neither did they understand the work of Christ from their historicist understanding of prophecies. The Reformation stands on soteriological surrounds (1517).

In the early nineteenth 100 years, there was a large renewal of concern in Christ's imminent chronicled come back of Christ in compare with the then-dominant outlook that He would arrive only after a future millennium. Three century and thirteen years after the Protestant Reformation, study of biblical apocalyptic prophecy intensified round the world. Using the Lutheran type of justification by belief as hermeneutical presupposition, evangelical theologians evolved the dispensational form of eschatological understanding (Darby, ...