I am grateful to Grove Books for a review copy.
I came to faith in my early teens while attending Sunday
School in a Brethren-influenced independent evangelical church. The eschatology
espoused here was of the sort found in this Chick tract and the wonderfully and
increasingly camp Left Behind series.
Almost thirty years on, I cannot help but wish there had existed at that time a
book on eschatology as effective as Ian Paul’s Kingdom, Hope and the End of the World. Reading a short book such
as this back in the late 1980s and early 1990s not only would have saved me
some theological blushes among my peers, but also have given me a wider
framework in which to read Scripture as a whole.
Paul first considers the ideas of kingdom and hope as
expressed in the Old Testament. The Creator God is king of the world but
delegates divine rule to men and women, God’s vice-regents. However, in a
fallen world, humanity fails to live up to its high calling, and so God elects
Israel to demonstrate how people are to live in the world in continuous
relationship with God. The emphasis here is on the prophetic expectation that
God will eventually exercise divine rule through a true successor to Israel’s
king, David. This, Paul contends, means that the fulfilment of Israel’s future
expectations is not simply a matter of God intervening in human history but of
God acting sovereignly to establish a new creation.
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| Old Testament eschatology |
Paul goes on to affirm that the various New Testament books
point to this very fact: a new creation has been inaugurated in the
resurrection of Jesus, even though there is still a ‘surplus of hope, the
difference between what we see already realized of the kingdom in Jesus, and
what we do not yet see realized in the present age’ (p. 12). This is the ‘now’
and the ‘not yet’ of the book’s subtitle.
 |
| New Testament eschatology |
Thus all the Old Testament’s future expectations find
completion in Jesus. This is not to say that there is nothing in the New
Testament that some would label ‘end-times prophecy’, but that finally
everything is centred on Jesus and not on the execution of some kind of divine
blueprint. As Paul writes, ‘At no point does any NT writer suggest that Jesus
does anything other than fulfil all God’s promises in the OT. We might not see
their complete fulfilment until his return—but it is his life, death and
resurrection, and not some other historical events, which meet all our hopes’
(p. 17).
Needless to say, I regard Kingdom, Hope and the End of the World as a very good addition to
the Grove Books Biblical series. Admittedly, those familiar with some of Tom
Wright’s writings, or those who have somehow escaped the influence of Scofield-style hermeneutics, will be unlikely to find much novelty here. But this is not a
criticism. The strength of this slim volume is that it manages to convey a lot
of detail about eschatology in relatively few words, successfully demonstrating
the extent to which eschatological themes pervade Scripture and how these
themes continue to be important for Christians today. Paul writes clearly and
fluently, and his discussions of the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24–25 and
parallels) and the book of Revelation are standout examples of how a carefully
considered understanding of eschatology helps to exegete difficult biblical passages.
Some might find Paul’s careful survey a little too tidy: Should we not expect
to find at least a few loose ends or unresolved tensions in Scripture simply by
virtue of it being a collection of diverse texts? Also, I notice there is no
treatment of eschatology as found in the New Testament from Hebrews to Jude.
While I appreciate that inclusion of such might not add too much to the overall
analysis (as well as making this particular Grove Book longer than others in
the series), I do think Hebrews has some uniquely interesting things to say on
how the life of the age to come impacts on the life of the present age.
In short, I commend Kingdom,
Hope and the End of the World. It contains a lot of good material for individual
study and could also be used effectively in a home group setting. The book is
available here.
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