The Christian Church. The primitive Christian un-
derstanding of the present as eschatological time is soon
clearly weakened in the Church. The present simply
becomes a time of preparation for the future salvation
promised by the sacraments. Hope for the future is
less connected with the end of the world than with
the salvation of the individual soul after death. The
doctrine of purgatory, in which individual souls are
purified, displaces the expectation of a cosmic con-
flagration at the end of time; the Day of Judgment
loses ground in favor of individual judgment after death
and the tenets of penitence and indulgence connected
with it. The teleological mode of historical thought
survives all the same, and apocalyptic eschatology is
not abandoned, but the end of time is postponed to
some indeterminate temporal distance. Already by the
time of II Peter 3:8 we read that with the Lord a
thousand years are as one day.
At first the Church kept eschatological anticipation
alive with the injunction to keep ever watchful for no
man knows the day and hour of the end (Mark 13:32f.).
But the triumph of the Church in the Roman state
caused interest in an indeterminate eschaton to decline.
As a legally constituted instrument of salvation the
Church bridges the period from the first Coming of
Jesus until the end of history on his return. Ticonius
and Augustine both equate the thousand-year inter-
regnum that is to precede the actual eschaton with
the age of the Church, and thus delay the end of the
world by a great interval, even if the number 1000
is not taken literally. The Church has in general re-
garded with suspicion and has restrained any height-
ened interest in eschatology and in the revolutionary
pathos easily associated with it. All the same, one
apocalyptic book, the Revelation of Saint John, finally
made its way into the canon of the New Testament
in the fourth century despite widespread opposition.
Thus apocalyptic eschatology as the goal of history
has remained a significant feature of the New Testament
and part of dogma, and can thus reappear in the fore-
ground from time to time. It becomes manifest again
in the Montanism of the second century with its acute
expectation of an imminent end, but even at this time
was viewed critically by the greater Church. Around
the year 1000 many awaited the end of the thousand-
year reign and therewith the end of the world; as a
result there was a temporary increase of interest in
the Day of Judgment (Peter Lombard). Joachim of
Floris (d. 1202) recalculated the epochs of history in
the light of the dogma of the Trinity and anticipated
that, following the age of the Father and that of the
Son, the onset of the age of the Holy Ghost as the
epoch assuring complete salvation would come in 1260.
Nicholas of Lyra likewise counts on the imminent
beginning of the last events in his commentary on the
Revelation of Saint John, written in 1329. In pre-
Reformation times apocalyptic speculations were
awakened particularly among those theologians who
suffered acutely from the unsatisfactory conditions in
the Church. Pre-Reformation and Reformation figures
saw in the Pope the Antichrist who would appear
before the end; thus Luther is able to announce the
end of the world as imminent, just as many of the
reformers inclined to call their age the final age, the
twilight of the world. Under the influence of the hu-
manists, apocalyptic thought retreated wholly in
Zwingli, and eschatological fanatics, associated in some
places with groups of enthusiasts and the Anabaptist
movement seeking to install the Kingdom of God for
the time being by force of arms, soon discredited all
radical speculations concerning the end of time in the
eyes of all the reformers. Reformation catechisms con-
tained hardly any eschatological propositions of an
apocalyptic nature: Article XVII of the Augsburg Con-
fession denounces the chiliasm of the fanatics as a
Jewish doctrine. Luther dissociated himself sharply
from the social revolutionary thoughts of Thomas
Münzer (who died in the Peasant War in 1525), from
Melchior Hofmann, the inspired prophet of the end
of time, and from the communistic fanaticism of
Bernard Rottmann and his friends in Münster. Despite
this, apocalyptic anticipations of the end remained
alive and were augmented in times of plague, in the
Thirty Years' War, and indeed everywhere that, from
the time of the Counter-Reformation, minorities lived
under repression and persecution and hoped for re-
demption from their plight. Above all in Pietistic cir-
cles all kinds of speculations concerning the onset of
the thousand-year reign constantly reappeared. Fol-
lowing the precedent of Jacob Böhme, Philipp Jacob
Spender, for example, combined exegesis of Revelation
20 with the optimistic expectation of a better time for
the Church in the future; and the Swabian Pietist,
Friedrich Christoph Oetinger drew the entire universe
into this hope of historical salvation: for, he says,
“carnality is the end of God's ways.”
Many contemporary sects derive from speculations
concerning the end of the world in the near future.
The group of Adventists, for example, was formed on
the basis of the American William Miller's computa-
tions that Christ would return in 1843-44 to found the
thousand-year reign. In the origination of such Catho-
lic-Apostolics as the New Apostolic Communion lies
the conviction that in preparation for the return of
Christ twelve apostles must stand ready; these indeed
met in 1835 and together awaited last events. The
Jehovah's Witness movement was based on the asser-
tion of another American, Charles T. Russell, that
Christ returned in secret in 1874 and would begin his
thousand-year reign in 1914. Similar expectations of
the imminent approach of the end recur frequently,
particularly in times of catastrophe and often on the
basis of fantastic interpretations of Revelation, without
however at once leading to the stable formation of
sects.
The remarkable increase in apocalyptic fanaticism
since the eighteenth century is connected with the
universal emergence of historical consciousness that
took place at that time; this in turn led to numerous
conceptions of an eschatologically oriented salvationist
theology; in the eighteenth century, for example, in
J. A. Bengel, who computed the date of the end of
the world as 3836, and in J. J. Hess, who—a clear sign
of historical interest—was the author of the first Life
of Jesus (3 vols., 1768-72), and in 1774 wrote a work
of salvationist dogmatics entitled Of the Kingdom of
God. An Essay on the Plan of God's Provisions and
Revelations; in the nineteenth century, J. C. K. Hof-
mann, among others, organized the whole of history
on the basis of the Bible into a scheme of prophecy
and fulfillment; more recently, in O. Cullmann, above
all, who takes Christ as the “Center of Time,” ebbing
in undulating lines toward its end.
Among the influential theologians of the present
whose suppositions are markedly determined by apoc-
alyptic eschatology are W. Pannenberg and J. Molt-
mann. Pannenberg sees the resurrection of Jesus
as a prolepsis of final events. Anyone who relies on
the resurrection of Jesus is thus enabled in advance
to view it to its end, and hence to grasp history as
meaningful including that part of it not yet played out.
Beginning with the resurrection of Jesus, Moltmann,
in his Evangelische Kommentare (1968), erects a theol-
ogy of hope teaching that all our forces are to be
concentrated on the final apocalyptic goal of history,
for Jesus' resurrection heralds the end of the world as
the end of misery, injustice, and mortality. “The social
revolution of unjust conditions is the immanent obverse
of transcendent hope in the resurrection.” Among phi-
losophers, G. Krüger and K. Löwith, for example,
associate themselves closely with the traditional bibli-
cal eschatology. In all the scholars mentioned, there
is, of course, a more or less pronounced association
of the idea of progress that has appeared in modern
times with apocalyptic eschatology. The conception
of the sudden end of history is replaced by the inter-
pretation of history as a process aspiring to a climax.
