Secularization. The awakening historical conscious-
ness that advanced salvationist schemes in theology
since the eighteenth century led in the course of a
general secularization of culture to a secular idea of
eschatology also. Although faith was maintained in the
thought of the end or of the goal of history proceeding
in linear fashion, no further consideration was given
to divine intervention in the course of history; the goal
of history was thought of as purely immanent.
The path to this goal was in part seen as progress
to ever greater perfection of the human condition;
and—where it clung more firmly to biblical modes of
thought—it was interpreted or promoted as a sudden
revolutionary incursion. The pioneers of this develop-
ment were the humanists, above all, Erasmus of
Rotterdam, who wanted to see the Kingdom of God
as a universal realm of peace already realized in earthly
society. Movements of chiliasm and pacifism, with their
intensive expectation of such an earthly realm of peace,
have thus prepared the ground since the time of the
Reformation for the complete secularization of escha-
tology; Thomas Münzer is one of the “saints” of com-
munism.
The Enlightenment, which led the battle of reason
against unreason, was able to view, to the extent that
it was open to historical thinking, the worldwide tri-
umph of human reason as the necessary outcome of
historical development—not that of history itself
(Turgot, Condorcet, the positivists). Compare also
Lessing's essay on “The Education of the Human Spe-
cies.” Under the spell of the Enlightenment Kant ex-
pects the Kingdom of God in the guise of a worldwide
ethical commonwealth, in any case as the end of a
“progression stretching to eternity” of mankind in-
volved in “the continuous progress and approach to
the highest good possible on earth.” In calling this view
“chiliasm” Kant correctly observes the close connec-
tion between the devout pietistic and the secularized
Enlightenment eschatology of the eighteenth century
(
Critique of Practical Reason, Book II, Ch. II, Sec. 5).
It is apparent that marked secular influences were
at work even in the idealistic systems described above,
for in these ideas the divine spirit is identical with the
human spirit so that the eschatological climax of history
can only be attained by means of human activity, and
is therefore conceived of as “this-worldly.” In his book
The Kingdom of Christ (1842; 1959), F. D. Maurice
takes up the idealistic concept of the Kingdom of God
and awaits the onset of God's reign in the immanent
moral perfection of mankind. Influenced by Maurice,
Charles Kingsley, for example, hopes for the progress
of the Kingdom of God in the improvement of the
social order. The influence of secularized eschatology
had its impact also on so-called liberal theology of the
last century which expected progress in human civili-
zation to come about through the education of indi-
vidual personality after the example of the absolute
personality of Jesus, and equated such progress with
the Kingdom of God, which it saw in consequence as
moral grandeur. Even Nietzsche's hero (Übermensch)
quiet naturally represents a secularized form of the
“new creature” of Christian hope for the end of time.
The most influential proposal for secularized escha-
tology to be found after Hegel was advanced by Karl
Marx. History develops for him, as for the apocalyptics,
with ineluctable lawlikeness. The impelling force of
history is neither God nor, as in Hegel, the absolute
World Spirit, but instead the process of production
with economic contradictions obtaining at any given
time, and in connection with which the development
of social classes and heightening of class conflict are
played out. The ultimate class in world history is the
proletariat. The proletarian revolution heralds the end
of class conflict and therewith, so to speak, the end
of history. Marxist theory computes the objective goal
of the course of history in advance: the victorious class
establishes the classless society. It renews and redeems
the world. With it will come the realm of freedom
for all individuals, the end of exploitation as primeval
evil, the triumph of the good, the reconciliation of all
contradiction between light and darkness, the Kingdom
of God without God. The very concept of revolution,
hitherto an expression for political upheavals in gen-
eral, takes on an explicitly eschatological sense in Marx.
But while Marx saw history striving with the necessity
of a natural law toward the proletarian revolution as
its eschatological goal, many of his followers expect
the classless society as the outcome of a world revolu-
tion consciously provoked by men. These modern
Marxist theories of revolution are the most utterly
explicit expression of secularized biblical eschatology.
In the 1960's the Marxist Ernst Bloch, in The Princi-
ple of Hope (1959), offers the most impressive account
of the connection between Marxist expectations for the
future and the hopes of religious apocalypse. He inter-
prets Marxist thought about the future as the real sense
of Judeo-Christian eschatology, just as, conversely,
religious socialism could for a time represent socialist
hopes for the appropriate temporal form of the biblical
hope for the Kingdom of God. Even at the present
time the “feedback” from Marxist eschatology to the-
ology is in some places considerable; above all in con-
nection with the so-called “God is dead” theology,
hope of social justice is considered to be the only
meaningful form of eschatological hope (Harvey Cox).
Increasingly expanded planning for the future, so nec-
essary in the modern world, with the aid of scientific
prognosis (“futurology”), is in itself not eschatological,
but reinforces the effectiveness of secularized eschato-
logical world perspectives, above all, of communism
and socialism.
