How much does the present articulation of Adventist eschatology impact the way we understand and organize our church? Our church organization doesn’t emerge in an ideological vacuum but rather in the theological milieu made of our most deep and intimate eschatological convictions.
Hanz Gutierrez
I have been examining the structural soundness of Adventist Eschatology from various perspectives. The first important level of reflection to take in account is the biblical one. Adventist Eschatology must start as a “Biblical hermeneutics” of the Eschatology expressed in the Bible. We cannot start elsewhere. We must remember though, that while remaining biblical, the understanding of Eschatology is not always crystal clear, definitive nor homogeneous.
More than 360 Seventh-day Adventist theologians, college and university professors, and church administrators, convened in Rome, Italy, from June 11-21, 2018, for the fourth International Bible Conference (IBC).
The 2018 FIFA World Cup officially kicked off on Thursday with host nation Russia beating Saudi Arabia five goals to none. The tournament involves 32 national teams, which include 31 teams determined through qualifying competitions and the automatically qualified host team. Iceland and Panama will both be making their first appearances at a FIFA World Cup. A total of 64 matches will be played in 12 venues located in 11 cities. The final will take place on 15 July at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow.
Christianity, historically and structurally, was born as an eschatological community. While this emphasis has not always been preserved in subsequent Christian movements, the same affirmation certainly still remains true for Adventism. But here we need to remember that both Christianity and Adventism need to pay careful attention because they continually face two different and opposite kinds of challenges. The first one, by default, is that of forgetting, or even escaping, from eschatology. The second one, by excess, is unbalancing it.
Eschatology is a major branch of study within Christian theology dealing with “last things." Eschatology, from two Greek words meaning "last" (ἔσχατος) and "study" (λογία), is the study of “end things,” whether the end of an individual life, the end of the age, the end of the world, or the nature of God’s coming Kingdom. Christianity is unintelligible without eschatology because Christ (Messiah), the center of it, is thoroughly an eschatological character.
Listen to this story:
“Unable to perceive the shape of You, I find You all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with Your love. It humbles my heart, for You are everywhere.” Guillermo del Toro, (The Shape of Water)
Listen to this story:
In last month’s column, I tried to address, in broad terms, the third topic of our theological enterprise built from a Latin-American perspective: the understanding of human “space”. Western contemporary societies have created an innovative and functional category of space understood as “aseptic space,” where humans are destined to just travel through it, leaving no traces of their passage and creating instead, in and with it, value, efficiency and profit.
In last month’s column, I tried to address, in broad terms, the second topic of any theological enterprise: the anthropological question. Which kind of human being does our theology, practice, and mission really imply? And I considered a too-frequently overlooked fact: that the true understanding of what a human being represents is not only given by church doctrinal statements.
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Volume 46, Issue 2, Summer 2018
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