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May 28 - June 12, 2025
There are several reasons for this Protestant move. First, abuses in the life of late medieval Roman Catholicism moved the Protestant Reformers to consider the theology of sacraments. The second reason flows from the Protestant principle of sola scriptura. Protestants participate in many of the practices defined by Catholics as sacraments, but Protestants reserve the special concept of sacrament for baptism and communion because Jesus commands these two for the church.
Protestant theology also emphasizes the priesthood of all believers (1 Pet. 2:9) and so limits sacraments to church practices that truly belong to all Christians.
For Luther, Christ is truly present in and with the bread, an understanding called consubstantiation because it affirms that Christ’s body is present with (con-) the substance of the bread. On this view, Christ’s real presence is a further affirmation of justification by grace.
On this view, the bread is a symbol of Christ’s body. Protestants in Zwingli’s line often prefer the term ordinances to the language of sacraments. An ordinance is something done in obedience, and Zwingli sees our participation in baptism and the supper as obedient responses to grace that has already been given, not as means of grace in and of themselves.
Violence and manipulation are contrary to the nature of the triune God and so to the nature of God’s church as body and bride in union with Christ.
The doctrine of eschatology (eschatos means “last”) is Christian teaching about the last things: heaven, hell, death, judgment, the second coming of Christ, and the kingdom of God.
This double aspect of eschatology is widely recognized by biblical scholars and theologians, who speak of it as an eschatological tension between the already and the not-yet.
The alreadiness of the kingdom is as real as Jesus. The kingdom has already come among us in Jesus’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, and “we have seen his glory”
characteristic Scriptural posture is to long for God’s future, trusting that the day is coming when God’s good purposes for creation will be fulfilled. When, in the practice of eschatology, we act as though those purposes have been fully realized in the present, we make the mistake of an overly realized eschatology, one that forfeits future hope, discounting the fullness of the kingdom, which is not yet embodied among us.
Premillennialism expects Christ to return before (pre-) the thousand years of Revelation. Premillennial theologies expect life to grow worse and worse as we draw near to the coming of Christ. Postmillennialism looks for Christ’s second coming after (post-) the millennium, understood as a time when Christ will reign from heaven through the power of the gospel. Postmillennial theology looks on the world with optimism, expecting things to grow better as we approach the millennium. Amillennialism does not see the millennium in Revelation as a future thousand years. The millennium is read as a
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The cure is resurrection. We cannot separate our healing from the future for which we hope in Christ, the hope that “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5). Christ’s resurrection, in the past, is the power of sanctification in the present and the confidence behind hope for the future.
eschatological reservation: acting in the knowledge that something is always reserved for the not-yet.
the parousia, the second coming of Christ.
Certainly, if we are to read Revelation well, we will read it together with the whole of Scripture.
Ours is also the expectation of a people whose hope gives us power, allowing us to speak truth in a world of lies and to embody love in a world of hate.
Our hope is defined by the distinctive Christian belief in the resurrection.
Wrapped up in the resurrection of Jesus on that first-century Easter day, we find hope for the general resurrection, in which we, like Jesus, will be raised from the dead to new life in new creation.
Where other kinds of hope might be escapist—looking to get out of this world and away from its problems—resurrection hope is redemptive. Where other kinds of hope might look for meaning in some other life, resurrection hope reveals the meaning of this life.
There are differences between Jesus’s body hanging on the cross and Jesus’s resurrected body, differences that testify to his victory over sin and death.
Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. All the skills and talents we have put to God’s service in this life—and perhaps too the interests and likings we gave up because they conflicted with our vocation—will be enhanced and ennobled and given back to us to be exercised in glory.e
The practice of eschatology, more importantly, is to live in God’s resurrection triumph over that enemy.
The practice of eschatology is to tell the truth about death, not to sugarcoat it. Death is horrible, and God is with us as we face that horror. Paul encourages Christians to claim the hope of the resurrection, not so that we will not grieve, but so that ours will not be the hopeless grief of those who do not know resurrection power (1 Thess. 4:13). The practice of Christian eschatology is to grieve and to hope, knowing that death will be followed by resurrection.
Most of the Christian tradition reads the biblical texts as pointing to a conscious intermediate state, a life for the soul in the time between an individual’s death and the day of resurrection.
Suggestions include the possibility of postmortem evangelism (an invitation to say yes to Jesus after one has died) or annihilationism (the proposal that hell is not everlasting but will finally wither away to nothing).
The Catholic doctrine of purgatory posits a postmortem space in which God purges all that remains of sin for those who have died in Christ but are not yet holy.
