ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 17.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> DAVID: You used the phrase inaugurated eschatology. That's a completely foreign concept to me. Would you mind explaining what you mean by those words? Thank you. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: The phrase inaugurated eschatology is really a very simple one in many ways. I've already talked about eschatology as being the things of the end, the last things. By saying inaugurated eschatology, we're saying that the things of the end have already begun now among us. If you remember in the previous question the lamb who was slain has begun his reign, having begun his reign is he has inaugurated his reign already now among us. And where does he reign from? He reigns from our worship, our liturgy of word and sacrament where he is bodily present with his gifts. Now, permit me a moment to read you a technical definition from the Commission on the Theology of Church Relations, the CTCR that I think, in a way very simply and very succinctly defines inaugurated eschatology. This is what they say. The term inaugurated eschatology embraces everything that the Old and New Testament scriptures teach concerning the believers� present possession and enjoyment of blessings which will be fully experience whenever Christ comes again. Therefore, the Christian lives in the proverbial tension between the now and the not yet. This tension underlies everything that the scriptures teach about eschatology. On the one hand, the end has arrived in Christ. The believer now receives the promised eschatological blessings through the gospel and the sacrament. On the other hand, the consummation is still a future reality. The Christian has not yet entered into the glories of heaven. Now, notice that language of now, not yet. When we are in the liturgy, we have now the blessings of the end in Christ. We talked about those things, forgiveness, life, salvation, communion with Christ in his flesh. And we talked about this in terms of the larger eschatological community that we are gathered there with all who have died and risen in Christ. But because of the world in which we live, the fallen world, the world filled with sin, this experience of Christ in his flesh, in our worship of word and sacrament is mediated by sin, death, and the devil. We still live under this kind of cloud of sin. We still come in with this kind of ambiguity in our lives because we are burdened by these tragedies, these suffering, these things that haunt us, the bondage of guilt and shame, for example. And so we do not have the full experience of those blessings, an experience we will not have until we die or, if Christ comes before our death in the second coming where we will fully experience heaven itself when he comes in his glory. This is why there is that tension between the now and the not yet. There is a wonderful theologian but the name of Oscar *Coleman who in his book "Christ and Time" illustrates this in terms of the imagery of the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. I think it's a wonderful way of describing exactly what inaugurated eschatology is all about. Think of it this way. The analogy works like this: When the Allies invaded Normandy on June 6th in 1944, that was for all intents and purposes the end of World War II. If you look back on it and you look at the history of that war, you'll see that the tide turned there, that there really was no way for our enemies in Europe to defeat us because we really did make a significant break in the war at that moment. However, the war did not end until the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is what technically brings the war to an end. And so between D-Day and the dropping of the atom bomb, there is a period of time where there is a lot of battles. And, in fact, many people died. And it was a time in which, in some cases like in the Battle of the Bulge, it almost looked as things were going to go the other way. Now, if you kind of use the parallel in terms of the cross of Christ and Jesus' second coming, D-Day is like the equivalent of the cross. When Jesus dies, because he is the end, he is the eschaton, and you notice what he says on the cross. It is finished. For all intents and purposes, it is over at that moment. Satan is defeated. He has taken upon himself the sins of the world. He brings in the new creation. All things are made new now. He is making right here what has gone wrong. It's over. And when he rises from the dead, he brings all of creation with him, and he declares now that the world is made new. However, we know that even after all of these events, we still live in a fallen world. People still get sick. There is still sin. People still die. We know this will go on until Christ comes again. The dropping of the atom bomb is the equivalent of the second coming. Then it's over once and for all never to see sin again. But between the cross and the second coming, there are battles that are fought with Satan. There is sin that still reigns in this world in many ways. Even though Christ has defeated it, we are still in this struggle. And as Luther calls it in our own beings, we are at the same time saints and sinners, and we have this kind of battle going on in our own bodies as saints and sinners. What is remarkable about this time between the cross and the second coming is that this is the time where God uses suffering, tragedy, even death as a way of bringing us closer to him. It is a way in which we see very clearly in these, what we might call dark sides of life, his presence, his comfort, his reaching out to us and calling us to be dependent on him and him alone. If you've ever experienced great suffering or seen somebody go through suffering, you know that no matter whether it's physical, mental, emotional suffering, psychological suffering, what suffering does is it levels you. All the things that you depended on in your whole life are no longer there to depend on. You must find something outside yourself to depend on. When people are in those situations, they need a pastor. They need somebody to help them not kind of go to despair where they feel that there is nothing to depend on, but to show them that they must trust fully and completely in Christ. This is why pastors come to people in times of suffering. And this is why suffering is a time in which we see in our own sufferings not only a participation in the sufferings of Christ, but as Paul says, how they are brought to completion because in our own lives, we see Christ's presence so clearly when he and he alone is all that we can depend on. That is why we need him so badly during this time between the cross and the second coming. And that is why we must run to the church, run to the liturgy because that is where he is found. That is where he is bodily giving us those gifts. That is where he sustains us. That is where he feeds us the holy food of his word and his sacrament. And so when we talk about inaugurated eschatology, we are talking about the very foundational essence of who we are as Christians, our complete identity comes from this notion. And in fact, as I teach the New Testament which is what I primarily do, this idea of inaugurated eschatology is the key understanding of the Old and New testaments. And if you don't read them through this understanding, they really are mysterious books indeed because inaugurated eschatology is all about Christ, and Christ's bodily presence among us where, no matter what has happened to us, no matter what things we have experienced in our life, no matter what doubts or despair, no matter what guilt or shame, no matter what tragedies we've had, Christ is there for us bodily, giving us those gifts, supporting us, showing us that he is the one who will lead us to heaven itself because heaven already in him is among us.