WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?
Christian hope and contemporary culture
Eds. Stephen Holmes & Russell Rook. Paternoster. 244 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978-1-84227-602-0
‘I was preaching on a text in Revelation … As preachers do when they warm to a theme, I’d left my notes some way behind. What actually came out of my mouth was: “The Left Behind series — astonishingly popular; astonishingly badly written; astonishingly wrong…” I knew I was going to regret it as soon as I heard myself say it’.
These first few sentences of the book explain why this book came to be written: because of the embarrassed silence of most evangelical churches in Britain when it comes to eschatology. Stephen Holmes tells us that his day-job is as an academic theologian and how he and Russell Rook hit upon the idea of a book on eschatology, written by scholars, ‘some of them the best in the world in their fields’, since it is a subject that ‘interests most theologians these days’.
The book covers eschatology in the Old Testament, the New Testament, in the Church Fathers and in evangelical history. It addresses the biblical teaching on heaven and hell. It attempts to show the relevance of eschatology in art, music, pop culture, politics, the world of work and the environment. There are some excellent insights and some fine turns of phrase. For example on the environment: ‘This is a holistic vision of the new creation, in which “heaven” and “earth”, the twin halves of created reality, are at last united’. Or on ethics: ‘Since Christians know what others do not know … they bring certain distinctives to ethical debate: they bring a recognition that God’s ultimate good is not yet available, that the best we can achieve in any dilemma is less than God’s best’.
Overall, the approach of the book is infinitely richer than the Left Behind series, as the editors aim to make us aware that ‘a proper eschatological vision could speak powerfully and pastorally to broken and hurting people, could answer the pressing questions that our non-Christian friends put to us about the presence of suffering in the world’.
But does the book work? Only partly, I think. I would have liked to know more than just the name of the authors who are said to be experts in their fields. Some of them wrote in beautifully clear prose, but I found a few quite incomprehensible at times. There was a certain inevitable duplication, and some differences in theological perspective. Overall, a valiant attempt, but not quite a 100% success.
David Brown,
General Secretary of GBU France (Groupes Bibliques Universitaires)
