CHRIST AND THE FUTURE
The Bible’s Teaching about Last Things
By Cornelis P. Venema. Banner of Truth. 224 pages. £7.50
ISBN 978 1 84871 008 5
What happens between our death and Christ’s return? Is hell eternal in its experience? What is the millennium?
Questions about the future — eschatology, as theologians call it — are among the thorniest that Christians will wrestle with.
Several years ago American scholar Cornelis P. Venema produced The Promise of the Future — a weighty, and critically well-received hardback that addressed all things eschatological. Now — and somewhat reluctantly, judging by his preface — he has produced an abridged form of that work, and re-titled it Christ and the Future.
The opening few chapters are workmanlike, rather than deeply inspiring, covering Old Testament expectation of the future; New Testament fulfilment; the centrality of Christ’s return; the intermediate state and the ‘signs of the times’. In the latter section, his treatment of the ‘Man of Lawlessness’ in 2 Thessalonians was a little disappointing.
It is, however, in the middle section that the book really comes to life. Here Venema tackles the millennium issue. Consecutive chapters present us with excellent summaries of the four different views, an analysis of Revelation 20 (with appropriate contextualising from chapter 19), and an evaluation of those views. It should be noted that he follows the ‘recapitulation’, or ‘progressive parallelism’, reading of the Book of Revelation and is amillennial in his convictions. The book is worth buying for these three chapters alone.
The final chapters address various things that will accompany Christ’s return: the resurrection of the body, the final judgment, the doctrine of eternal punishment, and the new heavens and earth.
In these chapters he offers some helpful treatment of matters such as the question of rewards, and the concept of annihilation. The final chapter provides an appropriate and stirring conclusion, with comments on the renewing of creation, worship, and ‘enjoying God forever’.
As is sometimes the case with abridgements, the editing is patchy in places, to the point of producing grammatical nonsense on one occasion. On the whole, however, this is a fine work, clearly intended for a wider readership than the original, and helpful for anyone wrestling with questions about the future.
