Imaginative Eschatology: Benson's ‘The Lord of the World’

Abstract

The advent of the end of the second millennium is unlikely to be greeted, in the historic Christian churches, with the mixture of enthusiasm and alarm which heralded the end of the first. Quite apart from the inroads of ‘de-mythologising’ and ‘existentialising’ before which traditional eschatology has lost ground, the number symbolism of biblical apocalypticism simply does not lend itself to two thousand years in the way believers with misplaced literalism applied it, in fear and awe, to the completion of the first thousand years of the agôn between the Gospel and the world. On the other hand, consider some presumptive ‘signs of the times’: the possibility, admittedly controverted, of eco-catastrophe; the ever-present threat of nuclear war—the more pressing as smaller powers, with less to lose and weaker traditions of rational policymaking, acquire weapons of mass destruction; the victories of secularist materialism which, it seems, only the Islamic powers will challenge—courageously as to substance, injudiciously as to mode; the creation of a medical technology that can encompass, at the ends of the life process, the manufacture of some human beings and the safe disposal of others; the new disparity between the technical means to feed the hungry, never before present, and the political will to do it. These provoke thought, and, in any case, the ending of a millennium reminds the Church of her faith conviction that, in this world, the human project is essentially limited in time.