So I went for a run…

And began to think of how our eschatology is dead, and the church is soon to follow. I believe that eschatology drives faith and deed. We are all too frequently driven by a belief in the after life, and all too often we use visions of puffy clouds and fiery torment to manipulate action and control the masses. We have become content with a belief that heaven is cut off from our world completely, and as a result nothing we can do affects its creation, and therefore we must just save our own skin.
We have therefore created an apathetic Christianity in which what one does matters naught except to receive a heavenly reward. Some will counter that it is faith and not action which is necessary to receive the ticket to heaven, but in reality what is faith but mental action? We have all too often traded the difficult life of obedience of the First Testament for the life of “faith” in order to avoid such annoyance.
The First Testament testifies to something much different, and you therefore find a community of individuals possessed by a spirit of creative eschatology. They were a community which truly believed that their actions could usher in the heavenly dream, the Promised Land. True, they understood God as the final powering force bringing their creation to fruition, but they were to be the people who were to act a certain way, retain purity and social justice, care for the widow and orphan, and follow the way of the LORD. It was after doing this that the LORD would usher them into the Promised Land, in the here and now! They even touched their dream under David, understanding his son to be the Son of God.
This Promised Land was not in the distant future, it was not upon the clouds of heaven. They understood their actions as directly contributing to their promised eschatology. A golden age when the law of the LORD would be written on the hearts of every person, and they themselves were creative agents!
We have lost this and exchanged it for a dead and dreamless theology. Rather than understanding our actions as directly contributing to the goals of God so as to usher in the Promised Land, we have understood ourselves as cut off, only responsible for our own entry into some platonic celestial city. We need to revive an eschatology of immediacy, one in which our actions directly contribute to its fruition. Only then will our faith once again matter, and only then will it once again transform a community so they can become a light to the world.