Editorial - Jonathan Adams

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot

Beliefs and theories about the end of life as we know it are legion. In 1925, T. S. Eliot suggested whimper, not bang, as the mode of termination. This happens to put him in the minority. Between the Maya Calendar and Ragnarök, Nuclear Warfare and Superbugs, the Heat Death of the Universe and the Climate Apocalypse, most people across history and culture have subscribed to a cataclysmic finale.

In God’s kindness, Christians are spared such speculation. The true end has been revealed to us in advance: the end is, and comes via, a person. The apostle John, in the vision at Patmos, saw Jesus, who identified himself as ‘The Beginning and the End’ who is ‘coming soon’ (Rev 22:13, 12). Not with a whimper. Not technically with a bang either. Rather, as the apostle Paul writes, ‘the Lord himself will descend from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet call of God’ (1 Thes 4:16).

And then ‘the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever’ (Rev 11:15). This is the way the world ends.

All this is clear from Scripture. But the danger for believers is when such eschatology fades from view. When our hearts and minds are bound up with this world. One trap is to idealise and yearn for a past golden era, when perhaps Christianity had reached a cultural high watermark. But while ‘every age is not as good as every other’, as the Catholic philosopher Antonin Sertillanges put it, what demands attentive Christian faithfulness is our own age: ‘We must help our God to renew, not the buried past and the chronicles of a vanished world, but the eternal face of the earth’. However, a related pitfall to nostalgia is to be so invested in the present as to forget that the New Creation is just around the corner. Or to forget that the world to come will be brought in by God’s appointed King, and not by the strivings of a noble coalition of humanity.

This issue of Societas explores what it means to follow Jesus well in the last days. We reflect on how the resurrection of Jesus from the dead reconfigures our priorities and enables confident, even radical, living for God’s kingdom. For all of us students, College is a time of preparation for future ministry. But how do we get the foundation of ministry right in our personal and family lives? Motherhood as a challenging yet joyful vocation is considered through several perspectives. And when things fall apart, seeing how the return of Jesus connects to our own broken worlds, and so to console and inspire us, is crucial. As is learning to wait for the end, which, as noted, can mean suffering – but suffering which prepares us to share in God’s glory. Mention of glory also lightens any all-too-solemn construal of the end. After all, the final image provided to us in Scripture this side of glory is of a wedding banquet and inexpressible rejoicing.

Therefore, from the vantage point of faith, which sees and knows the end, we think backwards from that last day to our present age, confident that our Lord Jesus ‘will be our guide even to the end’ (Ps 48:14).

We hope you enjoy reading this issue.