Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 27:1 (NA 1976)
Article: The Parousia In Modern Theology: Some Questions And Comments
Author: Anthony C. Thiselton

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TynBul 27:1 (1976) p. 27

The Parousia In Modern Theology: Some Questions And Comments

Anthony C. Thiselton

This paper was read at a meeting of the Tyndale Fellowship at Tyndale House, Cambridge, in July, 1975.

My aim is to provide a survey of approaches to the parousia in modern theology, and to formulate a number of questions and critical comments which these approaches suggest. In the main part of my paper I propose to describe and assess these modern approaches within their own proper theological and historical context. Then, towards the end, I shall try to set out my own approach to the subject, showing where we may draw fruitfully upon modern insights and where we must take warnings from modern misunderstandings.

One particular problem of procedure arises. Modern theology includes a wide variety of approaches to questions about eschatology, or about the future, which nevertheless give little or no consideration to the parousia. Should such approaches be examined in the present discussion? I suggest a compromise by beginning with a shorter discussion in which we shall glance very briefly at three approaches of this kind with little or no critical comment.

Firstly, process thought has much to say about the future. This movement entered theology some twelve years ago in North America, and calls to mind the names of D. D. Williams, John Cobb, Schubert Ogden, and Norman Pittenger. In 1964 Pittenger introduced it to this country in a lecture entitled “A Contemporary Trend in North American Theology.”1 This

TynBul 27:1 (1976) p. 28

movement looks back to the process-philosophy of A. N. Whitehead (1861–1949) and also to the philosophy of his pupil Charles Hartshorne. Its central idea is that reality is becoming rather than being, that it is dynamic rather than static. Taking his cue from emergent evolution and more especially from Einstein’s theory of relativity, Whitehead saw the universe as something “alive”. Ever on-the-move, it progressed as it changed, and it changed as it progressed. Process theologians argue that if God is the ground of this kind of universe, indeed if reality itself has this nature, God cannot merely be regarded as the timeless absolute of Platonism. Such a God is a mere abstraction of human thought. It is nearer to the Biblical notion of the living God who acts in history, it is argued, to see him as one who shares out his love actively in a dynamic and ongoing process.

Process theologians draw inferences from this for a view of the future. God is love, and the whole process is more than the individual. Hence Christian hope is centred not upon the individual himself, but upon the commun...

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