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all the emphasis on His ethical precepts. As a result it has no eschatology worthy of the name.
Other - worldliness made way for this - worldliness; the blessed hope of eternal life was
replaced by the social hope of a kingdom of God exclusively of this world; and the former
assurance respecting the resurrection of the dead and future glory was supplanted by the
vague trust that God may have even better things in store for man than the blessings which he
now enjoys. Says Gerald Birney Smith: “In no realm are the changes of thinking more marked
than in the portion of theology which deals with the future life. Where theologians used to
speak to us in detail concerning ‘last things,’ they now set forth in somewhat general terms the
reasonable basis for optimistic confidence in the continuance of life beyond physical death.”[A
Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion, p. 538.] At the present time, however, there are
some signs of a change for the better. A new wave of Premillennialism appeared, which is not
limited to the sects, but has also found entrance in some of the Churches of our day, and its
advocates suggest a Christian philosophy of history, based particularly on the study of Daniel
and Revelation, and help to fix the attention once more on the end of the ages. Weiss and
Schweitzer called attention to the fact that the eschatological teachings of Jesus were far more
important in His scheme of thought than His ethical precepts, which after all represent only an
“Interimsethik.” And Karl Barth also stresses the eschatological element in divine revelation.
C. THE RELATION OF ESCHATOLOGY TO THE REST OF DOGMATICS.
1. WRONG CONCEPTIONS WHICH OBSCURE THIS RELATION.
When Kliefoth wrote his
Eschatologie, he complained about the fact that there had never yet appeared a comprehensive
and adequate treatise on eschatology as a whole; and further calls attention to the fact that in
dogmatical works it often appears, not as a main division uniform with the others, but merely
as a fragmentary and neglected appendix, while some of its questions are discussed in other
loci. There were good reasons for his complaints. In general it may be said that eschatology is
even now the least developed of all the loci of dogmatics. Moreover, it was often given a very
subordinate place in the systematic treatment of theology. It was a mistake of Coccejus that he
arranged the whole of dogmatics according to the scheme of the covenants, and thus treated it
as a historical study rather than a systematic presentation of all the truths of the Christian
religion. In such a scheme eschatology could only appear as the finale of history, and not at all
as one of the constitutive elements of a system of truth. A historical discussion of the last things
may form a part of the historia revelationis, but cannot as such be introduced as an integral
part of dogmatics. Dogmatics is not a descriptive, but a normative science, in which we aim at
absolute, rather than at mere historical, truth. Reformed theologians on the whole saw this
point very clearly, and therefore discussed the last things in a systematic way. However, they
did not always do justice to it as one of the main divisions of dogmatics, but gave it a
subordinate place in one of the other loci. Several of them conceived of it merely as dealing