Re: Assurance of faith

Of course eschatology is "completely off limits" if you
erroneously understand biblical eschatology as something
that is still in the future.

That is why many find biblical eschatology so hard to
understand, because they have been taught their entire
lives that these events are future. When you understand
that the end time events spoken of by Jesus ocurred in
70AD, then everything makes perfect sense.

On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 06:50:35 +0100
  Peter Ruest <pruest@mail-ms.sunrise.ch> wrote:
>
>Samantha, you wrote: "...I'm afraid I still feel that the
>materials here
>focus on the creation end of the story and not the
>eschatological end..."
>
>>From what you wrote before, I got the impression that
>>assurance of faith was
>your problem, not (theoretical) eschatology. Eschatology
>has two aspects, a
>practical and a theoretical one. The practical one
>revolves around the
>assurance of faith and the joy of our "blessed hope" for
>our future after
>Christ's return, based on the few clear promises
>Scripture gives us for our
>practical life of faith today.
>
>Theoretical eschatology, on the other hand, deals with
>the question of what
>we can know about what will happen, in what sequence,
>etc. As biblical
>evidence for these topics is notoriously difficult to
>interpret, theologians
>have come up with various different, often incompatible
>views about this.
>And various sects or groups have settled on particular
>speculations, which
>we better ignore. Jesus said (Matthew 25:13) "Therefore
>keep watch, because
>you do not know the day or the hour."
>
>As far as science is concerned, we can know and learn
>lots of things about
>the past, but only tentative extrapolations about the
>future. And
>eschatology, (teaching about the last things) is
>completely off-limits.
>Therefore it's quite natural that the ASA list focuses,
>among other topics,
>on creation, but hardly, if at all, on eschatology.
>
>Peter
>
>--
>Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
><pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and
>evolution
>"..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)
Received on Thu Mar 25 10:13:00 2004