'Until he comes': Towards an eschatology of church membership

International Journal of Systematic Theology

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 187-200

  Gunton, Colin ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149112419     PISSN: 14631652     EISSN: 14682400     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1463-1652.00059     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, trans. E.C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 314.
2. Robert W. Jenson, God After God: The God. of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1969).
3. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, trans. Philip Clayton (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990), pp. 75ff.
4. Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1992).
5. Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1996).
6. Bruce McCormack, For Us and Our Salvation: Incarnation and Atonement in the Reformed Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1993), pp. 7-8.
7. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Triune God: vol. 2, The Works of God (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 1999), vol. 1, p. 205. For Jenson Christ is risen 'almost' as the church, because the position is more nuanced than some of citations I shall use suggest. In a forthcoming paper on the roots of Jenson's ecclesiology in the thought of his teacher Peter Brunner, David Yeago argues that Jenson tends to conflate two things that Brunner more carefully keeps apart. 'Brunner ... continues to distinguish ... two modes in which the risen body of the Lord exists. Jenson on the other hand regards a distinct mode of existence before God's throne as unnecessary, simply identifying "heaven" with the eucharistic assembly.'
8. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1, p. 206.
9. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2, p. 213.
10. '[T]he meal acknowledges the absence of the Lord and mingles memory and hope, recalling his death and awaiting his coming again.' Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians (Louisville: John Knox, 1997), p. 199.
11. G.B. Caird, New Testament Theology, ed. L.D. Hurst (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 229.
12. Christoph Schwöbel, 'The Creature of the Word: Recovering the Ecclesiology of the Reformers', On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community, ed. Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), pp. 110-55.
13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeill, trans. and indexed F.L. Battles, LCC vols. 20 and 21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), IV.xiv.3. Where I would differ from Calvin is in taking exception to his view that all of this is 'for our ignorance and dullness, then for our weakness.' Does it not indicate a suspicion that the materiality of the thing is somehow secondary?
14. Caird, New Testament Theology, p. 228.
15. See a discussion of its significance by Paul Johnson, The Spectator, 30 October 1999.
16. Douglas Farrow, 'In Support of (something like) a Reformed View of Ascension and Eucharist', p. 182.
17. By the end of his life, Schweitzer's account of Jesus' ethic had been completely spiritualized. 'The ethics of Jesus are concerned only with the attainment of inner perfection. They renounce moral works. They have nothing to do with the achievement of anything in the world.' Albert Schweitzer, The Kingdom of God and. Primitive Christianity, trans. L.A. Garrard (London: A. & C. Black, 1968), p. 98.
18. William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
19. Robert Jenson is on surer ground in remarking on the relation between sexual disorder and criminality: 'the simultaneity of the lack of sexual regulation in young males of American cities' Lumpenproletariat and their criminality is regularly taken as coincidence. It is nothing of the sort; the first causes the second.' Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2, n. 81, p. 91.