Jesus Christ, the Definer and Personification of the Eschaton

Abstract

All philosophical inquiries into the origin and purpose of history can be traced back to prephilosophical interpretations of reality, insofar as there is contained in the philosophical query something that is not generated by philosophy on its own, but is, nevertheless, original to that discipline. There exists something like an inchoate revelation of God in the primordial creative forces that predates God’s explicit self-disclosure in scripture and Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is experienced as “the end of history,” inasmuch as history has been confronted with its terminal point. History is unveiled as a single Theo-human drama, as God’s offer to humanity of dialogue with him. All secularized, often ideology-driven, attempts to find meaning without God—be they religious or areligious—are unmasked as sublimated efforts to redirect human hope toward an inner-worldly perfection. Giordano Bruno’s (1545–1600) humanist attempt to divinize the cosmos was later reinforced by Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel tried to overcome dualism by reducing God to an entity within the world process. To the believer, in contrast, in the God-man Jesus Christ the meaning of history is definitively revealed. “The beginning and end of this new history is the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, who is recognized as the last man (the second Adam), that is, as the long-awaited manifestation of what is truly human and the definitive revelation to man of his hidden nature; for this very reason, it is oriented toward the whole human race and presumes the abrogation of all partial histories, whose partial salvation is looked upon as essentially an absence of salvation.”¹