Theopedia

Inaugurated eschatology

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

— Mark 1:15 (ESV)

Definition

Inaugurated eschatology, often called the “already and not yet,” is the understanding that the kingdom of God began, but was not completed, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (Mark 1:15; Col. 1:13). Believers already share blessings Scripture elsewhere assigns to the age to come, already “raised with Christ” (Col. 3:1) and facing “no condemnation” (Rom. 8:1), yet still await the resurrection of the body and the kingdom’s consummation at Christ’s return (1 Cor. 15:23-24; Phil. 3:20-21). This age and the age to come therefore overlap between Christ’s two comings, rather than simply succeeding one another.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to eschatology’s already/not yet structure as such; the term itself is a twentieth-century coinage. Its chapter on Christ the Mediator, however, already holds the two together in describing what Christ was ordained to be:

“It pleased God, in His eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the Lord Jesus, his only begotten Son, according to the covenant made between them both, to be the mediator between God and man; the prophet, priest, and king; head and saviour of the church, the heir of all things, and judge of the world.”1

Christ is already “head and saviour of the church,” a present possession and rule, and at the same time “the heir of all things, and judge of the world,” an inheritance and a judgment Scripture elsewhere places at his return.1 The confession states this present-and-future headship without naming it a distinct doctrine or organizing the rest of its eschatology chapters, on the final judgment and the resurrection of the dead, around it.

Biblical Basis

Jesus opens his ministry by announcing that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), and tells the Pharisees that “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you,” present already rather than a future object of observation (Luke 17:20-21). Calvin reads Jesus’s own opening word this way: “he declares that the treasures of the divine mercy were opened in him,” present tense, “next, he enjoins repentance; and, lastly, he encourages confidence in the promises of God.”2

Paul states the same structure for the believer’s own standing. Union with the risen Christ is already true of believers, who “have been raised with Christ” and are told to “seek the things that are above” (Col. 3:1), and “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1), the verdict of the last judgment already rendered in the present. Yet the same union still awaits a future stage: believers “await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Phil. 3:20-21).

Paul frames Christ’s own resurrection the same way in 1 Corinthians 15: it is “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20), a guarantee already secured, but the full harvest, “then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power,” including “the last enemy,” death itself (1 Cor. 15:24-26), remains future. Only then, Bavinck writes, does Christ “celebrate his highest triumph” and “realize the consummation of his kingdom and the total subjection of all his enemies,” so that God is “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).3

Historical Development

Two twentieth-century poles

Two early-twentieth-century readings of Jesus’s kingdom preaching pulled in opposite directions. Johannes Weiss (1892) and Albert Schweitzer (1901) argued the kingdom Jesus announced was wholly future, an apocalyptic event Jesus expected imminently and that did not, in fact, arrive, a position later scholarship named “consistent eschatology.”4 C. H. Dodd’s The Parables of the Kingdom (1935) argued the opposite: that the kingdom had already fully arrived in Jesus’s own ministry, with no substantial future stage still outstanding, a position named “realized eschatology” in contrast to Weiss and Schweitzer’s.4

The already/not yet synthesis

Reformed biblical theology moved toward a synthesis of the two. Geerhardus Vos, teaching biblical theology at Princeton Seminary in the early twentieth century, worked out a framework in which “this age” and “the age to come” overlap rather than simply succeed one another, a reading of Paul’s own eschatology later republished as The Pauline Eschatology.5 Oscar Cullmann’s Christ and Time, first published in German in 1946, argued from the New Testament’s own timeline that Christ’s resurrection is the decisive midpoint of history, the point at which the coming age has already broken in, while the end of history, the “not yet,” remains still ahead.5

Evangelical New Testament scholars brought this synthesis into wider use in the mid-twentieth century, among them Herman Ridderbos’s The Coming of the Kingdom (1962) and George Eldon Ladd, who wrote:

“The Kingdom of God is the redemptive reign of God dynamically active to establish his rule among human beings, and that this Kingdom, which will appear as an apocalyptic act at the end of the age, has already come into human history in the person and mission of Jesus to overcome evil, to deliver people from its power, and to bring them into the blessings of God’s reign. The Kingdom of God involves two great moments: fulfillment within history, and consummation at the end of history.”6

Opposing Views

Dispensational premillennialism, discussed further at millennial kingdom, reserves the kingdom’s positive, earthly establishment for a future thousand-year reign of Christ still to come. A more recent form of the position, progressive dispensationalism, narrows this difference considerably: it holds that “the kingdom of God has come partially (i.e., spiritually) in the arrival of Christ and, derivatively, his church, but the final establishment of his kingdom on earth awaits its consummation upon Christ’s final return,” an already/not yet structure of its own.7

Fully realized readings, following Dodd’s “realized eschatology,” hold that the kingdom’s coming was exhausted in Christ’s first advent, leaving no substantial future consummation still outstanding.4 Inaugurated eschatology holds against this reading that Scripture still places real events, the resurrection of the body, the final judgment, and the subjection of every enemy including death, in the future (1 Cor. 15:24-26).

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2

  2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 3, sec. 19. ↩

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩

  4. Oren Rhea Martin, “The Beginning and the End: Situating the Land Promise in Redemptive History,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 36n25, citing C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (London: Nisbet, 1935); Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971; first published 1892); and Albert Schweitzer, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God (New York: Schocken, 1914; first published 1901). ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery Schema of Romans,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 123n210, citing Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964) and Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1992). ↩ ↩2

  6. George Eldon Ladd, quoted in Martin, “The Beginning and the End,” 103. ↩

  7. Oren Rhea Martin, “Conclusion,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 289n28. ↩