In this paper, I present an analysis of purgatory from an issuantist perspective – an approach that seeks to reconcile the concept of a loving God with the doctrine of eternal hell. Issuantism posits that both heaven and hell originate from God’s love, and I extend this framework to purgatory, offering a new interpretation of its eschatological significance. After examining the views of influential figures such as Joseph Ratzinger and Jerry Walls, I argue that purgatory must be understood as a condition outside of time to maintain theological consistency. I propose a model of purgatory located within an aeveternal dimension – an intermediate state between time and eternity – as a way to resolve tensions concerning temporality, moral agency, and the soul’s orientation toward heaven.

This article argues that E.L. Mascall develops the eschatology of C.S. Lewis to answer three common critiques of the consensual doctrine of hell. First, Mascall argues that human persons are capable of refusing the love of God because their potential reciprocal love depends on a freedom to give the self, or refuse to do so, in an indissoluble union. Second, the perfection of the new heavens and new earth is not a numerical perfection, and the numerical imperfection of finite creation demonstrates that this is not God’s goal in creation. Third, human nature and Christian revelation reveal that persons are made with the capacity to receive grace and participate in glory, but this reception and participation cannot be coerced. In order to test the plausibility of this position, I present David Bentley Hart’s critique of Lewis’s particularism and Mascall’s answer to such objections.

Hebrews scholarship regularly includes claims that the author used the word οὐρανός in either two or three distinct senses. Most basically, it is argued that the word can refer to created parts of the cosmos or to the uncreated place where God dwells, and that authors who use the word have one of these two distinct referents in mind. This is particularly important in Hebrews 12.25–9, where the οὐρανός is shaken. It is often argued that this must be the created οὐρανός in distinction to the divine or eternal οὐρανός. This article critiques this common understanding of οὐρανός and its application to Hebrews 12.25–9. First, it surveys some early Jewish and Christian texts that discuss humans ascending into heaven, illustrating that these texts do not indicate any ontological divisions between various entities named ‘heaven’. Second, it briefly examines the ten occurrences of οὐρανός in Hebrews against this background, and it becomes clear that the author of Hebrews was more interested in contrasting heaven and earth (and perhaps the highest from the lower heavens) than in separating ‘heaven’ into distinct realms based on ontology. Third, the article outlines the significance of this conclusion for understanding what Hebrews 12.25–9 says about the shaking of heaven and earth. The author of Hebrews does not mean that some uncreated οὐρανός will ‘remain’ while the created heavens and earth are shaken. Instead, all of the heavenly and earthly space will be shaken.

Dorotheos of Gaza (6th cent.) was a monastic leader whose works, along with the correspondence of his mentors, Barsanuphios (d. after 543) and John of Gaza (d. 543), provide insight into the Second Origenist Controversy and the tenor of theological investigation at a key juncture in late antiquity. The evidence of Dorotheos, who several times cites Evagrios by name, has been noted but its significance not yet fully appreciated. This essay reassesses Dorotheos’s theology and Gazan monastic culture through study of his eschatology in Instruction 12, in context of which the Evagrian passages appear, and which he develops from Origen’s On First Principles. Analysis of Dorotheos’s modifications and developing ideas suggests a more vigorous—indeed, “Origenist”—theological life in Gazan monasticism than has been recognized and calls for a new perspective on the effects of the Second Origenist Controversy as well as Dorotheos’s own position relative to it.

CEG 1.10 shows striking parallels in language and thought with Euripides’ Suppliant Women 531–6 (c. 423), with both passages describing the departure of the soul into the upper air (aithêr) after death. This article argues that rather than being a commonplace in fifth-century Athens, the mention of this eschatology in Suppliant Women is a deliberate reference to CEG 1.10; and that the significance of this reference is the recontextualization of the lines from CEG 1.10 to describe the battle of Delium (423), thus expressing the war-weariness and disillusion of Athens.

The essay compares the problem of history in the theological methods of the Reformed theologian Thomas Torrance and the Catholic theologian Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan works to incorporate historical science into theology, while Torrance argues for a revision of historical science. Lonergan's method is a synthesis of Catholic theology and history, but it is one constructed at the expense of eschatology and the full significance of Christ's resurrection. Torrance's method, on the contrary, includes a dogmatic understanding of history that is grounded solidly on the ‘Word-Act’ of God – the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. It gives full weight to eschatology but elides the contingencies of history.

This article outlines one way in which Joseph Ratzinger’s eschatology could contribute to reducing the risk humanity now creates to its own survival. Studies of ‘Existential Risk’ warn that hazards arising from Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and Engineered Pathogens require mitigation to safeguard the future of the human race from a calamitous end. Preventative measures, however, entail sacrifice, and there is no shortage of resistance to regulation of behaviours and technological development. Ethics of empathy, utility, and duties reach breaking point when stretched to overcome the temporal and moral gap between present agency and future well-being.

This article proposes that Ratzinger’s theology of history and commitment to eschatological realism offers an intertwined double benefit: his warning about the danger of conflating hope in God’s Kingdom with hope in a future world humanity could perfect for itself opens up the uniquely rich ground of a trans-historical hope in Jesus Christ, in which an impactful relationship of love for humanity’s future can put down roots today.

Die Untersuchung der Schöpfungsthematik in der Didache ist ein Forschungsdesiderat. Daher werden Übersetzungen und Kommentare daraufhin überprüft, welche griechischen Wörter an welchen Stellen schöpfungstheologisch interpretiert werden. Dieses vorläufige Netz der Schöpfungsterminologie wird durch weitere Analysen verfeinert, um einen Gesamteindruck der Schöpfungstheologie zu gewinnen. Im schöpfungsethischen Ausblick wird die Frage herausgegriffen, wie es für die Didache zukünftig mit der Schöpfung weitergeht, was im Horizont gegenwärtiger Herausforderung besprochen wird. Die Didache hat weder ein vordergründig ökologisches Interesse noch eine pauschale Abwertung der gegenwärtigen Schöpfung. Dennoch steckt in der Didache ein ökotheologisches Potenzial.

The connection between ecological responsibility and differing conceptions of Christian eschatology is widely observed. It is often assumed that the necessary response to Christian environmental inaction is affirmation of a strongly this-worldly vision of new creation (so, influentially, N. T. Wright). However, recent systematic theology has seen retrieval of elements of eschatology that foreground discontinuity and transcendence (e.g. Hans Boersma). Moreover, there are exegetical challenges to continuationist claims (e.g. Markus Bockmuehl and Edward Adams) and doctrinal reactions to ‘eschatological naturalism’ (Katherine Sonderegger and Michael Allen). Where does this leave the connection between ecological witness and the content of Christian hope? Doubtless, continuationist accounts have some salutary emphases, but on exegetical, doctrinal and moral grounds I seek to disentangle the assumed compact of particular construals of this-worldly continuity and ethical commitment. Finally, drawing on James Cone's meditations upon black spiritual traditions, I explore how discontinuous interpretations of the life to come themselves need not undermine responsible action.