What is realised eschatology?

Question 10143.

Realised eschatology is a phrase you will almost never hear from a pulpit and almost always hear in a lecture theatre, yet its influence has quietly reached a great many pulpits anyway. It is the view that the last things promised in Scripture have already arrived in the person and work of Jesus, so that what remains for the future is little or nothing.

I want to give it a fair hearing before I disagree with it, because it grew out of a genuine observation about the New Testament rather than out of unbelief. But I do disagree with it, and I think the reasons matter for how you read your Bible tomorrow morning.

Where the Idea Came From

The term is associated above all with the British scholar C. H. Dodd, who argued in the 1930s that Jesus taught the kingdom had already come in His own ministry, and that the later expectation of a future coming was a misunderstanding introduced by the early church. On that reading, the parables are not about a delayed harvest at all but about a harvest already gathered.

Dodd was reacting to an earlier generation of liberal scholarship which had made Jesus a purely ethical teacher, and also to Albert Schweitzer, who had made Jesus a failed apocalyptic prophet expecting an end that never came. Realised eschatology solved Schweitzer’s embarrassment neatly. If nothing was ever meant to arrive later, then nothing failed to arrive.

That is the context, and I mention it because it explains a good deal. Realised eschatology was designed to rescue the credibility of Jesus from a problem that a plain reading of the text never actually creates. The New Testament is perfectly comfortable with a King who came, was rejected, went away and promised to return.

What Realised Eschatology Gets Right

Let me be generous where generosity is deserved. The New Testament really does speak of the last days as having already begun. Peter stood up at Pentecost and said that what the crowd was seeing was what Joel had spoken about, “in the last days” (Acts 2:17). Hebrews says God has spoken to us “in these last days” by His Son. John says it is the last hour.

More than that, believers genuinely possess now what earlier generations only anticipated. Eternal life is a present possession, not a future prize. The Spirit indwells. Forgiveness is complete. The powers of the age to come were on display in the healings and exorcisms of Jesus’ ministry. Any theology that treats the present age as spiritually empty, a mere waiting room, has misread the New Testament badly.

So realised eschatology is pressing on something true. The trouble is what it does with the material that will not fit.

Where Realised Eschatology Falls Down

Start with the resurrection of the body. Paul devotes a whole chapter to it in 1 Corinthians 15 and places it firmly at the coming of Jesus, not at conversion. Indeed he names two men who taught that the resurrection had already happened and says they had swerved from the truth and were upsetting the faith of some (2 Timothy 2:18). That is a striking verdict on an over-realised eschatology delivered by an apostle.

Then there is the Lord’s Supper, where Paul says we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. There is the promise in John 14 that Jesus will come again and take His own to be where He is. There is the angelic word at the ascension that this same Jesus will come in the same way as He was seen to go. There is a whole book, Revelation, largely given over to events that had not happened when John wrote and have not happened yet.

And there is the world itself. Realised eschatology has to explain why creation still groans, why death still empties homes, why the wolf still eats the lamb. If all the promises have arrived, they have arrived in a form so unlike their wording that the words have stopped doing any work.

The Hermeneutical Cost

My deepest objection to realised eschatology is not any single verse but the method it requires. To make it work you must decide that prophetic language about a land, a throne, a city and a nation means something other than a land, a throne, a city and a nation. Once you grant yourself that permission, the interpreter rather than the text becomes the authority on what any promise means.

I would rather apply one consistent method throughout. The prophecies of Jesus’ first coming were fulfilled in a plain and physical manner: a real town called Bethlehem, a real virgin, real thirty pieces of silver, real pierced hands. If literal fulfilment was the pattern for the first advent, I see no honest reason to switch to a symbolic pattern for the second. My article on how we interpret biblical prophecy sets out that principle at length.

Realised Eschatology and Its Cousins

You will meet several relatives of this position. Full preterism holds that all prophecy was fulfilled by AD 70, which is realised eschatology with a date attached, and it collapses into denial of a future bodily resurrection. Partial preterism is more restrained but still relocates most of Matthew 24 into the first century. Inaugurated eschatology, the most common evangelical option, keeps a genuine future but tends to fold Israel’s promises into the church.

Each of these is a different setting on the same dial, and the dial measures how much of the promised future you are willing to treat as already spent. I take the readings in preterism, inaugurated eschatology and futurism separately, because the differences between them are real.

The Verses That Are Usually Cited

Let me handle the main texts that are pressed into service, because it is only fair to meet the argument where it is strongest.

Jesus says in John 5 that an hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and live, which sounds like resurrection in the present tense. But read on a few verses and He speaks of an hour when all who are in the tombs will hear His voice and come out. The first refers to spiritual life given now; the second to bodily resurrection later. Both are in the same paragraph, which is inconvenient for a purely realised reading.

John 12:31 is another favourite: now is the judgement of this world, now will the ruler of this world be cast out. That is genuinely a present statement about the decisive defeat of Satan at the cross. It is not a statement that his sentence has been executed, which Revelation 20 places a good deal later. A verdict delivered and a sentence carried out are two different moments in any court, and realised eschatology tends to collapse them.

What Is Lost

Doctrines rarely fail alone. When realised eschatology takes hold, other things go with it, and it is worth naming them.

The first casualty is Israel. If all the promises have been fulfilled spiritually in Jesus and the church, then the covenants made with Abraham and David have no outstanding balance, and Romans 11 becomes very hard work indeed. Paul’s whole argument there is that God has not rejected His people and that a future remains. See does God still have a plan for Israel?

The second casualty is comfort. Paul’s answer to grief was resurrection at the coming of Jesus, and Peter’s answer to persecution was an inheritance kept in heaven. Strip out the future and you are left telling suffering believers that this is as good as it gets, which is not what the apostles told anybody. That is why I regard realised eschatology as a pastoral problem and not only an academic one.

The third casualty is watchfulness. You do not stay awake for a master who has already come home. Whatever else realised eschatology achieves, it cannot produce the alertness the New Testament keeps commanding, and you can check that instinct against Titus 2:13, where Paul has believers still waiting.

So, now what?

Most people in the pew will never use the phrase realised eschatology, but many have absorbed a mild version of it without knowing. It shows up as a vague sense that all this end-times material is really about spiritual truths for today, that the return of Jesus is a way of talking about hope rather than an event with a date in God’s diary.

That mild version quietly steals something. It steals the comfort Paul intended when he told grieving Thessalonians that the dead in Christ will rise. It steals the motive Peter gave for holy living. It steals the ache in the last prayer of the Bible, “Come, Lord Jesus.” A hope that has already been entirely fulfilled is not a hope at all, and there is no use pretending otherwise.

So enjoy everything Jesus has already given you, and there is a great deal of it. Then lift your eyes. The best of it has not happened yet. Does your reading of Scripture still leave you with anything to wait for?

They have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. They are upsetting the faith of some.

2 Timothy 2:18 (ESV)