ABSTRACT

Jesus pictured life with God as involving such a radical change that ordinary human relationships would no longer prevail. That conviction of a radical change brought with it a commitment to the language of eschatology, of the ultimate transformation God both promised and threatened; although Jesus’ eschatology was sophisticated, his development of that idiom of discourse is evident. 1 Some efforts have been made recently to discount the eschatological dimension of Jesus’ teaching; they have not prevailed. Periodically, theologians in the West have attempted to convert Jesus’ perspective into their own sense that the world is a static and changeless entity, but that appears to have been far from his own orientation. 2