The Immanent, the Transcendent, and the Impossible

Reflections on New Testament Eschatology, Part Two

I believe that it was Eric Vögelin who, in The New Science of Politics (1952), first issued the now famous minatory maxim that we must never seek to “immanentize the eschaton.” It had been, he believed, the temptation to establish the Kingdom of God or the Age-to-Come by human effort and within terrestrial history that had prompted all the monstrous and…