In the End, God

Death, judgement, heaven, hell. These are the "Four Last Things" traditionally linked together under the heading "Eschatology." In this book, John Robinson examines them all with the trenchancy, lucidity, and refusal.

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In the End, God - identifies a gap that exists in the treatment of eschatology within the Christian faith. As Robinson points out, eschatology had traditionally dealt with the last things in a way that is remote and removed from everyday life and Christianity, and the goal of his book is to make eschatology fully relevant to the modern world. Although it is commonly held that eschatology within modern Christianity is centred on the fact and moment of death, Robinson shows that the true nature of eschatology is something quite different. It is not about the last things after everything else, but rather is about the relation of all things to the 'last things' or, as it were, about the 'lastness' of all things. Revealing the foundation of biblical eschatology to be the experience of God by the community of faith, Robinson calls readers to embrace the eschatological vision of the Bible, but to do so in a way that is alert to its mythic character. In the course of these explorations he also lays bare his own theology of universal salvation.
However, contrary to what one may expect, this universalism is one that seeks to take both human freedom and the reality of hell with the utmost seriousness.