Oliver O’Donovan, the noted ethicist, says this about history in his contribution to the first volume of David K. Clark and Robert V. Rakestraw’s edited collection, Readings in Christian Ethics:

Within Christianity one cannot think or speak about the meaning of the world without speaking also of its destined transformation. The problem of evil is met, not by asserting a profound cosmological order in the present, but by confident announcement of God’s purposes for the future. He who has come to earth as the meaning, has come also as the Purpose or Fulfillment. To understanding the coming of Christ it is necessary to expect the second coming.

There are, of course, notoriously, two ways of living in expectation. We can believe in the value of intermediate transformation, ‘preparing the way of the Lord’, and so commit ourselves to a life of activity; or we can feel that the ultimate transformation renders all penultimate change irrelevant, and so resign ourselves to a life of hopeful suffering. But what these two attitudes have in common is far more important than what differentiates them. They both take a negative view of the status quo. There is no natural purpose to which we can respond in love and obedience. The destiny of nature has to be imposed on it, either by our activity or by God’s. The purpose of the world is outside of it, in that new Jerusalem which is to descend from heaven prepared as a bride for the bridegroom.

Any thoughts?