Right from the days of Jesus’ mission between the Jordan, Galilee and Jerusalem, some have been embarrassed by the eschatology articulated in his message of the approach of God’s final reign. Some have not been able to avoid asking whether there is something shamefully mistaken or wrong hereabouts. Such embarrassment has persisted to this day. For about the last 100 years such concerns have become especially strong amongst some academic circles including theologians, historians, anthropologists and others. Complementing this, we are familiar with a recurrent cluster of embarrassments in encountering death or the dying, and topics such as guilt, sin, judgement, the worth and meaning of human life, authority, tradition, and related matters, in a wide range of contexts. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, most famously in her book Purity and Danger, explored insights concerning how we (as human beings) tend to find dangerous or dirty (impure) matters which we do not know how to make sense of, in terms of our conventional and established ways of trying to sort out our experience into various kinds and schemas. For example, is blood more to do with life or death, and how can we, how should we, keep these apart, or connect them, or both?
If Knight is right, then he offers us a powerful paradigm, new yet with ancient roots, for living and working face-to-face with such matters, so as to make better sense of them and of our shared, shareable humanity, in the company of Israel, Jesus Christ and the Christian community. His account of the triune God articulates the grammar which guides this approach. Knight helps us, here and now, towards appreciating better the riches of the vision of Irenaeus of Lyons: the glory of God is a living human being: human life is the vision of the glory of God. This is a book to buy and re-read, to argue and struggle and live with.
Ian McPherson Amazon (UK) review of The Eschatological Economy: Time and the Hospitality of God
You can read the Introduction to The Eschatological Economy on this site (right side bar) and chapter 1 at Amazon
Now you can read chapters 2-6 of The Eschatological Economy at Google Book .
