Inaugurated Eschatology and the Kingdom Already Present

Orthodox eschatology begins not at the end of history but in its middle — in the Resurrection of Christ, which has already inaugurated the age to come. The Kingdom of God is not only a future event awaited but a present reality entered, above all in the Eucharist, where the Church stands already within the eighth day. This “already/not-yet” structure is the frame within which every particular question about the last things must be read.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Kingdom That Has Already Come

The Christian doctrine of the last things (ta eschata, “the last things”) is often imagined as a chapter appended to the end of theology — a description of events still to come. Orthodox theology resists this arrangement. For the New Testament and the Fathers, the decisive eschatological event has already happened: in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, “the ends of the ages” have come upon the Church (1 Corinthians 10:11), and those who are baptized have already “tasted… the powers of the age to come” (Hebrews 6:5). The Kingdom of God is not merely predicted; it is inaugurated. This is why the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom opens not with a petition but with a proclamation already in the perfect tense of accomplished fact: “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Modern Orthodox theology has made this structure central. Fr. Alexander Schmemann argued that the whole life of the Church is the manifestation and gift of the Kingdom that is at once “at hand” and “to come,” so that the Church lives in the tension of a reality both already possessed and still awaited (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973, esp. chs. 2 and 4; The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988). Georges Florovsky described the Christian condition as one of “inaugurated eschatology”: the new age has genuinely begun, the old has not yet passed away, and the Church exists in the overlap (Florovsky, “The Patristic Age and Eschatology: An Introduction,” in Aspects of Church History, Collected Works vol. 4, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975). This is not a modern invention but the recovery of a New Testament and patristic pattern — the same pattern by which St. Paul can say both that we are “saved” (Ephesians 2:5–8) and that we are “being saved” and shall be saved (1 Corinthians 1:18; Romans 5:9–10).

“Realized” and “Future” Held Together

Twentieth-century biblical scholarship coined the terms “realized eschatology” (C. H. Dodd’s emphasis on the Kingdom as present in Jesus’ ministry) and “consistent” or “future eschatology” (the Kingdom as wholly future). Orthodox theology refuses the choice. The Kingdom is genuinely present — Christ says “the Kingdom of God is within you / in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21) and “if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28) — and it is genuinely future: “Thy Kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10) remains a prayer, and the general resurrection and Last Judgment are still awaited (see The Parousia and the General Resurrection). The “not-yet” is preserved without remainder; what inaugurated eschatology adds is that the “already” is equally real, and that the future the Church awaits is the manifestation of a Kingdom she has already begun to inhabit.

John Zizioulas pressed the point ontologically: the Church is not a society that remembers a past founder and expects a future return, but the community whose very being is constituted by the future — the eschaton — reaching back to shape the present. The Eucharist is the event in which the last things become present and the Church is what she will be (Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985, esp. the essays on eucharistic ecclesiology; and The Eucharistic Communion and the World, London: T&T Clark, 2011). This “eschatological ontology” is debated in its sharper formulations — it is one reading among several in contemporary Orthodox theology — but the underlying conviction, that the Church lives from the Kingdom and not only toward it, is common patristic ground.

The Eucharist as the Age to Come

If the Kingdom is already present, its concentrated presence is the Eucharist. Orthodox liturgical theology understands the Divine Liturgy as the entry of the Church, in time, into the timeless reality of the Kingdom — the “eighth day” beyond the seven days of this creation, the day of the Resurrection that is also the first day of the new creation. The Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom remembers, in a single breath, not only the Cross and Resurrection but “the second and glorious coming again” — commemorating a future event as already accomplished, because in the Kingdom’s own time it is (the Anaphora of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom; cf. Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988). Maximus the Confessor’s Mystagogia reads the whole Liturgy as an icon and enactment of the entire economy of salvation, from creation to the eschatological gathering of all things into God, so that the assembly at prayer is already rehearsing and participating in the end (Maximus, Mystagogia; on which see the Church Fathers).

This is why, for the Orthodox tradition, the fullest access to eschatology is not speculative but liturgical: one learns what the age to come is by standing in the Liturgy, receiving the Body and Blood that are “the medicine of immortality” (Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians 20.2), and hearing the Kingdom proclaimed as blessed. The last things are not first of all information about the future but a reality one enters now — a theme developed at length in Liturgy as Eschatology.

Why the Frame Matters

Holding the “already” and the “not-yet” together governs how the rest of this collection reads. Because the Kingdom is already present, the Christian meets death not as a leap into the unknown but as the passage of one who already belongs to the risen Christ (see The Christian Understanding of Death). Because the Kingdom is not yet consummated, the interim state of the departed is genuinely intermediate, still open to the Church’s prayer, and not the final word (see The Particular Judgment and the Intermediate State). Because heaven and hell are the manifestation of the same Kingdom-reality — God’s presence and love — to those prepared or unprepared for it, they are not two places but two receptions of one gift (see The Same Love Experienced Differently). And because the Kingdom is Christ’s Paschal victory, the whole is framed by hope (see The Paschal Frame).

Inaugurated eschatology also disciplines the tone of the tradition. It rules out both a merely “otherworldly” Christianity that treats the present as an antechamber of no value, and a merely “this-worldly” reduction of the Kingdom to social progress. The material creation is not discarded but destined for transfiguration: “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5), and the whole cosmos awaits “the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). The end is not the abolition of creation but its fulfillment — a theme taken up in The Transfiguration of Creation and rooted in Maximus’s vision of the recapitulation of all things in Christ (Maximus, Ambiguum 41). Eschatology, on this frame, is finally about what God is doing with the world he loves, and the Church’s confession of the last things is a confession of hope.

References

Florovsky, Georges. “The Patristic Age and Eschatology: An Introduction.” In Aspects of Church History. Collected Works, vol. 4. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975.
Ignatius of Antioch. Epistle to the Ephesians 20.2. In Michael W. Holmes, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007.
Maximus the Confessor. Mystagogia; Ambiguum 41. 7th century.
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Trans. Paul Kachur. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
Zizioulas, John D. The Eucharistic Communion and the World. London: T&T Clark, 2011.
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10:11; Hebrews 6:5; Luke 17:21; Matthew 6:10, 12:28; Romans 8:21; Revelation 21:5.