Public Theology and Eschatology:
Prolepsis and Lifeworld in the Narrative Frame
Public Theology and Eschatology: Prolepsis and Life-world in the Narrative Frame
For the bilingual site:
Paul, Chung. “Public Theology and Eschatology: Prolepsis and Life-world in the Narrative Frame,” Prolepsis, https://youngsung.devmisc.com/research-and-archives/prolepsis/. Accessed [July 1, 2025].
For the bilingual journal:
Paul, Chung. “Public Theology and Eschatology: Prolepsis and Life-world in the Narrative Frame,” Prolepsis & Multicultural Education, vol. 1, Fall 2026, http://publictheology.kr/main/bbs/board.php?bo_table=Forum&wr_id=1.
Acknowledgment
This paper is written in honor of Jürgen Moltmann, whose enduring solidarity with the Korean church—particularly with the faculty of Hanshin Theological Seminary—has profoundly shaped my theological formation. At Hanshin, my intellectual journey was nurtured through engagement with the thought of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Jürgen Moltmann.
In this paper, I seek to clarify the conceptual interplay between reconciliation and prolepsis as a theological doublet, drawing upon cultural narrative theory and the structure of the life-world. By re-situating Barth’s parabolic eschatology within this narrative framework, I aim to integrate Moltmann’s advent-shaped theology of hope into a vision of reconciliation as a proleptically embodied, world-transforming practice.
Rhetorical Suite: Life-world and Prolepsis
In exploring the relationship between the life-world and prolepsis, I seek to develop a refined theory of cultural narrative in which prolepsis is not merely a temporal or rhetorical device but a theological-epistemic key. In doing so, I construct an epistemological platform for rethinking biblical motifs such as reconciliation and prolepsis as a dual structure—interwoven within anticipation yet grounded in lived memory. I call this dynamic interplay a rhetorical suite: a constellation of narrative modes, temporal disruptions, and symbolic gestures that collectively mediate the eschatological horizon within the biblical narrative.
In a theological context, Wolfhart Pannenberg makes a significant contribution by linking history and hermeneutics with eschatology, integrating them into a coherent and unified theological vision. As he writes:
“That is to say, the text can be understood only in the context of the comprehensive history which joins the past with the present—and indeed not merely with the present that today exists, but with the future horizon of present possibilities, because the meaning of the present becomes clear only in the light of the future.”[1]
I take this statement as a platform for pursuing greater conceptual clarity in discussing the future horizon as a source of meaning. This future-oriented horizon allows for a more comprehensive understanding of history by mediating between the interpreter’s limited present perspective and the historical horizon of the text. The broader context of universal history is disclosed through the unfolding of history itself as illuminated by the eschatological openness of the future.
Pannenberg aligns with Wilhelm Dilthey’s historical hermeneutics, emphasizing the contextual and diachronic nature of meaning as it unfolds through historical continuity. Dilthey’s concept of the structural quality of spiritual life resonates with the theory of intentionality in consciousness, particularly as articulated in phenomenology.[2]
In the discussion of universal history and historical hermeneutics, I argue that Husserl’s concept of the life-world plays a crucial role in influencing Dilthey’s philosophy of life, especially in addressing Dilthey’s psychological limitations. I employ the concept of the life-world to explain the duality of prolepsis and reconciliation. The life-world refers to the realm of pre-reflective experience, the transcendent source of meaning, where a shared space of understanding is embedded in cultural, narrative and historical context, as opposed to the reductive scientific objectification of the world. I utilize a philosophical framework for understanding the life-world as a foundational concept for meaning, experience, embodiment, and narrative. The eschatological dimension—the ‘end’ or ultimate fulfillment of history—is always already embedded in the life-world, awakening proleptic intentionality and pushing its practice toward final revelation and completion.
Pannenberg acknowledges universal history in light of Dilthey’s concept of experienced meaning within the historical context of life; meaning becomes accessible only through the anticipation of a future that has not yet appeared. This insight provides a vital perspective on the unfolding of God’s revelation in history—as both divine self-disclosure and active engagement with the world. The future exerts a retroactive effect upon the present, since history remains incomplete and can be fully recognized as revelation only in light of its eschatological fulfillment.[3]
Moltmann argues that Pannenberg is rooted in a Jewish apocalyptic vision of the end of history, centered on the general resurrection of the dead, but ultimately reverts to a form of Greek cosmic theology. The resurrection of Jesus, in this framework, serves as a foretaste, anticipation, and prolepsis of the universal end.
In Moltmann’s view, Pannenberg overlooks the foundational Old Testament conception of history as a dynamic movement between promise and fulfillment. His eschatological emphasis on the resurrection risks marginalizing the theological and redemptive significance of the cross.[4]
Parable and Proleptic Meaning
In light of the theological debate between Moltmann and Pannenberg, I propose a redefinition of the proleptic element within rhetorical genre theory by reexamining its role in the broader narrative framework. This approach investigates how narrative itself becomes charged with the rhetorical force of prolepsis, thereby deepening its resonance with the biblical symbol of reconciliation and the phenomenological concept of the life-world.
Within this framework, prolepsis functions not merely as a temporal anticipation but as a narrative strategy that safeguards the biblical vision of eschatology—particularly the promise of a new heaven and a new earth.
Prolepsis, in a rhetorical sense, functions by articulating a richly layered depiction of multiple realities and deep semantic textures embedded within the biblical narrative. Narrative thinking plays a vital role in the construction of meaning, cultivating an authentic sense of identity and worldview oriented toward the future. It does so through stories, sagas, parables, poetic and divinatory language, analogy, and culturally embedded myths—each contributing to a symbolic economy of expectation. Through these forms, narrative not only interprets experience but also organizes it, shaping the memory of the past, the comprehension of the present, and the anticipation of what is to come.
The proleptic nature of God’s Kingdom becomes especially vivid in Jesus’s use of secular parables. These parables enact a “similarity-in-difference,” revealing the coming reign of God through ordinary images that simultaneously conceal and disclose divine truth.
These parables function as analogical narratives, grounded in the everyday cultural life-settings of their hearers, and exhibit the polyvalence of language and meaning across diverse contexts. Through metaphor, storytelling, and simile, they are designed not merely to explain but to provoke, disturb, and inspire within the horizon of eschatological expectation. This analogical mode stands in contrast to univocal language, which presumes a single, fixed meaning, and to equivocal language, which risks ambiguity and is often associated with logical fallacy.
Narrative Existence, Prolepsis, and Intentionality
Prolepsis, as a literary and rhetorical device, introduces future events into a narrative, thereby disrupting its linear chronology and infusing the present with anticipatory meaning. Aristotle discusses prolepsis in Rhetoric primarily as a technique of anticipation—used to pre-empt potential objections by addressing them before they arise.
Beyond its rhetorical utility, the concept was further developed in post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy, particularly by the Stoics. In Stoic thought, prolepsis refers not merely to anticipation in argument but to innate preconceptions (prolepseis)—pre-rational ideas implanted in the soul that allow one to recognize and affirm truth. These are transmitted through pneuma, the vital force that permeates both the body and the cosmos, uniting physical reality with rational order.
As a rhetorical figure of anticipation, prolepsis represents the future through human preconception, enabling a more vivid and immediate imagining of what is to come, while also producing a specific rhetorical effect.[5]
Meaning is embodied and disclosed through multiple layers of reality—through words, speech, and narrative—and culminates in the emergence of new and deeper significance as diverse horizons of understanding converge. This process suggests that a story is never simply received but is actively retold by a human subject who assembles its elements piece by piece. This act of narrative construction is guided by intentionality and shaped by an overarching horizon of meaning that transcends any single moment.
Robert Bellah, the American sociologist of religion, deepens our understanding of religion by emphasizing the centrality of narrative to human meaning-making. The truth of religion does not lie in isolated propositions but emerges from the coherence and integrity of the story as a whole. It is through narrative that religious communities interpret their past, orient themselves in the present, and project their hopes into the future. “Human beings are narrative creatures, and narrativity is at the heart of our identity.”[6]
Appreciating the significance of the human being as a narrative creature, I aim to guide a cultural narrative inquiry grounded in intentionality and a horizon of meaning within a dynamic spectrum. This approach engages the intentional arc: the dynamic structure through which we relate to and interpret the world around us.
The intentional “arc projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological, and moral situation.” The intentional arc in our life is situated in all these respects, bringing about “the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility.”[7]
The intentional arc encompasses the analysis of religious practices, discourse, and meaningful human actions by grounding the reality of the human as a narrative creature in our embodied existence—shaped through interaction with history, society, culture, and the world. This approach acknowledges the diverse forms of narrative, particularly as they are embodied in the lives of victims throughout histories of evolution, progress, and domination.
Bellah draws on Walter Benjamin’s notion of anamnesis, or remembrance, as a form of critical reasoning directed at the idea of progress: “The thought of history’s countless victims [is] nothing more than stepping stones along the path of development.”[8]
This perspective articulates a cultural narrative position within a regime of effective history centered on innocent victims. In Benjamin’s sense, the task of the historian is to fan the spark of hope in the past—to awaken hope within the flow of effective history by keeping memory alive and sustaining the anticipation of messianic time. This task involves transforming a history of death into a history of life, bringing it into the vivid presence of the now.
Questioning Back to Life-World
In defense of the narrative status of historical intentionality, Paul Ricoeur challenges the sharp epistemological break often drawn between history as a science and traditional narrative as myth. This is because all history, by its very nature, adopts narrative as a literary form, shaped by the structure of storytelling. Like sagas and ancient epics, historical accounts are essentially narratives of events in which human thought and action play a central role.[9]
Since “to narrate is already to explain,”[10] it is crucial to bridge the gap between narrative explanation and historical explanation through a critical method of questioning back—a concept rooted in Husserl’s Krisis. This approach calls for a return to the life-world as the forgotten foundation of science, while honoring the narrative configuration that underpins meaning-making.[11]
The concept of the life-world refers to the pre-reflective, lived experience of the world—a world we interpret by telling stories to ourselves, to others, and even to the cosmos, in an effort to make sense of experience through narrative explanation as moved in intentional circle.
The method of questioning back and its intentional circle offers a valuable lens for engaging with the sociological study of effective history through making a problematic regime. It supports a politics of recognition and restorative justice, especially in the context of multicultural society, standing in contrast to universalizing meta-discourses—such as the often-uncritical claim that “all religions are different paths to the same God.”[12]
Interpretive conflicts are inherent even within religious traditions such as Vedanta and Buddhism, or Islamic tradition, where differing understandings emerge in response to religious discourse and its multiple layers of reality. The difference of the life-world in interpretation safeguards particularity from the totalization of diverse paths into homogeneity or sameness.
In the maneuver of questioning back to the life-world, I maintain that God can be seen as the ultimate meaning or source of all meaning within the life-world. This meaning is not merely subjective or constructed by human minds, but is grounded in the divine reality that sustains all existence. The world and its meaning are not purely human projections; rather, they are shaped by a transcendent source of meaning—God—who imparts grace, freedom, and a future to the unfolding narrative of creation in the sense of epigenesis. This narrative unfolds dynamically within the ecological theater, as well as throughout the course of history, culture, and society. This approach helps me to expand the universal spectrum of God’s reconciliation in Christ with the world.
A Theology of Hope and Eschatology
Proleptic intentionality and life-world refers to an anticipatory narrative logic woven throughout the biblical narrative, manifesting in key theological moments such as creation, covenant, theologia crucis, reconciliation, resurrection, and adventus. Together, these moments form a constellation within the biblical world. This proleptic lens provides a valuable framework for comparing the eschatological perspectives of Jürgen Moltmann and Karl Barth.
In Moltmann’s view, Barth’s epistemology asserts that God can be known only through God’s own self-revelation—an idea rooted in Barth’s first edition of Romans (1919). In this work, Barth emphasizes a movement beyond historical facts toward the Spirit of the Bible, who is the eternal Spirit. In the second edition of Romans (1922), Barth deepens this approach by insisting on a rigorous engagement with the biblical text. He calls for wrestling with Scripture until the barrier between the first century and the present becomes transparent—an act of understanding that reveals what truly lies at the heart of the biblical witness.
However, Moltmann argues that Barth’s position is intertwined with Platonic concepts of the eternal Spirit, reflecting a tendency toward an uneschatological and ahistorical mode of thought. This tendency, Moltmann suggests, is rooted in a transcendent framework that underlies Barth’s understanding of God’s self-revelation and the resurrection of Christ. Nonetheless, in Moltmann’s account, Barth recognized in the appearance of the risen Lord the promise and anticipation of a truly decisive future.[13]
In fact, Moltmann contends that Barth’s model of parables and correspondences introduces faith into politically oppressed life in a liberating way, but does so using terms that are too hierarchical and, at times, arbitrary—given the qualitative difference between God and human beings. This model should be replaced by one of anticipation and promise within the ongoing process of political liberation: the ultimate reveals itself in the penultimate, and the unconditional manifests within the conditional.[14]
Parable, Eschatological Reality, and Social Justice
In response to Moltmann, I reposition Barth’s parabolic thinking within a cultural narrative model, integrating Moltmann’s insights into the transformative dimension of God’s coming (adventus).
Jesus’ parables express the coming of God, revealing divine love through the nearness of God’s reign and pointing toward eschatological reality with a clear articulation of the character of his good news. These parables are drawn from the everyday life of Palestine, and their narrative form reflects Jesus’ Galilean Aramaic within the Palestinian tradition—rooted in a cultural context distinct from that of the early Church. At the heart of his message about the kingdom of God is God’s forgiving mercy.[15]
In Jesus’s parable narrative, malkuth YHWH is primarily understood in a verbal sense—referring to God’s active rule—and by extension, the condition and sphere in which this reign unfolds. The fullness of God’s reign is realized only when all contradiction is removed, and the last enemy, death, is overcome (1 Cor. 15:26; Rev. 21:4).
The story of Jesus Christ is inseparably linked to the covenantal story of Israel. Insofar as God enters the world through Israel, the covenant with Israel embodies the promise of God’s kingdom for the entire world. It reaches beyond Israel to all humanity, aiming to establish a new social life characterized by greater communal well-being, justice, and divine order.[16]
In Jesus’s parabolic narrative, a secular use of language is operative, underlying a doublet of reconciliation and eschatology, where prolepsis functions not merely as a concept but as a living, narratively embodied practice of hope.
This cultural narrative inquiry leads me back to the regime of cultural complexity and the politics of recognition within the intentional circle of reconciliation—where God may engage in divine communication through society, culture, religion, and worldly affairs. A multicultural horizon is embraced within God’s act of reconciliation with the world, affirming its intrinsic value as an extraordinary expression of divine communication. Moltmann, however, tends to sidestep the problematic regime underlying Barth’s proleptic recognition of the ultimate reality manifest within the penultimate.[17]
Furthermore, this epistemic stance enables me to engage in questioning back to Barth’s text Christian Community and Civil Community (1946), clarifying Barth’s theology of analogy and correspondence in relation to J. J. Rousseau’s political theory of civil society and democratic solidarity. This analysis is particularly illuminated through the lenses of retributive justice and the governance of the common good, as articulated in Theses 17 and 29 of The Christian Community and the Civil Community.
This text, often recognized as a foundational program of public theology avant la lettre,[18] can be understood as proposing a more egalitarian and less bureaucratic framework—one oriented toward the highest possible realization of social justice.
Das Nichtige and the Critique of the Lordless Powers
I reinforce Barth’s public theology through his analysis of das Nichtige—the nothingness—and his critique of the lordless powers: those resistant, unaccountable forces that operate behind the scenes of human enterprise. These powers act as hidden wirepullers in both great and small human endeavors—shaping movements, achievements, revolutions, and even failures. They are real agents of progress, regress, and stagnation across politics, economics, scholarship, technology, and art, as well as in the evolution and retardation of personal life.
Barth identifies the demonism of politics particularly in the idea of empire—political absolutism embodied in the figure of the Leviathan. This is most clearly expressed in totalitarian states and dictatorships that claim sovereignty apart from God. Closely related is Mammon, the spirit of possession, which seeks its own self-absolutization through domination of resources and wealth. Both Leviathan and Mammon, in Barth’s theology, are not merely social constructs but spiritual realities—distortions of God’s good creation that threaten human freedom and dignity.[19]
This perspective carries eschatological significance by naming and resisting the penultimate realities that pose as ultimate—enemies of humanity and, therefore, adversaries of God. It entails a critique of ideology, propaganda, and chthonic forces that operate beneath the surface of political and cultural life. These powers first manifest themselves through dominion over the earth and cosmos, yet ultimately turn against humanity—placing people under obligation, technological control, and tyranny. In doing so, they become agents of rebellion against God, synonymous with the destruction and ruin of both individual lives and the social order.[20]
God’s coming Kingdom stands in radical contrast to the kingdom of disorder and the lordless powers. It arrives as a prophetic sign that exposes their limitations and reveals their ultimate futility in light of God’s sovereign reign.
Reconciliation and Eschatological Presence
In addressing reconciliation and eschatological presence through a prophetic-apocalyptic framework, I seek to refine the concept of prolepsis by viewing it through the lens of phenomenology—where prolepsis is understood as an intentional structure of protension, a forward-reaching movement of consciousness toward what is not yet but already anticipated.
In the synthesis of past and present, retention—as re-remembrance—gains vividness through anticipation. Every act of memory is inherently oriented by expectation-intentions, animated by protensions: forward-reaching movements of consciousness shaped by the structures of the life-world.
This double intentionality of recollection—simultaneously backward-looking and forward-reaching—forms a dual dimension of prolepsis, one that is marked by reconciliation with the past and the presence of eschatological hope.In the biblical narrative, prolepsis functions to embed future events within the vivid present (e.g., Ps. 87:1; 22:18; Ezek. 1:1).A striking example appears in Matthew 27:52, where the resurrection of the dead is narrated in an anticipatory manner. Within the narrative of Jesus’ death, apocalyptic phenomena accompany references to prophetic visions of the Lord’s judgment (cf. Isa. 13:9–13).
These phenomena also echo Jesus’ prophetic message concerning the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. An apocalyptic collapse—rooted in Jewish expectations of a general resurrection—unfolds at the moment of Jesus’s death as an anticipatory event. The convergence of apocalyptic catastrophe and the vision of a new world is thus centered on the death of Jesus and continues into the resurrection, which is itself framed within an apocalyptic narrative.
In this light, the Gospels can be understood as resurrection narratives with extended introductions, just as they are passion narratives with extensive preludes.[21]
This points to the concept of eschatological presence—a narrative and theological form grounded in the power of the Easter event. Eschatological presence serves as the hermeneutical key for interpreting the Gospels: not merely as past biography, but as a narrative about Jesus as the future human being (Matt. 28:20), whose presence transcends historical time and opens it toward fulfillment.[22]
In particular, Barth understands prolepsis within the passion tradition as the event of the general resurrection occurring in the death of Jesus on the cross. An earthquake shakes the earth, rocks split, and tombs open (Matt 27:51). On the cross, the eschatological event is anticipated, and the cosmos is drawn into this extraordinary moment (CD IV/1, 239). Prolepsis within the narrative form of Scripture thus carries a cosmological and apocalyptic dimension centered on the general resurrection of the dead.
Prolepsis is the Ascension, which becomes a sign of the proleptic future return of Christ (CD III/2: 454). The ascended Christ comes to the Church through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and the Church becomes the community embodying the second form of His return. In the “between times,” prolepsis occurs when God places His Spirit in human hearts as a deposit or pledge of what is to come (2 Cor. 1:22). Barth presents the ascension narrative as an integral part of the prolepsis in the exposition of reconciliation. The resurrection and ascension are presupposed, and even within the Easter narrative, the empty tomb and ascension are indicated, but not explicitly described (CD III/2:452).
Biblical prolepsis is grounded in God’s promise, which finds its ultimate affirmation in Christ—the divine “yes.” God’s future is apprehended only through faith, seen as though reflected in a mirror, yet made real in the present through Christ’s reconciliation and resurrection.
Discourse Clarification on Barth’s Christological Concentration
Barth’s Christological concentration is anchored in the interconnection between the ascension and exaltation, along with a proleptic sign of the parousia. Furthermore, Barth, drawing from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, presents the preexistence of Jesus Christ as an act of God—one that works on behalf of humanity through incarnation, revelation, and reconciliation. In Barth’s view, the Word became time itself, and through the act of the incarnation, Jesus becomes the “Deus præsens”—the God who is present (CD I/2:50). Barth critiques limitations in the Chalcedonian model, suggesting that in Jesus Christ, humanity—the humanum of all people—is posited and exalted to unity with God. Our humanitas exists in and with God Himself (CD IV/2:49, 59).
However, Barth’s reconciled Christology is not merely anthropocentric. It implicates the Pantocrator in the whole created cosmos, including the world of nature and the ecological web of life, as articulated in his doctrine of concursus—divine action working in creation (CD III/3).
Barth’s theology also intersects with public concerns and social issues, embracing a postcolonial perspective that aligns with the suffering of humanity beyond Christian borders, as well as ecological justice. In comparative religious studies, Barth’s Christology opens a dialogue with thinkers like Martin Buber, Feuerbach, and even Confucius, who approach humanity through a shared perspective of “co-humanity” or solidarity with suffering (CD III/2:277). Barth’s comparative work is also evident in his engagement with Reformation teachings on grace and justification, alongside Amida Buddhism’s concept of grace in the context of Japanese Shin Buddhism (CD I/2).
Barth’s Self-Renewal
Barth emphasizes that God is the source of all time, signaling a shift from his earlier position in the second edition of Romans, where he asserted a more extreme contrast between God and humanity (e.g., “God is everything, the human being is nothing”). Barth later critiqued this view as “a shocking simplification but complete nonsense” (CD IV/1:89). Over time, Barth developed a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between God and human beings, particularly evident in his later work, Humanity of God (1956), seeking to avoid the extreme dialectic of qualitative difference in a critical realist sense.
Barth further developed a threefold Christology, framing Christ’s work within the priestly, kingly, and prophetic offices (CD IV/1, IV/2, IV/3). This tripartite structure underpins Barth’s understanding of the dynamics between the humiliation of the Son of God and His exaltation, a dialectic between Lord and Servant. Theologia crucis is central here, as God, through Christ on the cross, participates fully in human suffering, bridging the gap between God and humanity. His communicatio gratiorum through God’s electing grace integrates Luther’s teaching of communicatio idiomatum into his reconciling Christology (CD IV/2:88). Reconciliation in Barth’s theology involves a double movement: from God to humanity, and equally from humanity to God, as forwarding to the eschaton of the resurrection and eternal life (CD IV/1:80).
Barth’s Response to Bultmann and Eschatology
Barth engages with Bultmann’s skepticism about the eschatological nature of the covenants in the Hebrew Scriptures, particularly in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. While Bultmann saw these covenants as potentially disconnected from a future eschatological event, Barth interprets them as a renewed, ongoing promise, finding fulfillment in Christ’s reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:19). For Barth, this eschatological reality is not something separate but is realized in the person of Christ, fulfilling the covenant and establishing a new humanity in Israel through Christ’s work and the Spirit.
Barth reinterprets the communication of attributes between Christ’s divine and human natures (communicatio idiomatum) in terms of the doctrines of anhypostasis and enhypostasis, emphasizing Christ’s solidarity with the poor. Jesus is presented as “the poorest of the poor” (CD IV/2:167) and as a “partisan of the poor” (CD IV/2:180), embodying a radical, revolutionary stance against established powers. His very existence as the incarnate God speaks to his identification with the oppressed and marginalized in this world (CD IV/2:249).
Constellation and Eschatological Reality
By refining the doublet between reconciliation and prolepsis within a narrative framework, I incorporate embodied internationality and the method of “questioning back” to the life-world—exploring eschatological reality and the multicultural regime within the broader biblical constellation.
Moltmann refines the eschatology of the coming God—that is, God’s arrival understood through an advent-like concept of the future, the novum, as recorded in the biblical writings. The category novum represents the historical aspect of eschatological openness to the future, the creatio nova revealed in the Easter appearance of the crucified Christ.[23]
By contrast, Barth’s parabolic eschatology emerges within his doctrine of reconciliation by acknowledging the ultimate within the penultimate through analogical imagination. Christ came to Israel in the past, and through the resurrection for the world. He comes to the Church in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The Church is a community of hope that awaits His final return (CD IV/3.1: 294).
Barth presents Jesus Christ as the partisan of the poor in light of God’s revolution, a vision that resonates with Walter Benjamin’s genealogical approach to memory—particularly his insistence on remembering the suffering of the vanquished. This perspective challenges the regime of historicism and the myth of progress, emphasizing that the past becomes present in moments of danger. In such in-breaking moments, hope is rekindled for the past itself, even in the face of apocalyptic catastrophe, uniting believers in a shared anticipation of redemption.
In a similar vein, Moltmann engages Benjamin’s philosophy of history by integrating a genealogical approach to memory into his advent-shaped eschatology. The future redemption of this still-unredeemed world breaks into the present as an irruption of the Wholly Other. In such moments, time itself appears to stand still—suspended by a divine interruption that transcends the laws of society and the compulsions of historical causality. The eschatological future presses into the present, disrupting the closed system of historical inevitability and revealing the possibility of genuine transformation.[24]
Proleptic Conclusion
I conclude my dialogue with Moltmann and Barth in an open and forward-leaning manner, as my cultural narrative articulates aspects of the life-world, correcting the dialectics of qualitative differences while critically engaging with the Jewish Gnostic understanding of creation. However, I regard the divergence between God’s final indwelling and eschatological panentheism as an open question, one that remains pertinent in Jewish interpretations of eschatology, especially in its dual structure as outlined by Gershom Scholem.
In fact, Barth diverges from Moltmann, who interprets the Pauline vision that “God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) in a panentheistic framework through a mutual indwelling of the world in God and God in the world; a finitude embraces infinity, because God will be in everything.[25]
For Barth, however, Paul’s text does not necessarily imply an emanationist model of divine radical self-withdrawal (Luria’s term tzimtzum) followed by a corresponding return or reintegration of the divine presence.[26] Rather, Paul’s text refers to the final revelation in which creatures witness God accomplishing His ultimate purpose in their lives (CD III/3: 86). God’s indwelling in all things is a gracious act of eternal preservation, ultimately revealed in Christ’s final judgment. God’s menuha (final rest, 1 Cor. 15:28) is tied to the eschatological hope of the one who enters God’s rest (Heb. 4:10) and marks the culmination of the new creation.
God’s being as the all in all—a truly transformative reality—implies that God is all in all, as grounded in the Sabbath of creation, the transcendent backdrop of God’s self-revelation, the resurrection of Christ, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Final eschatology refers to God’s ultimate menuha (rest), reflecting the distinction between the days of the Messiah and the Day of YHWH (Isa. 2:2–4; 4:2–6).
According to the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem, Jewish messianism denotes a historical phase grounded in Israel’s nationalism, centered on the restoration of the Davidic monarchy, accompanied by war and great catastrophe. The birth pangs of the Messiah and his historical reign on earth do not signify progress in history but rather its decline; this emergence is not brought about by human effort but through the catastrophic intervention of the Messiah. The Messiah’s historical and catastrophic reign is ultimately distinct from the utopian, eternal world revealed in Yahweh’s final judgment.[27]
This Jewish structure of eschatology finds its locus in St. Paul’s eschatological vision, from which Barth derives the distinction between eschatological catastrophe and the Messianic Parousia—integrating it into his Christological concentration on final consummation.
This eschatological structure enables me to envision “God all in all” in connection with the Trinitarian indwelling in the New Jerusalem, where the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp, shining in the presence of the Spirit—revealing the eschatological unification of the Triune God (Rev. 21:22–23; John 10:30–31).
Eschatological thinking, as it instructs hope, grounds a proleptic praxis in a utopian longing for God’s novum and indwelling among us—manifested in fragmentary and parabolic forms. In this light, I reinterpret reconciliation and prolepsis as a doublet: the end times can influence daily life and shape our perception of reality, addressing brokenness, suffering, and the need for public healing in the present world.
For Barth, a parabolic approach to the reign of God offers a narrative structure that enables advent-like transformation—a foretaste of what is to come. Moltmann, by contrast, reinvigorates this parabolic imagination through his theology of hope, which serves as a springboard of time. He grounds this hope in God’s coming as the transformative reality of the novum—the new—that breaks into the present and reshapes it in light of the promised future.
[1] W. Pannenberg, “Hermeneutik und Universalgeschichte,” ZTK 60, 1963, 116, cited in Jűrgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 277.
[2] Hans G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. trans. and rev. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 225.
[3] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and Philosophy of Science, trans. F. McDonagh (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 281-82.
[4] Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 77-8. 83.
[5] Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher, “Rhetorical Figures as Argument Schemes—The Proleptic Suite,” Argument & Computation, vol. 8. no.3, 233-252, 2017.
[6] Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 34.
[7] M. Merleau-Ponty, Perception of the World (London: Routledge, 1962), 136.
[8] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 598.
[9] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1. Trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 151.
[10] Ibid.,178.
[11] Ibid., 180.
[12] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 603.
[13] Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 57. 87. 281.
[14] Moltmann, The Crucified God: the Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 320.
[15] Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, 3nd rev. ed. (New Jersey: SCM Press, 1963), 11-22.
[16] Helmut Gollwitzer, An Introduction to Protestant Theology (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1982), 150-1.
[17] See § 69. 2. The Light of Life, Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3.1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004).
[18] Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, “Public Theology and Political Ethics,” in Liberation Theology.
[19] Barth, The Christian Life, Church Dogmatics 4/4, Lecture fragments, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1981), 220-22.
[20] Ibid., 233. See Sabine Plonz, Die herrenlosen Gewalten: Eine Relekture Karl Barths in befreiungstheologischer Perspektve (Mainz: Matthias Grunewald Verlag, 1995). In his Powers trilogy, Walter Wink refines the cosmic reality and its power structures in his analysis of Ephesians 6:12, exploring the myth of redemptive violence and advocating for nonviolent resistance. Wink discusses these concepts in Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), among other works.
[21] F. W. Marquardt, Was dűrfen wir hoffen, when wir hoffen dűrften? Eine Eschatologie 1 (Cr. Kaiser/ Gutersloher Verlaghaus, Gutersloh, 1993), 373-5.
[22] Ibid., 365.
[23] Moltmann, The Coming of God, 28.
[24] Ibid., 41.
[25] Moltmann, “The World in God or God in the World,” in God will be All in All: The Eschatology of Jűrgen Moltmann, ed. R. Bauckham (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 40.
[26] Moltmann, God in Creation, trans. M. Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1985), 87.
[27] Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 6, 8.