Product Description

Two leading New Testament scholars explore the Christian vision of the future from the perspective of life today.

The start of the twenty-first century evokes fresh concern for what the future holds. Will it bring an end to suffering and evil? Can we look for a new heaven and earth? Will judgment be cosmic or personal? HOPE AGAINST HOPE revisits these and other questions central to Christian eschatology and provides a fresh yet responsible look at the church's vision of the future. Integrating images from the Bible and Christian tradition with analysis of contemporary Western culture, Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart reinterpret the meaning of such eschatological themes as the antichrist, the last judgment, and the kingdom of God in terms that will benefit students and general readers alike.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92770 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 252 pages

About the Author
Richard Bauckham is professor emeritus of New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and senior scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. A fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has also written Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World.

Customer Reviews

Beautifully Written
I'll leave the complex in depth reviews to others. What I love about this book is that I can understand it. It's graceful and lucid and reading it is a pleasure. The words are infused with a kind of joy. As a novelist, I have to make characters, plots, put people in action. It's hard for me to approach theology or philosophy because of the density of abstractions in the writing. I just can't get most of it. But these two highly gifted theologians have written something of great meaning that is accessible to some one like me. As to the premise of the book, it's a convincing testament to the unfathomable and ever increasing power of the Christian Event. It moves us forward. I connect it with Teilhard de Chardin.

Disappointing
Another work disfigured by the inability to tell the difference between conventional liberal politics and the Christian worldview. I am sick to death of Brits like Bauckham and N.T. Wright going on about the "ambiguous American empire." It reminds me of the old quip about the Holy Roman Empire being neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire. America is neither an empire nor ambiguous, and the current "international order" or "community of nations" they are talking about isn't the nation created by the Founders. Englishmen like John Winthrop founded America on the purely Deutoronomist basis of creating in a new land a Christian republic. That Bauckham views this as just another discredited Enlightenment project shows that he doesn't understand the country and maybe he should leave out discussions of it in the books he writes.