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Updated: June 23, 2025
On the borders of the Tigris and the Euphrates, as well as on the banks of the Nile, appeared the beginnings of a different eschatology and a vague expectation of a resurrection of the dead. The Hellenes and Romans, under the influence of philosophy, acquired another conception of immortality, and their institutions, issuing from collectivism, broke up into individualism.
We do not seek to save the heathen because of an eschatology which would consign them to the outer darkness. We cannot receive as true any conception of God which includes belief in a doctrine involving so terrible an injustice as that men should be eternally punished for refusing that which has never been offered for their acceptance.
In the conflict about the nature of the future life, it was the Greek eschatology which prevailed over the Jewish. St. Paul's famous declaration, 'We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal', is pure Platonism and quite alien to Jewish thought.
As to eschatology, Plato looked forward to a heaven where the virtuous soul shall dwell in the presence of God, and in the enjoyment of pure delights. Aristotle's idea of God was scarcely less exalted than that of Plato. He expressed it thus: "The principle of life is in God; for energy of mind constitutes life, and God is this energy.
"Hippolytus Romanus," Dict. Christ. Polycarp seems to refer to Simon in the following passage in his Epistle Ad Philipp. In treating of eschatology and the beginning of things the human mind is ever beset with the same difficulties, and no matter how grand may be the effort of the intellect to transcend itself, the finite must ever fail to comprehend the infinite.
Paul; compare, for example, 1 Cor. xiii. 12 and a still more important passage, Phil. ii. 8-10. This knowledge was partly communicated by visions and revelations, to which St. Paul attributed some importance; but on the whole he is consistent in treating knowledge as the crown and consummation of faith. The pneumatic transformation of the personality is the centre of St. Paul's eschatology.
The same facts hold good with regard to the diffusion of intellectual culture from Persia. How far Persian ideas may have influenced the development of Muhammedan and even of Christian eschatology, we need not here discuss: but the influence of the great Graeco-Christian schools of Persia was enormous: they made the Arabs acquainted with the most important works in Greek and Persian literature.
"I loved the maid, and desired to be rich," he tells us; but these Puritan people were horrified at his deliberately intending to live the life of a usurer, and they "threatened great judgments, and danger of damnation hereafter." It is clear that the frightful eschatology of the time was exercising a far greater power upon the imagination of the masses than anything else.
Judged by our standards this belief is magical, just as the Jewish eschatology is mythological. Neither has part or lot in modern thinking; this does not necessarily prove that they are wrong, but it means that the problem for us is not one of details, but of opposing systems, the parts of which cannot be interchanged.
On the other hand, Christian eschatology is alone able to do most essential service to the evolution theory, in case it should be verified, by giving an answer to questions to which the evolution theory tends more decidedly than any other scientific theory namely, to the questions as to the end of the world and mankind, with such distinctions as no philosophy which treats of the doctrines of nature, is able to give, although natural science itself demands the answer to these questions the more peremptorily, the higher the points of view are to which it leads us.
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