Peace in the Face of War

An eschatological understanding of Christianity – the proclamation of the
good news, the ‘breaking in’ of God’s Kingdom – gave way to an historical
understanding. Christianity became a part of history. A long and agonizing
process then unfolded between the First and Second Comings of Christ.
Historical Christianity proved itself accommodating to this world, a
compromise with it, which was a travesty of true, eschatological Christianity
– the Christianity of the End, the immediate presence of God’s Kingdom – and
exchanged it for a Christianity of the personal salvation of souls. But we cannot
deny that Christianity is essentially eschatological. There can be no distorting
of Christianity, and nothing other than an eschatological Christianity.
History has always been predominantly militarist and full of wars. There
have only been comparatively short periods of peace, of relative stability,
which were readily overturned. History flows over volcanic soil, where lava
is periodically erupting. History has to end, because history is war. There
is an eschatological moment within history, a kind of inner apocalypse of
history. This eschatological moment is acutely felt particularly in catastrophic
epochs, in wars, in revolutions, in crises of civilization. War is
predominantly an historical phenomenon and, at the same time, the horrors
of war give people a heightened eschatological sense of the approach of the
End. Similarly, eschatological feeling is heightened in the lives of individual
people in catastrophic experiences, in sufferings, in the closeness of death.
War is principally a question of history, but at the same time, war is
always connected with the End of history. We speak in conventional terms
about apocalyptic eras and in such eras people are easily led astray by false
prophecies of the coming End of the world in a certain year of historical time.
But in a deeper sense all epochs are apocalyptic and the End is always near.
Only in relatively peaceful times does the eschatological sense of people
become dulled. The onset of an apocalyptic climate does not mean that the
end is chronologically near yet. Indeed, it is a mistake to understand the end
of the world chronologically, to objectivize it in historical time.
In the year 1000, people expected the end of the world. In the Reformation
era, there were strong eschatological attitudes. After the French Revolution
in the Napoleonic era, the intellectual life of Europe was saturated with
apocalyptic and eschatological currents. They expected the imminent
end of the world, the appearing of Antichrist. Jung-Stilling [1740-1817]
predicted that the world would end in 1836. There is something tempting
about premonitions and predictions of the imminent end of the world, and
people often console themselves with them. They frequently experience
it as the end of the world when an historic era that they liked and with
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