Reasonable Hope. The Relevance of Reconciliation in Contemporary Eschatology

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Contemporary Christian eschatology has to navigate between two extremes: On the one hand, it must not be lured into overtly informed speculations on the actual process of reconciliation in the afterlife. On the other hand, it is its recurrent task to conceptualize the Christian hope for reconciliation and to provide a rational justification of this hope, because the traditional imagery is neither self-explicatory nor self-evident. This is the aim of this book: Drawing on the culpable entanglement of modern human beings in the globalized world, it identifies an antinomic structure of human existence. This antinomy necessitates the quasi-postulate of a reality which redeems human beings beyond their death. A theological reception of Hannah Arendt’s concept of forgiveness opens up the possibility of defining the Christian eschatological hope as hope for reconciliation. Its theological sustainability is proven when facing the problems of the subject of eschatological action, its implementation, and its universal completion.