Political Eschatology

Nothing is more distressing to the modern person than the experience of an unsurpassable limit of the calculable. Nothing disturbs us more deeply than incalculable time, unpredictable time--the time of the advent of the unpredictably new.

In a series of interventions into contemporary political crises, McGrath reactualizes the early Christian sense of eschatology as the experience of a time that runs out rather than moves forward. In contemporary politics, economy, ecology, and technology, much that was familiar for most of the twentieth century--the intra-generational transmission of religious values, progressive economic growth, a stable global climate, and predictable movements of peoples and nonhuman species across the planet--is ending calamitously. Endtime, however, is not only the time of endings; it is also the time of unforeseeable beginnings.