“We wait for the blessed hope – the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).

If our preaching of the Gospel and its call for decision is not to lose a great deal of the urgency with which it is presented in the New Testament, we must resist the call to demythologize the Bible’s teaching concerning the future and we must continue to affirm our faith in the return of Christ.

The view which demythologizes the Bible’s eschatological language has been expressed succinctly by Nicholas Lash when he writes,

“I am suggesting … that the concept of ‘risen life’ be taken to refer, not to another order of existence subsequent to that which we historically experience, but to that single historical process, within its beginning and its end defining and delimiting its particularity, as experienced from the standpoint of the God who, in the stillness of unchanging love, creates, sustains and enlivens that process. to say that life, in Christ, is eternal, is not to say that it has no beginning and no end but that even in its finitude and particularity, it is, as finite and particular, eternally an expression of God, a participation in eternity (”Eternal Life; Life after Death?”, Heythorp Journal, XIV, 3, July 1978, p. 281).

While this position has a certain appeal to modern man who thinks in this-worldly categories, it is questionable whether it holds the balance between the present and the future as delicately as the New Testament, which it claims to be interpreting.

In comparison with the New Testament’s treatment of the present and the future elements of eternal life, this view would appear to be somewhat one-sided.

While the New Testament idea of eternal life is not completely futuristic, neither is it wholly present. The present and the future are viewed as two essential elements in the one spiritual reality which we call “eternal life.”