Eastern Orthodox ☦ Christianity/The Last Things--Eschaton

[sprinkleeninow]

"Therefore, just as it is the last things that give being to the first things, and eschatology to protology, so it is the Kingdom of God —the fullness of life and of truth which will come to completion and be fully revealed at the eschaton— that defines and gives meaning to the tradition of the Church. The future is therefore the cause and not the effect of the past, since, according to Metropolitan John Zizioulas, the reason for which the world came into being is the eschatological Christ as the union of created and uncreated in the eschatological times.”

“Or, to recall the apt words of the late Greek theologian Nikos Nissiotis: so the Tradition of Orthodoxy […] is not history but witness; it is not the completed and fulfilled event of past centuries, but the summons to fulfil it in the future […] Tradition as it has been understood from the very Beginning is the ‘new’, that which erupts into the world in order to make all things new once and for all in Christ, and then continuously in the Holy Spirit through the Church.”

“Looked at from this angle, then, Tradition is not the letter which kills, a nostalgic repetition or uncritical acceptance or continuation of the past, but a creative continuity in the Holy Spirit and an openness to the future, to the new world of the Kingdom of God which we await.”

https://frted.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/tradition-revealing-the-eschaton-not-seeking-the-past/