Part of the human condition is living in a world wherein teleology is an inescapable reality. What I mean is that in-built into our creatureliness is an innate notion that nature, or creation is heading somewhere; viz. that it has some sort of end. It isn’t just Christians who have an eschatology as part of their doctrine of creation [or as the mainstay of their doctrine of creation]; it isn’t just Christians who have a belief in last things, and how the cosmos, and the earth therein ends. The secular, because of the human condition, because ‘eternity has been set in our hearts’ (Eccl. 3.11), has a view towards the way the natural order will come to an end. True, the Christian versus the Secular view is dissimilar in some radical ways, but this is to be expected just as some can call Christ, LORD, and others cannot; because the others do not have the Spirit. This dissimilarity notwithstanding, creatures build intellectual and even spiritual constructs based upon the hollowed-out material left to them in the old-fallen-creation; insofar as the old creation has God’s ratio, some might want to call it Logoi replete within it, here concepts of nature’s finitude and transitoriness help supply the secular with its own versions of the eschaton. These versions, the secular’s, are only able to be developed as a result of a sort of parasitic siphon on the actual eschatological reality as that has been Revealed in God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Within the webbing of this Revelation the secular is given conceptual/intellectual access that helps illumine further what remains for them in the old-fallen-world order. In other words, it’s not as if the secular has no exposure to the Revealed reality of God in the taxis of the intellectual world order of ideas. Indeed, the secular has been shaped, ‘innately,’ even as that is only given pressure for the secular in mostly unconscious ways, by the conceptual seeds broadcast this world over by the kerygmatic in-breaking of the Christian witness, as that has ruptured the horizon of this old-world-order with the Light of God’s own beaming Eschatos in the face of the Christ; it is in this new horizon that that old-horizon can faintly sense orientations that remain dead to them, insofar as the Spirit has not hovered over them bringing the sprout of new life—the seed imperishable.

All of the aforementioned to say: The world order itself, as broken man experiences it, provides for a schema of the ‘end’ that ultimately bears witness to the fact that humanity has never nor will ever be alone. Fallen humanity, the secular, lives in a world that requires a response to its stimuli. The stimuli of this world is a reality that is extra nos (outside of us), a reality that is external to us grounded in the heavenly session of the Son of Man seated at the Right Hand of the Father. This pressure, even for the fallen humanity, makes such humanity squirm under the Light of God’s forbearance; under the reality that this fallen humanity lives under the No of God’s Yes in Jesus Christ. Such contradiction to the secular’s attempt to create a life out of the world’s perceived nothings is precisely the point wherein humanity feels compelled to construct accounts of the ‘end’, as they couch that in their concepts of the ‘Beginning’ (protology), such that they hope to ‘innately’ mimic the reality pressed upon them without bowing the knee to this Ultimacy which they cannot escape. The secular has a concept of the beginning correlating to an end; not just in a linear sense, but in an apocalyptic sense. Colin Gunton helps illustrate what I’ve been getting at thus far,

When we seek to speak of the eschatological dimension of creation theology, we should be careful to define what it is that we mean theologically. There are in currency a number of what can be called secular eschatologies, often scientific theories of the end of things in the observable universe, taking the form of the disappearance of everything in an immense black hole, a heat death of everything or the equivalent death by extreme cold. In response, some scientists have attempted to salvage from the wreckage some form of secular salvation, supposing that a kind of immortality might be attainable for the human race if something could be projected into eternity in computerised form. It must be said of all these that they are not truly eschatological, in the sense we shall explore, because they are simply or largely projections on the universe of forms of this-worldly experience. It is possible that some of them may signal an end of all things in a more radical sense, but it remains the case that the end of things as we know them is not necessarily identical with the End, just as speculation about the ‘big bang’, or whatever, is not the same as the doctrine of creation out of nothing.[1]

Gunton helps to reinforce some of my own inklings, and at the same time brings even greater precision as he notes the role that human projection plays in constructing naturalistic concepts of the beginning and end.

For my part, what I want to drive home, in the main, is that no man or woman can escape the conditions which they have been born into. And the harder they try the more precision they will offer in regard to the sort of mimicry they will achieve when they attempt to explain reality under the new world order within which they exist (but do not live); i.e. the New-Creation. I think this is important: The Secular animal only proves the reality of the cross of Jesus Christ as they attempt to continue to find some sort of harbinger in its Shadow side. What I am pressing is the idea that humanity is objectively oriented to God by the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; whether they will acknowledge that or not. In their disacknowledgement of that they only ironically bear witness to God’s No over them, and their fallen condition, while not participating in God’s Yes for them in Jesus Christ. As a result, they live from the ‘kingdom of darkness’ and attempt to create a reality, even an eschaton for the human story, that is given fiery breath from their doomed father, the devil. The devil has been attempting to construct a kingdom out of the rot of his own choice to be against Christ rather than for him for millennia untold. Is it any surprise that his progeny in the dark underworld of this fallen world bears witness not only to the No of God, but to the tactics and tics of the devil himself?

[1] Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical And Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), Loc 2961, 2966 kindle.