Personal eschatology isn’t a term you hear used every day, but it is, indeed, terminology used, technically, in eschatology classes, at least in conservative circles, whether that be in bible colleges or seminaries, rather frequently. For my ecclesiology/eschatology class, in undergrad, this was the first time I heard such terminology. Personal eschatology, if you hadn’t guessed it, or if you’re unaware, has to do with a person’s death, and the subsequent translation into the heavenly abode (on the positive side). Often, and mostly, when people in the churches refer to eschatology they generally have collective eschatology in mind; rarely, in such discussions, is personal eschatology on their mind. And yet personal eschatology is the most predominant form of eschatology currently being realized, at least in the transmigratory sense.

Being brought into the presence of the Lord, realizing ones’ mortality, only to be swallowed up by immortality (or mortality realized), is a second-by-second global reality. According to the World Death Clock, 1.8 persons are dying every second worldwide; 56,000,000 persons die every year. Far from the suspended middle, or agnostic waywardness people live their lives from on a daily basis, in regard to the things of God in particular, the realization of God’s reality is being realized en masse, by millions upon millions of people on an annual and second-by-second basis.

Personally, as I reflect on these things, it is rather mind-boggling. The scale of the Kingdom of God in Christ is massive, and this is only with reference to the ‘very good’ of humanity. There are, of course, unseen, ineffable, inarticulable, inexpressible realities regarding the bigness of God, as that finds co-inherence in the perichoretic relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the world, the eternal life, the Christian is being translated into second-by-second all across the globe.

Inversely, those who leave this world outside of Jesus Christ, that is as subjectively and personally experienced through saving faith in Him, is equally ineffable. People, en masse, are exiting this life only to be confronted with the fact that life as they knew it really wasn’t life after all; that is, if they attempted to live lives now as an existential construction of their own making and assertion. Unfortunately, as Jesus taught, this is the broadway, this is the side of ‘personal eschatology’ that most people in the world are experiencing on an ongoing basis. There is this type of ‘transfer’ from this life to the next, even as the next, one way or the other, impinges on this life, that is the ongoing reality whether we consciously think about it or not. As I write this, country and western star, Naomi Judd just died today. She, with so many others, one way or the other, were finally confronted with the reality of God as God. She, and they, finally can no longer escape the fact that they are not God (and I have no idea what Judd’s standing before the Lord was). For the Christian, we relish the fact that God is God; for the non-Christian, they, by definition, relish the thought that they are God of their own self-imagined/constructed universes—universes based on their ‘word’ rather than God’s Logos. But this, again, is where personal eschatology terminates: all of us, one way or the other, will have this personal moment in time that finally gives way to the eternal reality of time, as time is surely conditioned and given its context by the eternality of the triune God.

I simply wanted to register some thoughts on this typically unspoken theology of personal eschatology. It is the most vernacular of theology that the person is faced with on a day-to-day basis; viz. our own mortality vis-à-vis God’s ineffable immortality, as we come to stand before Him.