eschaton
English
Etymology
Borrowed from Ancient Greek ἔσχατον (éskhaton, “last thing”), from the neuter singular of ἔσχατος (éskhatos, “last”).
Pronunciation
- enPR: ĕs'kə-tŏn
- IPA(key): (General American) /ˈɛs.kə.tɑn/, (UK) /-tɒn/
Audio (US): (file)
Noun
eschaton (plural eschatons or eschata)
- (Christianity, theology) The apocalypse; the arrival and the era of God’s reign immediately preceding the end of the world; a conception of or circumstance pertaining to this era.
- 1953, F. W. Dillistone, “The Church and Time”, in Scottish Journal of Theology, volume 6, page 163:
- Only in the eschaton will God’s purpose gain its final fulfilment, a fulfilment, be it noted, which may still include some form of movement within a time-series.
- 1966 [1962], Karl Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Associations”, in Karl Rahner, translated by Kevin Smyth, Theological Investigations, volume 4, page 336:
- And this is also true of the revelation of the eschata: they do not reach us in a discourse about the future still to come, but in an action, in which God has already really begun them in us.
- 1994, Marcus J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, →ISBN, page 86:
- Without these sayings, the textual basis for saying Jesus expected an imminent eschaton becomes very slender.
- (by extension) An end or fulfilment of history in general.
- 1949 December, Helmut Kuhn, “[Review of Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History]”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume 46, number 25, →JSTOR, page 825:
- He, too, constructs a philosophical history towards an eschaton. In a peculiarly inverted manner he is among the believers in progress—the goal being the undoing of the things done.
- 2011, Darrin Drda, The Four Global Truths: Awakening to the Peril and Promise of Our Times, →ISBN, page 152:
- The most major of these eschatons involves the 65-million-year Cenozoic era, which began with the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event that decimated the dinosaurs and is now closing with another mass extinction event.
- 2016, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Introduction: Technology, Utopianism and Eschatology”, in J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, editors, Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, →ISBN, page 10:
- From predictions of an imminent technological eschaton to theologically inflected ideas of human perfectibility achieved through technological means, there is ample warrant to see transhumanism as culturally other.
- 2025 September 4, Ross Douthat, quoting Dan Wang, “This Is Why America Is Losing to China”, in The New York Times[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC:
- And I think there is this eschaton that they [Silicon Valley's technologists] want to bring about in which the world ends in something like 2027. And they don’t have a great vision beyond 2027.