Kristi Genkomst og kødets opstandelse. Det eskatogiske hos Grundtvig

Resumé

The Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection of the Body.

Grundtvigs Eschatology. By C. I. Scharling.

This essay shows how Grundtvig, in contrast to his contemporaries in the Church, laid great stress upon the eschatological hope of the future. He may have been partly inspired by Scandinavian mythology (the myth of Ragnarok) and partly by Schellings theories about the great drama of existence (the coming forth of ideas from the Absolute and their returning thither). But the essential point is that the eschatological hope grew forth naturally from his personal understanding of life and death, of the meaning and object of human life, and from his faith in the living, risen Christ as Lord and victor over the powers of darkness and death.

It is remarkable that while after 1825 Grundtvig lived with such intensity in the experience of the realisation of the Kingdom of God here and now in the Church’s fellowship with the risen, present Saviour, at the same time, both in his hymns and in his preaching, he gives such powerful expression to the eschatological hope of the future. The author finds the explanation of this in the fact that for Grundtvig (unlike many others) it was not the need and distress of the time that gave life to the Biblical promises of the Second Coming of Christ and the setting*up of the Kingdom of Glory at the Last Day, but his very joy in God’s great Salvation, experienced in the Church.

Thus the peculiar thing about Grundtvig’s eschatological expectation is that the tidings of the Second Coming of the Lord are for him an evangel in the full sense of the word; his feelings about the Last Day are far removed from the feeling of fear and horror which meets us in many of the mediaeval frescoes of the Lord’s Return to Judgment or in the old hymn, “Dies irae, dies ilia”. Characteristic of him, too, is his stress on the contin uity between the present world, which came into being at the Creation, and the world to come; the old world shall not be destroyed, but reborn and transfigured; its for this reason that he lays so much stress on faith in the resurrection of the body. On the other hand the author rejects the theory put forward by the Norwegian writer, Paulus Svendsen, that Grundtvig was a Chiliast and “believed in an external, perfect Kingdom of God on earth” ; he refutes it by reference to the fact that Grundtvig explicitly rejected Edward Irving’s conception of the millennium.