BEGINNING WITH THE "END" IN MIND: ESCHATOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE STONE-CAMPBELL AMERICAN RESTORATION MOVEMENT

Steven Covey's popular book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People proposes Habit #2: "Begin with the end in mind."1 So doing provides marvellous focus and energy, as peripheral concerns find their proper place within the larger vision of the goal and purpose for which one lives, and energy and resources are effectively allocated to the desired end. The clearer the end-goal, the more energetic and effective the pursuit. In a very similar way, the energy and effectiveness of a church fellowship in its mission, relations with the world, and internal relations is dramatically influenced by the clarity with which it envisions the End, i.e. its eschatology, and the priority that it assigns to that vision. Eschatology in the Churches of Christ (CC) underwent a profound development throughout its roughly 230-year history as the conservative wing of the movement here named the American Stone-Campbell (SC) movement. This development brought remarkable gains to the movement's scholarship – and significant losses to its spiritual vitality. Thesis: Sound biblical eschatology is absolutely essential to the vitality of every aspect of church life. To begin with the End in mind is the driving energy motivating ministry and mission. This paper seeks to demonstrate the thesis by surveying eschatological development in the history of Churches of Christ in four stages, from its early eschatological fervour and theological pluralism through chilled hope and theological pluralism after the American Civil War past an early twentieth-century brush with renewed fervor and dispensational premillennialism into disregard and strident theological triumph of amillennialism. It will provide a brief introduction to the movement's history, and it will seek to address the questions: "Where are we, and how did we get here?" It will conclude with a modest proposal for new direction for discourse about the End of this age which employs the significant gains in biblical scholarship and promotes the return of the Lord Jesus as the "End in mind" which could shape and energize all our "beginnings."