Ep 280: Inaugurated Eschatology: Are We Living in the End Times?

In this episode I explain the New Testament concept of ‘inaugurated eschatology’ and mount a biblical response to the claim that we are currently living through the end times. ‘Eschatology’ simply means ‘the study of final things’, and in theology eschatology explores how God is going to bring his plans for creation to their intended conclusion. Despite the rhetoric that the end times have begun in recent years, the New Testament authors unanimously affirm that the end of history began with the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. God, according to the Old Testament prophets, would be faithful to his promises, and in the end would rescue his people, pour out his Spirit, reestablish the temple and sacrifices, and install a Davidic king on the throne. Jesus accomplishes all these goals, and so the Old Testament ‘end of history’ is inaugurated by Jesus, who then gives his Spirit-enabled people the ability to build his kingdom until his final return. Inaugurated eschatology, the idea that the end times have already begun, is central to New Testament theology and must shape our faith and practice today.

Media Referenced:

Ascension, Kingdom, and Eschatology: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-235-ascension-kingdom-and-eschatology/

Apocalypticism: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-272-the-apocalyptic-worldview-of-ancient-judaism-and-christianity-with-john-j-collins/

1 Corinthians 2:6-18: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-257-the-rulers-of-this-age-are-passing-away-1-corinthians-26-8/

Ephesians 1: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-248-far-above-all-rule-and-authority-ephesians-115-23/

Ascension: https://libertarianchristians.com/episode/ep-233-the-ascension-of-jesus-with-ross-hastings/

The Protestant Libertarian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and a part of the Christians For Liberty Network. The Libertarian Christian Institute can be found at www.libertarianchristians.com.

Questions, comments, suggestions? Please reach out to me at theprotestantlibertarian@gmail.com.  You can also follow the podcast on Twitter: @prolibertypod, and YouTube, @ProLibertyPod, where you will get shorts and other exclusive video content. For more about the show, you can go to theprotestantlibertarianpodcast.com. If you like the show and want to support it, you can! Go to libertarianchristians.com, where you can donate to LCI and buy The Protestant Libertarian Podcast Merch! Also, please consider giving me a star rating and leaving me a review, it really helps expand the show’s profile! Thanks!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I really hope that you guys enjoy today's show. All right, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. We other have another edition today of our Theology Thursday series, which is a series where, you know, I try every other Thursday, don't always get there, but every other Thursday I do a shorter episode, a much shorter episode, uh, hopefully in this case, on a theological or biblical studies issue that I'm passionate about that might not be directly related to political and economic themes in the New Testament. I mean, of course, what we're gonna be talking about today is absolutely related to political and economic themes as well as like the hermeneutical problem of how the church applies the Bible in the modern world. But it is not going to be one of those that uh corresponds directly with a lot of the stuff that I talk about. Well, actually, it will in many ways. What I'm trying to say is it's not explicitly or overtly political or economic, but we're gonna be talking about eschatology today. And in particular, we're gonna be talking about the New Testament's inaugurated eschatology. So I want to break down that vocabulary term because this is something that if you've been a longtime listener to the show, you know I'm very passionate about. I talk about this in all my episodes. I think that this is one of the keys to understanding the New Testament. But over the last couple of years, as I've had more and more conversations with people in my church, I've realized that there's a lot of misunderstandings about eschatology and what it all means. And in particular, the framework of inaugurated eschatology that we find in the New Testament. So the word eschatology literally just means the study of final things. So when we talk about eschatology, we're talking about how is God going to bring his plans for creation to their intended destination. Notice I didn't say the end of the world because I don't think the Bible actually teaches a literal end to the physical universe. I believe that it teaches its restoration uh through the resurrection of human beings and the establishment of the new heavens and the new earth. But there are various different perspectives within Christianity, many various different perspectives within Christianity about how God is going to bring all things to a close. So if you're new to theological discourse or biblical discourse today, the word eschatology just means the study of the last thing. So when I say eschatology, I am talking about how God is going to bring all of this to its intended conclusion and what the writers of the Bible say about what is going to happen in the end, whatever the end might be. Now, the term inaugurated, that means begin. So when I use the phrase inaugurated eschatology, what I mean by that is that it is the belief that is articulated by all 27 works in the New Testament that the end, God's intended plan for creation, has already begun due to the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus and everything that came along with that. So the writers of the New Testament do believe that the end has already begun. And I get this a lot. And as some of you guys know from my earlier episodes, because I've talked about this a few times when I've had scholars on my show in particular talk about the book of Revelation. Uh, I was born in 1989, right? So I am a millennial, meaning that I was someone that was, you know, a kid, um or I guess a preteen when the millennium came around. So I very vividly remember the year 2000. I remember exactly what I did when the 1990s gave way to the 2000s. Uh, I know exactly what happened on that night. But one of the really interesting phenomenon was that within evangelical Christianity, the turn of the millennium precipitated this mentality and this belief that we were somehow living in the end times. And there were books that were published, how Lindsay's Late Great Planet Earth, I think at the end of the 1970s, and then very famously in the 90s, the Left Behind series that all kind of laid out this timetable for how God was going to bring history to its intended conclusion. Now, they were all dispensationalist and spirit matter dualists. So they believed essentially that the Bible taught that there was going to be something along the lines of a rapture, and then people would suffer for seven years, and then God would destroy all of creation. Um, and then we go and live in heaven, or at least the righteous ones go and live in heaven for uh all times, and that there were signs that accompanied the end times, right? So the end times, according to the writers of the left behind series and many evangelicals in the 1990s, and in that period around the time of the millennium, meant that there was a period of time where the times were not coming to an end. But now in this new modern era, time history was all about to come to a dramatic conclusion, right? So there's this end time scenario. And you hear this in church uh pretty repeatedly, like every year, really, someone brings this up. And in fact, what precipitated this particular episode was not only have we been talking about this a lot in our small group, but then one of our friends were was talking to my wife a couple of weeks ago, um, you know, just about the Bible and where we're at in the world. And she asked my wife if she thought that we were living in the end times, if she thought that the end times had already begun. And of course, what is always meant by that question in evangelical conversations like that is that are we living right now through the time of the end? And of course, we are the Protestant Libertarian podcast here, the Protestant is first. And so what it means for me to be a Protestant is that I believe that the Bible is the primary source of authority for all matters of faith and doctrine and belief for Christians. And so the this is a this is a properly biblical and therefore theological question. We should be able to ask and answer whether or not we are currently living in the end times. And the writers of the New Testament would unanimously affirm that we are indeed living in the end times. But here is the catch. The end times actually began with the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus over 2,000 years ago or nearly 2,000 years ago at this point. So the church has always been living, according to the writers of the New Testament, in the end times, in the end of history. And in fact, it is the belief that eschatology has been brought into the present, that eschatology has been inaugurated through Jesus that animates many of the writers of the New Testament and generates much of what is known as Christian theology and generates much of good biblical theology and thinking about these massive issues like the nature of the church, salvation, the Messiah, Jesus, all of these things are conditioned by this fundamental belief in the early church that the end had already begun. So, with that in mind, before we look at some of the biblical data, and I'm not gonna have any slides today. I'm just kind of doing this on the fly, just thinking about some of these issues that I've I've been wrestling with over the last couple of years, not wrestling with, I've been settled on this for a while, but thinking about over the last couple of years, um, I just want to point that out that when somebody asks, are we living at the end times? the correct answer is technically yes. But while that might be the correct answer, we also need to go back and correct any misunderstandings and say, well, we've been living at the end of history ever since the very beginning. And here's how this works, right? So in the Old Testament, particularly in the prophets, you have these promises that God made, these covenants that God made with Abraham, with Moses, with David, right? So there are these promises that with Israel, like through the Mosaic covenant. So there are these promises that God has made to his people. And since God is a faithful and righteous God, he has to fulfill his covenantal promises. He has to bring them to fruition. But the problem is that Israel was unfaithful. Israel did not follow God, they were not obedient. And so in Deuteronomy 27 through 32, God lays out this whole covenant with Israel and he says essentially that if Israel is obedient, then they will be blessed, and if not, then they will be cursed and they will go into exile. And the problem, and this is built into Deuteronomy 30, and in particular, do and in particular Deuteronomy 32, the problem is that the writer of Deuteronomy knows that Israel is most likely going to fail, that they are not going to be obedient to God, and therefore they will incur the curse of the covenant. But God promised Abraham in Genesis 12 that it is through Abraham's family that the entire world will be blessed. So God will have to do something about the sin of Israel and rescue them from their sins. And so this is when we get into the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and then all of the smaller, minor prophets at the end of the Christian Old Testament. And what they all affirm is that there is an eschatology, right? There is going to be an age when God is going to come back and rescue his people. That age has not yet begun. But there are several themes and motifs that dominate the prophets in the Old Testament that serve as signs that God has come back to finally reassert his rule over creation and rescue Israel, which for them would have been the end of history. Again, not the dissolution of the space-time universe, uh, killing everybody, destroying all that is matter, and taking everyone up to live in some sort of disembodied spiritual existence, but the restoration and the rescue of Israel. This is what the prophets foretell. And so you have these major themes like whenever Israel returns from exile and is no longer under pagan dominion, that means that God has acted decisively to bring about the end. When a Davidic Messiah and a real priest are sitting on the throne and occupying the high priesthood, then you know that God will have brought you back from the brink of disaster, that the end has arrived. When the nations flood to Jerusalem to worship Yahweh, the only true God, then the end times have begun. So there are all of these themes that are tied up with the end of history. And what's interesting is that Jeremiah in Jeremiah 31 conceptualizes this as a new covenant, that God is going to make a new covenant with Israel. And the difference between the new covenant foreseen in Jeremiah and the old covenant is that in the new covenant, God is going to circumcise the hearts of Israel so that they can actually remain faithful to him. That is a huge part of this new covenant mentality. And then I think that Ezekiel 36 and Joel II are probably looking at Jeremiah 31, which is looking back to Deuteronomy 30 and 32. And they come up with this idea that in the end times, the only way that God is going to be able to create a people who are faithful to him is by giving them his spirit. In the Old Testament, God's spirit, the Holy Spirit only descends on prophets, priests, kings, and other leaders in times of crisis. But when the end has finally arrived, God is going to pour out his spirit on all of those who are faithful to him so that they can be faithful to God, so that they can actually live out a life of faithfulness. And then, of course, you have, and this isn't fully developed in the sense that we would like it to be, but you have in the little apocalypse of Isaiah 24 through 27 and the very end of the book of Daniel and Daniel chapter 12. And then, of course, this is kind of um more metaphorical and symbolic, but you have the very famous vision of Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37, you have this notion of resurrection. It's the idea that those who are faithful to God, those who had remained faithful to God, no matter how much they had to suffer because of Israel's disobedience and the punishment of the curse, God would one day raise them from the dead to inherit this new heavens and new earth. And again, even the idea of a new heavens and a new earth comes from the very end of Isaiah. There's this beautiful uh prophecy in Isaiah 61, which Jesus quotes during his ministry, uh, when John the Baptist in Luke 7 asked Jesus if he is the Messiah, if he's the expected one. And Jesus quotes um uh it is Isaiah 61, I think one through two, and he says, Look, uh, you can see that the blind are now being able to see, the blind are being given vision. Those who are unable to walk, the lame, they can walk again. I'm healing. So, yes, I'm clearly bringing out, um I'm clearly bringing into existence this promise of fulfillment. And then at the very end of Isaiah, he conceptualizes that in terms of new creation, that God is going to restore the the world, create a new heavens and the new earth. And so when we get to the New Testament, the writers of the New Testament believe that that entire constellation of themes, the restoration of Israel, the uh enthronement of a Messiah, the fulfillment and completion of the priesthood, the pouring out of the spirit and the creation of an obedient people, all of these happen in and through Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension. And so, from the perspective of the writers of the New Testament, the end has already begun because all of the things that were promised by the prophets, the eschatology of the Hebrew prophets, all point towards that reality. And you can see this at the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, and in all of the Gospels, when Jesus introduces his public ministry, this is Mark, I think, 1, 14 and 15 or 15 and 16. Uh, when Jesus introduces his public ministry, he says, the kingdom of God is at hand, right? So the reign or rule of God, God re-establishing his rule over all creation, is happening in and through Jesus. And from the very beginning of Mark's gospel, the first ever written gospel, Mark 1:1, Jesus is identified as the Messiah, the Christ, which means that those promises to David in 2 Samuel 7 and um seen throughout the prophets that one of David's descendants will be, will, will, uh, will forge, create an everlasting throne. Well, that's happening in and through Jesus. He is the Davidic messianic king. And this is something that we get in all four of the Gospels, up front, up center, from the opening lines of all of the Gospels, they all unambiguously affirm that Jesus is this Davidic Messiah. Even the Gospel of John, which is maybe a little more Christologically oriented, right? So the Gospel of John, uh, this is taking, and I didn't an episode about this a while ago, but I'll try to post a link in here, but taking um uh James Barker and Mark Goodacre's theory of synoptic trajectories into consideration, where this the development from Mark through Matthew to Luke and then to John is not one of each gospel abandoning what the writer said before them, but of developing some ideas that were understated in those previous gospels. By the time we get to John, we have a very high developed high Christology, but John has not abandoned the fact that Jesus is the Messiah. And in fact, it's the presupposition for all of his work. And throughout the New Testament, we see this over and over again in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians. I believe that Paul refers to Jesus as the Lord Jesus Christ, all messianic titles, like 10 times in the first chapter, uh, the first two chapters of 1 Corinthians, and so much that he can even say that the rulers of this present age are passing away because the Messiah has already come and or became. And then when we take a look, and this is one of the clearest examples of inaugurated eschatology in the entire New Testament, at 1 Corinthians 10, 11, Paul is talking about how the Corinthians should avoid idolatry, and he's referring back to a story about how Israel is punished for idolatry in the wilderness during the Exodus, and he says that those things were written for our instruction upon whom the ends of the ages have come. So Paul explicitly says at multiple places in his letters, but I you know, I just love the language of 1 Corinthians 10 11 that we are the ones who are living now at the very end of the ages. So the end has already arrived. And this is going to be the foundation for a lot of New Testament theology. If you look at Acts chapter 2, when God pours out the Spirit on the believers on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, what exactly does Peter quote in his speech? He quotes Joel 2. And in Joel 2, Joel 2 says that in the last days, in the end of time, in the final day, in the end times, right? In our Hebrew eschatology, God is going to pour out his Holy Spirit upon those who are faithful so that they will be obedient. And that is exactly what happens in Acts chapter 2. And even more surprisingly in the book of Acts, if you look at Acts chapter 10 through chapter 15, the Holy Spirit also gets poured out on believing Gentiles. Well, that's a fulfillment of Isaiah chapter 2 and other prophecies where Isaiah says that in the end the nations are going to flock, and I think this is in Isaiah 11 as well, that the nations are going to flock to Jerusalem and worship Israel's God. Well, that happens through the Gentiles believing in the Messiah. So we see that the gift of the Holy Spirit and the ability for not just Jews, but also Gentiles to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit through faith is an example itself of inaugurated eschatology. If the nations are flocking to worship Israel's God and they're being given the Holy Spirit, then the ends must have already arrived. And we can also see that in Paul, in Galatians chapter six and in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, Paul uses the term new creation, which is an allusion to this entire theme in the Old Testament. And he says that we are already living out or living into the new creation. Now, for Paul, a big aspect of this is the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. So resurrection is a sign that the end has arrived. And so because somebody, and you see this in the Gospels too, particularly in the Gospels of Luke and John, because Jesus is raised from the dead, that means that the kingdom of God has in fact already begun. It's already been started, it's already been inaugurated, and it's up to the church to work that out. So the resurrection of Jesus is what signals the end of history. And as Paul says in Romans chapter six and elsewhere, the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits of the general resurrection. So those who are in Christ by virtue of faith in the Spirit will also inherit the resurrection. And not only that, and this is one of the really important aspects of Paul's logic in Romans 5 through 8, not only will we be raised from the dead on the final day, but through the regenerative power of the Holy Spirit, through what we Wesleans call sanctification, we are already living out our resurrection in the present. God is already restoring us by helping us overcome the power of sin and death. And of course, Paul views sin and death in in personal and anthropological terms on one level, but then also as cosmic powers that Jesus has already begun to defeat and will ultimately defeat in the final day. And of course, a part of the not a huge part of the New Testament's logic, a very underappreciated part of the New Testament's logic of Messianism and the end times is the ascension itself, which is the foundation of much of the theology of Acts and a presupposition for all of the letter writers in the New Testament. Paul believes this is Ephesians 1. Uh, we see this in many places, or Romans chapter 8. Uh, there are, it's all over the place where Paul clearly says that Jesus is already in control. He has been not only resurrected but ascended, and he sits at the right hand of the Father ruling over all creation. The book of Revelation, which many of these end times conspiracy theorists will go to, and I'm using conspiracy theorist in a pejorative term here, not in the uh the cool way that we should all accept, which is where you actually theorize about what rich and powerful, how rich and powerful people are conspiring. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm talking about people that are just literally using the Bible selectively to say that we're living in the end times and we weren't before. The book of Revelation, if you read the first few verses, John of Patmos says up front and center that the ascended Christ is the reason why his kingdom has already come. He's already won the decisive victory. And if you look at the great throne room scene in Revelation 4 and 5, who is sitting at the right hand of the Father? It is Jesus. And that is the foundation for an eschatological Christology. Okay, if Jesus is already sitting, the Davidic Messiah is already sitting at the right hand of the Father, that means the end times have already begun. He's already restored in part the Davidic throne. And we look at a passage like Revelation 11, 15, where John of Patmos says, the kingdoms of the world have become the kingdoms of our God and his Christ. He's clearly saying that Jesus is already ruling over all creation. Now, his rule is not complete, uh, but on the final day, you look at the vision of the new heaven and the new earth, which is heavily based on the prophets at the very end of Revelation 21 and 22. On the final day, uh when God comes back, Jesus will be all in all. And like all of these promises will reach their full fulfillment, but they already begun 2,000 years ago. So the end has already begun, which is why we can speak of the inaugurated Eschaton. We can also see that this idea from Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant is prevalent in the writers of the New Testament. So you have in a passage in 2 Corinthians 3 where Paul is talking about the the new covenant and the contrasting the new covenant uh of which he is a minister with the old covenant. And he says a lot of great things about the old covenant. He says the old, the old covenant was was glorious, but it's nothing compared to the new covenant that has been inaugurated. And so Paul is clearly alluding back to Jeremiah 31. And Jeremiah 31 is a prediction, a prophecy about the end of history, about the end times. And so by applying and appropriating this language of new covenant, Paul is signaling once again that he believes that the end has already begun. And we can see this in Hebrews chapter 8, which actually has the longest Old Testament citation in the entire New Testament, and that is from no other passage than Jeremiah 31. And so the writer of Hebrews is saying that the new covenant has been inaugurated. And this is where the priestly prophecy comes into play, because even though the writer of Hebrews believes clearly that Jesus is the Messiah, he's very unambiguous about that. Uh, Hebrews more emphasizes the cosmic priesthood of Jesus, that Jesus is able to do what the Old Testament sacrificial system was not able to do, not because the Old Testament sacrificial system was bad, but because it was temporary. It wasn't meant to be permanent. And so Jesus offers himself up as the final sacrifice. And therefore, since he's been ascended to the right hand of the Father, he not only rules over all creation as king, but he's also the final great high priest in the conversation. Cosmic throne room. So we can see all of these, the idea that there's a restoration of the sacrificial system, the messianic reign and rule of the Davidic Messiah, all of these are fulfilled through the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and the establishment of the Jew plus Gentile church through the power of the Holy Spirit, which transforms communities through the regeneration of sanctification by the power of the Holy Spirit. So the cumulative evidence of the New Testament, besides the explicit passages like Mark 1, 14 and 15, where Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and 1 Corinthians 10, 11, where Paul says, we are those upon whom the ends of the ages have come. And then, of course, the book of Revelation, where he clearly portrayed, or John of Patmos clearly portrays Jesus as sitting on the throne already. All of these prophetic features work their way into the New Testament and they have already begun to be fulfilled. And this is what is unique in what characterizes Christianity. And I think in a lot of ways, it's what it's what separates our faith from all of the other ones. And I think that throughout history, the church has constantly lost sight of the eschatological reality of the New Testament. But the truth is that this idea of inaugurated eschatology, this is not one theological aspect among many in the New Testament. This is the framework by which we understand the whole of New Testament theology. Ernst Kazemon, a very famous biblical scholar from the 20th century and someone who I have just started reading for the first time in my life in full a couple of months ago, I don't agree with everything he says, but he was a very brilliant and visionary scholar. He said that apocalyptic is the mother of all Christian theology. But of course, a big component of apocalypticism is eschatology. And so he makes the point that the entire New Testament is just so suffuse with eschatology, the idea that the end has already begun, that by getting rid of or marginalizing eschatology or by making eschatology one theological issue among others, you're actually distorting the whole of the New Testament teaching. And so this is my challenge for you today. If this is your first time thinking about inaugurated eschatology and what all of this means, I issued this challenge to my small group a couple of weeks ago, and this has come up in several conversations over the last few years. My challenge is when you come to a complicated passage in the New Testament, think about how that fits into an eschatological framework. And this is going to be where it's really helpful for you to, if you, if you don't have like a, and I don't, I don't. My primary Bible, I use a thin line Pew N A S B just because it's easy to carry around. Um, and I I just I like it, but there's no, there's no margins, no notes, nothing like that. There's no scripture cross-references. But I would highly recommend to find a Bible that you can use for studying that has the scripture cross-references, or get on Biblegateway.com. And whenever you come to a passage of the New Testament that's challenging, look for the cross-references, go back and read all of the referenced Old Testament text, and then try to think about how that fits into this idea of inaugurated eschatology, the idea that the end has already begun in the present. And this is going to clear up a lot of theological issues. And here is the real kicker for all of this. So I guess there is kind of a political point here. There are a lot of people that base American foreign policy off of this idea that we are living in the end of history, that we are living in the unique end times. And there are a lot of people that want to read our present experience into this framework where we're literally living on the precipice or the edge of civilizational collapse. But that's not really a biblical way of understanding Christian history. The more biblical way of understanding Christian history is that Jesus has already won the decisive battle and that the end has already begun, and that God has equipped the church with the power of the Holy Spirit to go out and build his kingdom. And I think that there are a lot of people that operate with a false set of assumptions about eschatology that have this kind of step back and let the world burn mentality. And they see rightly that there are a lot of problems in this world, but they don't do anything to try to solve them. And I think that the church in many ways has become complacent and uh in just waiting for whatever is going to happen in the future to happen because we've misread the Bible's eschatology. We forgot that we're already living at the end of history, therefore, God has empowered us to be the kind of people that can go out and affect real change in the world. Again, this is Acts 1.8, uh, or in the great commission at the end of Matthew 28. Jesus says in Matthew 28, all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me, therefore go to all the nations and baptize them in my name, making disciples for me. And then in Acts chapter 1.8, um, what does the resurrected Jesus say right before his ascension to the disciples? You'll be my witnesses in Judea and Samaria and even to the end of the ends of the earth, right? So it's our responsibility to take this gospel, this announcement that Jesus is already king and that the end has already begun to the ends of the earth. And God has equipped us to do that through the power of the Spirit, all as a sign that the end has already begun. So the next time one of your friends asks you if we're living through the end of history, you can say, yes, but, and we need to be able to have that conversation. And the next time you hear a politician making claims that this event, X event, this war, this thing that's happening is bringing about the end of history or is a sign of the end of times, you can comfortably ignore it, knowing that all almost all politicians are liars and don't know anything about theology to begin with. And also because that's not at all what the New Testament says. And in fact, Jesus says in uh Mark 13 and Matthew 24, and then I guess Luke 21 a little bit too, that there will be wars and rumors of wars, kings will come, kings will go, nations will rise, nations will fall. Um, all that stuff is going to happen until he finally returns. So we are living at the end of history right now, but the church has always been living at the end of history, and we need to allow our theology and our practice to be shaped by that knowledge. Um, before I let you go today, if you take a look over my right shoulder, there it is, if you're watching on YouTube, there you go. Uh, that is my new book, Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation. And I am very excited to announce, and I will continue to announce, that this book will be available for you to purchase starting September 15th, 2026. So my new book is going to be out in less than two months. I'm really excited about it. Now, as of the day of recording, which is in late July, um, we're not sure about pre-orders and everything yet. We hope to have that ready in the next week or so. Uh, we hope to get out there on some of the podcasts. So I'm hoping hopefully I can be on some of your favorite biblical studies and libertarian podcasts in the next couple of months. If you know someone, if you want to reach out to somebody for me, if you listen to this and you have a podcast and you want to have me on, I would love to come on and discuss the book. I can get you a free copy of the PDF, the uncorrected proof right now. But hopefully we'll have the fully corrected proof um in the near future. But very excited about this book, very excited to get it out there. And inaugurated eschatology is one of the key frameworks through which I read the New Testament and analyze it in terms of its relation to political and economic structures of our day. So very excited for you guys to get that. We'll get more information out to you soon. But as always, thank you for this. Uh thank you for listening to this Theology Thursday episode. You can support the show libertarianchristians.com/slash shop. Um, follow me on Twitter, that's at Pro Liberty Pod. You can see the handle if you're watching on YouTube right down here, or follow me um on YouTube. I can use as much help as possible on YouTube. Uh, that is at prolibertypod on YouTube as well. Again, thank you guys for everything you've done, and I will see you on Tuesday. Have a great week. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me at theprotestantlibertarian at gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter. You can follow me at the handle at Pro Liberty Pod. Again, that is at Pro Liberty Pod. And you can also visit me at the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com. At the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com, you can also support the Christians for Liberty Network and the Libertarian Christian Institute. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and we will see you next Tuesday.