Ruether and Segundo are representative of those who discuss
eschatology primarily in the context of ecology and human liberation. According
to Ruether, the Biblical view of eschatology, with its incorporation of “the
lush Hebraic view of earthly blessedness into eternal salvation,” was replaced
by millennial, earthly power in the early church. Today there are three options
for an ecological theology and Christian eschatology. Matthew Fox is “basically
on target” but his “superficiality” is problemmatic, particularly regarding the
problem of sin and death. Teilhard incorporated evolution in ways that would
mesh well with the Gaia hypothesis that Ruether favors, but she is concerned
with his “sanguine acceptance of the extinction of species” and his ‘tossing
aside’ of “the material underpinnings of consciousness”. Process theology, with
its dipolar God who “lures” each entity through its subjectivity, is promising
since freedom and risk are shared by creatures and God, and since redemption
involves the divine remembering. She also develops an “ecofeminist
theocosmology” which includes “the transience of selves, the living
interdependency of all things, and the value of the personal in communion.” 
Segundo writes that the “‘new earth’ suggests the transposition of our earthly
existence to another in which all the things that seemed to negate our values
and our efforts to implant them in this existence are done away with... The
’new earth’ is ‘the new heaven’ of God...Thus the meaning of history...is not
going to be replaced by something else; it is going to be absolutized in the
new, definitive creation” in which God is identified with the culmination of
the human struggle for meaning.
Contributed by: Dr. Robert Russell