He Shall Have Dominion

6 He Shall Have Dominion
The English word “eschatology” is a fairly late theological term,
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apparently not put into common use before the nineteenth century. Its
first use, however, appears as far back as in Germany in 1644 in the last
section of Philip Heinrich Friedlieb’s Dogmatics. That section was titled:
Eschatologia seu Florilegium theolgicum exhibens locorum de moret, resurrectione
martuoru, extreme iudicio, cosummatione seculi, inferno sue maorte aeterna
et denique vita eterna (which explains why you never see it mentioned on
a bumper sticker). 8
The term “Eschatology” is the compound of two Greek terms:
eschatos, which means “last,” and logia, which means “word, discourse.”
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Etymologically then, eschatology is “the study of the last things.” The
term derives from certain Scriptural passages that speak of “the last days”
(2Ti 3:1; Heb 1:2), “the last time” (1 Pe 1:20; Jude 18), “the last hour” (1
John 2:18), and other comparable statements. We find similar examples
7. Oscar Cullmann and W. Georg Kümmel, “Eschatology,” in ODCC, 469. See
also: COED, 1:893, cites George Bush’s Anastasis; or the Doctrine of the Resurrection
of the Body, written in 1845, as the earliest work employing the term
“eschatology.”
8. Sauter, Eschatological Rationality, 136.
9. Some theologians and dictionaries define it as: “The department of theological
science concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgement, heaven,
and hell.’” COED, 1:893.