Eschatology and hope for nature

Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ provokes the need for both an ecological and eschatological reflection on how ultimate fulfilment in Christ includes the liberation and transformation of earthly nature itself. Hope envisages the end when God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15:28). The biblical perspectives presenting the City of God (Rev 21:5), and the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 12:11) extend the range and concreteness of this hope, along with the God-willed multiplicity of creation and the primordial creativity of love itself. The focus remains incarnational in that the Word not only became flesh but also is an ‘earthling’ in a particular planetary environment. Consequently, eschatological fulfilment does not entail the abolition of the natural world, but anticipates its unimaginable fulfilment.