128 Apokatastasis: Four Meditationstime is the promised cry of Christ that will one day raise the
dead. Then again, perhaps even that too has already sounded
out: "Lazarus, come forth." It is not clear, in any event, that the
fourth gospel foretells any "last judgment" in the sense of a real
additional judgment that accomplishes more than has already
happened in Christ. So perhaps another, still better "preterist"
understanding of Christ's prophecies regarding the coming of
the Son of Adam, one that makes even better sense of his prom-
ises to his disciples regarding the Kingdom's imminent advent,
is to see his words as pointing toward and fulfilled within his
own crucifixion and resurrection -wherein all things were
judged, all things redeemed. There is then no longer any scan-
dal in the memory of those dire warnings of imminent judg-
ment that would need explaining away after the fact, and so
there would have been no reason to expunge them from the
record. All that was foretold has indeed already come to pass,
perhaps. The Kingdom has indeed drawn very near, and even
now is being revealed. The hour indeed has come. The "judge
judged in our place" (to use Karl Barth's phrase) is also the res-
urrection and the life that has always already succeeded and
exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell
meet in those three days-and so now, no matter how far any
soul may venture from God in all the ages, Christ has already
gone further out into that "far country," has borne all the con-
sequences of anyone's alienation from God and neighbor, and
has eternally opened the way back into the sanctuary of the
Presence. In this way, then, the risen Christ truly is himself
already the Temple restored, as his words foretold. And per-
haps, then, just as there is a threshold that must yet be crossed
in history between this age and the Age to come, or between
this temporal age here below and that supercelestial Age there
above, so there is also a still more ultimate threshold to be