¹ John E. Thiel, Icons of Hope: The ‘Last Things’ in Catholic Imagination (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), esp. pp. 48–55.

² Karen Kilby, ‘Eschatology, Suffering, and the Limits of Theology’, in Christophe Chalamet et al. (eds), Game Over?: Reconsidering Eschatology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017), pp. 179–91.

³ Ian A. McFarland, The Hope of Glory: A Theology of Redemption (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2024), pp. 104–9.

⁴ Kevin Hector suggests that the beatific vision tends toward a pure identity of the human and God, threatening to ‘dissolve’ particularity; Kevin W. Hector, Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 247. This critique is striking because it goes directly counter to the reason the beatific vision was downplayed by Hans Urs von Balthasar. According to Hans Boersma, von Balthasar thought the beatific vision overemphasised the distance required for external sight, and so preferred to focus on participation in the intratrinitarian relations. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Eschatology in Outline’, in Explorations in Theology, vol. 4, Spirit and Institution, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1995), p. 441; and Hans Boersma, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2018), pp. 27–33. If we analyse assessments of the beatific vision through the lens of the triune persons, we could say that Hector’s critique in terms of dissolution foregrounds the Father (whose vision is participated) and Balthasar’s critique in terms of exteriority/distance foregrounds the Son (who is seen). The Spirit, in a Coakley-like incorporative model of the Trinity, is the third who disrupts the aporias inherent in these binaries; cf. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), pp. 111–15.

⁵ Markus Mühling critiques ‘dual outcome’ construals of eschatological judgement, because they inevitably reduce to either works-righteousness or double-predestination. Instead, he argues for thinking of judgement as a process that extends throughout the duration of life. Cf. Markus Mühling, T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Eschatology, trans. Jennifer Adams-Maßmann and David Andrew Gilland (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), pp. 307–36. I am, then, extending Mühling’s reorientation to judgement-as-process and developing an explicitly synergistic account of how this process of judgement is brought to completion while still emphasising the priority of grace (over ‘merit’).

⁶ Quotations of Scripture are from the NRSVue.

⁷ Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018), p. 5. On the significance of completion and wholeness, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1996), pp. 65–77, 292–96.

⁸ This is a key concern of McFarland’s Hope of Glory. In the present essay, I am sympathetic to McFarland’s eschatology, as evidenced by its use and citation throughout. However, the beatific vision is marginal to Hope of Glory, which I see as a limitation of the book. Consequently, my use of McFarland could be seen partly as a demonstration of the compatibility (and supplementation) of Hope of Glory with a stronger emphasis on the beatific vision. One effect of my shift toward the beatific vision is that it qualifies McFarland’s insistence that nothing ‘new’ happens after death. By emphasising the visio Dei as the means and end of redemption, I am also suggesting that it brings about something new for the redeemed creature; however, this ‘something new’ (the novissimum proper to the human creature) happens to the whole life lived, which means that although it is genuinely new (and, I think, experienced as new), it is not a new moment within the temporal span of one’s life. To the extent that it happens to the whole life, it is, in one sense, already happening, but, in another sense, the one event will only be completed at the resurrection of the body. This seems compatible with McFarland’s broader argument, though it is not as explicit in Hope of Glory. In personal correspondence, McFarland has confirmed the compatibility of this move with his insistence that nothing ‘new’ happens.

⁹ David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), pp. 66–73.

¹⁰ Cf. McFarland, Hope of Glory, pp. 131–4.

¹¹ The Book of Job is an especially important source for thinking about loss in respect of diachronic wholeness. As Alissa Jones Nelson says of the opening lines of Job 1, ‘From the beginning, Job’s wholeness (Heb. tam, which also has the connotation of ‘integrity’) and uprightness (yashar) are particularly important. These personal qualities also extend to his wealth and his family…. Tam means whole or complete rather than without sin, but one must maintain right relationships with God and others in order to maintain this wholeness’. Alissa Jones Nelson, ‘Job’, in The Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha, ed. Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page Jr., and Matthew J. M. Coomber (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2014), p. 521. Also Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987), pp. 3–5.

¹² Cf. Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (New York: OUP, 2010). This is also a key component of Marilyn McCord Adams’ project; see for instance her Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: CUP, 2006).

¹³ McFarland puts this mystery in stark terms through a comparison of Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther, suggesting that they each grapple with the mystery (of the reality of evil and the goodness of God) and come to opposing ‘wrong’ answers: for Julian, the goodness of God threatens to turn evil into illusion, whereas for Luther the reality of evil renders God more wrathful than good (Hope of Glory, pp. 95–9, 101–4, and for his analysis, pp. 104–9). This means that suffering both requires eschatological speculation and dooms such speculation to error.

¹⁴ Stump, Wandering in Darkness, pp. 129–50.

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 136–40.

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 150, 169–71.

¹⁷ Cf. Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (New York: Avery, 2022), pp. 15–36, 390–422, 463–81; Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin, 2014), pp. 190–96, 173–201.

¹⁸ Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1997), 11.39–41; and The City of God, trans. William Babcock (New York: New City, 2013), 12.16.

¹⁹ The Spirit’s involvement in deification is evident from the role it played in the pneumatological controversies. For example, Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, vol. 4 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1892), 1.9, 3.1. And yet, once the Spirit’s activity in theosis ensures dogmatic affirmation of the Spirit’s divinity, the Spirit’s action is less focal. While the Spirit receives regular mention, the primary focus centres on God as such or on Christ. For examples of rich articulations of theosis that make only brief acknowledgement of the role of Spirit, see David Vincent Meconi and Carl E. Olson, eds., Called to Be Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2016), pp. 13–4, 91–4, 208–9.

²⁰ Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘Orations’, 31.3 (Fifth Theological Oration), in On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), p. 118. Thanks to Scott Dermer for directing my attention to this passage.

²¹ This language is indebted to Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, pp. 111–5.

²² While Luke 23:34a is absent in some early manuscripts, Joel Green argues that it is authentic to Luke; see Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 817–20.

²³ Thanks to Renee Dutter Miller for helping me appreciate this element in the narrative of Acts.

²⁴ Daniel Castelo, Pneumatology: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), p. 28.

²⁵ McFarland, Hope of Glory, pp. 12–3.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 13.

²⁷ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae [hereafter ST], trans. Lawrence Shapcote (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute, 2012), 1.12.1; 1.12.6, argues that as intellectual beings, humans are only fulfilled through seeing God’s essence. In ST, 3Supp.87.3, the ‘Book of Life’ (cf. Ps. 69:28; Rev 3:5; 13:8; 17:8; 20:12,15; 21:27; 22:19) is taken to contain the whole of one’s life so that, in the visio Dei, one can see all one’s deeds ‘in a single glance’ – that is, without succession.

²⁸ Though the Job account does not implicitly or explicitly involve the Spirit in the visio Dei, I take the narrative of Stephen’s vision to be normative, so that the Spirit’s presence and agency is a necessary condition for the visio Dei. In Daniel Castelo’s language, Christian reading identifies various ‘tags’ and ‘codings’ for the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, though these are theologically underdetermined (Castelo, Pneumatology, pp. 21–3). If then, we interpret scripture theologically with an eye to the codes and tags for the Spirit, the gifts of life, breath and (prophetic) vision are Spirit-coded gifts of God. This would justify a theological interpretation of Job’s vision as appropriated to the Spirit, as well as Nazianzen’s pneumatological interpretation of Psalm 36:9.

²⁹ Part of what appears to have happened is that God has brought Job into a second-person relation with God through the speeches. So, although the meaning of the suffering itself remains ambiguous, Job’s life is restored primarily through a new relational intimacy with God. Cf. Stump, Wandering in Darkness, p. 192.

³⁰ Cf. Gutiérrez, On Job, pp. 87–92.

³¹ On the Spirit as eschatological freedom, see Robert W. Jenson, ‘The Holy Spirit’, in vol. 2 of Christian Dogmatics, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1984), pp. 102–78; and Robert W. Jenson Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 1997–1999), 1:146–61. On the language of ‘rhyming history and hope’, see Robert W. Jenson Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), pp. 13–31, 105; and Robert W. Jenson Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), pp. 29–30.

³² See, for example, Castelo, Pneumatology, pp. 92–4, who includes discussion of corroborating theological texts. Also, Robert W. Jenson, Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), pp. 118, 132–47.

³³ John Milbank, ‘Pleonasm, Speech, and Writing’, in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 55–83.

³⁴ Eugene F. Rogers Jr, After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 64–7, 136–48.

³⁵ Ben Quash, Found Theology: History, Imagination, and the Holy Spirit (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 254–5.

³⁶ Ibid., pp. 5–30, 76–81, and esp. pp. 138–61.

³⁷ van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, pp. 190–96.

³⁸ Aquinas, ST, 3Supp.87.3.

³⁹ Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, trans. Lawrence Shapcote (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute, 2019), 3.60–63. My approach, though, is not radically different than Aquinas’, since he also seems at times to understand the visio Dei to be the means of eternal life and its end – particularly the final activity by which a person sees the whole of their life in a single glance (by reading the ‘Book of Life’, according to the Supplement to the tertia pars of the ST; see footnote 27 above). In Aquinas, the visio Dei is, implicitly, the ‘means’ insofar as the inclusive act of vision is the final act by virtue of which the person comes to their final rest. This rest is the glorious consummation of human activity; hence it is logically but not chronologically subsequent.

⁴⁰ Similarly, see McFarland, Hope of Glory, pp. 118–25.

⁴¹ ‘Those who see God are in God, and receive of His splendour, [which] … vivifies them; those, therefore, who see God, do receive life’. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, in The Apostolic Fathers, with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, vol. 1 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1885), 4.20.5. Also McFarland, Hope of Glory, pp. 135–57.

⁴² Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions, trans. Urban Hannon (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute, 2024), 7.1.1, responsio; and Stump, Wandering in Darkness, p. 388.

⁴³ I am indebted to a conversation with Ian McFarland on this point.

⁴⁴ Again, this seems to be at least part of the narrative tension in Job 1, where Job is initially described as ‘whole’ (tam) and ‘upright’ (yashar), so that his ‘testing’ consists in confronting threats to this wholeness (Job 1:1, 6–12); cf. Nelson, ‘Job’, p. 521. See also footnote 11 above.

⁴⁵ In addition to the above-cited ‘Eschatology, Suffering, and Limits’; see also Karen E. Kilby, ‘Julian of Norwich, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Status of Suffering in Christian Theology’, New Blackfriars 90/1029 (September 2009): pp. 552–9.

⁴⁶ ‘Insofar as imagining redemption is an ingredient of one’s own perception it is something we can only do for ourselves;’ David H. Kelsey, Imagining Redemption (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), p. 105. Also, Stump, Wandering in Darkness, p. 373.

⁴⁷ van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, pp. 205–31. This does not mean that the suffering person bears the sole responsibility for alleviating their own suffering, or even the primary responsibility. It simply means that, at a minimum, the person must assent without coercion in order for the means on offer to bring about genuine redemption.

⁴⁸ Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letter of St Paul to the Hebrews, ed. J. Mortensen and E. Alarcón, trans. F. R. Larcher (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute, 2012), 4.2.226; and Stump, Wandering in Darkness, p. 408.

⁴⁹ We ‘participate in God’s vision’ to the extent that we come to see our whole life in a manner analogous to God’s comprehension and by the Spirit’s empowerment. We do not become omniscient but receive by grace a new mode of attention to the whole of our life, as specified in the following paragraph.

⁵⁰ Summa contra Gentiles, 3.60.

⁵¹ Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.20.6 (trans. alt.; PG 7:1036).

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Wesleyan Theological Society in March 2025. My thanks to feedback and discussion from Laura Dahl, Logan Hoffman and Thomas McCall. My argument also benefited from discussion with Scott Dermer, Renee Dutter Miller and Ian McFarland, though I am responsible for the argument and any of its weaknesses.