One is therefore left to wonder whether he sees association of the 144,000 with Jesus as implying discipleship in the future (since they follow him wherever he goes and he views them as actual sacrificial offerings to God and the exalted Jesus) and as being paradigmatic for Christian disciples. All in all, this is a stimulating work. It is a valuable resource for discipleship studies, especially with the significant bibliography at each chapter's end. A final chapter summarizing the patterns detected or giving a conclusion would have strengthened it. Nevertheless, it will prove valuable to its targeted audience. It is a good introduction to the series. It can be recommended to students, pastors, scholars, and laypeople who need help as they follow on the path to discipleship. Columbia Union College Takoma Park, MD 20912
BERTRAM L. MELBOURNE
Moltmann, Jurgen. The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology. Trans. Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. 390 pp. Paper. $29.00. Eschatology is usually perceived as spelling disaster for history. Yet as human beings, we live and imagine the future from within the world of history. The Coming of God continues Moltmann's scholarly and personal quest to understand Christian hope as neither the end nor the mere continuation of human history. If eschatology is viewed as the fiial solution of all insoluble problems, then, Moltmann contends,we would do better to turn our backs on it altogether, for the end of history calls into question the meaning of our daily lives. "The person who presses forward to the end of life misses life itself" (x-xi). On the other hand, to identify the eschaton within history calls into question the hope of the poor, the oppressed, and the murdered that someday righteousness will flourish in the earth. "The dumb suffering of those who have been defeated and subjected finds no place in the annals of the &g nationsn (43). Clearly, the interests of both liberation and feminist theologies underlie Moltmann's theology, yet his real conversation partners are Jewish writers such as Ernst Bloch and Franz Rosenzweig. What is perhaps clearer in The Coming of God than in any of his earlier work is the thoroughly Jewish underpinning of Moltmann's entire theological journey-which far transcendseven Karl Barth's post-Holocaust sermon on "Jesus the Jew." In a truly remarkable expression of the transformative power of the cross, Moltmann, who came to his eschatological interest as a captured Nazi soldier, configureseschatologyas the Easter Event refracted through Jewish images of bodily resurrection, Sabbath, and the Shekinah glory of temple worship. It is in light of these images that Moltmann pursues the very practical questions of What happens to a person in death?What is the political and ecological history of the world? And what are the future conditions of the cosmos? Belief in the immortality of the soul, Moltmann contends, is an option. The resurrection of the dead is a hope. "Whereas the one puts its trust in the selftranscendence of the human being, the other relies on God's transcendence over deathn (58). Belief in the resurrection seeks hope for history, not in the depths of o w selves, but in the coming power of God. Furthermore, since there is no soul detached from the body, and no body that is not a part of nature, there can be no