Immanentize the eschaton

In political theory and theology, to immanentize the eschaton is a generally pejorative term referring to attempts to bring about utopian conditions in the world, and to effectively create heaven on earth. Theologically, the belief is akin to postmillennialism as reflected in the Social Gospel of the 1880–1930 era, as well as Protestant reform movements during the Second Great Awakening in the 1830s and 1840s such as abolitionism. Modern usage of the phrase started with Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics in 1952. Conservative spokesman William F. Buckley popularized Voegelin's phrase as "Don't immanentize the eschaton!". Buckley's version became a political slogan of Young Americans for Freedom during the 1960s and 1970s. Voegelin identified a number of similarities between ancient Gnosticism and the beliefs held by a number of modern political theories, particularly Communism and Nazism. He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as belief in a lack of concord within society as a result of an inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. He described this as having two effects: The belief that the disorder of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin (the Gnostics themselves referred to this as gnosis). The desire to implement a policy to actualize the speculation, or as Voegelin said, to Immanentize the Eschaton, to create a sort of heaven on earth within history. See Scientism. One of the more oft-quoted passages from Voegelin's work on Gnosticism is that "The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy." James H. Billington's 1980 book Fire in the Minds of Men explores the idea further. The Lutheran Confessions directly reject the idea of an immanentized eschaton, condemning the belief "that before the resurrection of the dead the godly shall take possession of the kingdom of the world, the ungodly being everywhere suppressed.