In Depth Analysis

The Golden Age — Three Traditions, One Final Chapter

The term "the Golden Age" has become popularised recently by the President of the United States, Donald Trump. In his inaugural address, he declared that "the golden age of America begins right now." But the Golden Age has a much longer history than any single presidency. It relates to a period very early in the earth's history, as described by the ancients — and all over the world, the term revives memories of a utopian world of perfection. History demonstrates that the ancients held to a view of two Golden Ages: one before a great Flood, and one that developed after it.

Today, the term has taken on other applications — political, cultural, and, as this study focuses on, theological. Here we turn to three Abrahamic religious systems, each of which derives its origins from claims of descent from Abraham, and each of which has developed its own distinctive expectation of a coming Golden Age at the end of history.

Few questions have occupied the human imagination more persistently than the question of how history ends. Across cultures, centuries, and civilisations, the conviction that the present order of things is not final — that something decisive lies ahead, something that will resolve the tensions, injustices, and incompleteness of the present age — has proven remarkably resilient. It surfaces in mythology, in philosophy, and above all in the great monotheistic religious traditions that have shaped the moral and political landscape of the world for three millennia.

This study focuses on three traditions — Judaism, Christianity (specifically in its Dispensational expression), and Islam. For the Islamic position, this study draws particularly on the eschatological framework of the contemporary Islamic scholar Dr. Imran Hosein, who has done much to pioneer a systematic treatment of Islamic eschatology, a field that had little developed tradition of its own until his work over the last two decades. All three traditions are Abrahamic, tracing their origins to the covenant made between God and Abraham. All three regard Jerusalem as a city of unique sacred significance. And all three anticipate, in their own distinctive ways, a final chapter of human history in which divine sovereignty is fully and visibly established over a world that has, for most of its duration, resisted it.

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