Liberating Eschatology: Ignacio Ellacuría's Philosophy of History and the Disruption of Capitalist Temporality

We live today amidst a crisis of eschatology. That is to say, we lack the capacity to speak of, envision, and thus call into being, a novel future that breaks with our present conditions. How we conceive of the trajectory of history and the end of time in both theological scholarship and our social imaginary more broadly, is co-constitutive with the colonial project and its afterlife: the endless march of capitalist extraction, transforming life into commodity for profit. This paper posits that Christian eschatological discourse is entangled with the structures of capitalist and neoliberal politics. In order to address this crisis, theological scholarship must break with the dominant frames of eschatology, specifically atemporal, individual and realized eschatology logics. In response this paper offers an alternative conception of time and history through examining the unrealized promise of the apocalyptic, anti-capitalist eschatology of Ignacio Ellacuría.