This project began to take shape while I was a student at Westminster Seminary California, although in those days it was little more than a nagging thought about how an issue as misunderstood and arcane as eschatology could bear directly on so many aspects of the Christian life. Princeton theologian Geerhardus Vos famously said that “eschatology precedes soteriology,” but I would go so far as to say that eschatology (looking at the present from the standpoint of the future) precedes everything.