Building on the insights of the ressourcement theology of grace, this sophisticated theological aesthetics offers a fresh vision of the doctrine of creation through a consideration of the beauty of time. Conventional eschatological accounts of life after death tend to emphasize the discontinuity between earthly life and the hereafter: whereas this life is subject to the contingencies of time, life after death is characterized by a stolid eternity. In contrast to this standard view, John E. Thiel's Now and Forever articulates a Catholic eschatology in which earthly life and heavenly life are seen as gracefully continuous. This account offers a reconceptualization of time, which, Thiel argues, is best understood as the sacramental medium of God's grace to creation. Thiel's project thus attempts to rescue time from its Platonically negative resonance in the doctrine of creation. Rather than viewing time as the ambiance of sinful dissolution, Thiel argues for a Christian vision of time's beauty, and so explicitly develops an aesthetics that views time as a creaturely reflection of God's own Trinitarian life. This thesis proceeds from the assumption that all time is eschatological time and is thus guided by attention to the temporality implicit in the virtue of hope, with its orientation toward a fulfilled future that culminates in resurrected life. This interpretation of the beauty of eschatological time in its widest expanse presses further the insight of ressourcement theology that grace is everywhere, while appreciating how time's graceful beauty manifests itself in the diversity of temporal moments, human communities, and most fully in the heavenly communion of the saints.

This book articulates a theory of Catholic tradition that departs from previous understandings. Drawing on the medieval concept of the four-fold sense of scripture, John Thiel proposes four interpretive senses of tradition. He also offers a theory of doctrinal development that reconciles Catholic belief in apostolic authority and continuity of tradition with a critical approach to the evidence of history.

In Icons of Hope: The "Last Things" in Catholic Imagination, John Thiel, one of the most influential Catholic theologians today, argues that modern theologians have been unduly reticent in their writing about "last things": death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Beholden to a historical-critical standard of interpretation, they often have been reluctant to engage in eschatological reflection that takes the doctrine of the "last things" seriously as real events that Christians are obliged to imagine meaningfully and to describe with some measure of faithful coherence. Modern theology's religious pluralism leaves room for a speculative style of interpretation that issues in icons of hope-theological portraits of resurrected life that can inform and inspire the life of faith. Icons of Hope presents an interpretation of heavenly life, the Last Judgment, and the communion of the saints that is shaped by a view of the activity of the blessed dead consistent with Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, namely, the view that the blessed dead in heaven continue to be eschatologically engaged in the redemptive task of forgiveness. Thiel offers a revision of the traditional Catholic imaginary regarding judgment and life after death that highlights the virtuous actions of all the saints in their heavenly response to the vision of God. These constructive efforts are fostered by Thiel's conclusions on the disappearance of the concept of purgatory in large segments of contemporary Catholic belief, a disappearance attributable to the emergence of a noncompetitive spirituality in postconciliar Catholicism, which has eclipsed the kinds of religious sensibilities that made belief in purgatory a practice in earlier centuries. This noncompetitive spirituality-one that recovers traditional Pauline sensibilities on the gratuitousness of grace-encourages an eschatological imaginary of mutual, ongoing forgiveness in the communion of the saints in this life and in the life to come.