Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, perhaps the most creative thinker of the contemporary Orthodox Church, was born in a small village near Kozani, Greece, in 1931. He studied theology at the University of Athens, where he received his degree in 1955. With a scholarship, he traveled abroad to study at Harvard University, where he received a master’s degree.

Eschatology Is One of the Dominant Themes of the Theology of our Time. It is mainly since the work of biblical scholar Johannes Weiss, under the title Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (particularly in its second edition of 1900), that eschatology has begun to occupy the center of Christian theology. One may even say that the history of eschatology is divided into a pre-Weiss and a post-Weiss period. It is no longer possible to return to the period before Weiss, neither in biblical nor in systematic theology.

This article focuses on the transformative journey “from the Omega to the Alpha” with the late Metropolitan John Zizioulas. Here I share personal souvenirs of my encounters with him, recalling how his academic rigor and pastoral warmth deeply enriched my understanding of our faith. Metropolitan John had a unique way of blending the biblical and eucharistic traditions into his theological discourse, and his last book was no exception.

For Christian theology, the eschaton represents both a mystery and a problematic. On the one hand, it expresses a mystery preached and promised by Jesus Christ as the culmination of his work, which penetrates history by confronting the Church, the individual, and history itself with a parousia from beyond. It is a constant experience (and expectation) of the ongoing revelation and action of the Trinitarian God, who, by the Spirit, makes present in time—primarily in the Eucharist—his promised kingdom. The Church is called upon to cooperate to establish this kingdom already in the now of the world.

When I was a senior in college, working on my undergraduate honors thesis on the theme of primacy in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, my mentor, the late Father John Meyendorff, told me that I must read Metropolitan John Zizioulas’s Being as Communion. The book had an immediate impact on me, as I could see the truth of the way in which Metropolitan John spoke about personhood in terms of uniqueness and freedom constituted in particular forms of relations, especially when one reflected on our human experience.

Metropolitan of Pergamon John D. Zizioulas did not develop a systematic theology of gender and sexuality. According to his theological project— an eschatological ontology that he considered to have been articulated in the Bible and fully realized by the patristic age—sexuality does not belong to the eschatological state of being, the kingdom of God, but to postlapsarian nature. As opposed to an ontology grounded in sexual or biological differentiation, Zizioulas develops a concept of personhood springing from otherness.

Metropolitan of Pergamon John (Zizioulas) was reluctant to formulate a full-blown political theology. The main reason was that he viewed politics as a domain of coercion and violence, thus distinguishing it from the Church as the place of freedom and non-violent love. His ecclesiological vision that the Eucharist constitutes an anticipation of the future state of the whole of humanity in the eschaton does, however, have political consequences, since the Church can be considered an “eschatological city” that could inspire the secular political society.

The anthropologies of both Metropolitan John Zizioulas and Father Dumitru Stăniloae fall within the broad personalist movement in modern Orthodox theology. This movement identifies the principal philosophical and theological characteristic of human existence in the personal mode of existence of every human, an image of the mode of existence of the Persons of the Divine Trinity.

The greatest theological legacy of Metropolitan John Zizioulas is his eucharistic ecclesiology. This view was shared by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, who in his 2011 essay “Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology” points out that despite recent trends to replace or rival a eucharistic approach, “the eucharistic ecclesiology of Zizioulas continues to prevail almost everywhere” and “will prevail in Orthodox thought during the future.”

To understand both Metropolitans John Zizioulas and Kallistos Ware, one must be reminded of the contours of contemporary Orthodox theology. After the fifteenth century and because of the Ottoman occupation, theological output in the Orthodox world almost came to a full stop; what was produced between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries has not enjoyed any lingering significance.

“The Lord is the first and quintessential monk” (22). Read out of context, one can hardly believe that these words come from the late Metropolitan John Zizioulas. Widely considered one of the most influential Orthodox theologians of our age, Zizioulas’s fame rests on his insistence on the episcopate and the Eucharist as the contexts which foretell the Kingdom of God. Thus, this collection of articles, most of which originally appeared in Greek, come as a surprise even for those quite familiar with his work.