Continuing my reading of 1 Peter, I’ve come to the ominous sounding text of 1 Peter 4:7: “The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers.” (NRSV). (Πάντων δὲ τὸ τέλος ἤγγικεν. σωφρονήσατε οὖν καὶ νήψατε εἰς προσευχὰς). Harink notes that “[w]e must clarify the meaning of telos (end, goal). . . .” He suggests, first, that telos
is not in any signifcant sense simply the final point in the cosmic or historical temporal sequence. It is not the end as midnight is the end of a twenty-four-hour day, nor is it near in the sense that midnight is near to 11:59 PM. It is not the next or last thing, but the goal of all things, a goal that subsumes the temporal but cannot be summed up by it.
Harink, Commentary, p. 111. 
This is the sense telos carries in much of Greek thought, and it also seems consistent with New Testament eschatological usage more broadly, so I’m surprised that David Bentley Hart’s translation also reads “Now the end of all things has drawn near.” I’m curious why Hart used a phrase that has such a different resonance in popular culture.
Harink further argues that “the telos here is not immanent in or intrinsic to the being of all things, something given a priori and awaiting discovery and realization. It is not a possession or potential. It is other; it is fundamentally beyond; it is present in its coming.” Harink Commentary, p. 111. I don’t fully agree with Harink here. As he does consistently throughout this Commentary, Harink radically separates nature and grace, immanence and transcendence, church and world, and so-on. This is a mistake, because it devalues creation and fails to recognize that creation as given is already a gift of grace that anticipates its eschatological realization.
I agree with Harink that in creation as we now experience it, in the world as we now live in it, the original telos of creation is only restored by Christ. In that sense, the telos of creation is not latent and waiting to be discovered, but requires the radical event of resurrection and new creation. Yet even the radical event of resurrection and new creation is not entirely discontinuous with creation as given or with creation as we experience it. Indeed, what is elided in resurrection and new creation — death, despair, evil — is not a part of creation, not a thing in itself, but is a deprivation of creation’s telos. As St. Paul said, “we know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Romans 8:22). The new creation being birthed cannot be utterly “other” and “beyond” if it derives from the labor pains of this present creation.