When nothing happened on May 21, Camping was left with a choice, said DiTommaso, whose book, «The Architecture
of Apocalypticism,» is scheduled for publication next spring.
He continues the story by examining the period of the second temple in Jewish thought, the rise
of apocalypticism and millenarianism, sectarian life in New Testament times, New Testament views of afterlife, pseudepigraphic literature, the Church fathers, the early rabbis, and Muslim views of the afterlife..
The wonder is not that such sublimated reminiscences
of apocalypticism should be present, but that the Johannine writer should have commended so boldly to the early church so radical a rethinking of its hope.
And there is good reason for this, apocalypticism is inevitably subversive, and perhaps the most purely subversive force in history, all of the great political revolutions in modernity have been apocalyptic revolutions, and even the advent of both Christianity and Islam can be understood as the consequence
of apocalypticism.
It must be admitted at once that there is a strong element
of apocalypticism in the Gospels, with anticipation of the Parousia in Acts, in Paul's letters and in Revelation.
Not exact matches
As if the seeming predestinarian «logic»
of revelational theology (so fundamentally alien to the apologetic mindset) were not problem enough, there is the harsh
apocalypticism into which Jesus is reported to have so deeply dipped his hands.
Apocalypticism puts evangelicals in control
of history and lets them sound as if they know the mind
of God.
I suspect that this wide attraction is partly the result
of incessant repetition, and partly because events such as the doomsday nuclear policies
of the United States and the Soviet Union and the dangerously deepening crisis in the Middle East lend
apocalypticism a certain surface plausibility.
a survey
of medieval
apocalypticism officially rejected by the church, and Robert Darnton's history
of pornography, The Forbidden Bestsellers
of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995).
Though
apocalypticism had been around for millennia, it is worth noting that Darbyism, the peculiarly rigid and florid form that arose in the late 19th century, accompanied the growth
of Darwinism, biblical higher criticism, and the dawning awareness
of world religions.
In When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, Paul Boyer, a senior historian at the University
of Wisconsin, and one
of the best in the business, seeks to address the world
of secularized academics and journalists who can scarcely imagine, let alone appreciate, the breadth and depth
of popular
apocalypticism in contemporary America.
The incarnate Lord lived at a particular time and place in history, and in his
apocalypticism Jesus was apparently a man
of his time.
Yet he himself did not make the repetition
of that rite, or John's
apocalypticism, the focus
of what he himself was up to.
Hence, the movement from
apocalypticism to the Gnostic rejection
of law was more abrupt than that from Stoicism.
The world - rejecting elements in Christianity are adequately explained by Jewish
apocalypticism, and this, despite its enmity toward the present world, stopped short
of and opposed the dissolution
of moral order.
I was talking to these churchmen about apocalyptic and I did this liberal arts, comparative, secular review
of the Book
of Daniel, the Book
of the Apocalypse, and he was wrong and these people and Montanus, they were wrong, on and on and on and on; four days
of listening to these wrong prophecies that described the history
of Christian
apocalypticism.
Schweitzer himself drew the conclusion, not that nothing can be known
of Jesus, but that what can be known
of him is precisely the messianism and
apocalypticism that the nineteenth - century biographers had tried to discard.
Similarly, in some forms
of Jewish
apocalypticism, the tension between the felt injustice
of history and faith in the God who was Creator and Lord
of history reached an extreme pitch.
Yet it is not enough to think
of Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher, however true this may be, for his
apocalypticism was quite distinct from that
of mainstream Judaism.
Nowhere in modernity is
apocalypticism more open and manifest than it is in our great political revolutions, and if these begin with the English Revolution, this was our most apocalyptic revolution until the French Revolution, a revolution which innumerable thinkers at that time, and above all Hegel himself, could know as the ending
of an old world and the inauguration
of a truly new and universal world.
Apocalypticism (from the Greek word meaning revelation, or unveiling)-- A belief that God will intervene, on behalf
of the faithful, in history.
But if a uniquely modern
apocalypticism is inseparable from the death
of God, a death
of God which it can know as apocalypse itself, could this be the first purely conceptual realization
of the Kingdom
of God?
Nothing so clearly unveils Hegel's system as an apocalyptic system as does this ending, but such an ultimate ending is unique to
apocalypticism, for even if it parallels archaic visions
of eternal return, it wholly differs from all primordial vision in knowing an absolute and final ending, an ending which is apocalypse itself.
Nothing is so unique in
apocalypticism as is its enactment
of a new totality, an absolute novum that is the polar opposite
of a primordial totality, but a novum in full
apocalypticism that is already dawning or near at hand, just as it is in Jesus» initial eschatological proclamation that the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom
of God is immediately at hand (Mark 1:15).
So that if a pure enactment
of the death
of God occurs throughout all
of the full expressions
of a uniquely modern apocalyptic thinking, does this movement fully and finally distinguish ancient and modern
apocalypticism?
This is that Jesus was heavily indebted to his past, but was no copyist
of it; that he spoke as an apocalyptist, but that his
apocalypticism was probably distorted and exaggerated in the records
of the Synoptics; more important, that he had a prophetic sense
of mission as God's suffering servant and agent
of redemption; that he deeply respected the law
of his fathers, but gave it a new depth
of meaning in self - giving love.
But all
of these thinkers are reborn or renewed Pauline thinkers, and are so precisely in their
apocalypticism, an
apocalypticism inseparable from an enactment
of absolute ending, but that ending is absolute beginning itself.
Or is modern
apocalypticism a genuine recovery and renewal
of an original Christian
apocalypticism, one which had perished or become wholly transformed in the victory
of an ancient Christian orthodoxy, then only to be renewed in profoundly subversive and heretical expressions?
His
apocalypticism is suffused with the spirit
of God and given a moral character, as was everything he touched.
While Jesus seems to have accepted its particular terminology and some
of its concepts familiar in his day, his
apocalypticism is different.
The crux
of the problem as to the
apocalypticism of Jesus and his own relation to the coming kingdom lies in the degree to which he shared this point
of view.
Now even as ancient Jewish
apocalypticism profoundly challenged the orthodox guardians
of the Torah, a challenge which is profoundly renewed in Paul, modern
apocalypticism profoundly challenges Christian orthodoxy.
For a brief discussion
of the typical features
of apocalyptic writing, see the article «
Apocalypticism» by Martin Rist in The Interpreter's Dictionary
of the Bible, ed.
It may well be possible to speak
of Zen existential
apocalypticism as King does, but we should be aware that this is a form
of «
apocalypticism» in which nothing actually happens, in which there is neither world - nor self - transformation.
The thought expressed here is adverse to those who claim
apocalypticism as the real creator
of the new Testament's ethic.
Commenting on this same text, Gordon D. Kaufman remarks: «If, now, we bring a different framework
of interpretation from Jewish
apocalypticism to this critical event in which Christian faith was born — as we must — we should not be overly surprised or dismayed when we find it necessary to understand the character
of the event somewhat differently from the first Christians.»
«Fulfillment» didn't even come onto religious thought until the nonsense
of «fulfilled prophesy» became popular LATE LATE in Hebrew culture, (when
apocalypticism became popular), near the turn
of the millennium.
It is a principle component
of the eschatological projection
of a new heaven and a new earth that originated in the millennialism
of Jewish
apocalypticism, and it seems to have made its earliest appearance in the Apocalypse
of Isaiah (Isaiah 24 — 2 7), specifically in Isaiah 26:29.
In Jesus» own recorded words, this emphasis appears in the spiritual nature and present accessibility
of the kingdom
of God an emphasis that, in view
of the postponed hopes
of Jewish
apocalypticism, is very significant.
The one unifying factor that put sense into the strange and varied developments
of Jewish
apocalypticism was the urgent demand
of the Jewish conscience that, one way or another, the cosmic process should not in the end be ethically unsatisfactory.
Even the accent
of immediacy is in Jesus» words about the coming Messiah, (Matthew 16:27 - 28) and alike in direct statement and in parable his reported teaching shows the influence
of the prevalent Jewish
apocalypticism.
To be sure, some students
of the New Testament have been so completely commandeered by
apocalypticism that they insist on interpreting all references to the kingdom in terms
of its categories.
Now, though I am totally convinced that we must try to eradicate messianism and
apocalypticism from politics and from social matters, I still think that in some way this temptation
of apocalypse will always be with us.
For far from being Johannine,
apocalypticism was fairly well read out
of the record in the Fourth Gospel.
-- such characteristic teachings
of Jesus, even when their statement happens to be set in an eschatological framework, have another source than
apocalypticism, and they are not so demonstrably fashioned by it that, without it, we can be sure they would have been very different.
What have the parables
of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, or the idea
of love in the thirteenth chapter
of First Corinthians to do with
apocalypticism?
The shift from a prophecy to
apocalypticism gave an important stimulus toward views
of divine determinism.
Finally, the course
of thought we have been tracing in this chapter is adverse to those who claim
apocalypticism as the real creator
of the New Testament's ethic.
For another thing, while apocalyptic forms
of hope probably did exercise this influence, it is flying in the face
of the evidence to explain the New Testament's ethic, as a whole, as dependent on and everywhere fashioned by
apocalypticism.
Granted, Jesus interpreted the
apocalypticism of his time in the light
of his own unique vision.