His fearless and intellectually bracing work points to the connectivity of all points in the universe and is a welcome respite from popular culture's relentless consumerism and the siren calls
of apocalyptic thinking.
We leave to one side, for this review, extended reflections on the relationship
of apocalyptic thinking to modern liberal theology generally, but it is an issue worthy of some attention.
While these are the longest and most explicit examples
of apocalyptic thinking, there are many shorter examples.
There is the same type
of apocalyptic thinking and the same seizing of the high moral ground.
He focuses almost exclusively upon Darbyite prermillennialism, which might be called the main trunk
of apocalyptic thinking in modern America.
These twin emphases
of apocalyptic thought remain present in Protestantism.
In this great parable of the last judgment there is a striking combination
of apocalyptic thought with the prophetic.
There was an outbreak
of apocalyptic thought and activity in the late second century, led by the prophet Montanus and his women supporters Prisca and Maximilla.
Not exact matches
In a panel discussion in Silicon Valley Saturday, however, Musk took a more measured tone on AI, encouraging members
of the audience to
think about how to prevent it from progressing along a potentially
apocalyptic path.
For many techies, the
thought of reality star Kim Kardashian West speaking at a tech conference is something akin to an
apocalyptic sign.
John Paul is
apocalyptic, obsessed with martyrdom and with the Virgin Mary, and, worst
of all, self - important: «The pope himself seems to
think the whole church depends on him — on his being saved by the Virgin
of Fatima, on his living into the new millennium, on his visiting every Marian shrine, on his Stakhanovite canonizing, on his re-definitions
of every truth, on his creating a like - minded episcopate....
Thomas Paine's assertion in Common Sense that «we have it in our power to begin the world over again» represents secularized
apocalyptic thought in the form
of a revolutionary overthrow
of monarchy, which was demonized as anti-Christ.
Apocalyptic thought provokes resistance, because it fuses an alternative vision
of history's telos with warfare and final judgment, all within the context
of a prophetic claim to have removed the veil that keeps humans from truly perceiving the world.
An inevitable temptation
of Christian theology, and particularly so in our own time, has been to
think that the idea or symbol
of an actual end
of the world was no part
of the original proclamation
of Jesus, and rather derived either from the
apocalyptic religious world that so dominated Jesus» disciples or from the all - too - human or fleshy component
of their minds and hearts, which was impervious to the higher call
of the Spirit.
Indeed, I believe the greatest challenge before us is one
of understanding the integral and mutual relationship between
apocalyptic faith and a dialectical mode
of thinking and vision.
It reflects the theology
of those who
thought of Jesus exclusively in
apocalyptic terms, and were prepared not only to go through the tradition and substitute «the Son
of Man» for his simple «I,» but also to insert appropriate quotations or paraphrases
of their favorite
apocalyptic texts in order to give his life its appropriate setting — as they assumed — and his teaching its proper interpretation.
There is no doubt that
apocalyptic thought nourished ideas
of revolution in both evangelical and secular circles in the late 1700s.
He examines the way that
apocalyptic thinking has structured popular attitudes toward nuclear war, Israel, Russia, American foreign policy, the growth
of government, and whatever was regarded at the moment as the Antichrist.
There are some, though it is a minority position among New Testament scholars, who
think that the
apocalyptic passages attributed to Jesus were interpolations
of early Christian
thought.
It is the writer's view that Jesus did hold to some aspects
of the
apocalyptic expectations
of his time and may have
thought of himself as the heavenly being sent by God to usher in a new order.
Although he wisely assured them that God would take care
of «those who have fallen asleep,» his own picture
of the second coming as it appears in both letters shows that his
thought regarding it had not progressed much beyond current Jewish
apocalyptic ideas.
While Jesus certainly was a
Apocalyptic preacher, (as were the other approximately 19 or so
of his day), he
thought the end - times would come in his day.
This
apocalyptic sense
of dreadful things to come hangs over Nietzsche's
thinking like a thundercloud.
In this article we shall be looking for some structures
of response which can be facilitated by
apocalyptic and by process
thought respectively, and which can illuminate our own situation and what it is to recognize the new and respond to it adequately.
Now Christianity has produced its own false form
of apocalyptic in which the
apocalyptic goal (eschaton) is
thought of in a chronological sense as some far - off divine event toward which all creation and all history move.
The concept
of nature as evil and alien to humanity began basically in late
apocalyptic and gnostic
thought in the Christian era.
In this article we shall be looking for some structures
of response which can be facilitated by
apocalyptic and by process
thought respectively, and which can illuminate our own situation and what it is...
THIS, faithless, is the nature
of so much belief: «The amazing thing about
apocalyptic thought is that a specific prophecy can be disconfirmed, but the idea can never be discredited.
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.
In the August issue
of Bible Review magazine, Witherington noted the popular appeal that
apocalyptic literature has in unsettling times, «Unfortunately, not all
apocalyptic thinking is good
apocalyptic thinking, and this is especially true
of the so - called dispensational theology that informs these novels,» Witherington wrote.
Apparently there are two
thoughts as to how devistation will come to us in the near future:
Apocalyptic disaster brought forth by the grace
of God, or climate data which has been continually compiled and interpreted by climate scientists since the 1960s.
If this be the case, then an understanding
of the kingdom in three senses — the eternal, righteous rule
of the sovereign God; the call to moral obedience in love; and an
apocalyptic final consummation — seems less inconsistent in the
thought of Jesus than they have often been assumed to be.
This is a subject or self - consciousness which becomes deeply reborn in early modernity, thence being renewed in a uniquely modern
apocalyptic thinking, only to be absolutely negated in Nietzsche's
apocalyptic dissolution
of the «I,» an «I» which he could know as the creation
of ressentiment.
Leahy is a deeply contemporary and a deeply Catholic thinker, and his first book, Novitas Mundi (1980), intends to be a revolutionary breakthrough to an absolutely new
thinking, and while conceptually enacting the history
of Being from Aristotle through Heidegger, at bottom this book is an
apocalyptic calling forth and celebration
of the absolute beginning now occurring
of transcendent existence in pure
thinking itself.
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?
America may well be the primal site
of contemporary
apocalyptic thinking, and it is America that has given us our purest and deepest contemporary
apocalyptic thinker, D. G. Leahy.
Surely this is the first time that the Incarnation has been absolutely central in Catholic
thinking, the first time that matter and Spirit have been so deeply and so purely united, and so much so that now Spirit is the body itself (page 96), and even as this
thinking intends to be an
apocalyptic consummation
of the totality
of history, never before has such a Catholic consummation actually been conceived, although there are those who would see it as having been imaginatively enacted in Dante's Paradiso and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
Sometimes this was from the angle
of the principles
of Christian ethics believed to be derived from it, and again it centered on the attempt to explore the relations
of apocalyptic to prophetic
thought in the message
of Jesus.
It is to be remembered that at this time New Testament scholarship had little if any awareness
of the
apocalyptic ground
of the New Testament, the transformation
of New Testament scholarship entailed by this realization did not occur until the end
of the nineteenth century, but already the original
apocalyptic ground
of Jesus and
of primitive Christianity was profoundly recovered and renewed in the radically new imaginative vision
of Blake, just as it was in the radically new philosophical
thinking of Hegel.
In the
thought of Jesus, there was a blend
of the prophetic and
apocalyptic elements inherited from his Jewish culture.
And could this be said
of the whole world
of modern
apocalyptic thinking?
As opposed to Novitas Mundi, now American pragmatism is the true prelude to the
thinking now occurring for the first time, and most immediately so the uniquely American theology
of the death
of God, a theology which while voiding pragmatism is the last gasp
of modernity, and it in these death throes that a final
apocalyptic thinking is born.
Altizer holds that Jesus was an
apocalyptic prophet who proclaimed and enacted the dawning
of the Kingdom
of God, and that there is a comparable dawning in modern
thinking which calls for a transformation
of and a break from the old aeon or old world.
We often
think of the Revelation as a quite unique book with nothing else like it; but it is
of the first importance to remember that in fact the Revelation is the one representative in the NT
of a type
of literature called
apocalyptic literature which was very common between the Testaments and in NT times.
The biblical writers were fallible persons like ourselves and could have made mistakes, the more probably because current Jewish
thought was full
of apocalyptic imagery.
The only connection which would be possible for his
thought would be that which is here and there expressed in Jewish
apocalyptic, namely, that in the blessed time
of the end the first age
of creation, with Paradise and its felicity, will return.
These interpreters hold that Jesus used the phrase only in its ordinary sense
of «man,» and that some community in which the Gospel tradition was being formed, itself
thinking of Jesus as the
apocalyptic Son
of Man, read that meaning back into Jesus» words.
Denise, I
think the consensus is here — if consensus is allowed in terms
of being on their own journeys, even NP is leery
of all beliefs — anyways, the consensus arrived at by Contextual epistemology, not Foundational, as it can not be seen as a given, is that Jesus did not even exist, so hence he can not even be a failed
apocalyptic prophet.
Their
thinking was largely affected by Jewish
apocalyptic conceptions, according to which history had fallen under the dominion
of demonic powers; when «the fullness
of time» should come, God would engage these powers in battle, would defeat and destroy them and their human agents, and would inaugurate a new and unimaginable order
of blessedness, righteousness and peace.
Apocalyptic thought implies an epoch, a period
of time, before the triumph.