Comments on: Defining Apocalypse, Apocalypticism, and Apocalyptic Eschatology

By: Apocalypticism and Destruction « kata ta biblia

Apocalypticism and Destruction « kata ta biblia — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:07:18 +0000

[...] defining characteristic of apocalyptic thought? If you look at the chart that I have included in a previous post, you see that “judgment/destruction of the wicked” is the only category that appears in [...]

By: Patrick George McCullough

Patrick George McCullough — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:31:00 +0000

E.: I think that your “Or” here may be misplaced. Why not both? The definition above is referring specifically to the genre of apocalypse. Certainly, the Book of Revelation is concerned with another, supernatural world (see chapter 21). But also note the second part of the definition added by Semeia 36: “to influence both the understanding and the behavior of the audience by means of divine authority.” The unique (if we can use that term) concept of the Jesus movement is that it is concerned with both: awaiting the coming judgment and the end of this age, while also believing that the end has been “inaugurated” with implications for present behavior.

By: E. Hermosillo

E. Hermosillo — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:08:02 +0000

My only response, again, would be that, when we speak of Jesus of Nazareth, can we really apply this to his ‘basileia’ movement?
“a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves ANOTHER, SUPERNATURAL world.

I think the main question which we’d have to ask if we are to define Jesus (and by extension, early Christianity) as being both eschatological and apocalyptic is motivation. Were Jesus and his followers motivated primarily by another, supernatural world? Or were they motivated by changing THIS world? Were their beliefs destructive, or were they transformative? Was theirs an interim ethic or was it permanent?

That is why I continue to hold that Jesus and his followers were eschatological but not apocalyptic (at least most of them). If I can steal J.D. Crossan’s term, theirs was an “inaugurative eschatology.”

By: slaveofone

slaveofone — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 01:17:01 +0000

“a group of scholars sought to expand this description to include social features of the apocalypse genre in Semeia 36:

[Such a work is] intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world and of the future . . .”

This is in line with a point that Tom Wright has repeated in his fabulous Christian Origins series, that the dramatic, metaphoric, symbolic, and cosmic language used by apocalyptic literature is a way of investing political, social, and perhaps even personal events with their divine significance. Because, like in wisdom literature, the deity was responsible for and worked through the system and order of nature, so by referring to nature in extraordinary ways, the extraordinary nature of the divine activity is better described. Oftentimes, the social context that gives rise to it is one of oppression.

In fact, I myself, as a person who feels oppressed by my own government and views my government as an oppressor, felt that the genre of apocalypse was well-suited for my own purposes. And thus, I wrote something called A Presidental Apocalypse
(http://www.echoofeden.com/digest/slaveofone/2008/09/23/a-presidential-apocalypse/) in which I not only described recent past history, but described ahead of time (correctly, I should add) not only who was going to be president but what would happen with Wall Street.

By: Hauger

Hauger — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:34:10 +0000

I can’t speak to these definitions.

But I can speak to one of my pet peeves. It irritates me to no end when writers use ‘apocalyptic’ as a noun (e.g. “Daniel wrote in the genre of apocalyptic”). Come on. Seriously?