The New Apocalyptic (original) (raw)
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Abstract
A comparison of early Christian, modern American Christian, and modern American secular apocalypticism
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From Apocalyptic Demonization to Theological Responsibility
Streit-Kultur: Journal für Theologie , 2024
This essay is a response to an invitation by the journal Streit-Kultur to ponder the question: 'Which values should not guide us?' As the effects of climate change, political upheaval and ravaging war are palpable, apocalyptic images as well as the concept ‘apocalyptic’ are today regularly invoked in politics, popular culture and mass media. This essay ponders the potential dangers of the apocalyptic imaginary, especially its tendency to encourage idealization of one’s own community and demonization of the other. As carriers of this complex biblical legacy, it argues, Christian churches have a special responsibility. A major task for theology today is therefore to provide perspectives and tools that allow churches as well as other civil agents to interpret and understand the affective, deeply rooted, but largely unconscious ways in which apocalyptic tropes and images resurface in response to today’s cultural and political challenges.
The End of Historicism? Reflections on the Adventist Approach to Biblical Apocalyptic - Part One
Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, 2003
Introduction In Part One of this article I addressed significant issues related to historicism and its application to biblical apocalyptic.1 Historicism, as a method for interpreting biblical apocalyptic, sees in books like Daniel and Revelation sequences of history moving from the prophet’s time to the end of history.2 This way of reading biblical apocalyptic, widely practiced up until the 19 Century, has not only been marginalized in current scholarship,3 but is being increasingly challenged in one of its remaining bastions, the Seventh-day Adventist Church.4 Recent scholarship, however, has exhibited a renewed interest in ancient apocalyptic, both inside and outside the Bible. Significant work has been done to define apocalyptic as a literary genre produced in the context of ancient apocalyptic eschatology.5 Scholars have recognized that apocalyptic literature does not come in a single, crisply-defined form.
Apocalypticism as Political Theology
Special issue, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2019
Open source: https://jcrt.org/archives/19.1/McCullough.pdf Essay #10 in “Thomas J. J. Altizer & Radical Theology,” special issue of Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 18, no. 4 (Winter 2019), guest edited by Lissa McCullough.
The United States: Messianism, Apocalypticism, and Political Religion
An examination of seedbeds of neofascism in the United States in 2008 Can a nation of civilized religions and civil religion produce political religions? Why should the United States be an exception? Beyond the marginal totalitarian groups that we easily identify as political religions, however, is a larger question of how an American sense of messianic destiny continuously pushes social and political movements toward political religion in ways that periodically gain mass support and influence public policy. The tendency toward political religion in the United States is fed by the apocalyptic and messianic tradition brought to our shores by certain forms of Protestantism; and the legacy of a civil religion that incorporates a messianic vision of national historic destiny.
Pharos Journal of Theology , 2021
The article has three parts. Firstly, we give an overview on how the Greek-Hellenistic imperialism provoked apocalypticism as a way of resistance to colonization (e.g. Egypt and Judah). Secondly, we show how the early African apocalypticism is very similar to that of the Ancient Near East. In many African countries, colonization was perceived as an apocalyptic phenomenon. Within this mind-set, apocalypticism became an information system that speculated about the true nature of time, space and being. This information system also gave solutions to how the coming destruction could be ameliorated by human ingenuity and actions. This ideology informed liberation movements like the Chimurenga and others. Thirdly, we analyse how the anti-imperial apocalypticism was calmed by an imperially formatted Christianity. Elements like the belief in heaven created a naïve world-denying attitude: 'this world is not my home I am just passing through.' Within the African apocalyptic mind-set, COVID-19 is an ambivalent phenomenon. Initially, it was perceived as God's judgment on the ungodly West, but perceptions quickly changed as it later ravaged Africa. Many government officials voiced that COVID-19 is a well-promoted hoax by fake news of prominent western media houses. Some dismissed the existence of the pandemic while others declared that the vaccine is the dreaded 666 mark of 'the beast' or the protective masks were blamed the masks of 'the beast'. COVID-19 apocalypticism thus can be understood as an anti-modern, xenophobic way of constructing identity.
Secular Apocalyptic Themes in the Nuclear Era
Wojcik, Daniel. “Secular Apocalyptic Themes in the Nuclear Era.” In The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America, pp. 97-132. New York and London: New York University Press, 1997. , 1997
Apocalyptic ideas traditionally have been associated with religious eschatologies, but American secular culture also has contributed to widespread beliefs, images, and expectations about the end of the world. The concept of a meaningless apocalypse brought about by human or natural causes is a relatively recent phenomenon, differing dramatically from religious apocalyptic cosmologies. Instead of faith in a redemptive new realm to be established after the present world is annihilated, secular doomsday visions are usually characterized by a sense of pessimism, absurdity, and nihilism.
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Future Clash: Popular American Apocalyptic Religion and its Contradictions
http://futureswewant.net/, 2019
This piece was commissioned for futureswewant.net/ by its curator Prof. Dr. Markus Schulz (http://markus-s-schulz.net/about/), Professor at the New School for Social Research and a co-fellow with me at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. The title plays on Alvin Toffler's best selling 1970 book, *Future Shock* (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future\_Shock), whose chief thesis is that we are living in a social situation of increasingly compressed time and disorientation produced by the advent of ever new technologies. The following essay takes up the apparent contradiction of best selling popular apocalyptic literature anticipating an imminent end producing massive sales and large fortunes for it creators who capitalize on the economic opportunities of a late industrial economy. The paradox is that belief in the swift return of Jesus is marketed in a way that participates in a neoliberal economy whose ideal is endless growth and production. The essay develops a lived religion approach to religious belief and practice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lived\_religion) in the analysis of popular apocalyptic expectations and draws on Michel de Certeau's notion of reading as a practice of daily life. Its chief thesis is that the consumption of popular apocalyptic literature by the American public serves a particular set of social settings in which it finds its salience, a salience otherwise absent under different social settings where readers also lead their lives. Future clash refers to the way we live in multiple anticipations of the future, in ways that are not always logically consistent with one another. As such the essay challenges the idea that people who consume apocalyptic popular literature are dupes of religious hucksters and argues that consumers use the literature for their own purposes which may not in fact have very much to do with belief about the end of the world or the intentions of those who produce it. The essay contains language that some may find offensive.
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How does one of the most important sociological theories of communication -the theory of social systems-deals with religion and more specifically with Christian apocalypticism? This article provides an answer to this question. The answer runs along the lines of connecting the apocalyptic eschatological teachings of Christianity to specific periods of dogma construction and organized religious communication.
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No part of the Bible has been as neglected in the mainline church as the apocalyptic literature. Biblical interpreters from the second century until the twentieth have paid too little attention to it. Systematic theologians traditionally relegated eschatology to the end of their treatment, and ignored apocalyptic. The clergy of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and mainline Protestant churches have slighted apocalyptic as well, often deliberately. Many people in both the pulpit and the pew today are wary of apocalyptic, even frightened by it.