Sharpe Eschatology 2013
Sharpe Eschatology 2013
Sharpe Eschatology 2013
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203
On Eschatology and
the Return to Religion
Matthew Sharpe
1 P. Kelly, Blair sees the Real Power of Faith, The Australian, 28 July 2011, <http://www.
theaustralian.com.au/news/features/blair-sees-the-real-power-in-faith/story-e6frg6z6-
1226102974094>, accessed September 2011.
2 I. Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, USA, Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 1999, p. 368.
3 J. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, London, Blackwell, 1993, p. 15;
cf. p. 267, p. 358.
4 The locus classicus here is John Milbanks Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason.
For Milbank, science is just a particular form of narrative practice that has theorised
internally its peculiar specificity, simply by concentrating on experimental knowledge
[but] one can very often give different theoretical accounts of the same successful or
unsuccessful experiment (p. 270). We simply cannot assume, says Milbank who here
echoes Montaigne, Nietzsche and Lyotard, that different cultural discourses are approxima-
tions to the same external (even if not independently specifiable) reality ... (p. 343). Rather, there
is a plurality of competing discourses, and theology must have the metadiscursive right to
position, qualify, or criticise other discourses. Otherwise, as Milbank warns in his opening
salvos, these discourses will position theology: for the need for an ultimate organising logic
... cannot be wished away (p. 1). The good news of epistemological and cultural relativism
is that a revitalized public theology need not feel that the alleged advances of modern
knowledge are any obstacle to the credibility of its metaphysical claims: for these claims are
no less or more narratival than would-be secular accounts. Compare also J. Milbank, G. Ward
and C. Pickstocks Introduction: Suspending the Material: the Turn of Radical Orthodoxy,
in J. Milbank, G. Ward and C. Pickstock (eds), Radical Orthodoxy, London, Routledge, 1999.
5 This return to religion in theory has been well documented, sometimes under the heading
of a post-secular turn. For a recent survey, including of Slavoy Zizek, Terry Eagleton and
Theodor Adorno, see R. Boer, Criticism of Heaven; On Marxism and Theology Volume 1 (of 5),
Brill, United Kingdom, 2007.
6 D. Leigh, Iraq War Logs Reveal 15,000 Previously Unlisted Civilian Deaths Leaked Pentagon
Files Contain Records of More than 100,000 Fatalities Including 66,000 Civilians, 23 October
2010, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq>,
accessed 20 November 2010.
7 E. Kaplan, With God on Their Side, New York, The New Press, 2005, p. 9.
8 On this topic, see, for example, the essays collected in E. Qureshi, The New Crusades:
Constructing the Muslim Enemy, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003.
9 M. Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm, London, I. B. Tauris, 2004, p. 67, and see below.
10 Kaplan, God on Their Side, pp. 1315.
11 47 per cent of the French in 2003 declared themselves agnostic. Figures courtesy of Wikipedia
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Europe>, accessed September 2011.
12 Eurobarometer Poll 2005, <http://ec.europa.eu/public.opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_225_
report_en.pdf>.
16 M. Weber, Religious Groups (The Sociology Of Religion), in G. Roth and C. Wittich (eds),
Economy and Society Volume 1, Berkeley, University Of California Press, 1978.
17 On this, see P. Bailey, Voltaire and Confucius: French Attitudes towards China in the Early
Twentieth Century, History of European Ideas, vol. 14, no. 6, 1992, pp. 81737.
18 Weber, Religious Groups, p. 579.
19 On the distinction between religions of legitimation, and religions of consolation see Weber,
Religious Groups, pp. 4902, 41215.
20 On this distinction and its sociopolitical implications, see Weber, Religious Groups, pp.
439441, 457, 4667, 473, 487, 5289, 5778.
4:17), Jesus Christ will return (Matthew 24: 29-31), and the
Marriage of the Lamb or of Jesus and his faithful will occur
(Revelation 19:8-10). Meanwhile, the antichrist will have appeared
(cf. I John 2:18) to unite his forces on earth in a sinister global
government, perhaps claiming to be Jesus but certainly profiting in
deceit. He will take Jerusalem, and perform the abomination of
desolation, by desecrating the Temple (Daniel 11:31; 12:11;
Matthew 24:15). The majority of the Christian fundamentalist
churches are pre-millennialists. This means they maintain that
Armaggedon, the final Holy War between Christ and the Devil on
the fields of Meggido in Israel, will take place at the end of the
Tribulation. It will see Satan cast into Hell for 1000 years, heralding
a millennial period of Christs earthly dominion (Revelation 20: 1-6),
alongside the living faithful and the resurrected Saints, a number of
exactly 144,000 according to the Jehovahs witnesses. During this
period of peace the natural order of the world will be
fundamentally changed. Poverty, wickedness, corruption, hunger
and sickness will be cured in ways previously only imagined.
Nevertheless, at the end of the millennium, Satan will be allowed
to return, to go out to deceive the nations from all corners of the
earth (Revelation 20: 7). For a second time, then, Christ will wage
war with and defeat Satan, casting him for a second time, forever
into a lake of fire and brimstone. At this time, a second resurrection
will occur, of all those not resurrected after the Tribulation. The last
judgement follows, with all those found not written into the Book
of Life being cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:11, 13-15). Jesus
23 For example, R. L. Hymers, Jr, The Prime Prophecies of the Pauline Epistles, taught at
Louisiana Baptist University, Shreveport, Louisiana on 25 May 2003, <http://
www.rlhymersjr.com/Articles/05-25-03PaulineEpistles.html>, accessed September 2011.
24 Nor does it capture the extraordinary, peculiar attention paid in particular to numbers in the
text, all of which are charged with heightened significance. But that is not our concern here.
25 On the importance of the advent of the nuclear age, and the state of Israel, in shaping
contemporary fundamentalist eschatology, see A. M. Lahr, Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic
Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelism, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2007, esp. Introduction, pp. 223.
26 Northcott, Angel Directs Storm, p. 64.
27 Northcott, Angel Directs Storm, p. 65.
28 R. H. Smith, Apocalypse, A Commentary on Revelation in Words and Images, Collegeville,
Liturgical Press, 2000, p. xiii.
29 S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. and ed. J. Strachey, Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21, London, Hogarth Press, 1961, p. 21.
30 Figures from <http://www.good.is/post/more-than-40-percent-of-americans-believe-the-
rapture-is-coming/>, accessed September 2011.
now past and has conscience against it.37 To the extent that pre-
millennialists have made falsifiable predictions about the second
coming, our presence here today proves that they have been wrong
and wrong again. Most famously in modern times, the Millerites
predicted that Christ would return between 21 March 1843 and 21
March 1844, then, that failing, boldly revised the prediction to 22
October 1844, precipitating what is called the Great Disappoint-
ment.38 In our times, Edgard Whisenant predicted 1988, and then
following The Final Shout: Rapture Report 1989, 1992 and 1995. In
2012 Hal Camping set 21 May for the apocalypse, and was then
forced to move the date back to 21 October incidentally at 6 pm,
adjusted for time-zone. The overwhelming consensus in Biblical
scholarship of the last two centuries is that the apocalypses of Daniel
and of John were attempts to come to terms with the Jews, then the
Christians, persecution at the hand of the Romans: the so-called
historicist or preterist position. The apocalyptic prophecies attributed
to Christ in the gospels looked forward to the destruction of the
second temple after the Jewish revolt in 70 CE, or else describe the
spiritual transformation wrought by Christs own ministry. Again,
the Catholic a-millennialist position established since Augustine
in the fourth century CE deems all attempts at anticipating the
historical eschaton heretical. According to Augustines City of God,
redemptive grace had been bestowed in Christ and his resurrection,
in the past: the Church is already the Kingdom of Christ and the
Kingdom of Heaven.39 The millennium of the biblical texts is a
symbolic description of the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church,
and the internal destiny of the soul;40 and while Augustine preserves
a view of the seven 1000-year ages of the world since creation, the
end of history is indefinitely postponed.41 Secular history (the
saeculum of all, passing time this side of the heavenly kingdom) and
the civitas terrenne or diaboli as such is devalued by Augustine.42 It
is a realm in which true Christians are as peregrini, in contrast to the
37 K. Lowith, Meaning in History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949, p. v; see also pp.
56, where Lowith argues along Voegelins lines that to assign a meaning to History as a
whole is to assign it a purpose, which would have to be outside of history.
38 See J. M. Court, Approaching the Apocalypse: A Short History of Christian Millennerianism,
London, I. B. Tauris, 2008, pp. 11922.
39 Augustine, Civitas Dei cited in J. Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, Stanford, Stanford University
Press, 2009, p. 80.
40 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, p. 80.
41 Lowith, Meaning in History, p. 171.
42 On the meaning of secular as the passing age, this side of the new age of the rule of God, see
O. ODonovan, The Desire of the Nations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp.
212.
43 Voegelin New Science p. 109; Lowith, Meaning in History, pp. 166, 168, 16970; campare
Augustine, Civitas Dei, p. XVIII, p. 46.
44 See S. Freud, The Schreber Case, London, Penguin Classics, 2003. According to Freud, the end
of world delusion metaphorises a loss of object-cathexes, attachments of the subject to
external objects, and a retreat of libido back into earlier, narcissistic investments. See M.
Sharpe and J. Faulkner, Understanding Psychoanalysis, London, Acumen, 2007, pp. 1215.
45 R. Hofstaedter, The Paranoid Style in US Politics and Other Essays, United States, Harvard
University Press, 1996. For the original article, see Harpers Magazine, November 1964, pp.
7786, <http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/ the_paranoid_mentality/the_
paranoid_style.html>, accessed September 2011.
46 C. B. Strozier and K. Boyd, The Psychology of Apocalypticism, The Journal of Psychohistory,
vol. 37, no. 4, Spring 2010, p. 281.
47 Strozier and Boyd, The Psychology of Apocalypticism, p. 284.
48 Hofstaedter, in T. D. Daniels, R. J. Jensen and A. Lichtenstein, Resolving the Paradox of
Politicised Christian Fundamentalism, Western Journal of Speech Communication, vol. 49, Fall
1985, p. 254.
56 See M. Ostow, Apocalyptic Thinking in Mental Illness and Social Disorder, Psychoanalysis
of Contemporary Thought, vol. 11, 1988, pp. 28597.
57 N. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the
Middle Ages, London, Paladin, 1970, pp. 4851. On Zevi, see eg. M. Himmelfarb, The
Apocalypse: A Brief History, Chicester, Malden, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 1435; also the locus
classicus, G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality,
London, Allen and Unwin, 1971, esp. pp. 287336.
58 Landes in Strozier and Boyd, Psychology of Apocalypticism, p. 278.
59 See M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism The Version of 1905, London,
Penguin, 2002; also Weber, Religious Groups, pp. 5724.
60 Differently, Daniels, Jensen and Lichtenstein propose that political activism to restore biblical
Law in America is seen as necessary for evangelization since as per Pauls Letter to the
Romans, the sense of ones sinfulness which animates repentance requires consciousness of
such Law, in Resolving the Paradox, esp. pp. 2604.
61 Schaeffer in Daniels, Jensen and Lichtenstein, Resolving the Paradox, p. 262. On the
political turn of the evangelicals after the 1970s, see Angela M. Lahr, Millennial Dreams and
Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism, Oxford University
Press, pp. 18797.
62 Members of eschatological groups, moved by their longing for the new heaven and earth
their prophecy imagines, must in the absence of strong countervailing authority also
be tempted to press for the end, to use Gershom Scholems term, used in the context of
Jewish messianism. See Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, pp. 1415.
63 Schaeffer, The Christian Manifesto, cited in Daniels, Jensen and Lichtenstein, Resolving the
Paradox, p. 258.
68 For example, R. Smolinski, The Eschatological Limits of Puritan Typology in New England,
in The New England Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 3, 1990, pp. 35795; J. H. Smith, The Promised Day
of the Lord: American Millennialism and Apocalypticism 17351783, in Richard Conners
(ed.), Anglo-American Millennialism, from Milton to the Millerites, Leiden, Brill, 2004, pp.
11550; Baumgartner, Longing for the End, pp. 119132.
69 Northcott, Angel Directs the Storm, pp. 14, 16, 24.
70 For example. H. Kung, Great Christian Thinkers, pp. 9498; also M. Russell, The Political Idea
of the Christian Identity Revisited, in P. Quadrio (ed.), Politics and Religion in the New
Century, Australia, University of Sydney, 2010, pp. 1578, 164.
71 Compare on this point, esp. Lowith, Introduction, Meaning in History, pp. 610; also A.
Camus, The Rebel, trans. J. OBrien, London, Penguin, 1971, p. 190.
72 See esp. N. Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith,
United States, Yale University Press, 1993.
Socio-political Argument
82 And his hostility to modernity much deeper and more sweeping than is Camus.
83 Voegelin, New Science, pp. 1212.
84 Weber, Religious Groups, p. 499.
85 Voegelin, New Science, p. 122.
86 Although we cannot pursue it here, Voegelin shares a near-vocational overestimation of the
power of ideas in making history with several other philosophers of history.
87 Weber, Religious Groups, p. 519.
dualism and the transmigration of souls.88 Here the problem and its
solution are historicized. The unrequited, manifest sufferings of the
present time are either the justified response of the God to past sins,
inherited original sin, or breaches of covenant. In all events, justice
will be divinely restored at the end time, when the wicked will be
justly punished and the good inherit a transformed nature.89 These
tropes are absent from many non-Western religions.
On the other hand, any social intellectualist explanation of the
continuing appeal of apocalyptic eschatology will clearly be in-
sufficient, given the socio-political and psychological constituents
of human motivation. To take the, for us, foundational case of
Jewish messianism: different scholars have noted the direct
connection between this world conception and the Hebrews ancient
status in the post-exilic period as a politically disempowered
nation, successively colonised by the four beasts of surrounding,
more powerful empires. Yet the hope for a mashiah, anointed King,
was for a long period not given a cosmological, supernaturalist
framing. Still, for a philosophical rabbi like Maimonides, messian-
ism for instance in the Song of Solomon (Solomon, 17.37-8)
expresses disappointed political hopes and a longing for vengeance
against the occupying powers, and looks to future political and
military solutions. The supernatural component to Jewish
messianism was developed only after the Maccabean revolt, with
the Book of Daniel (c. 165 BCE) arguably still a political tract
necessarily coded in order to avoid censorship and aimed at
consoling the Hassidim (righteous ones) who had been subject to
persecution at the hands of Antiochus IV.90 Gershom Scholem,
probably the foremost scholar of Jewish mysticism and
apocalypticism, posits a direct correlation between political
disempowerment and apocalyptic supernaturalism:
The stronger the loss of historical reality in Judaism during
the turmoil surrounding the destruction of the second
temple and of the ancient world, the more intense became
consciousness of the cryptic character and mystery of the
Messianic message ... Jewish messianism is in its origins and
88 Weber, Religious Groups, pp. 52326; compare Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,
pp. 127136.
89 Weber, Religious Groups, pp. 519523.
90 Compare N. Moskowitz, The Book of Daniel, Part I: A Theological-Political Tractate
Addressed to the Judean Hasidim Under Seleucid-Greek Rule, Jewish Bible Quarterly, vol. 38,
no. 2, 2010, <http://jbq.jewishbible.org/assets/Uploads/382/bookdaniel1.pdf>, accessed
September 2011; also Himmelfarb, Apocalypse, pp. 556.
94 See Weber, Religious Groups, pp. 441, 467, 473, 4856, 4912, 493, 496, 507, 5779.
95 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 60.