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Eschatology and Epistemology

Christian Ideas of Personal vs. Cosmic Eschatology

The Debate

Cosmic Eschatology

Personal Eschatology

Atheists/Positivists

Christian Response

Christ returns as king, brings whole world in harmony with God's design

Individuals survive death and persist in a divine state prior to final fulfillment

Belief in the end of the world as having meaning

  • There is no proof
  • It needs to verifiable
  • Christians use science as acts of God
  • The body is subject to chemistry and biology
  • The universe is heading for destruction, humans will be gone well before that
  • It does not need to be immediately verifiable
  • You cannot cut off the beliefs and just focus on the eschatology
  • The end is spatial as opposed to temporal
  • God has plans that have not been revealed yet
  • God exists on a different plane

Pop Culture

Background

Types of Pop Culture Interrogated

Purposes of looking at pop culture in order to understand the evolution of popular eschatology:

  • Myths of pop culture celebrate and ritualize social and political values of American society
  • eschatologies in American pop culture are fictional counterparts of American "civil religion"

Initially, popular eschatology was a way to make sense of the fears associated with modern life, account for evil and understand the implications of the end of social and political order

With respect to modern pop culture (which encompasses a diverse range of expression), focusing primarily upon:

  • Novels
  • Video games
  • Movies
  • Television series
  • Websites

Syncretic conflation of secular domains with Christian eschatological ideas to create "popular eschatology" -- reconciliation of the opposing ideologies of secularism and religion

Christian Eschatology Vs. Science

Importance of Eschatology to Christianity

Freeze Vs. Fry

Freeze- The universe expands to a point where the temperature falls to absolute zero

Limited to last things:

  • General Resurrection
  • Last Judgment
  • Heaven and Hell
  • End of World

Eschatology was fundamental to Jesus' mission (Albert Shweitzer)

Fry- The universe will condense upon itself and the temperature will rise to infinity

3 examples of responses to this belief

  • View eschatology as mythology, reinterpret it in scientific terms
  • Construct a "Non-Eschatological" Jesus
  • Combine future hopes for universal transformation with present hopes in the world
  • Not a new world, but a fixed world under Jesus
  • Happen both in the present and at the end of time

Christian Responses

Pessimistic Response

Physical Eschatology

Cosmology is irrelevant to eschatology

  • Science separate from Theology
  • Theology adapts to Science
  • Universe has no destiny, humanity does
  • After death become a part of God
  • Science provides continuity

Divine Intervention to Divine Education

Traditional Christian Eschatology

Modern Pop Culture Themes

"Christ will come again to hold a final judgment, to raise the dead, and to receive those who believe in him to participate in his eternal life that he shares with God the Father"

  • Affirmed an end to the present world of nature
  • Affirmed an end to human history

Persistent Themes

Emerged primarily out of World War II era

Five Basic Themes

Superhero Themes

  • Explicitly millennial, end of time scenarios, evident in both early and modern America (ex: John Edwards' Fire and Brimstone sermons,Mortal Kombat)

  • Images of destruction, moral decay, and rampant violence that (ex: Albrecht Durer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Batman)

Shift to Education

  • America as the savior of humanity, morality, and civilization
  • moral polarities of a spiritualized apocalyptic struggle
  • heroes called by a destiny to liberate a humanity that lacks consciousness it losses
  • Sacrificial nature of heroes
  • All echo images of Jesus as portrayed in Christianity, (or even elements of the Mahdi as portrayed in Islam)
  • possession of special powers (ex: superhero figures, such as Superman, Captain America, Batman)

  • suffering of mankind

  • judgement (ex: marking the good versus those who are evil)

  • messianism (ex: a redemptive quality that battles the evil)

  • millenialism (ex: the creation of a new wold order based on good -- representative of images of Eden)

(refer to imagery of The Dark Knight Rises)

Problematizing Popular Eschatology

  • 18th Century
  • Shift away from catastrophic apocalyptic beliefs
  • Luke 17:21
  • "the kingdom of God is 'within you'"
  • Revelation sought to guide humankind to a mature future of rational autonomy
  • adaptations insufficient in addressing the nuances and complexities of Christian eschatology
  • vehicle to justify the morally upright, universal "police" status of the United States -- puts nation on a moral pedestal
  • promotes unfair stereotypes about moralities of non-American or non-Christian institutions

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The Secularization of Christian Eschatology

Rediscovery of Eschatology

Kant: Humankind has hidden potential to reach perfect moral order but requires the assumption that God will hold individuals accountable for their earthly actions in the future life

Weiss (1892) was the first to return to traditional eschatology

  • kingdom of God will come from God alone without human cooperation
  • not a result of moral evolution
  • catastrophic event that will change the cosmic order
  • final judgment on the living and the dead

Hegel: "realized eschatology"

  • true freedom is rooted in communion with God -- effective only in Jesus
  • relevance of perfect human freedom realized during the Reformation
  • "Christian Freedom"

WWI caused many people to return to early Christian eschatological views

  • the war was perceived as an act of divine judgment on modern culture
  • later accepted that God does not want to annihilate his creation, but to redeem it

Schleiermacher: kingdom of God is the highest good of Christian ethical action

"Moralization of Jesus' procolomation of the kingdom of God" became more widely accepted

  • American Social Gospel
  • Religious Socialist
  • Roman Catholic (~1850)

Christian Eschatology:

Relationships with History, Pop Culture, Epistemology, Cosmology and Ethics

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