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What happens at the end of our lives and of the course of history? Will God bring about a just and peaceful world? What lies beyond this realm, and what can we know of the beings who dwell there? In Death, the End of History, and Beyond, Greg Carey offers resources for understanding multiple, even conflicting, ways that the Bible imagines these ultimate realities. Carey opens the Scriptures with a breadth of insight that acknowledges its diversity of viewpoints about what lies beyond the veil, centering hope in God's action to bring good out of evil in our lived realities, in our personal journeys through death, and in visions of resurrection and justice restored. An appendix on preaching also invites clergy to help their communities imagine when and how eschatology can inform our lives today.

Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, numerous apocalyptical and messianic movements came to the fore across Eurasia and North Africa, raising questions about possible interconnections. Why were eschatological movements so pervasive in early modern times? This volume provides some answers to this question by exploring the interconnected histories of confessions and religions from Moscow to Cusco. It offers a broad picture of Christian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish and Islamic eschatological movements from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, thereby bridging important and long-standing gaps in the historiography. Apocalypse Now will appeal to both researchers and students of the history of early modern religion and politics in the Christian, Jewish and Islamic worlds. By exploring connections between numerous eschatological movements, it gives a fresh insight into one of the most promising fields of European and global history.

This volume of essays by Christopher Rowland, written during the last forty years, concerns the nature of apocalypticism and its reception history. His reading of apocalyptic texts is thereby colored not by immersion into the study of'apocalyptic'in biblical scholarship, but by acquaintance with early Jewish mysticism. One of the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions of'mystic'is one which helps to understand not only the mystical but also apocalyptic: a mystic is'one who believes in the possibility of the spiritual apprehension of truths that are inaccessible to the understanding.'This definition and the importance of the opening word of Revelation as an apocalypse - in other words, a writing whose form is revelatory -, are explored in these essays. As this understanding of apocalypticism contrasts with the eschatological character predominant in modern biblical scholarship, a theme of this collection therefore is that the eschatological elements in apocalyptic texts are not the determining feature of what constitutes'apocalyptic,'which must especially attend to the revelatory form of apocalyptic texts such as Revelation. The pervasiveness of apocalyptic and mystical elements in the New Testament is a consistent thread throughout the volume, which also includes consideration of the apocalyptic and eschatological thought of Joachim of Fiore and his disciples, the early modern appeal to visions and revelation, and culminates in the texts and images of William Blake (1757-1827). The collection's concern with the history of the reception of such ideas contributes to the vindication of Ernst Käsemann's view of apocalyptic being the'mother of Christian theology'.

In all religions, in the medieval West as in the East, ideas about the past, the present and the future were shaped by expectations related to the End. The volumes Cultures of Eschatology explore the many ways apocalyptic thought and visions of the end intersected with the development of pre-modern religio-political communities, with social changes and with the emergence of new intellectual and literary traditions. The two volumes present a wide variety of case studies from the early Christian communities of Antiquity, through the times of the Islamic invasion and the Crusades and up to modern receptions, from the Latin West to the Byzantine Empire, from South Yemen to the Hidden Lands of Tibetan Buddhism. Examining apocalypticism, messianism and eschatology in medieval Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist communities, the contributions paint a multi-faceted picture of End-Time scenarios and provide their readers with a broad array of source material from different historical contexts. The first volume, Empires and Scriptural Authorities, examines the formation of literary and visual apocalyptic traditions, and the role they played as vehicles for defining a community's religious and political enemies. The second volume, Time, Death and Afterlife, focuses on key topics of eschatology: death, judgment, afterlife and the perception of time and its end. It also analyses modern readings and interpretations of eschatological concepts.

Para promover la devoción a las ánimas y popularizar en Europa los dogmas del purgatorio, las indulgencias y los sufragios como medio de salvación, desde el siglo XV hasta el XVII la iglesia tridentina y postridentina se apoyó en unos sencillos relatos, anónimos en su mayoría, denominados ejemplos e exempla.

Ernst Baasland, Synthetischer Dualismus in der Bibel. Zur wissenschaftlichen Lebensarbeit Sverre Aalens (1909 - 1980) Sverre Aalen, Heilsverlangen und Heilsverwirklichung1. Apokalyptische Texte im Alten Testament2. Das Buch Daniel3. Zur Abgrenzung des Materials4. Das Buch der Jubiläen5. Traktate des äthiopischen Henoch-Buchs6. Die Psalmen Salomos7. Die Testamente der Zwölf Patriarchen8. Die Texte von Qumran9. Die Himmelfahrt Moses - Das Testament des Mose10. Die Bilderreden des äthiopischen Henoch-Buchs und der Rabbinismus des 1.Jahrhunderts n.Chr.11. Die Esra-Apokalypse12. Die syrische Baruch-Apokalypse13. Die slavische Henoch-Apokalypse und die AbrahamApokalypse sowie weitere verwandte Schriften

The meaning of'the millennium'--the thousand-year reign of Christ spoken of in Revelation 20--has been controversial for much of the church's history, and even the main perspectives on the matter turn out to be more variegated than is often realized. This book takes the oldest of those options, premillennialism, and offers an excellent introduction to a variety of models of premillennialism currently available, including classical dispensationalism, progressive dispensationalism, historic premillennialism, thematic premillennialism, and historic premillennialism in Asian context. The product of collaboration between a systematic theologian and a New Testament scholar, this book provides a fascinating reference tool for anyone interested in what Scripture teaches about the last things of redemptive history, the Parousia, and the millennial kingdom.

Catholic Dogmatics is the definitive text on the structure of Catholic dogmatics, written by one of the most important authors in the Catholic Church today. The author is highly placed in the Vatican hierarchy. Cardinal Mueller oversaw the collected writings of Pope Benedict. The book will enhance both the scholar's and lay reader's knowledge of dogmatics.

Prophecy and millennial speculation are often seen as having played a key role in early European engagements with the new world, from Columbus's use of the predictions of Joachim of Fiore, to the puritan ‘Errand into the Wilderness'. Yet examinations of such ideas have sometimes presumed an overly simplistic application of these beliefs in the lives of those who held to them. This book explores the way in which prophecy and eschatological ideas influenced poets, politicians, theologians, and ordinary people in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Chapters cover topics ranging from messianic claimants to the Portuguese crown to popular prophetic almanacs in eighteenth-century New England; from eschatological ideas in the poetry of George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet, to the prophetic speculation surrounding the Evangelical revivals. It highlights the ways in which prophecy and eschatology played a key role in the early modern Atlantic world.

Starting in the 1530s with John Bale, English reformers found in the apocalyptic mysteries of the Book of Revelation a framework for reinterpreting the history of Christianity and explaining the break from the Roman Catholic Church. Identifying the papacy with antichrist and the Roman Catholic Church with Babylon, they pictured the reformation as a departure from the false church that derived its jurisdiction from the devil. Those who took the initiative in throwing off the Roman yoke acted as instruments of God in the cosmic warfare against the power of evil that raged in the latter days of the world. The reformation ushered in the beginning of the end as prophesied by St. John.Reformers and Babylon examines the English apocalyptic tradition as developed in the works of religious thinkers both within and without the Established Church and distinguishes the various streams into which the tradition split. By the middle of Elizabeth's reign the mainstream apocalyptic interpretation was widely accepted within the Church of England. Under Charles I, however, it also provided a vocabulary of attack for critics of the Established Church. Using the same weapons that their ancestors had used to justify the reformation in the first place, reformers like John Bastwick, Henry Burton, William Prynne, and John Lilburne attacked the Church of England's growing sympathies with Romish ways and eventually prepared parliamentarians to take up arms against the royalist forces whom they saw as the forces of antichrist. Scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century intellectual history will welcome this closely reasoned study of the background of religious dissent which underlay the politics of the time.

Die aktualisierte Auflage der bewährten Eschatologie behandelt alle Fragen der'Lehre von den letzten Dingen'. Neben klassischen Themen (etwa Leib/Seele, Gericht, Himmel/Hölle) stellt sie sich aktuellen theologischen Herausforderungen und politischen Instrumentalisierungen von Jenseitsvorstellungen.

We are in the last days. Living well in such a time depends upon believing that Christ has conquered sin and death and is ruling today, alive at God's right hand. These essays on the end time will help Christians live like people who really have eternal life already--the life of the Spirit of Christ who lives and moves in both Christ and Christians. Whether your question is about heaven, the soul, hell, the new earth, about how believers in the Old Testament thought of these things, or about what redemptive progress God brought by the resurrection of Christ, you will find answers here. Readers will also be warmly encouraged by the practical and realistic chapters about the Christian's calling in social and political matters and about the ways that the church's worship is a participation in heavenly realities. Central to everything about the end time is the fact that by dying and rising, Jesus Christ brought the whole world forward into the last days and has in principle brought Christians into a fullness that Moses and even Adam did not yet know. Read, and be encouraged!

Modern scholars have varied responses to apocalyptic narrative in the Synoptic Gospels. Some ignore it; others reinterpret it and don't think that Jesus'warning about persecution works in this setting. In order to understand apocalyptic in the New Testament, we need to understand Jewish apocalyptic, and its similarities and differences with Jesus. We need to know the key themes and where those themes develop in the Synoptic Gospels. Eschatological Relationships and Jesus begins by exploring the components of prophetic and apocalyptic eschatology (figurative language, history, sequence, and juxtaposition of ideas) and then develops some of the major theological themes in Meyer, Wright, and Progressive Dispensationalism from the Synoptic Gospels. As readers work through Eschatological Relationships and Jesus, they begin to see and interpret the various patterns and themes in the eschatological discourses. Samples from Mark's Gospel to Matthew and Luke and a table of key eschatological relations makes this study a practical guide to the gospels.

People still believe that Jesus is returning to earth... and soon! Like Jesus first followers, millions of Christians hold fast to the idea that we are living in the last days, yet here we are, two thousand years later, still waiting. In The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to the End Times Jeffrey C. Pugh recounts his own brief sojourn in an apocalyptic cult. Looking back now, as a respected professor of theology, he tackles how Christianity in general, and the evangelical world in particular, have been captivated by the theological innovation known as Dispensationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century.The embrace of this idea has influenced millions, leading to such cultural phenomena as the Left Behind books and movies, and Christian Zionism. But Pugh argues that the belief in the imminent return of Christ has in fact been harmful to Christian engagement with the world, and he builds this argument on a thorough and occasionally sassy reading of biblical texts and church history.

Early Christian writers preferred to speak of the coming resurrection in the most bodily way possible: the resurrection of the flesh. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth took the same avenue, daring to speak of humans'eternal life in rather striking corporeal terms. In this study, Nathan Hitchcock pulls together Barth's doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, anticipating what the great thinker might have said more systematically in volume V of his Church Dogmatics. Provocatively, Hitchcock goes on to argue that Barth's description of the resurrection--as eternalization, as manifestation, as incorporation--bears much in common with some unlikely programs and, contrary to its intention, jeopardizes the very contours of human life it hopes to preserve. In addition to contributing to Barth studies, this book offers a sober warning to theologians pursuing eschatology through notions of participation.

Millions of American Christians see U.S. support for the State of Israel as a God-ordained responsibility. American sympathies for the State of Israel are consistently and often substantially higher than for Arab states or Palestinians. More Desired than Our Owne Salvation is a compelling historical look at how this consensus came to be. In 2006, John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel. Several high-level policymakers, both Christians and Jews, rushed to endorse the effort. Soon, however, questions arose about anti-Catholic and anti-Islamic ideas contained in Hagee's preaching and writing. More Desired than Our Owne Salvation shows that these ideas draw from a long heritage of Anglo-American Protestant culture. Contemporary Christian Zionism may say more about American culture than most Americans care to admit. The roots of Christian Zionism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant interpretations of scripture and history formed not only Anglo-American theology but the foundations of American culture itself. Black Protestant views show, for instance, how Christian Zionism is connected intimately with racial identity and American exceptionalism, not just Christian beliefs. Martin Luther and John Calvin's identification of the Pope and the Turk as the two heads of the Antichrist echoes in our world today. Robert O. Smith has identified an English Protestant tradition of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation that shaped Puritan commitment. In New England, this tradition informed the foundations of American identity. From the Cartwright Petition in 1649 to the Blackstone Memorial in 1891 to the work of John Hagee today, Christian Zionism has prepared the ground for Christians in the U.S. to see the modern State of Israel as a prophetic counterpart, a modern nation-state whose preservation'may be more desired then our owne salvation.'

Israel's Messiah and the People of God presents a rich and diverse selection of essays by theologian Mark Kinzer, whose work constitutes a pioneering step in Messianic Jewish theology. Including several pieces never before published, this collectionilluminates Kinzer's thought on topics such as Oral Torah, Jewish prayer, eschatology, soteriology, and Messianic Jewish-Catholic dialogue. This volume offers the reader numerous portals into the vision of Messianic Judaism offered in Kinzer's Postmissionary Messianic Judaism (2005).

Verständliche Aufarbeitung eines komplexen Themas Die Erwartung eines radikalen Endes dieser Welt begegnet in der jüdischen und christlichen Tradition seit der Antike, und bis heute gehört die Vorstellung vom nahen Weltuntergang zu den Glaubensüberzeugungen zahlreicher religiöser Sondergemeinschaften. Vom Holzschnitt bis zum Horrorfilm fand das Thema immer wieder Eingang in die populäre Kultur. Dieser Band bietet gezielte und präzise Informationen über die antike jüdische und frühchristliche Apokalyptik sowie eine anschauliche Darstellung der Geschichte des Phänomens von der Spätantike bis in die Gegenwart.

Israel's Messiah and the People of God presents a rich and diverse selection of essays by theologian Mark Kinzer, whose work constitutes a pioneering step in Messianic Jewish theology. Including several pieces never before published, this collection illuminates Kinzer's thought on topics such as Oral Torah, Jewish prayer, eschatology, soteriology, and Messianic Jewish-Catholic dialogue. This volume offers the reader numerous portals into the vision of Messianic Judaism offered in Kinzer's Postmissionary Messianic Judaism (2005). An introductory essay by editor Jennifer M. Rosner sets Kinzer's thought and writings in context.

The early part of this book is concerned with what it is in human existence that is addressed by the message of hope in the Scriptures. The final four chapters present that divine promise for human destiny and the understanding of it as it is reflected on in contemporary theology. Although directed mainly to advanced students of theology, this book discusses issues which are of interest to many believers today whose knowledge about matters of religion has not kept pace with their knowledge of the secular disciplines.