Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Eschatology, cont'd
I had mentioned last week that John's eschatology and Jesus's eschatology were, although radically different in execution, near-identical in end goals. However, a comment Professor Silliman left on that post got me to think a bit further, which led me to the realization that the two movements are also different in terms of how they view those end goals. Apocalyptic eschatology spends all its energy waiting for the overturning of society. Since sapiential eschatology, however, uses its energy trying to bring about those changes, it doesn't matter if the change is never fully realized -- if the arbitrary power structures remain in place -- because the process of working towards those changes is just as, if not more, important than the goal itself.
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So Jesus' ideals follow more the concept "doing good because someone has to do it", instead of John's idea of just waiting for everything to happen for you? Or am I over-simplifying this?
ReplyDeleteThat's a neat and concise way of summing it up, I think. Or perhaps 'doing good even though/because nobody else is.'
DeleteI'm not sure if you're oversimplifying the issue, although I would be inclined to agree. Jesus was trying to enact the kingdom of God, ergo, the process of doing so was just as much, if not more important, than the realistic notion of that kingdom coming to complete fruition.
ReplyDeleteRemember that John wasn't just waiting for God's violent intervention to fix the world -- he was actively preparing people for it, partly in hopes of showing God that the community was deserving of it. That is, he was also trying to hurry it along. In the process, of course, the relationships he forged among his followers as a community of the ready may well have had some features of Jesus' present/sapiential kingdom of god. So however much Jesus' understanding of the timing differed from John's, many of the relevant behaviors might have been borrowed from John (baptizing people in the Jordan is a little like the psychosocial healing of lepers by embracing them...)
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