The End is Always Near!

The founding motives of a movement are baked into it for its entire lifespan. A movement cannot evolve beyond its original purpose.

Apocalypticism sees world history in the grip of warring forces, God and Satan, the spirits of truth and error, light and darkness … the old age has moved to its allotted end and the age of consummation is at hand, the age of the vindication of the elect and the redemption of the world.

Frank Moore Cross, Ancient Library, pg. 77

Christianity began as an apocalyptic movement. The world as it was known was about to end and be radically transformed by the coming of the Son of Man. The Faith does not make sense without that expectation. The end is always near, or the Church settles into stagnant dogma and tradition. However, the New Testament’s ethical teachings are less a handbook for ordinary moral living than instructions for how to conduct oneself in the last days.

For two thousand years, Christian predictions of the end have been wrong, yet the predictions keep coming. Christianity thrives on apocalypticism; without it, the movement loses its purpose.

The New Testament authors were wrong in their timing. They all expected the end to occur within their own generation. And what end exactly did they anticipate? It appears they awaited the end of Israel’s suffering and the end of the hostile world surrounding the Jewish people. It was a localized end—localized to the world they knew and lived in.

How did Israelite theology reach that point? Early in the Hebrew scriptures Israel worshiped YHWH. YHWH was more powerful than the other gods, and if Israel stayed loyal and obeyed him, he would protect them from their enemies and give them victory in their wars. Yet Israel was conquered, first by Assyria, then by Babylon. How could this be if YHWH is the most powerful? The answer: Israel was being punished by YHWH. He was using these other nations to discipline his own people. He had control over all the nations.

Good. But after the return from exile, after the second temple had been constructed, and after the Jews were living according to the law faithfully, there was still persecution. They remained under the thumb of the Greeks and then the Romans. What of this? God revealed the answer: a cosmic battle was underway. Spiritual forces of good and evil fought in the heavens. The persecution came down from the powers and principalities ruling in the skies.

This is the world into which Christianity was born. Jesus came as the apocalyptic Messiah. He came to radically change the world, restore his people, end death, and establish a good and glorious kingdom.

The problem is that did not happen. There is still death and suffering. If there is a kingdom with Jesus on the throne, it is not clear how that is manifest in our world today. For many Christians, the future hope has been reduced to an unfalsifiable claim about life after death not even found in scripture.

And so the apocalyptic expectation continues. On and on. The end is always near.

Eschatology in Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrian Influence (Link)

Faith in the events beyond life on this earth is attested in the Zoroastrian scriptures from the very first, from the Gāthās. This faith developed and became central to later Zoroastrianism so that it colors almost all aspects of the religious life. It also seems to have had a deep impact on neighboring religions, notably on Judaism, and through it on Christianity and Islam, as well as on Manicheism.

Click here for the article.

The Ten Modes of Aenesidemus: Core Arguments of Pyrrhonian Skepticism

  1. From the variety among animals
    Different species perceive the same objects differently (e.g., what is pleasant or nourishing to one animal is harmful or repulsive to another). We have no privileged reason to prefer human perceptions as the true ones.
  2. From the differences among human beings
    Individual humans (or groups) differ in constitution, temperament, and preferences, producing conflicting impressions of the same things. There is no neutral standard for deciding whose perception is correct.
  3. From the different structures of the sense organs
    The same object appears differently to different senses (e.g., a painting looks three-dimensional to sight but flat to touch). We cannot determine which sense (if any) reveals the object’s true qualities.
  4. From circumstances (or conditions)
    Perceptions vary with the observer’s state: health vs. illness, waking vs. sleeping, youth vs. age, motion vs. rest, hunger, drunkenness, emotional states, etc. The same thing can appear hot, sweet, or beautiful under one condition and the opposite under another.
  5. From positions, distances, and locations
    Objects change appearance according to where and how they are viewed (e.g., a tower looks round from afar and square up close; the same oar looks bent in water and straight out of it).
  6. From intermixtures
    We never perceive objects in isolation; they are always mixed with the medium (air, moisture, etc.) or with our own bodily conditions. What we experience is therefore a compound, not the pure object itself.
  7. From the quantities and compositions (or formations) of objects
    The same substance appears different according to its amount or arrangement (e.g., a few grains of sand feel rough, a larger quantity feels smooth; wine in small amounts invigorates, in large amounts intoxicates).
  8. From relativity
    Everything is relative to the perceiver, the circumstances, or other things. Nothing can be known as it is “in itself,” independently of these relations.
  9. From the frequency or rarity of occurrence
    Rare or unusual things strike us as more remarkable or valuable than common ones, even if they are not intrinsically different. Habit and familiarity alter our impressions.
  10. From customs, laws, beliefs, and dogmatic assumptions
    Different cultures, legal systems, religious traditions, and philosophical schools hold conflicting views about what is good, just, pious, or true. There is no agreed-upon criterion for deciding among them.

I suspend judgment on most claims to ultimate knowledge or inherent meaning, live by practical appearances and chosen commitments, confront the absence of cosmic significance without despair, and continue to treat certain moral distinctions as more than mere preference.

Tradition and Disruption by David Bentley Hart

Apocalypse, not dogma, is Christianity’s grounds for hope.

Once upon a time, Christianity grew and endured and even flourished over the course of many generations in total and blissful ignorance of any officially defined dogma, any single universally recognized canon of scripture, anything remotely like the systematic or dogmatic theologies of the coming ages of Christendom and after. I would add that, for most of that time, there was no single church hierarchy, and that the apostolic lines of succession preserved in later official chronicles were products partly of what one might call retroactive genealogy and partly of what one has to call pious misrepresentations; but we may leave that argument for another time. The point to make here is that, for the first several generations of Christians, anything so precise as a doctrinal symbol authorized by an episcopal council would have been either a curious superfluity of or ponderous encumbrance upon the faith. There had been divisions among Christians even in the apostolic era; the New Testament bears plenteous witness to this reality – so much so that the reader can easily get the impression that division was far more common than unity among the early Christian communities. But the principal reason that so many confessional and theological differences of such enormous consequence, on matters so basic to the faith, came to light within the church of the empire only well into the fourth century is that Christian faith and Christian hope had long been sustained by something quite different from official confessional unanimity. The differences had always been there, and in many respects were more or less as old as the faith itself; but for most of the time they were scarcely noticed, since the guiding concern of most Christians was not some perennial wisdom or immemorial doctrine handed down from the past, but rather the rapid approach of the Kingdom of God, the Age to Come, and the final advent of Christ as Lord of all things. Apocalyptic expectation – an eager certainty of the imminence of the full and final revelation of God’s truth in a restored and glorified cosmos – and not dogmatic purity was the very essence of faithfulness to the Gospel.

Click here to read the rest of the article.