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Eschatology and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Glenn Tinder
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Extract

THE outlook implicit in eschatology — that worldly events are moving toward a climax in which history will be terminated, and its trends overruled or fulfilled, according to a divine determination — is dim and implausible in the modern mind. The Biblical and Augustinian pictures of the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, and the Last Judgment, are likely to seem the most outworn vestments of religious faith; and even without these particular vestments, many find it difficult to conceive soberly of an ordained end of the world and history. This is especially clear in the case of the nonreligious. Their main ideologies during the past century or more, such as liberal progressivism, socialism, and communism, have all, in their typical forms, presupposed the finality of earthly developments. But even among religious people, the weakness of eschatology is manifest. It is true that there are some theologians, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Rudolf Bultmann, who have been concerned with eschatological ideas. But outside of small, intellectual circles eschatology has been largely monopolized by popular sects tending to specialize in lurid visions of “hellfire and brimstone.” The enfeeblement of eschatology even among the religious is apparent in the political outlook which is perhaps more intimately connected than any other in recent times with religious faith — conservatism. Burke and his followers have had remarkably little concern with the question of history's being ended and overruled. One can feel that in his attack on the French Revolution Burke was thinking less of God's judgment on all of history than he was of what he believed to be His manifest presence in history's residue of traditions and institutions. Thus, neither on the “left” nor on the “right,” and neither among the irreligious nor among the religious, are men today very much inclined to envision their history as subject to any sort of climactic interruption and judgment.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , July 1965 , pp. 311 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1965

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References

1 See Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York, 1951)Google Scholar and Bultmann, Rudolf, The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology (New York, 1957). 311Google Scholar

2 A useful review of the history of eschatological doctrines can be found in Lowith, Karl, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949)Google Scholar.

3 The dualistic presuppositions of eschatology are effectively brought out in Berdyaev, Nicolas, The Beginning and the End, trans, by French, R. M. (New York, 1952)Google Scholar.

4 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans, by Smith, Norman Kemp (London, 1958), pp. 65–91Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., pp. 384–421.

6 See Jaspers, Karl, The Origin and Goal of History, trans, by Bullock, Michael (New Haven, 1953)Google Scholar.

7 See, for example, Berdyaev's, chapter on hell in The Destiny of Man, trans, by Duddington, Natalie (New York, 1960)Google Scholar.

8 See Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Part One (Edinburgh, 1956)Google Scholar.

9 Over twenty centuries later another philosopher, likewise inspired by biological studies, stressed the creativity of time and defended the “open society”; this was Henri Bergson. See The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans, by Audra, R. Ashley and Brereton, Cloudesley (New York, 1954)Google Scholar.

10 For a fanciful but brilliant exploration of the antihistorical implications of science see Seidenberg, Roderick, Post-Historic Man: An Inquiry (Chapel Hill, 1950)Google Scholar.

11 Tocqueville's analysis of the effort to control history is found in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans, by Gilbert, Stuart (New York, 1955)Google Scholar.

12 See Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, Vol. II: The Doctrine of God (New York, 1957), first half-volume, pp. 406–439Google Scholar.

13 Cullmann, Oscar, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, trans, by Filson, Floyd V. (Philadelphia, 1950)Google Scholar.

14 Mark 13 contains one statement of this prophecy, as well as the phrases quoted (verses 7 and 8).

15 See the Church Dogmatics, Vol. II: The Doctrine of God, first halfvolume, pp. 608–677, entitled “The Eternity and Glory of God.”

16 Croce, Benedetto, History as the Story of Liberty (London, 1941)Google Scholar.