The Apocalyptic Literature (INTERPRETING BIBLICAL TEXTS) - Softcover

Cook, Stephen L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0687051967 ISBN 13: 9780687051960

Verlag: Abingdon Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Biblical texts create worlds of meaning and invite readers to enter them. When readers enter such textual worlds, which are strange and complex, they are confronted with theological claims. With this in mind, the purpose of the IBT series is to help serious readers in their experience of reading and interpreting by providing guides for their journeys into textual worlds. The focus of the series is not so much on the world behind the text as on the worlds created by the texts in their engagement with readers. Nowhere is the world of the biblical text stranger than in the apocalyptic literature of both the Old and New Testaments. In this volume, Stephen Cook makes the puzzling visions and symbols of the biblical apocalyptic literature intelligible to modern readers. He begins with definitions of apocalypticism and apocalyptic literature and introduces the various scholarly approaches to and issues for our understanding of the text. Cook introduces the reader to the social and historical worlds of the apocalyptic groups that gave rise to such literature and leads the reader into a better appreciation and understanding of the theological import of biblical apocalyptic literature. In the second major section of the book, Cook guides the reader through specific examples of the Bible’s apocalyptic literature. He addresses both the best-known examples (the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation) and other important but lesser known examples (Zechariah and some words of Jesus and Paul).

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(2001) Stephen L. Cook is Associate Professor of Old Testament, Virginia Theological Seminary. His Prophecy and Apocalypticism: The Postexilic Social Setting (Fortress Press, 1995) was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the professional journal Choice.

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The Apocalyptic Literature

By Stephen L. Cook

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2003 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-687-05196-0

Contents

FOREWORD, 
PREFACE, 
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, 
PART ONE ISSUES IN INTERPRETING APOCALYPTIC TEXTS, 
CHAPTER 1 ENCOUNTERING APOCALYPTIC WORLDS, 
CHAPTER 2 THE DANGER OF DOMESTICATING THE APOCALYPTIC TEXTS, 
CHAPTER 3 A NEW SEARCH FOR THE LITERAL SENSE OF APOCALYPTIC TEXTS, 
CHAPTER 4 THE SOCIAL WORLDS BEHIND THE APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE, 
PART TWO READING THE APOCALYPTIC TEXTS OF THE BIBLE, 
CHAPTER 5 EARLY APOCALYPTIC TEXTS AMONG THE PROPHETIC BOOKS, 
CHAPTER 6 THE BOOK OF DANIEL, 
CHAPTER 7 APOCALYPTICISM AND THE JESUS GROUP, 
CHAPTER 8 APOCALYPTIC WORLDS AND THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCHES, 
CHAPTER 9 THE BOOK OF REVELATION, 
NOTES, 
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Encountering Apocalyptic Worlds

Readers encounter wonderfully diverse worlds to explore in most parts of the Bible, but the apocalyptic parts—Revelation, for example, or Daniel—offer one that is uncommonly expansive and venturesome. Apocalyptic horizons dwarf other worlds within the Bible, encompassing the very destiny of the cosmos. Beyond its vastness, the apocalyptic world is illumining. Within its horizons, ethical lines are fully exposed. There is no difficulty identifying the allies of God or the enemies.

Entering an apocalyptic world within the Bible, the reader cannot remain neutral for long. Battle lines are drawn between the forces of good and evil. The stakes are profound, and they force a quick choosing of sides.

One's daily routines and encounters take on new meaning, framed against a supernatural battle. It is hard not to become engaged with present, earthly life when a purposeful, cosmic backdrop is revealed to lie behind it. Against such a backdrop, focused by the Bible's apocalyptic literature, individual existence brims with urgency and vibrancy.

Fantastic wonders and extreme horrors fill the apocalyptic worlds of the Bible. These worlds provoke readers' imaginations with highly metaphorical and mythological language. This colorful and elastic language is intrinsically flexible, encompassing diverse human situations and challenges and revealing heaven's cosmic perspective on them all.

The vista is breathtaking and enlivening but subject to much abuse. Too often, in fact, people read apocalyptic literature with misguided motives and interests. Eager for clairvoyant speculations or sensational entertainment, they miss the texts' real import. Apocalyptic texts aim much more to clarify the patterns and conflicts at stake in present experience than to speculate about the details of the future.

Wakefulness about God's interests and goals and their impact on present experience is the core concern of apocalyptic texts. A good example of how this works occurs in an apocalyptic hymn among the Dead Sea Scrolls, interpreted by John J. Collins, a major scholar of apocalyptic literature. Collins's discussion of the hymn illustrates the relevance of an apocalyptic world for the immediate situation of the document's author. Collins writes:

The space in which the author of this hymn moves is the cosmic space of Sheol and the eternal height. The time in which he moves is the eschatological period of wrath against [Satan]. The pattern of future tumult and deliverance is already manifest in his own experience.

The Bible's apocalyptic worlds can put off modern readers. The light of apocalyptic illumination is piercing, cutting through the many gray areas familiar from our daily experience. The tone of crisis and catastrophe of apocalypticism is jarring. It pulls the rug of normalcy out from under our feet.

Apocalyptic worlds even call into question common religious beliefs. The apocalyptic reign of God has nothing to do with many spiritual assumptions and aspirations typical of religious believers in the Western world. For example, it does not set its future hopes on an ethereal realm of heaven, populated by souls enjoying a beatific afterlife. Rather, its fervent hope centers firmly on a tangible, physical renewal of the cosmos and natural environment and of humanity and human community.

A realized, undisputed reign of God would necessarily contradict humanity's will to power, disrupting and overthrowing the powers and structures presently forging human history. It would have cataclysmic implications for earth's present systems of politics, economics, and society. In addition, since sovereignty over the whole cosmos—heaven and earth—is God's prerogative, an advent of God's ultimate reign would be cosmic in scope. Its impact would change nature, space, and time alongside human society.

Despite their strange and disconcerting traits, the Bible's apocalyptic worlds continually captivate large numbers of readers. These worlds must appeal to real, deep human needs.

As the twenty-first century begins, apocalyptic fears, hopes, and dreams are everywhere. Ongoing research into the apocalyptic imagination of the Dead Sea Scrolls enthralls scholars of religion and the educated public alike. The question of whether Jesus of Nazareth was an apocalyptic prophet currently stimulates even greater interest and debate. In popular culture, the Left Behind series of novels about the end of the world has now sold more than fifty million copies in twenty-one different languages. Three of the novels in the series have reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

Many people experienced the terrorist destruction of New York City's twin towers on September 11, 2001, as an apocalyptic specter. The baseline normalcy of things we took for granted suddenly appeared vulnerable and transitory in the wake of the disaster. What is more, our decent and acceptable world revealed a gory potential for demonic tragedy in a way hard to contest. United States culture as a whole was jarred—at least for a few months—with an existential shock usually confined to individual experience, when a person loses a parent or spouse to death and comes face-to-face with the unacceptable, the catastrophic.

The apocalyptic texts of the Bible come to terms with the very revelations about the world unveiled by the tragedy of September 11. They grapple with the unmistakable truth that components of "normal" life are fundamentally inhuman, completely unacceptable. Biblical apocalyptic worlds take for granted that space/time reality, as we know it, contains tangible signs of inherent catastrophe. They claim God has a plan of cosmic redemption to address that problem.

Despite modern suspicions and reluctance about the Bible's apocalyptic imagination, the apocalyptic dream may well be the only one worth dreaming. If our post-September 11 realism is accurate, the world suffers irredeemable wrong, and salvation is only possible with God's climactic intervention. The New Testament scholar Dale C. Allison elegantly expresses the point:

If our wounds never heal, if the outrageous spectacle of a history filled with cataclysmic sadness is never undone, if there is nothing more for those who were slaughtered in the death camps or for six-year olds devoured by cancer, then let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. If in the end there is no good God to calm this sea of troubles, to raise the dead, and to give good news to the poor, then this is indeed a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

WHAT IS APOCALYPTICISM?

The term apocalyptic, given to the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Abingdon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0687051967
• ISBN 13: 9780687051960
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 234
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland