Eschatology

eschatology (noun)
Etymology: Greek eschatos last, farthest
1 : a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of mankind
2 : a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of mankind; specifically : any of various Christian doctrines concerning the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, or the Last Judgment
Merriam Webster online

There was a lot of interest at the meeting we had on this topic. It's an area I'm a bit of a 'hobbyist' in and would love to continue discussing it here.

I am particularly interested in the similarities that can be found between the imagery used for the 'evil final empire' and capitalism.

I'm also interested in the soteriological aspects of eschatology (ahem), for example, I like to use the End and the Judgement in Revelation as having a clear and distinct 'inclusivist' (at) least position on the old thorny matter of 'who will be saved?'.

Eschatology is of course a part of the broader areas of prophecy and Providence and they are good topics too .

I think I should suggest the sci-fi book "Light of Other Days" to you. Besides the bulk of the book addressing privacy issues that resonate with those of Second Life, the ending is right up your alley, I should think. Eschation through technology.

If we are thinking of books that deal with this, and the 'saved' and so forth, have you read the Night's Dawn trilogy? It sort of deals with everything...

But go on Jinny, pontificate about the links between the end of times and capitalism, and i will start thinking about it.

Interestingly none of my dictionaries limit eschatology to christianity, although some on line ones I checked did. How about some comparative eschatology between mythos sets as well?

Jinny,

<<I am particularly interested in the similarities that can be found between the imagery used for the 'evil final empire' and capitalism.>>

For the ignorant among us (i.e. me), what similarities?

Jinny can go into greater detail, I read Revelations without any commentaries, so some of the "meaning" was lost on me.

Thie biggest allusion to capitalism is the whole Mark fo the Beast thing. It will put on a persons forehead or right hand (could be left, but I think it was explicit one way or another). Anyone without the mark will not be able to trade.

Also, it routinely mentions merchants and traders as an element of the evil of Babylon or something. Not really clear on how one is supposed to interpret it, but the writer clearly doesn't like trade. Some chunks of the NT are relatively tolerant of business and physical world pursuits it seems, Revelations is not one of the those chunks by a long shot.

Others more up on the commentaries of it can probably provide more examples, but those seemed to be the big two.

Oh come on children. Revelation was written as a coded tirade against Rome and Nero. The Mediteranean world was terrified that he would come back to life; Christians along with everyone else. The early Christian communities (being often of Jewish origin) were commonly against trade with outsiders to avoid ritual contamination. To suggest that capitalism is the evil force predicted in Revelation is a new low for the end-of-world types. It also ignores all the biblical scholarship of the past 200 years.

I know that all you socialists will seek to have me barred from the bathrooms, but surely you must see that some form of fettered capitalism has saved humanity several times in the past century. Without capitalistic motives, India would still be a starving land. Daughters all over the world would be exposed at birth to save the food for the sons. Pharmacological companies exist only because they make money at it.

You may not like it, but money has been the only successfull motivating force toward constructive behavior in history. Religion, nationalism, socialism, communism - all failed to incite a striving in humanity to build and protect. Mostly they sought to stagnate and destroy.

Bah on you all.

The problem is not so much capitalism as cities. Everyone needs a couple of acres of farmland somewhere to provide food. I think with Roman technology it was more like ten. Rome had a million people at its peak, and so needed the Mediterranean basin to provide its food, and that included Palestine.

Now when the people who work the land live with you, you will tend to treat them like family members. When they live on the other side of the world and your only connection with them is a number on a ledger, you will squeeze them to the point of oppression. Who doesn't feel safer when they are a hundred percent in control of where their food comes from? That's why the revolution always starts in the countryside and is directed against the people in the big city.

To suggest that trade furnished the rural communities with goods they wouldn't have otherwise had is true, but facile. They may have liked city goods, but one pot is functionally the same as the next and the cities would starve without the produce of the farms. It's not a symmetrical relationship.

Of course, without capitalism, cities as we know them wouldn't be possible, so it's natural that there's some confusion about the source of the problem.

There's plenty of recent scholarship linking capitalism to eschatology. See "The Birth of Christianity" by John Dominic Crossan. He makes a very powerful case, and provides plenty of references to other literature.

I find Crossan very disingenuous, self-serving, and too fond of the sound of his own voice. But then I do find "Jesus Before Christianity" by Albert Nolan or "Following Christ in a Consumer Society" by John Kavanaugh to be compelling enough. My point was that to use Revelation as a proof text against capitalism puts us back intellectually to the early middle ages or earlier. Admittedly, some are still there but why join them?

The struggle to finish the harnessing of capitalism for the good of humanity without destroying ourselves is the great project of the 21st century. If we fail, another and longer dark ages begins IMHO. This is too important to let the fundametalists and the naive control the issue. Capitalism and capitalistically driven technology constitute our last hope.

The alternative is to find an effective way to reduce our population back to less than a billion or so and then wait for the oil, water, and land to end. We already have effective skills for population reduction. Their use becomes inevitable if we fail to evolve capitalism into something more benign without turning it into socialism. I'm not sure where the answer lies, but it is not in the book of Revelation.

I think you could make the claim that most religions are themselves a form of capitalism since they're primarily focused on an ultimate reward. I've always found it ironic that the word used to denote different currency values is the same used to denote congregations of different faiths.

It is telling that you address his arguments by discussing his character.

I found this particular book of his very disturbing because it is thoroughly and effectively argued and I have always thought capitalism (or rather, economy, to take a step back from twentieth century politics) a pretty good idea, and cities excellent.Come on, man, think rigorously. How is explaining Revelation by reference to capitalism at all the same thing as explaining capitalism by reference to Revelation?

I'll be glad to discuss capitalism as well, but that seems like another thread.

Oooooh, a capitalism thread, this could be fun! But I'll hold most of that for another thread if one pops up. It's my favorite topic, though I don't usually subject others to it, Jinny excepted to some extent. Just a few points.

When we discussed eschatology in SL, and Jinny made the comparisons between Revelations and Capitalism (which are there it seems) I made the comment that it would be funny if capitalism is the force that brings relative peace to the world (and I think it's our only shot personally), that then the the almighty good and evil powers decide to end the world. I thought of it as funny because I don't see spiritual Armageddon happening. But if it did, I'd be a bit pissed off. We finally get it right, and then they lower the boom? Would be rather unfair.

As for the whole city discussion. I've started reading "Alternatives to Economic Globalization", bunch of different authors, and they kind of revere the whole local production theme. Unless you really want to go back to roughly subsistence existence (much of the ag productivity is due to machines that aren't invented or made on farms, post crop rotation and basic irrigation anyway), it doesn't work. If you want say even half of the technological developments, there must be some concentration and therefore some external trade. Once you allow for that, it is philosophically inconsistent to draw a random lien in the sand, it generally comes down to allow trade or not at all. And the latter is VERY bad.

Lots of games end when you win!

Almarea, OK I confess that my view of Crossan's work is colored by his preening ways on the History channel. You're right. I shouldn't do that. But all that is a red-herring. The writers of apocalyptic literature simply didn't speak about economic systems. The mark was a mark of professed loyalty to the beast (the reincarnated Nero). We misuse the text when we ignore its original context. Next we'll be quoting Nostradamus. Geees.

Ah.

I think because I came into the discussion late, or didn't really take the time to digest your post before I responded (or had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to your "come on children"!), that I heard you saying the the economic conditions of the time didn't fuel the rhetoric of Revelations. That would have been an easier position to take issue with.This sounds reasonable, but I want to read more. Can you recommend an author or two?

sure Almarea. Start with any good bible translation that is well footnoted. Two good choices are the New American Bible and The New Oxford Annotated Bible. To me, the most convicing evidence is first that 666 is the Hebrew number for Nero (in Hebrew, letters are numbers) AND 616 is the Latin number for Nero (or a misspelled Hebrew version). Early, manuscripts of Revelation have BOTH numbers. Unfortunately, Tyndale did not have access to these suppressed texts so all the Tyndale rooted translations (e.g., King James) use 666. Modern scohlarship and the rediscovery of ancient codexes have restored this lost understanding.

If you really want to get heavy, a fine ecumenical effort is The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. It will keep you occupied for a long time. There's a good article in there on apocalyptic literature in general. And yes, it says that that literary form always comes from economically and physically stressed communities.

last of all, I would recommend a Roman Catholic source - Volume 16 of the Sacra Pagina series from the Liturgical Press Collegeville Minnesota - Revelation by Wilfred J, Harrington.

And thanks for forgiving me and my "children" outburst.

Sorry for my absence lately-- I got a job (sigh) and so my net time has been curtailed severely, and I was so tired this week I've not been on. Come the bank holiday weekend, I discovered that my connection was down. Bastard.

Anyway.

I'll be catching up with things over the next few days and will post something here that follws up my original post and hopefully addresses some of the points made in my absence...