Since the exegetical works of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer at the beginning of the 20th century (the school of "consistent eschatology") and the dialectic theology of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann in the mid-20th century, eschatology has again become a principal theme of academic Christian theology. Crises in the West have also led to a renewal of eschatological hopes. Within the church there has been a struggle between Christianity as a state religion and congregations with eschatological orientations. Initial attempts to combine eschatology and philosophy, hope, and social practice and thus overcome the differences between the church and the sects—as well as those between the church and the modern age—are found in Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope (The Principle of Hope, 1959), the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the "theology of hope.”
These millennial philosophies spread in the aftermath of World War II, leading in the late 1950s and early ’60s to a new wave of radical progressive reform. This was especially evident in the United States, where the civil rights movement strove to fulfill the millennial promises of equality. This idealism was further fueled by antiwar activism, interest in liberation theologies drawn from both Western psychology and East Asian religion, psychedelic drugs, rock music, and a “back-to-nature” communal movement. Christened “the Age of Aquarius,” this postmillennial movement peaked in 1968–69 with a series of (largely student) uprisings around the world, from Los Angeles to Paris, that culminated in the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in the summer of 1969. At the same time, the assassinations in the United States during the mid- to late 1960s (Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X) brought more violent forces to the fore, including the Weathermen faction of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers. The movement rapidly lost its consensual momentum, fragmenting into a wide range of postapocalyptic and premillennial sects (Heaven’s Gate in California, the worldwide Unification Church, Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in Guyana) and leading to the rise of the Rapture premillennial scenario described in Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and reflected in the first of a series of Rapture movies, Thief in the Night (1972). In the 1980s and ’90s other millennial, sometimes violent, sects emerged, including the Order of the Solar Temple in Canada, France, and Switzerland and AUM Shinrikyo (1987–2000; reorganized as Aleph in 2000) in Japan.
Starting in the late 1980s with Edgar Whisenant’s 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in 1988 (significantly, 40 years after the creation of the State of Israel), the premillennial dispensationalism became increasingly prominent in the United States and Latin America. Led by such figures as Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, and Hal Lindsey, premillennial dipsensationalists became more excited about an imminent Rapture. This group created an unprecedented alliance of millennial currents in Judaism and Christianity when it linked up with the messianic religious Zionism that wanted to build a “Third Temple.” This action triggered apocalyptic prophecy among Muslims who saw their Dome of the Rock (the oldest existing Muslim shrine) threatened by such an alliance. The natural tendency for Christian apocalyptic prophecy to intensify with the approach of a millennial date was further stimulated by the Y2K computer problem, which, ironically, created an apocalyptic prophecy for 2000 based not on scripture but on the computer technology on which the entire world had become increasingly dependent in the previous two decades.
Thus, at the approach of 2000 (and 2001—the actual millennial year by the Common Era and anno Domini calendars), millennial expectations intensified around the world, not only in Christianity but in Judaism, Islam, and non-Western religions. The global spread of modernity had created ideal conditions for the emergence of a new wave of millennial movements. Whether these will be radical or reactionary, jubilaic or authoritarian, more akin to a civil rights movement or to the tausandjahriger Reich (“thousand-year empire”) of Nazi ideology—this remains to be seen. Richard Landes
Citation Information
Article Title: Eschatology
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 22 January 2016
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/eschatology
Access Date: August 16, 2019
Additional Reading General works
Valuable general studies of eschatology and related topics include Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (1974, reprinted 1986); Frederic J. Baumgartner, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (1999); Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (1981, reissued 1983); Rudolf Bultmann, The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology (1957, reprinted 1975; also published as History and Eschatology, 1957, reissued 1975); Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (1969, reissued 1986); Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954; originally published in French, 1949); Stephen Jay Gould, Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown, rev. ed. (1999); Richard Landes, Heaven and Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience (2011); R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, rev. ed. (1988); Arthur P. Mendel, Vision and Violence (1992, reissued 1999); Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (1994, reissued 1998); Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (1997); Michael J. St. Clair, Millenarian Movements in Historical Context (1992); Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages (1999); Wilson D. Wallis, Messiahs: Their Role in Civilization (1943); and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Last Things First (1982). Eschatology in world religions
Studies of eschatological thought in religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition include Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements Against the European Colonial Order (1979, reissued 1987); David Cook, “Moral Apocalyptic in Islam,” Studia Islamica, 86(2):37–69 (August 1997); Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977, reissued 1980); S. Insler, The Gathas of Zarathustra (1974); Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (1970, reissued, 1990); Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults (1963; originally published in Italian, 1960); Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (1976); and Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (1996). Jewish and early Christian eschatology
Jewish and early Christian eschatological thought are discussed in Albert I. Baumgarten, The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation (1997); R.H. Charles, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, Judaism, and in Christianity (1899, reissued as Eschatology: The Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, Judaism, and Christianity, 1963); Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (1993, reissued 1995); John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 2nd ed. (1998); Oscar Cullman, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time, rev. ed. (1964; originally published in German, 1946); John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Chrisitanity (1975); P.S. Minear, The Christian Hope and the Second Coming (1954); Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah: A New Translation, (1988); and R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Messianism in Jewish History,” Journal of World History, 11(1–2):30–45 (1968). Eschatology in the Middle Ages