Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and, since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible. And from time to time it has the extremely negative consequence of encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat. If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on the other, it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism--exactly the same grounds, in fact--that i, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another's. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 29.
Christopher Rowland, “Things into Which Angels Long to Look: Approaching Mysticism from the Perspective of the New Testament and the Jewish Apocalypses,” in Christopher Rowland and Christopher R. A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament (CRINT, vol. 12; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), pp. 1-216. In this study Christopher Rowland provides an outstanding survey of apocalypticism in the New Testament (NT). Rowland is to be commended for presenting a thorough argument in favor of the permeation of apocalypticism in New Testament theology. Instead of a limited focus on apocalyptic eschatology, Rowland capitalizes on the theme of the volume by analyzing apocalypticism in its “mystical” aspects. Following Hengel’s definition of apocalypticism as the search for “higher wisdom through revelation,” Rowland is keen to highlight visionary experience(s) and developed angelological and merkavah themes. Thus Rowland seeks to establish the apocaly...
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