ESCHATOLOGY AND THE CRITICAL METHOD

The liberal synthesis, which effectively merged the ancient and modern horizons of the text by its appeal to permanently valid principles and ideals, proved remarkably durable. The idealist tradition, which could claim an ancestry reaching back to Plato himself, had been firmly grounded in the work of Kant, and enhanced by the comprehensiveness of Hegel's system. The intellectual ferment of the nineteenth century was produced by, and largely contained within, this dominant world view: a feat all the more remarkable in view of the variety and complexity of the intellectual endeavours. As the twentieth century dawned, newer approaches rooted in the same Western intellectual tradition tended to disjoin ancient and modern horizons through their insistence that a given text be related closely to its historical milieu. When apocalyptic eschatology was pinpointed as the dominant feature of the world of Jesus, the disjunction was virtually inevitable, and the consequences for theology far-reaching.

To be sure, eschatology – Jewish and Christian – was open to a variety of interpretations, in the ancient as in the modern world. Eschatology literally denotes discourse about the end of time, and apocalyptic eschatology is concerned with visions of the end. For some ancients apocalypticism was dominant, with its attendant sense of urgency and imminent judgment, its stimulus to repentance and its sanctions of reward and penalty.