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  • From: FucciXXV AT aol.com
  • To: corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Rom 7, Pauline eschatology, and other questions
  • Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 21:27:59 EST


In a message dated 3/30/99 11:16:20 AM Central Standard Time,
crhutson AT salisbury.net writes:

> This is an interesting set of questions, but I am confused by your
> intent "to argue for a non-apocalyptic eschatological Paul." What in
> the world would that be? What sort of eschatology do you envision
> that would not be apocalyptic? It seems to me that the whole notion
> of TA ESXATA is an apocalyptic notion. So if you want to argue that
> Paul's theology is not apocalyptic, wouldn't you also need to argue
> that it is likewise not eschatological? How do you separate these two
> ideas?

J.D. Crossan makes a good case in his recent "The Birth of Christianity" that
the words "eschatological" and "apocalyptic" have become in definition so
idiosyncratic to almost every scholar who uses them that it's almost pointless
to use the words without explicitly defining what the present author means by
them. Crossan, for example, would have no difficulty separating the two ideas
as follows: "eschatology" for Crossan means a "world-negating" ideology, one
which holds that some fundamental aspect of the dominant ideological paradigm
is irretrievably incorrect; "apocalyptic," on the other hand, is the view that
the dominant ideological paradigm is about to end (either through actual
destruction of the world or such a fundamental reshaping as to become
essentially a new world.) If Paul believed "the world" to be fundamentally
flawed but didn't think it was about to be destroyed by God, he would be non-
apocalyptically eschatological by these definitions.

I gather from a subsequent posting that Jeffrey is saying something along
those lines: Paul is only apparently "apocalyptic" in the above sense, because
his statements concerning "end times" are in fact references not to some "Late
Great Planet Earth" scenario but to a very concrete threat to the safety of
Judea and Judaism if certain religious ideologies continue to create friction
with Rome.

Jim Thorn
Chicago, IL




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