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  • From: Ronald Troxel <rltroxel AT facstaff.wisc.edu>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Rom 7, Pauline eschatology, and other questions
  • Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 07:27:54 -0600


>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.)

I have only begun Dom Crossan's new tome and so have not come to his
discussion of this issue. However, if this is what he says, I congratulate
him on supporting his observation (not new in any case) regarding the
idiosyncratic use(s) of "eschatology" and "apocalyptic" with his own
idiosyncratic definition. Given that "eschatology" is the rubric for
ideology attentive to *ta esCata*, ideology that typically looks (as J.
Collins has pointed out) not to the end events themselves, but to the ideal
state lying beyond them, then truncating this perspective by halting with
dissatisfaction over the present shape of things seems to me truly
idiosyncratic. It's one thing to urge each scholar to define
"eschatology"; it's another to treat the term as a cipher.

Ron Troxel

Ronald L. Troxel, Ph.D.
Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies
1340 Van Hise Hall
1220 Linden Dr.
Madison, WI 53706




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