Apocalypticism

by Robert W. Funk (Editor), Hans Dieter Betz (Contributor), Frank Moore Cross (Contributor)

Consists in part of English translations of articles originally published in German in the Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche.

Contents:
The beginnings of Christian theology / Ernst Käsemann --
The ground of Christian theology / Gerhard Ebeling --
On the task of a Christian theology / Ernst Fuchs --
On the topic of primitive Christian apocalyptic / Ernst Kasemann --
On the problem of the religio-historical understanding of apocalypticism / Hans Dieter Betz --
New directions in the study of apocalyptic / Frank M. Cross --
The flowering of apocalyptic / David Noel Freedman --
Apocalyptic as an historical and theological problem in current New Testament scholarship / Robert W. Funk --
The concept of apocalyptic in the theology of the Pannenberg group / Hans Dieter Betz.

207 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Robert Walter Funk (July 18, 1926 – September 3, 2005), was an American biblical scholar, founder of the controversial Jesus Seminar and the non-profit Westar Institute in Santa Rosa, California. Funk, an academic, sought to promote research and education on what he called biblical literacy. His approach to hermeneutics was historical-critical, with a strongly sceptical view of orthodox Christian belief, particularly concerning historical Jesus. He and his peers described Jesus' parables as containing shocking messages that contradicted established religious attitudes.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The word "apocalypse" derives from the Greek meaning something like opening a curtain to reveal what's behind. The most notable apocalypse in the Christian Scriptures is, of course, that of John. The Hebrew Bible features others like Ezekiel and Daniel, but the real flowering of the genre was during the intertestamental period during which time Jesus preached and his followers built their communities in preparation for the End. Their early writings, the gospels, often have Jesus represented as quoting some of this intertestimental material, most particularly the books attributed to Enoch.

I had done a religion degree in college and followed that with seminary studies in part because of such literature--or, more exactly, because of those people around me who took such literature seriously. I'd grown up during the Cold War, so the notion of End Times, a kind of secular eschaton, was all-too-familiar. So, more hopefully, was the notion of 'the revolution' that many of us hoped would save the planet and improve the lives of its inhabitants. These thought forms weren't all that different from those held by Jews suffering under the Roman yoke and hoping for a better future--not that different on one end of the spectrum at least. The other extreme, however, the one the Christians took up and which is most floridly represented in the Apocalypse of John (Revelation), seemed utterly crazy.

So, when I had the chance, I signed up for Raymond Brown's course on Apocalyptic, attended the lectures, read assigned books like this one and went on to read all the extant literature of this genre in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

What I learned helped, just a little bit. Revelation, for instance, can be read as a back-dated metaphorical political screed against the Romans, a polemic self-consciously taking up old themes from the Hebrew Scriptures and their representation of history. Still, some of this remains inscruitable to me at a deep levelk, i.e. the irreducible supernaturalism running throughout. This is a thoughtworld that remains mysterious to me and upon which I'm still working.