I think I am going to start writing more ‘Book Impressions’ in the days to come, for the blog. I won’t be writing full fledged reviews, but just presenting my raw impressions as I finish this or that book. By the way, I do read a lot of theology books as time passes by; I just rarely share any of that here (you mostly get my Barth readings and reflections these days). Anyway, I just finished another book, and below is my reflection on it. The book: Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages.
I started this one a couple of years ago. It got tedious at points, but glad I picked it up again and finished. It ended strong. Books like this help put things in perspective. Christian people, in the case of this book’s examination, all the way from the 5th to the 16th centuries have always presented fanciful ideas about why they believed their time in history was in fact the end; and that the arrival of Jesus would be in their lifetimes. But beyond that this book shows all of the schism present in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Further how apocalyptic prophecy etc. was taken up by self-proclaimed prophets to announce the end of this or that evil Pope. Also, in this book theories of history are presented, primary of which is Joachim of Fiore’s three statuses view of the history of the church and the world, climaxing in the coming of Christ. Also, in this book, we see how millenarianism was an early development of parts of the church, and how later among the Hussites, apocalypticism was deployed in a way to justify political revolution so on and so forth (much like we see today). What Left Behind theology or more specifically, Dispensational premillennialism foments in the American evangelical churches today, in regard to apocalyptic speculations and its application to current events, is nothing new, and was done even that much more substantively in the past. Indeed, Jesus is coming again, and it could be today (please Lord), but we will never know exactly how “this is that” until He in fact comes again. Maranatha