This volume addresses Jewish, Christian and Muslim future visions on the end of the world, focusing on the respective allies and antagonists for each religious society. Extensive lists of murderous end-time peoples, whether for good or evil, and those who merit salvation hold variably defined roles in end-time scenarios. Spanning late Antiquity to the early modern period, the collected papers examine distinctive aspects represented by each religion’s approach as well as shared concepts.

This volume addresses Jewish, Christian and Muslim future visions on the end of the world, focusing on the respective allies and antagonists for each religious society. Spanning late Antiquity to the early modern period, the collected papers examine distinctive aspects represented by each religion’s approach as well as shared concepts.

Religion. For thousands of years this thing has dictated which people should live and which people should die, what shape our buildings should have or what colors our garments should contain, what food people should eat or what words people should speak. If religion is the opium of the masses, then beliefs about the end of the world are like overdoses. People touched by such beliefs no longer rely on a hidden, personal and intimate god, contemplated upon from the safe distance of the beating human heart. They live with the promise of divine intervention at a grand scale on the current coordinates of space and time. This can be an exceptional motivator and a game changer in terms of civil obedience, both at an individual and collective level. In the name of an immediate and palpable deity people can commit shocking cruelties. However, such belief can also account for some of the most exceptional social developments in human history.

Stephen Pattemore examines passages within Revelation 4:1–22:21 that depict the people of God as actors in the apocalyptic drama and infers what impact these passages would have had on the self-understanding and behaviour of the original audience of the work. He uses Relevance Theory, a development in the linguistic field of pragmatics, to help understand the text against the background of allusion to other texts. Three important images are traced. The picture of the souls under the altar (6:9–11) is found to govern much of the direction of the text with its call to faithful witness and willingness for martyrdom. Even the militant image of a messianic army (7:1–8, 14:1–5) urges the audience in precisely the same direction. Both images combine in the final image of the bride, the culmination of challenge and hope traced briefly in the New Jerusalem visions.

Book Delisted

The Book of Revelation has always been a mysterious and intriguing book, describing in symbolic terms the confrontation between the Disciples of Christ and the powers - political and supernatural - that hold sway over the current age. Fundamentalists have been attracted to the book and have sought to decipher its strange symbols as coded prophecy of future events. But as Pablo Richard shows in Apocalypse, the most powerful readings of the Book of Revelation are through the eyes of the oppressed, living out their Christian faith in the context of the modern empire. It is they who identify most strongly with Revelation's ultimate message of hope and life in the midst of death and persecution. Apocalypse first provides a general introduction to the reading of Revelation by examining three keys for its understanding: the historical, he sociological, and the literary-structural. The book then goes on to explore the whole of the Book of Revelation, following the book's own structure. Each section provides a line-by-line reading of the text, establishing the literal meaning before applying the interpretive keys already established.

The soul is so closely connected to life that one cannot think that it could ever be separated from life and, consequently, be mortal. Therefore, it can only be immortal. This argument from Plato's Phaedo for the immortality of the soul exhibits both a great strength and a great weakness. Its strength is that it is dif ficult for anyone to think that the soul could ever exist without life. Its weakness is, first, that not all religions accept a soul that remains the same as the center of the person - thus one speaks, for instance, in Buddhism of a "soulless theory of the human being" - and, second, that what is true does not depend on what we can think, but on what we recognize in experience and thought. The religions believe in the existence of a power that can work contrary to our experience that the soul in death is not separated from life. How the reli gions believe they can establish this continued life after death and how faith in this life is related in the religions to the interpretation of history, its progress, its apocalyptic end, and its eschatological completion and transfiguration is the theme of this book. In the culture of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, faith in the secular progress of the technological control of nature and the economic or ganization of society was the enemy of faith in the immortality of the soul.