- The history of Christianity
The role of imminent expectation in missions and emigrations
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The great missionary activities of Christian history in most cases have been based upon a reawakened imminent expectation, which creates a characteristic tension. The tension between the universal mission of the church and the hitherto omitted missionary duties, as well as the idea that the colossal task must be accomplished in the shortest time possible, renders comprehensible the astonishing physical and spiritual achievements of the great Christian missionaries. After the inundation of Christian areas of Africa and Asia by Islam, Franciscan missionaries in the 13th and 14th centuries, enduring incredible hardships, went by land and by sea to India, China, and Mongolia to preach the gospel. In a similar way, the missionary movement of the 18th and 19th centuries also proceeded from such eschatological groups within Protestantism.
The expectation of the kingdom of God, in the form of the imminent expectation, plays a strong role in emigration movements. Great masses of European Christians again and again set out for Palestine with a sense of finding there the land of their salvation and being present when Christ returns there to establish his kingdom. Mass pilgrimages to Jerusalem took place in 1033 and again in 1064–65, and the Crusades can be seen as a form of pilgrimage whose participants held eschatological concerns. The peasants of the so-called “People’s Crusade” and the knights of the First Crusade were clearly motivated by apocalyptic anxieties, and Count Emicho of Flonheim, who led the massacres of the Jews in Germany, may have seen himself in the role of the Last Emperor. The eschatological strain of the Crusades can also be noted in the Crusade sermons of St. Bernard de Clairvaux in 1147, who kindled enthusiasm to liberate Jerusalem with reference to the pressing terminal dates of the end-time.
A great number of the attempts undertaken to found radical Christian communities in North America may be viewed as anticipations of the coming Jerusalem. The emigration movement toward America was influenced by beliefs in eschatologically fixed dates (e.g., Columbus). Puritans who traveled to America in the 17th century and Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists in the 18th century believed that America was the “wilderness” promised in the Revelation to John. William Penn gave the name Philadelphia to the capital of the woodland areas ceded to him (1681) because he took up the idea of establishing the true church of the end-time, represented by the Philadelphia community of the Revelation to John. The same influence holds true for the emigration of German revivalists of the 18th and early 19th centuries to Russia and Palestine. The “Friends of the Temple”—Swabians who went with Christoph Hoffmann to Palestine in 1866—and the Swabians, Franks, Hessians, and Bavarians, who after the Napoleonic Wars followed the call of Tsar Alexander I to Bessarabia, were all dominated by the idea of living in the end-time and preparing themselves for the coming kingdom of God. In Tsar Alexander I they saw the “eagle…as it flew in midheaven” (Revelation 8:13), which prepared the “recovery spot” for them in the East upon which Christ will descend.
As had occurred earlier in Christian history, eschatological expectations in the modern age sometimes turned violent. The intensely apocalyptical ideas of David Koresh, for example, led him and other Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, to a tragic end.
Eschatological expectations and secularization
In the eyes of some theologians, the very process of secularization, which progressively rules out transcendent explanations of natural and historical conditions, has been a working out of a form of eschatological expectation. Of course, the substance is quite different in the cases where people work in expectation of the kingdom of God and in the other cases where they become “futurologists.” But the impulse to prepare oneself for such futures has analogues and origins, it is contended, in old Christian ideas of penance and preparation for the coming kingdom.
In the Gospels the attitude toward the coming kingdom of God led, over and beyond the expectation of nullifying sin and death, to certain worldly conclusions of an organizational kind. The disciples of Jesus knew that there will be “first ones” in the kingdom of Heaven; they pressed for the administrative posts in the coming kingdom of God (e.g., the apostles James and John). The promise, too, that they are to take part as judges at the Last Judgment (Luke 22:30) sparked definite conceptions of rank. Jesus castigated them in their disputes over rank with the words, “If any one would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35).
Despite this warning, the imminent expectation of the coming kingdom of God awakened concrete, substantial ideas that led ever closer to social utopias. With the 18th-century German Lutheran mystic and Pietist F.C. Oetinger, the end-time expectation generated definite social and political demands—e.g., dissolution of the state, abolition of property, and elimination of class differences. Some of the aspects of the end-time expectation of Pietism were revived in the French Revolution’s political and social programs. The transition from the end-time expectation to the social utopia, however, had already been achieved in writings from the 16th and early 17th centuries—e.g., the English humanist and saint Sir Thomas More’s …de optimo reipublicae statu deque nova Insula Utopia (1516; “On the Highest State of a Republic and on the New Island Utopia”), the German theologian Johann Valentin Andrea’s Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio (1619; “A Description of the Christian Republic”), the English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), and the English bishop Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone (1638). It is also found in early socialism of the 19th century—e.g., the French social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme (1825; “The New Christianity”) and the French Socialist Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840; “Voyage to Icaria”).
What distinguishes the Christian social utopia from the earlier kind of eschatology is the stronger emphasis upon social responsibility for the preparation of the kingdom of God and a considerable preponderance of various techniques in the establishment of the utopian society. (In general, the end-time expectation has also inspired technical fantasy and science fiction.) Also characteristic is the basic attitude that people themselves must prepare the future perfect society in a formative and organizing manner and that “hoping” and “awaiting” are replaced by human initiative. A graduated transition from a social utopia still consciously Christian to a purely Socialist one can be observed in the writings and activities of the French Socialists Charles Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the English Socialist Robert Owen, and the German Socialist Wilhelm Weitling. Secularized remnants of a glowing Christian end-time expectation are still found even in the Marxist view of the social utopia.
Modern planning and projection of alternative futures is a secularization of the end-time expectations previously envisioned in Christian terms. The future is thus manipulated through planning (i.e., “horizontal eschatology”) in place of eschatological “hoping” and “waiting for” fulfillment. “Horizontal eschatology” is thus taken out of the sphere of the unexpected and numinous (spiritual); it is made the subject not only of a detailed prognosis based upon statistics but also of a detailed programming undertaken on the basis of this prognosis. An eschatological remainder is found only in an ideological image of man, upon which programming and planning are based.
