Footnotes by Chapter
05. Bibliography of Recent Millennial Studies
5. Lee Quimby deconstructed the millennial narrative she saw gaining strength in the 1990s in Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Daniel Wojcik offered a survey of the American scene at the eve of the millennium in The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (New York: New York University Press, 1999). On the clustering of apocalyptic phenomenon at the turn of the century marker, see Hillel Schwartz, Century’s End (New York: Doubleday, 1990). On the role of internet in intensifying apocalyptic activity (as did the printing press), see Brenda Brasher, Give Me that Online Religion (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2001), 160–83. For the work of the Center for Millennial Studies, see both Journal of Millennial Studies (1998–2001), and the four-volume series of articles edited by Brenda Brasher published with Equinox Press, Millennium and Society (2005–9), esp. John Walliss and Kenneth G.C. Newport, eds., The End All Around Us: The Apocalypse and Popular Culture (London: Equinox Press, 2009).
13. Irony of Political Augustinianism
13. The irony here is quite exceptional: historians who self-consciously adopted Augustinian theology, like Orosius and Otto of Freising, actually fell prey to what one French historian called “augustinisme politique,” or the systematic mis-understanding of Augustine; see Arquillère, L’augustinisme politique (Paris: Vrin, 1933), and Theodor Mommsen, “Orosius and Saint Augustine,” in Mommsen, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Eugene Rice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1959), 325–48; John A. Maxfield, “Divine Providence, History, and Progress in Augustine’s City of God,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2002): 339–60.
60. Charles Hill on defining Millennialism
0. Often historians, especially historians of theology, use a more restrictive term for millennialism, as, for example recently Charles Hill Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Future Hope in Early Christianity (Clarendon: Oxford, 1992), pp. 1-8. Hill rejects the broader term as I use it here in favor of a more restrictive one. “Full blown chiliasm” [the Greek term for millennialism] he insists, includes all three elements of 1) a temporary period (not necessarily 1000 years), 2) earthly, and 3) messianic [individual deliverers play a key role] (p. 5f). If one does not adhere to this specific scenario, he argues, if one denies the interim, temporary millennial period, one “remove[s] oneself from the millennialist camp” (p. 1, n.1). Aside from the fact that he is tracing this particular configuration in early Christianity, Hill gives no reason to so restrict the definition, although one suspects a theological agenda that permits him to argue that not only is millennialism not the dominant ideology of the early Church (contra many, primarily Protestant German, historians, pp. 2-4), but that not even the book of Revelation (whose passage 20:7 gave us the term) is millennial (pp. 163-77). Both of these conclusions are puzzling and crippling for understanding the larger phenomenon that is the subject of this book. His analysis would be far more useful if he had a term for the larger phenomenon, as well as for this subset. Hereafter, I refer to the larger phenomenon of expectation of the kingdom of God on earth (Hill’s point 2) as millennial; it may or may not be messianic (point 3) and whether it’s temporary or not is hardly pertinent, since the (anticipated) transformation to the perfect world is the key historical issue.
