84. Modern Scholarly Distaste for Millennialism
84. As one author, critiquing Jurgen Moltmann’s millennial theology put it: “This belief leads him [Moltmann] to assert that ‘Christian eschatology—eschatology which is messianic, healing, and saving—is millenarian eschatology.’ Many of us remain unconvinced of the need for such a [this-worldly] transitional episode,” (John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000], 86-87. “I have argued that there was no popular millennial expectation in 999 ce. I am an active Christian and I never perceived any widespread popular expectation in the last months of 1999, much less in December of 2000, either among the Christians who I know or among my other friends . . . Rarely does a minister preach from the Apocalypse, and the book’s interpretation has been left to those denominations or sects that have made it the focus of their thinking,” E. Randolph Daniel, “Medieval Apocalypticism, Millennialism and Violence,” Terrorism and Political Violence 14 (2002): 292.
