Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium - Hardcover

Katz, David S.; Popkin, Richard H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809068850 ISBN 13: 9780809068852

Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub, 1999

Synopsis

Two historians explore how fringe beliefs and those who follow them have been carried through the last one thousand years and offer reasons for the strong hold apocalyptic thinking has had on people living in the New World.

About this title

About the Author

David S. Katz received his B.A. from Columbia University and his D.Phil. from Oxford University. Since 1978 he has been professor of history at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of six books on the history of religious ideas and their political effects. He lives in Tel Aviv.

Richard H. Popkin is professor emeritus of philosophy at Washington University and adjunct professor of philosophy and history at UCLA. He is the author of many books, including The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. He lives in Pacific Palisades, California.

From the Inside Flap

On April 19,1993, at least seventy-four people lost their lives near Waco, Texas, in the confrontation between the followers of David Koresh and the federal agents outside his compound. These groups, clearly, inhabited two different conceptual worlds. Two years later, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed by people who related the act to what had happened in Waco. Yet both then and now, it seemed that neither journalists nor law-enforcement experts nor the public was aware of the rich tradition of messianic, revolutionary politics behind groups like Koresh's, a history that stretches back, unbroken, to the early Middle Ages.

In this fascinating study, two historians explore that tradition, showing how the beliefs of many fringe, distressed, disenfranchised, or purely mystical Christians and Jews have been transmitted across a millennium. Professors David Katz and Richard Popkin's Messianic Revolution offers a strong and lucid explanation of why and how this apocalyptic strain found especially fertile ground in the New World, and it throws new light on the many strands of biblical interpretation, both Jewish and Christian, that are woven into this complex, fascinating history.

Reviews

Katz, Professor of History at the University of Tel Aviv, and Popkin, Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Religion at UCLA, teamed to trace the history of radical millennial religious movements from the Renaissance to the present. Approximately half of the text deals with the European background of such movements and the other half with subsequent American developments. Their history brings together a potpourri of interesting people who have been fascinated by the interpretation of biblical prophecy, including Pico, Paracelsus, Sir Isaac Newton, Swedenborg, William Miller, Pat Robertson and David Koresh. The distinctive position of each successive prophetic interpreter is clearly identified in relation to those who came before and those who followed. The authors carefully note the political effects of such biblical prophecy. Katz and Popkin maintain that millennialism has been an important breeding ground for radical political ideologies on both the left and the right. They argue persuasively that political movements rooted in millennial ideas have influenced both past and present political behavior and that an understanding of how this ideology operates is important to an appreciation of the contemporary situation. The authors suggest, furthermore, that an understanding of millennialism is essential to getting a grasp on much of the current American religious right and the militia movements. Katz and Popkin have produced a book that is clear, concise and comprehensive.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A sweeping yet nuanced intellectual history of the rise of millennialism in Protestant Christianity. Popkin (Philosophy and Religion/Univ. of Calif., Los Angeles) and Katz (History/Tel Aviv Univ.) begin their story in an unusual place. Rather than tracing millennialism from its most popular 19th-century manifestations (William Millers followers tarrying for the return of Christ, for example), Katz and Popkin begin with the European Renaissance, finding apocalyptic themes in 15th-century hermeticism and alchemy. They carefully wend their tale through the Reformation, discussing how millennialist fervor spawned the English Civil War and the creation of the Fifth Monarchy, which they call ``the first organized millenarian political movement.'' The Enlightenment period favored empirical truth and scientific rationalism, but as the authors show, millennialism did not fall by the wayside; championed by esteemed philosophers such as Isaac Newton, it only grew more vigorous. The Enlightenment did shift millennialism's focus away from personal piety, toward a quest for verifiable knowledge about precisely when Christ might arrive and what an apocalypse would entail. This obsession with dates and other specifics carried over into the 19th and 20th centuries, most obviously in the Millerite movement, but also among its descendants (Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists, as well as the descendants of the latter, the Branch Davidians). The authors weave their way expertly through intricate terminology, such as ``Darbyite dispensational premillennialism,'' defining terms by example. One surprising thread among these millenarian groups, stretching across seven centuries, is their fascination with the Jews' role in bringing about the apocalypse (though, as the authors show, philo-Semitism can easily morph into its ugly opposite, as it has in the Christian Identity movement). The book is well written and, for an intellectual history, fairly straightforward, but the historical connections are sometimes tentatively drawn (e.g., ``possibly Columbus knew something'' of the views of one apocalyptic contemporary). In all, a superior attempt at a broader view of millennialism, uncovering some intriguing recurrent motifs. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Katz (history, Tel Aviv Univ.) and Popkin (history/philosophy, UCLA) present a condensed overview of the development of millennialist and messianic ideas since the Renaissance and the influence of these ideas on radical politics. Though not exhaustive, their survey ranges from Joachim of Fiore and the Anabaptists of 16th-century Germany to Isaac Newton to the Branch Davidians. The authors purpose is to examine groups and individuals who believe in the imminent return of Christ and insist on fundamental social change in preparation for His coming. Their thesis supports the idea that law enforcement agencies must be aware of radical groups that are inspired to extreme action by their religious convictions. One criticism: millennialist and messianic are used too loosely and interchangeably, bypassing new understandings among millennialist scholars. Nevertheless, this is a useful addition to a growing literature accessible to the nonacademic reader, to be supplemented with such works as Paul Boyers When Time Shall Be No More (Belknap, 1992). Recommended for academic and large public libraries.William P. Collins, Library of Congress
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Katz and Popkin say this is a book "about ideas of messianic revelation rather than a general history of messianism or millenarian theology." But those subjects overlap. The ensuing careful narrative of socially and politically engaged Christian messianism since the Renaissance provides excellent background for anyone intrigued by the Eurocentric obsession with the end of Christianity's second millennium that is often played out in a sociopolitical vacuum. Katz and Popkin offer a fresh reading of European history and a look at sources often neglected in textbook accounts; that they associate Calvinism with the radical Reformation should interest those concerned with the economic and political legacies of Protestant theology. Although they too easily dismiss Lutheran thought as conservative and represent the Catholic Reformation as entirely reactive, they provide great insight into the philosophical and theological roots of contemporary movements as diverse as the Mormons, the People's Temple, and the Christian Coalition. Acquaintance with those roots helps in understanding not only messianic movements but also the social and political conversations those movements inform. Steven Schroeder

Edition details

• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809068850
• ISBN 13: 9780809068852
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 303