NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 65, Issue 4, 2011

Dit artikel biedt een kort overzicht van enkele aspecten van eschatologische verwachtingen in het vroege Jodendom. Aandacht gaat uit naar noties uit het Oude Testament, zoals de Dag des Heren en Jeremia’s zeventig-jaren profetie, die later Joods eschatologisch denken beïnvloedden, alhoewel de gedachte van een absoluut eindpunt van de tijd een nieuw fenomeen was. Delen van 1 Henoch en Daniël dienen als voorbeeld van historische apocalypsen. Openbaring, pseudepigrafie en gezag zijn belangrijke kenmerken van teksten die eschatologische kennis claimen die worden besproken. Tot slot worden eindtijdverwachtingen in Qumran kort besproken.

For the confessional mainstream of Dutch Protestantism, eschatological reflection had always centred on the return of Christ and the last judgment. This contribution examines how this focus changed during a process of rethinking the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. A new view, centred on justice and the coming of the Kingdom of God, emerged. Interestingly, opposition to this redefinition of eschatology was not restricted to classical Calvinists. An eschatological expectation in which the return of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel remained central was eloquently defended by Messianic Jews.

In the New Testament, the belief that the last judgment would arrive soon was paired with an ethical appeal to change one’s attitude or way of life. However, with the expectation of an imminent judgment fading, this connection weakened. This paper investigates whether the existential theology of Rudolf Bultmann offers an inter-pretation that manages to actualise belief in a last judgment for the present day. Bultmann interprets the core meaning of judgment to be that God, with the coming of Jesus Christ into the world, opens the possibility for a new form of true existence for every individual who submits to it. This conception indeed implies an existential importance of the belief in an eschatological judgment for human life in the present. However, a more exact interpretation of the rather abstract notion of this form of true existence seems hard to describe and therefore leaves the question somewhat open.

This article addresses the case of Jozef Rulof, one of the representatives of new religious movements in the early 20th century in the Netherlands. Self-proclaimed prophet and medium in the service of the ‘Cosmic Masters from the Other Side’, he urged his contemporaries to welcome a new cosmic age that would give the initial impetus to the Kingdom of God on Earth - to be realised by humankind itself. In his thinking, strongly based upon the concepts of reincarnation and karma, the end of times refers to the ‘fading’ of the planet as a logical step in the evolutionary development of both humanity and universe.

This article traces what is said about the last judgment in recent sermons. In most of the sermons this is simply nothing. In the sermons of the ministers who do talk about it, the following three motives can be identified: the problems of modern man with this topic, the warning of an upcoming judgment after death, and the critique on the notion of the last judgment from a standpoint of apocatastasis. There appears to be the following split: ministers announcing the judgment after death do not care about the problems of modern man with this, while ministers who are engaged with the problems of modern man do not realise that a part of their listeners still fear hell and eternal damnation.