Christ History And Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission

by Kerr, Nathan R.

• ISBN13: 9781606081990
• ISBN10: 1606081993
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-10-13
• Publisher: Wipf & Stock Pub

Summary

This book offers a comprehensive reflection on what it means that Christians claim that "Jesus is Lord" by engaging in a defense of Christian apocalyptic as the criterion for evaluating the "truth" of history and of history's relation to the transcendent political reality that theology calls "the Kingdom of God." The heart of this work comprises an original genealogical analysis of twentieth-century theological encounters with the modern historicist problematic through a series of critical engagements with the work of Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Howard Yoder. On the basis of a rereading of John Howard Yoder's place within this genealogy, the author outlines an alternative "apocalyptic historicism," which conceives the work of Christian politics as a mode of subversive, missionary encounter between church and world. The result is a profoundly original vision of history that at once calls for and is empowered by a Christian apocalyptic politics, in which the ideologically reductionist concerns for political effectiveness and productivity are surpassed by way of a missionary praxis of subversion and liberation rooted in liturgy and doxology. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Nathan Kerr is Assistant Professor of Theology and Philosophy, Trevecca Nazarene University, Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of the forthcoming Exodus, Exile, and Ecclesia (Cascade Books)

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
Guide to Abbreviations	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Ernst Troeltsch: The Triumph of Ideology and the Eclipse of Apocalyptic	p. 23
Karl Barth: Foundations for an Apocalyptic Christology	p. 63
Stanley Hauerwas: Apocalyptic, Narrative Ecclesiology, and 'The Limits of Anti-Constantinianism'	p. 93
John Howard Yoder: The Singularity of Jesus and the Apocalypticization of History	p. 127
Towards an Apocalyptic Politics of Mission	p. 161
Index of Names and Subjects	p. 197
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