- Title
- The privatization of eschatology and myth: Ernst Bloch vs. Rudolf Bultmann
- Creator
- Boer, Roland
- Relation
- The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia p. 106-120
- Relation
- https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Privatization-of-Hope/
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- The mention of either myth or eschatology today conjures up ideas such as "myths to live by" (anyone can make a billion dollars or become president or prime minister) or sets us pondering on what happens to us when we die. In short, it is a privatized sense of myth and eschatology that dominates our perceptions. But how did it come to this? Why are the deeply collective practices of myth and eschatology now so privatized? In order to explore those questions, I turn to an old debate from the 1930s between Ernst Bloch and the theologian Rudolph Bultmann. Unlike the situation in philosophy and theology today, where both camps can proceed to talk and write about the Bible with only the barest recognition of one another, what we find is a biblical scholar adept at philosophy and a philosopher with a propensity for reading biblical scholarship. Their debate concerned the matters of myth and eschatology in the New Testament. Yet, despite Bloch's collective and political emphasis, it seems today as though Bultmann's existentialist reinterpretation has won the day. In this essay, then, I trace their debate in order to show how Bultmann's existential reinterpretation of myth and privatized eschatology seems to have triumphed over Bloch. In response to a neglected Bloch and a victorious Bultmann, I seek to recover one and recuperate the other by bringing them back into contact with one another. Before I proceed, there is a preliminary question: how are myth and eschatology connected? The answer is disarmingly simple (and obvious): eschatology is a form of myth. Indeed, stories about the end of the world and the inauguration of a new and better age cannot avoid dealing in the language, metaphors, and narrative structures of myth. Eschatology may be regarded as a subset of mythology, along with what are conventionally called theogonic, cosmogonic, and anthropogonic myths (the creation of the gods, the universe, and human beings). To these I would add "poligonic" myths, not merely because these various types of myths are inescapably political but also because we can speak of a distinct category of political myth. What eschatology does is round out the picture, for all these types of myth actually deal with origins; by contrast, the concern of eschatology is the process of the end of history and whatever might follow.
- Subject
- myth; eschatology; Ernst Bloch; Rudolf Bultmann
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1055796
- Identifier
- uon:15936
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780822355892
- Language
- eng
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