The Book of Revelation's legacy of visual imagery is evaluated here, from the 11th century to the end of World War 2 illuminated manuscripts, books, prints and drawings of apocalyptic phases are examined.
The artist and entrepreneur Albrecht Dürer lived in Germany in the early 1500s, when two storms were threatening the Holy Roman Empire. First, Suleiman the Magnificent and his army of Ottoman Turks were expanding from Constantinople to Vienna, the doorstep of Europe. Second, Martin Luther, a German monk and professor, wrote his Ninety-Five Theses identifying corruption within the Roman Catholic Church. This challenged the authority of both Emperor Charles V and Pope Leo X, who responded by accusing Luther of heresy. Albrecht Dürer influenced art and media throughout Europe as strongly as Martin Luther influenced people’s views of life, death, and their relationship with God. Dürer's art and writing reveal how this creative and thoughtful man responded to the changes offered by Luther. Why was Dürer so attracted to Luther’s writings? Why would he risk being accused of being a heretic? Both of these men inspired changes in art, religion, and politics that still underlie the foundation of today’s social structures and Western culture.
Utilizes material from the award-winning Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible to introduce theological interpretation through a book-by-book survey of the New Testament.
The book of Revelation has been a source of continual fascination for nearly two thousand years. Concepts such as The Lamb of God, the Four Horsemen, the Seventh Seal, the Beasts and Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon, Armageddon, the Millennium, the Last Judgement, the New Jerusalem, and the ubiquitous Angel of the Apocalypse have captured the popular imagination. One can hardly open a newspaper or click on a news web site without reading about impending financial or climate change Armageddon, while the concept of the Four Horsemen pervades popular music, gaming, and satire. Yet few people know much about either the basic meaning or original context of these concepts or the multiplicity of different ways in which they have been interpreted by visual artists in particular. The visual history of this most widely illustrated of all the biblical books deserves greater attention. This book fills these gaps in a striking and original way by means of ten concise thematic chapters which explain the origins of these concepts from the book of Revelation in an accessible way. These explanations are augmented and developed via a carefully selected sample of the ways in which the concepts have been treated by artists through the centuries. The 120 visual examples are drawn from a wide range of time periods and media including the ninth-century Trier Apocalypse, thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Apocalypse Manuscripts such as the Lambeth and Trinity Apocalypses, the fourteenth-century Angers Apocalypse Tapestry, fifteenth-century Apocalypse altarpieces by Van Eyck and Memling, Dürer and Cranach's sixteenth-century Apocalypse woodcuts, and more recently a range of works by William Blake, J. M. W. Turner, Max Beckmann, as well as film posters and stills, cartoons, and children's book illustrations. The final chapter demonstrates the continuing resonance of all the themes in contemporary religious, political, and popular thinking, while throughout the book a contrast will be drawn between those readers of Revelation who have seen it in terms of earthly revolutions in the here and now, and those who have adopted a more spiritual, otherworldly approach.
The final book of the New Testament, the Apocalypse, has been controversial since its initial appearance during the first century A.D. For centuries after, theologians, exegetes, scholars, and preachers have grappled with the imagery and symbolism behind this fascinating and terrifying book. Their thoughts and ideas regarding the apocalypse—and its trials and tribulations—were received within both elite and popular culture in the medieval and early modern eras. Therefore, one may rightly call the Apocalypse, and its accompanying hopes and fears, a foundational pillar of Western Civilization. The interest in the Apocalypse, and apocalyptic movements, continues apace in modern scholarship and society alike. This present volume, A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse, collates essays from specialists in the study of premodern apocalyptic subjects. It is designed to orient undergraduate and graduate students, as well as more established scholars, to the state of the field of premodern apocalyptic studies as well as to point them in future directions for their scholarship and/or pedagogy. Contributors are: Roland Betancourt, Robert Boenig, Richard K. Emmerson, Ernst Hintz, László Hubbes, Hiram Kümper, Natalie Latteri, Thomas Long, Katherine Olson, Kevin Poole, Matthias Riedl, Michael A. Ryan
Stephen Pattemore examines passages within Revelation 4:1–22:21 that depict the people of God as actors in the apocalyptic drama and infers what impact these passages would have had on the self-understanding and behaviour of the original audience of the work. He uses Relevance Theory, a development in the linguistic field of pragmatics, to help understand the text against the background of allusion to other texts. Three important images are traced. The picture of the souls under the altar (6:9–11) is found to govern much of the direction of the text with its call to faithful witness and willingness for martyrdom. Even the militant image of a messianic army (7:1–8, 14:1–5) urges the audience in precisely the same direction. Both images combine in the final image of the bride, the culmination of challenge and hope traced briefly in the New Jerusalem visions.
The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War, and the lasting impact it had on Christianity and world religions more extensively in the century that followed. The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. A steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was served to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon. But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Philip Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels, apparitions, and the supernatural, was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the Abrahamic religions - Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - paving the way for modern views of religion and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism. Connecting remarkable incidents and characters - from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian Genocide - Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis. We cannot understand our present religious, political, and cultural climate without understanding the dramatic changes initiated by the First World War. The war created the world's religious map as we know it today.
The Book of Revelation has fired the imaginations of theologians, preachers, artists, and ordinary Christians across the centuries. The resulting number of commentaries on the book is enormous, and most studies can only touch upon, at most, a representative sample of this vast literature. As a consequence, many focus largely on the interpretation of the Apocalypse only within specific periods, such as the patristic period or during the Reformation. One result of this severe limitation given the vast literary corpus is how historical interpretations in critical commentaries of the Book of Revelations tend to prioritize authors from the modern period. In The Book of Revelation and Its Interpreters: Short Studies and an Annotated Bibliography, editors Richard Tresley and Ian Boxall fill a significant gap in the scholarly literature. At its heart is an extensive annotated bibliography, covering commentaries on the book up to 1700, including most of the early illuminated Apocalypses. Supporting the presentation of this survey of the historical interpretations of the Book of Revelation is an extended overview of Revelation’s often-colorful reception history by Christopher Rowland, together with a number of short studies on various aspects of the book. These include discussions of specific commentators, such as Sean Michael Ryan’s look at Tyconius and Francis X. Gumerlock exploration of Chromatius of Aquileia, alongside a more general treatment of Revelation’s impact on the figure of John of Patmos in an essay by Ian Boxall and the visual reception of Revelation in Natasha O’Hear’s article. The Book of Revelation and Its Interpreters provides a valuable bibliographical resource for those working in the field of Biblical Studies, history of Christianity, eschatology and apocalyptic studies. The accompanying essays orient the authors recorded in the bibliography within a larger context, offering specific examples of the Apocalypse’s capacity to speak in fresh and often surprising ways to diverse audiences throughout history.
This text evaluates the biblical commentaries of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern age with each commentary examined by an expert. Each chapter focuses on the two or three major themes of its particular commentary and also relates the themes of the commentaries to Aquinas' 'Summa Contra Gentiles' and especially to his 'Suma Theologica'.
This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so. The religious and mystical dimension of poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. Chapters also explore how church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the period. This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of this important but often overlooked aspect of modern English poetry.