DT: Yes, I don’t think you can understand the New Testament, and therefore Christianity, without its strong apocalyptic tradition. And not just apocalyptic texts like Paul’s Epistle to the Thessalonians, Matthew 24, almost the whole of Mark, and especially the tremendum et fascinans power of the Book of Revelation. The whole Christian Bible ends with that plaintive cry, “Come, Lord Jesus.” Without its apocalyptic dimension, properly deliteralized of course, Christianity would settle down into a religion that has lost its sense of the not yet, and the existential sense that the Second Coming, like our own death, could happen at any time.
“To really absorb, appropriate, and articulate the whole tradition” would require 7-8 lifetimes. David Tracy on how to understand theology in fragments.https://t.co/9DochZI9Mk
— Commonweal Magazine (@commonwealmag) October 7, 2019