RT Article
T1 Plowshares or swords? End-of-the-world rhetoric in a politically divided world
JF Review and expositor
VO 120
IS 4
SP 267
OP 276
A1 Brenneman, James E.
LA English
YR 2023
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1907410090
AB A presidential election year, when apocalyptic rhetorical bombast can be at its most cutting and binary, provides an ideal socio-political setting to assess and challenge the standard accounts of political realism. Insofar as appeals to end-of-the-world rhetoric in Scripture are often enough used by politicians backed by their various religious constituencies in making their opposing cases, opposing apocalypses in the Bible provide an ideal literary context to assess and challenge the standard accounts and efforts to unify texts in Scripture that are on-their-face contradictory. Since preachers in pulpits are often the primary interpreters of Scripture to their church-going publics, how might a preacher preach the famous contradictory “plowshare” passages in the Bible (Isa 2:2-4 and Joel 3:9-12) in a season of heightened political tension, indeed, any time when faced with contradictions in the Bible? This article argues for a nonviolent political realism as a political theology for addressing such end-of-the-world binaries that have and continue to threaten real and unleashed violence upon the world.
K1 preaching conflicting biblical texts
K1 political realism
K1 nonviolent politics
K1 Joel 3:9-17
K1 Isaiah 2:2-4
K1 false prophecy
K1 end-times
K1 end-of-the-world binaries
K1 Apocalyptic
DO 10.1177/00346373241259742