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The Arian writers made much of the blunt admission by Jesus that he was ignorant of the Day of Judgment. This chapter examines orthodox responses to the charge that this was proof of the inferiority of the Incarnate Word's nature.

This chapter goes into the psychology of apocalyptic believers, the megalomanic (and often paranoid) belief that they are at the center of a cosmic drama, and explores why, despite so many spectacular failures in announcing the coming kingdom of heaven, the belief has not abated even in the modern, “rational,” and secular world. It then offers a set of definitions for terms the book will use repeatedly: apocalyptic, millennial, eschatological. It lays out two sets of variables that allow one to map the phenomena: for millennialism, demotic (egalitarian) versus imperial (hierarchical), progressive versus restorative; for apocalyptic, cataclysmic (violent destruction) versus transformative (change of will), active (human participation) versus passive (divine action).

This chapter relates John Locke's use of the word “consciousness” to the notion that a subject of experience's field of consciousness is identical with its “field of from-the-inside givenness,” where this includes all its present experience, as well as all memories accessible from-the-inside, and also everything somatosensorily available. The chapter suggests that a subject of experience's field of consciousness is identical with its field of morally-affectively-concerned from-the-inside experience, and that Lockean consciousness is always accompanied by concernment. Finally, it considers the fundamental and forensic aspect of Locke's view of personal identity, the commonsense point that “human beings won't on the Day of Judgment be responsible for all the things they have done in their lives, but only for those that they're still Conscious of and so still Concerned in.”

This chapter examines John Locke's position regarding concernment and repentance. It first considers various possibilities for past events to become part of present consciousness before discussing guilt as a form of concernment in relation to consciousness, personhood, accountability, and punishability. It then explores the idea that one's overall forensic condition, or fundamental moral standing, at any time, either now or on the Day of Judgment, lies in his overall moral character or moral being at that time. It also analyzes the possibility that repentance—metanoia—can cancel out or detach one from a past wrongdoing in such a way that he won't be punished for it on the Day of Judgment, or indeed on some earlier, sublunary occasion, even though he remembers perfectly well what he did.

Humanity has a long record of reacting strongly to heavenly spectacles. Celestial events can be regarded as omens for many reasons. Eclipses and meteor showers impress any observer with the awesome nature of the spectacle itself. Astrological theory can attach importance to certain specific planetary configurations. Tradition associates both comets and meteors with death. The Christian Bible and the Islamic Koran associate solar and lunar eclipses with Judgment Day. Judgment Day is fundamental to Christian theology, and there are some biblical grounds for anticipating its imminent arrival. It is natural to think that such a momentous event will be heralded in the skies. For a variety of reasons, medieval Europeans were expecting Judgment Day to arrive around the end of the first Christian millennium. Hence, any study of the apocalyptic year 1000 should include a survey of the astronomical situation during that period.

This chapter examines the notion that personal identity or sameness of subject of experience across time doesn't require sameness of substance or substantial composition across time, any more than the diachronic continuity of an individual animal life requires sameness of substance or substantial composition. It begins with a discussion of materialism, one of John Locke's principal ideas in his discussion of personal identity, and especially the idea that one's whole psychological being—one's character, personality, memory, and so on—is wholly located in one's brain. It then considers Locke's claim that materialists can—must—allow full transmission of personal identity across complete change of substance, along with his attempt to block an argument from the taken-for-granted or nonnegotiable fact of personal responsibility on the Day of Judgment to the immateriality of thinking substance.

This chapter examines another reason why the idea of a person's overall moral identity or nature may be useful in a Lockean framework. It first considers the difficulty that arises when materialists or mortalists address the troublesome question of what guarantees personal identity between death and resurrection before discussing John Locke's reply to the same question in terms of consciousness. It then explores Locke's position regarding the idea that God may give each of us a brand-new body on the Day of Judgment, which won't matter so long as our personality and memory information and mental capacities and consciousness are somehow preserved. It argues that this kind of preservation of personal identity is no worse than its preservation through sleep or change of material particles. The chapter also analyzes the link between consciousness and concernment and concludes by commenting on punishment and reward.

This chapter examines the charge of circularity or question-begging that has been leveled against John Locke's notion of personal identity. It first considers Locke's assumption, in raising the question of personal identity, that there exists a diachronically continuous subject of experience that qualifies as a person by virtue of possessing the capacities characteristic of personhood. It then discusses the concept of a person (Person), described as something that has a certain personality or moral-characteral coherence in addition to being a cognitively sophisticated “sensible creature.” It also suggests that Locke never endorsed the radical theory of personal identity and concludes by interpreting the claim that “consciousness makes personal identity” as simply the claim that “the actions that you'll be responsible for on the Day of Judgment, as a human subject of experience, will be all.”

Nathanael Emmons is one of the most peculiar but influential theologians of the New England Theology. He declared that God would be judged on the Day of Judgment, and that God loves Lucifer as much today as before the Fall. Although his influence on abolitionism and democratic liberalism is important to American social and political history, this chapter focuses on his eccentric theology. It shows how this tobacco-chewing thinker, “the most extraordinary specimen of the Calvinist personality ever developed in the historic seedbed” (Henry F. May), used a radically individualist hermeneutic that would eventually undermine the Calvinism of his tradition.

Slowly but surely, Allen Jones was getting acclimated to life on Rikers Island. Once again, as on the streets, basketball was his path to acceptance. Jones was a boy in a world of men, but now he had won some mentors and protectors. When Jones went down for his second court hearing in the Bronx, he felt a strange combination of emotions. It was a sunny morning, and he was happy to be out and about and doing something different. The judge hearing his case charged him with five armed robberies and possession of a deadly weapon, just as the probation officer had predicted. Because there was no way his family could make that bail, he would have to stay on Rikers for ninety court days before being called back for another hearing. This chapter further describes Jones's final judgment day and freedom from the jailhouse.

The chapter glosses the notion of a weak messianic power, arguing that it be understood first and foremost in terms of unrealized potential and latent potency. What remains unrealized, Benjamin suggests, stays with us, remaining not merely as a lingering echo but as a secretly insistent appeal. What speaks to us out of the past, what summons us to a secret appointment with it, is strictly speaking that which will never have belonged to it or that which will have belonged only as a missed possibility and unrealized potential. Because such appeals involve speech of another nature they require from the addressee a special attunement, perhaps even a certain mode of unconscious receptivity. The chapter argues that the materialist historian is such an addressee and that his work consists in attuning himself to the repetition of traumatic moments in Benjamin’s own writings as well as to key moments of testimonial failure in the Eichmann trial. These moments remain literally unforgettable and as such function as the sign of a constantly replayed and still ungrasped kernel of collective memory. Such replays are understood as traumatic flashbacks, as the insistent appeal of what speaks to us out of a certain historical unconscious.

This chapter argues that in one of its chief aspects Locke’s famous theory of personal identity is an attempt to show how personal immortality is conceptually possible on his principles. Through his analysis of personal identity in terms of consciousness, Locke shows how a person can be present at the Day of Judgment and responsible for his or her sins in this life even if there is no persisting immaterial substance. The second half of the chapter examines Locke’s debate with Stillingfleet over the nature of the general resurrection. It is shown that Locke argues on both philosophical and scriptural grounds that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead does not entail the traditional doctrine of the resurrection of the same body.

This chapter examines the staging of divinity in the York Corpus Christi play. Theatre historians traditionally have identified ‘goldface’ as the primary sign for representing divinity on the medieval stage. The York pageant of The Transfiguration of Christ—in which, for the first time, the human Jesus visibly transforms into the divine ‘Christ’ in front of three core apostles—offers the theological explanation for this convention. Often overlooked in otherwise comprehensive studies of the York cycle drama, this pageant highlights the convention of goldface as a material process that is itself the explicit subject of the dramatic action, thereby establishing a signifying idiom of divinity that recurs across those pageants that also take up the mystery of Christ's dual nature. This chapter furthermore offers an original interpretation of Christ's body that differs from readings focused solely on the suffering Christ of the Passion sequence.

The work of this author is largely a eulogy of a blind stirring of love. The chapter argues that the author's words give the impression that this stirring is sometimes like a beautiful but foreign intrusion into the life the contemplative, interfering with his life, cutting him off from society, and making him a target of criticism. The discussion stresses the experimental nature of the blind stirring of love with its repercussions on the body, pointing to the belief that contemplative love enters deeply into the human psyche. The author explains that his contemplation is only a preparation for the time when body and soul will rise in “undeadliness” at the day of judgment.

This section draws together significant themes in the self-awareness and ministry identity of Edwards by expounding his “Farewell Sermon” delivered in 1750 to the congregation in Northampton. Having just been dismissed by the church, this “separation” is nonetheless not final, for Edwards argues that only the Judgment Day can truly dissolve pastoral relations between minister and people. As ambassador of Christ, he has brought light to the church of Northampton representing God’s objective promises and gifts. The sermon is preached from 2 Corinthians, which is also a farewell message from Paul. Edwards, having immersed himself in the life and trials of the Northampton church, appeals to the ministry of Jeremiah as ministry counterpart, for they both have a prophetic role feeling the response of God to the hardheartedness of the congregation. He affirms the created order and wishes for its ultimate transformation.