messianism

plural messianisms

1. countableuncountableThe belief in a messiah.

   After his death, the monarchy was restored and his Puritanic messianism lost its power but its message endured in the American Colonies and amongst the English Nonconformists ready to blossom again in the evangelical awakening two hundred years later.

   2011, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography – A History of the Middle East, page 362

   2 more examples

   Left prostrate by the fall of the ancient order, the collapse of Maat itself, and assessed by more sensitive moral discernment, the corrupt and disorganised society which followed the Pyramid Age appeared hopeless to the horrified eyes of some of the social sages who contemplated the wreck of the old order. The earliest known age of pessimism and disillusionment ensued. The social prophets painted a terrible picture of corruption and disorganisation which they denounced in unsparing terms—in one case even addressing these denunciations to the king himself. Nevertheless there were some among the Egyptian sages who had not lost hope, and they carried on the earliest crusade for social justice. It is very surprising that their social idealism took the form of Messianism, the belief in a righteous ruler yet to come, one who should usher in a golden age of justice for all mankind, a belief later inherited by the Hebrews.

   1935, James H. Breasted, chapter II, in The Dawn of Conscience, pages 20–21

   Derridean "messianicity without messianism" that marks so much of post-modernist educational theorizing today, and that makes use of esotericism, sigetics, acroamatics, proleptics, and illocutionary and perlocutionary acts in the disguise of a new pedagogy of the unknowable, wasn't the answer ten years ago.

   2002, Dave Hill, Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, page 257