Episode 279: Greg Carey - Apocalyptic Imagination in the Bible
In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared are joined by Greg Carey to explore the concept of apocalyptic literature within the Bible and its broader implications. Greg delves into the meaning of apocalyptic, explains the evolution of apocalyptic literature from proto-apocalyptic texts in the Old Testament to its more developed forms in Second Temple literature and the New Testament, and also addresses how apocalyptic themes might resonate with contemporary issues like political nationalism and economic exploitation. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What is the definition of apocalyptic literature, and what are its key characteristics?
How do apocalyptic texts differ from apocryphal and eschatological literature?
Can you provide examples of proto-apocalyptic texts found in the Old Testament, such as those in Isaiah, Zechariah, Ezekiel, and Joel?
How did apocalyptic literature develop during the Second Temple period, and what are some notable examples like the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch?
In what ways did apocalyptic themes influence the New Testament and early Christian thought?
How can apocalyptic literature be relevant to modern political and social issues?
What impact does spiritualizing apocalyptic texts have on their relevance and interpretation today?
Quotables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-tweetable-length statements from the episode you can share.
“The entire New Testament is shaped by different kinds of apocalyptic imagination.” — Greg Carey @theb4np
“Scholars use apocalyptic to talk about a set of ideas that are distinctive when they're packaged together and also literary motifs that are pretty easy to describe.” — Greg Carey @theb4np
“[Apocalyptic] is like a flavor of eschatology, just like chocolate mint chip is a flavor of ice cream. And it's a big one in the New Testament.” — Greg Carey @theb4np
“It seems like some of this apocalyptic literature really flourishes as a response to crisis.” — Greg Carey @theb4np
“The entire New Testament is shaped by different kinds of apocalyptic imagination. This is the time of Jesus and Paul, and most scholars regard Jesus and Paul as thoroughly apocalyptic figures. Jesus talks about the coming of the Son of Man at a time of great crisis, and particularly crisis for Jerusalem. Paul talks about the return of Jesus and the resurrection at the end of history, and both of them use language about a final judgment.” — Greg Carey @theb4np
“The gospels are full of Jesus having conflict with demons and being tempted by Satan, and of course the whole idea of a Messiah or son of man who is Israel's great deliverer and the one who's going to set the world right. That's not an idea that's crystallized within our Old Testament. Within the Jewish scriptures, that idea becomes more crystallized in the apocalyptic literature of that Second Temple period. So the way I would put it is if you take those ideas out, what's left of your New Testament is really small.” — Greg Carey @theb4np
“As the movement grew and became either close to majority or majority within the broader Roman Empire, you begin to see Christian interpreters arguing that Revelation is really about spiritual things rather than about this historical conflict involving Rome. And it was written specifically to address conditions within the Roman Empire. You see that getting spiritualized because it just doesn't fit where the church is, going into the end of the third and end of the fourth century.” — Greg Carey @theb4np
Mentioned in This Episode
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Pete: You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
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Pete: So make sure you sign up before September 6 at: thebiblefornormalpeople.com/HonorRoll. Welcome everyone to today's episode. We're talking about the apocalypse with Greg Carey.
Jared: Greg is professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary where he teaches courses on the New Testament and on biblical and contextual interpretation. He's actually the author of the book, Apocalyptic Literature in the New Testament. And we get to dive into that quite a bit. Not the book, but the idea. And he unpacks it in really helpful ways.
Pete: Very helpful ideas. So, let's get into the episode.
[Teaser clip of Greg speaking plays over music}
Greg: “The entire New Testament is shaped by different kinds of apocalyptic imagination. Jesus talks about the coming of the Son of Man at a time of great crisis. Paul talks about the resurrection. Both of them use language about a final judgment. The whole idea of a messiah becomes more crystallized in the apocalyptic literature of that Second Temple period. If you take those ideas out, what's left of your New Testament is really small.”
Pete: Greg Carey, welcome to our podcast.
Greg Carey: Hi Pete, it is a delight to be here.
Pete: Okay, listen, we're going to talk about apocalyptic in the Bible, and can we just start with the basics? What does apocalyptic even mean?
Greg: Yeah, scholars use apocalyptic to talk about a set of ideas that are distinctive when they're packaged together and also literary motifs that are pretty easy to describe.
So one way I like to talk about the ideas is to imagine someone who's read their whole Protestant Old Testament all the way through. They get to the end of Malachi and turn the page and find out they're in the New Testament. If they've read the whole Protestant Old Testament and they understood it, remembered it, they're still not ready for some of the biggest ideas in the New Testament, like resurrection, and final judgment, and a messiah or son of man who's coming at the end of history, or the Satan who's running around opposing God's will and tormenting people with demons, right?
All of those ideas surface in Jewish apocalyptic literature just before the time of Jesus. And then we see it in the Bible, especially in the second half of Daniel and in Revelation, where we get literary texts that are thoroughly what we call apocalypses. So, they tell a story about a person who has had a vision, that vision has revealed the final course of history to them, or maybe the regions of heaven and hell, otherworldly mysteries, they get help from an angel, all of the apocalypses have conversations with this heavenly being, bizarre symbols, dualism, you're either right or wrong, you're good or evil, and most people are on the wrong camp. And we can get more technical. There are some other literary motifs, but we call this stuff apocalyptic when it all shows up kind of in a package, becomes recognizable.
Jared: Just for people who, this is a new term apocalyptic, it may sound similar to some other words like apocryphal or even eschatology, which is a fancy word that some people might have heard in churches, but not really understood. Could you just distinguish those before we move forward, so people are clear on what apocalyptic is and how it's distinct from, say, apocryphal and eschatology, just because those are kind of big words.
Greg: It's easier, Jared, to start with eschatology. If you think of eschatology as this big basket of the ways we imagine ultimate things, what's truly real beyond what we see and hear in our ordinary experience, where history's headed, right, is history headed toward a goal or an end, and what lies beyond death are sort of the classic eschatological topics.
Within all of that, the kinds of topics I just named, like a resurrection, a final judgment, a messiah, heaven and hell sorts of things—those are within eschatology what make up apocalyptic eschatology. So it's like a flavor of eschatology, just like chocolate mint chip is a flavor of ice cream. And it's a big one in the New Testament.
And you're right, apocalyptic sounds like apocryphal, or the books of the apocrypha. They have as a root, the uncovering of things that are hidden. That's what apocalyptic means, is things that have been revealed. But when we say apocryphal literature, we're really talking about the literature that's outside of our Protestant canon. Some of the books we consider apocryphal are part of the Catholic Bible or the Orthodox Bibles of the Christian world, but apocryphal is talking about a specific set of books that were produced by ancient Jews, especially, but also sometimes Christians that were taken seriously and widely read, but are not part of our biblical canon.
Jared: So, maybe before we dive in a little bit deeper into apocalyptic, another definition that might help us get there one step at a time is you made, it sounds like you made a distinction between apocalyptic as a broader category and then apocalypses that are, seem to be more specific kinds of literature that we find inside and outside of the, of the Bible. Can you make a distinction between that? Because I think it's a, I was going to say a revelation, that would have been a good pun intended, uh, a revelation or it might be new for people to think about. All of the New Testament is somewhat apocalyptic, which may be a strange thing if you are only thinking of the book of Revelation.
So maybe can you talk about apocalyptic in general versus apocalypses specifically?
Greg: Yeah, so when we say apocalypses, we're talking about specific books that tell that story of the visionary and their experience and their revelation. The second half of Daniel and the book of Revelation are our big examples in the canon, right?
Specific books. But we see these ideas shot through the New Testament and a lot of Jewish literature of the same period that we call Second Temple literature, you know, the idea of a messianic or son of man figure who will deliver Israel and fix history, the idea of a final judgment, conflict between God and the angels over against Satan and the demons, a resurrection and a final judgment, minority of true believers who are pitted against the majority of humanity and these horrible demonic forces, all of those are apocalyptic ideas. And just like with any movement, those ideas can work their way throughout a culture. If we imagine the biblical world, a vast, vast percentage of people would have been illiterate, right?
They're not writing apocalypses, but those ideas are part of their imaginations. And so there is a difference between apocalyptic ideas or apocalyptic eschatology and the classic books that are devoted specifically to telling that kind of story. And I'll just add one thing. We use this term apocalyptic really because we're trying to understand this literature. And the book of Revelation starts by identifying itself, its first word is apocalypsis or revelation, right? So it's a category that helps us understand the literature we're reading.
Pete: Can I ask one last question just for definitions and clarification, because I have in my mind guys who play video games. You know, and, and the word, “there's an apocalypse coming”, and it's, it's end of the world violence. Is there an overlap between that concept and the idea of apocalyptic literature, or are they separate? How much? Is this a violent thing necessarily, or what's happening?
Greg: That's a great question, Pete. Not all of the apocalypses are interested in sort of an end time conflict, a great cataclysm that wraps up history and inaugurates this new age. But Revelation and Daniel are interested in that, and some other Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature are interested in that. The idea that there's this conflict between good and evil at the ultimate level that has to resolve itself, and that's not even unique to Judaism and Christianity, right?
You know that better than I do from your own training. So, it's not a misuse to talk about the zombie apocalypse or, right, apocalyptic movies, just understanding that that's a riff on this popular take of what we mean when we're talking about this ancient literature.
Jared: Okay, so maybe let's go back and do some chronology because you talked about, which I think was a really helpful way for people to understand If you knew all of the themes and everything in, in the Old Testament and then flipped to Matthew chapter one and read through that, you would still be missing some of these concepts because there's a, a lot of time passed between those books and the New Testament and a lot happened in Jewish culture.
You know, the Second Temple period had a lot of cultural shifts and, and religious ideas and things evolving and developing, but that's not to say, I don't think you're saying that it's completely new, that we may have what some scholars call this proto-apocalyptic. You talked about Daniel as one example, that we still, we do see it.
So, are there other ones, and then maybe, even before we get to the New Testament, could you tie some of that proto stuff to some of the Second Temple literature, like introduce us to some of these titles, that if people wanted to go and read, it might help close that gap a little bit. It might help them understand the New Testament a little bit as far as apocalyptic goes.
Greg: There's a big question. So if you don't mind my starting a little indirectly, scholars used to argue over what's the source of apocalyptic literature. But that's sort of like asking what's the source of blues rock, right? If you go back, you find out that Black musicians were listening to the Grand Ole Opry, and white musicians were trying to sneak into juke joints, and there are all these streams that come together, and those resources are there within Judaism and coming from all kinds of other ancient Near Eastern sources.
So you start to see, for example, visions of the world kind of ripping itself apart in a great end time crisis. And you get that sort of language in Isaiah 24-27, you get it in Zechariah 9-14, Ezekiel 37 and 38 have this huge conflict against the forces of Gog and Magog, the book of Joel seems to interpret a locust plague as this massive cataclysmic event.
Those are some texts within the Hebrew scriptures that we wouldn't call thoroughly apocalyptic, they don't have those distinctive ideas, but they are imagining history in a way that is sort of highly poetic and beyond the bounds of ordinary history. And we call that literature proto apocalyptic. But around the time of the Maccabean revolt, and this is, I'm sure an oversimplification, two great Jewish apocalypses start to come together. Literary apocalypses.
Pete: And Greg, when is the Maccabean revolt?
Greg: Thank you, Pete! 167 to 164 BCE. This is a moment in which some Jews or Judeans revolted against the local empire of a ruler called Antiochus IV, and in parts of the books of Enoch and in Daniel, especially the second half, that period is interpreted as the great end time crisis, in which God is going to dramatically intervene, purge Israel of its enemies, and inaugurate this era of peace, and righteousness, and judgment.
And those are sort of the two landmark texts. A lot of your hearers won't have heard of the book of Enoch, but it was highly influential in Judaism of the period, and even influential within the New Testament. It's quoted as scripture in the book of Jude, right? So, Enoch and Daniel are landmarks of the emergence of this new kind of literature.
Another period, this could be helpful, another period when we see sort of a flourishing of apocalyptic literature is another time of political upheaval after the end of the first Jewish revolt against the Romans that culminated with Jerusalem being just destroyed and depopulated, right, by the Romans in the year 70 CE, that's a period not long before or when Revelation is being written, and other Jewish apocalypses like 2 and 3 Baruch, 4 Ezra, are all responding in part to that event, so it seems like some of this apocalyptic literature really flourishes as a response to crisis.
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Pete: While we're on that, before we get too far, a quick step back to the Old Testament, it's not quite apocalyptic. It's called proto— they're not quite there. Was there also political upheaval that might have given rise to things like Zechariah or Isaiah or Joel?
Greg: You see it really clearly with Ezekiel, which is responding very directly to the exile. Joel is responding to this locust plague. I think Zechariah is responding to sort of the attempt to reestablish a Judean culture after the exile, at least at the end of Zechariah. And those chapters in Isaiah that are most often called proto apocalyptic are really hard to pin down historically. Just the short thing I would say is, it looks like a lot of people at a lot of different times had a hand in writing what we call Isaiah today.
Jared: But it's not surprising that a lot of that is located in our Old Testament in the prophetic tradition, like these things that you're naming are prophets and prophets tend to show up in time of crisis in the same way that later, apocalyptic shows up in times of crisis. So that seems to be the connection.
Greg: And all of these books, I mean, this sounds kind of obvious, but to just remember, all of these books are written, books are written, of course, but what I mean is these are people who have the resources and the training and the materials and the time to write elite literature. So, you know, I think it can be over simple to just say apocalyptic literature is the literature of oppressed people in crisis, but they understand themselves to be oppressed and they are responding to the crisis of their day.
Pete: You mentioned some Second Temple, uh, texts and can we weave the Dead Sea Scrolls into this? Yeah, help, help us because that's been so foundational for so many things in New Testament scholarship.
Greg: So, the Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish texts that were created by or copied by a group of people who had chosen to live out in the desert and written within a couple of centuries before that destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, because that community was destroyed not long before that, apparently by the Romans.
So this is a Jewish community that we would call sectarian. They've gone off to live by themselves and build this life. Their foundational documents talk about this community as the children of righteousness, pitting themselves against whoever is running the temple in Jerusalem. That part is not as heavily apocalyptic as some of the other texts there.
For example, among the Dead Sea Scrolls is a war scroll, and it describes this imaginary order of battle for the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness. And the Sons of Darkness, it also identifies them as the Kittim, which is a term used for invaders who come across the sea. So, it seems to be sort of a poetic, imaginative text about this final conflict against Israel's foreign oppressors.
So, the outlook of that group seems to be us versus the world. Seems to be very end time oriented. It's hard to assume that we know too much about the group from the text because some, they copied. The one other thing I'll add is they really liked that book of Enoch. Because about a dozen parts of Enoch show up among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Jared: So, it's a part of the same time period that we see the rise of apocalyptic literature and these apocalypses and that's also around the time that we have the New Testament beginning to form. So, maybe we can talk about that connection, not just with Revelation, but what's the relationship of apocalyptic to all of the New Testament?
You know, some scholars would say the New Testament as a whole is apocalyptic in some sense. So, do you agree with that? How would you frame the New Testament literature?
Greg: I would thoroughly agree that the entire New Testament is shaped by different kinds of apocalyptic imagination. There are some books where that's weaker to me, like Hebrews or maybe John, but what I would also say is, you know, this is the time of Jesus and Paul, and most scholars regard Jesus and Paul as thoroughly apocalyptic figures. Jesus talks about the coming of the Son of Man at a time of great crisis, and particularly crisis for Jerusalem. Paul talks about the return of Jesus and the resurrection at the end of history, and both of them use language about a final judgment. The Gospels are full of Jesus having conflict with demons and being tempted by Satan, and of course the whole idea of a Messiah or son of man who is Israel's great deliverer and the one who's going to set the world right. I mean, that idea, and this may surprise some of your hearers who haven't heard a lot.
That's not an idea that's crystallized within our Old Testament. Within the Jewish scriptures, that idea becomes more crystallized in the apocalyptic literature of that Second Temple period. So I mean, if you take those ideas out, the way I would put it is, if you take those ideas out, what's left of your New Testament is really small.
So, I think that a lot of Christians would like to marginalize that part of the New Testament and talk about which parts are apocalyptic and you can sort of work around them. But if you frame it the way I'm framing it, and I don't know, Jared and Pete, if you agree, if you want to read through the New Testament, you have to work through that material. You can't go around it.
Pete: Yeah, and I think that's a really important point you're bringing up. David Bentley Hart says, I mean, many people say this, but The New Testament is Jewish apocalypticism, and I think, I mean, my opinion, Greg, I think why it might be new for people to hear that and they want to go through and sift out that weird apocalyptic stuff and stick with the, you know, the real message of the New Testament, is that it becomes very Gentile pretty soon thereafter, right? So by the second century, certainly, you have a different population reading these texts and the apocalypse hasn't happened. Allow me to say, put it that way. And so I would put it this way, that the Jewish apocalyptic nature of the New Testament is morphed somehow to talk about something else.
And to me, just when I, if I'm wrong on that, you need to correct me here on this podcast. But if, if there's some truth to that, that was a very important moment for me. When I saw that, I said, my goodness gracious, that the Christian tradition has sort of lost some of that apocalyptic fervor and feel and tenor of the New Testament.
Greg: It has, and some of that is decisions Christians made, right? I mean, one of the hard parts is if we take seriously that Paul thought Jesus would return while he was alive, at least when he wrote 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians, he clearly expects to be alive at Jesus' return. That means he's wrong at one level.
And, you know, Jesus in the Gospels uses language like “this generation.” Could Jesus in being apocalyptic in his outlook, have been wrong about that? And what would we do with that information? And so early Christians had to sort that out. And the other part is as the movement grew and became either close to majority or majority within the broader Roman Empire, you begin to see Christian interpreters arguing that Revelation is really about spiritual things rather than about this historical conflict involving Rome. And it was written specifically to address conditions within the Roman Empire. You see that getting spiritualized because it just doesn't fit where the church is, going into the end of the third and end of the fourth century.
Pete: We've really lost something by not coming to terms and really embodying absorbing this apocalyptic notion. I guess that was inevitable.
Jared: Yeah, maybe, maybe we have a little conversation here because I maybe want to push back a little bit on that Pete of like, yes, we've, we've lost something, but I don't want it to become, I don't think you intend it to be kind of originalist, that we need to get back to this thing. Because whenever we're talking about, I think your second point you just made Greg is really highlighted to me, which is, one of the reasons people like to skirt around it is because they want to skirt around the situatedness and social location and context of the New Testament because it's supposed to be this inerrant, absolute truth, objective for all time, truth teller and apocalyptic smells contextual.
It gives, it's the flavor of the day and that doesn't work with the kind of thing we want the Bible to be. And so, not just, hey, a century later, we're largely Gentile, and we're past this moment of political crisis, and so, this isn't as relevant, so we have to figure it out, but just the very nature that it had a context, I think, gets more and more problematic through the centuries. And especially in kind of post Reformation and into, you know, modern evangelicalism, that gets really problematic to look at the text and see the context just there.
Pete: And you know, that's, that's ironic. Greg, we'll get back to you in a minute here. [Laughing] But the tendency among, and I'll say this descriptively, evangelical and fundamentalist readers of scripture is historical context.
Right. Got to get back to that. Well, here you have it, Greg.
Greg: Right, right, right.
Pete: And it's like, and historical context in that sense becomes a problem if you see the Bible as this thing that just doesn't change and gives us timeless truth. It gives us contextualized truth. Let's just put it that way. Right. You know?
Jared: Yeah. Okay. Now, now Greg, comment on all that.
Pete: So thanks for ruining the Bible for us, Greg.
Jared: What do you think of all that?
Greg: I think a lot about it. So I think with Revelation, for example, that fundamentalists, what do they do with Revelation at the beginning and the end of the book? Insisting that it's about things that are happening and are about to happen soon. What do they do with, it's written to these seven churches scattered in what we'd call Western Turkey today and addresses specifically their circumstances. Do we spiritualize it? You know, and I've heard people say, “well, soon, you know, a thousand years is like a day in the Lord's sight,” but what we lose is that Revelation was speaking specifically to issues within the Roman Empire that would be relevant for us as modern readers to consider. So that's one dimension of what we lose. We lose an ability to engage political culture and empire and abuse that Revelation's addressing. The other one I would say is the whole idea of Jesus' resurrection is the idea. Right? We don't get Christianity in a recognizable way without the idea that God raised Jesus from the dead.
That's an apocalyptic idea, and we could go into the weeds if y'all do it. But, the point I want to make is, resurrection means we're mortal and we die. And so many Christians want to avoid that and just say, “Oh, we die and we go off and, you know, our spirits go to be with God and our favorite pet and the people we love.”
That's not resurrection at all in the New Testament. Resurrection is this event that happens as God is pulling history together. And the place I want to land on is what resurrection reminds us of is something we try to avoid all the time. We are truly mortal. We really die and any life we have depends on God. Everybody, Christians, no less, will avoid that as hard as we can.
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Pete: That's a really great way of putting it, Greg, that resurrection is an apocalyptic concept, but we don't live in an apocalyptic context anymore. And it's been 2000 years, you know, so…
Jared: We've even done what you were saying, Greg, we've spiritualized the concept of resurrection. It's gotten doubly abstract and as a way to escape from death and as a way to escape from, I mean, in general, what I'm hearing is like a theme of we're trying to escape the humanity of the Bible and the humanity of us as humans.
And we do that by spiritualizing these things away instead of rooting them in the context, which is what we are, that's what we do as humans. And so, resurrection as this apocalyptic idea, we have to root it in what that meant then, and—again, maybe to tie this together and to turn it into a question, I want to ask you, you said something about it being relevant to our political moment, and it's ironic that we spiritualize it in order to make it relevant because it feels like, well, that context seems so far away from us, but in so doing, we kind of miss the relevancy that's right in front of us in the here and now, in the political or, and I don't mean political in Republican versus Democrat, but I mean it in, in a broader sense of this earthly conversations and discussions and policies around flourishing and suffering as a human community.
So, can you just give us a peek into that world of how this might be relevant if we don't overly spiritualize it, but see it for what it is in its context.
Greg: Right, and I would say I'm not sure that's accidental, because in some ways it's convenient to ignore the kinds of critiques that Revelation puts out. So, you know, the Roman Empire is present, and it is a matter of local people literally worshiped Rome and its emperors. They sent delegations to Rome and asked permission to build temples and hold festivals. And they conducted that, and it was important to them. It was signs of patriotism. And Revelation, in part, is addressing that and saying, if you follow Jesus, you cannot offer your devotion to the empire or its emperor, or all the trappings of the empire.
And now we have this movement, Christian nationalism, which is not new, right? You don't need a lecture on that, but it's just that it has risen with particular virulence in our moment, trying to equate the United States with God's will for the world. The Romans were great at talking about how the gods had arranged for Rome to rule the world.
And Revelation doesn't just critique that kind of political idolatry, it specifically outlines in chapter 18 Rome's economic and diplomatic, and some scholars would even say environmental, abuse of the Mediterranean world. And in Revelation 18, you get this list of cargo where Rome is taking the resources out of other lands and sending it for what's what empires do. And that is a system that implicates everyone in the empire who benefits from it. So you can read Revelation 18 that way and almost every scholar would agree that's what's going on there, is a critique of that sort of economic exploitation and abuse.
So you have a critique of imperialism and excessive loyalty to the authorities of the day and also a critique of, of their abuses of their power and economic abuse. My goodness, I mean, we need to be able to engage the Bible with an awareness that that witness is there.
Pete: So, not to put words in your mouth, and I'm not trying to start something here, but, um, but maybe I am. Christian nationalism, one way of thinking about that is a revivification of Roman imperialism.
Greg: Well, I mean, it, it, what I would say is, it's a great way to start a conversation about it that probably won't hold up all the way through the analysis, right? It's a critique of national arrogance or imperial arrogance. It's a critique of imperial violence. And it's a critique of a world that keeps making a very few people richer and richer and richer.
In Revelation 13, it says no one can buy or sell unless they have the mark of a beast. Those things are keenly relevant for now. So, I don't want to say the United States is the beast or the United States is the prostitute of Revelation 17 and 18. But I do want to say that there are things we need to engage there and here. So, I, you know, I think the way you framed it, Pete, can help us have that conversation.
Jared: I wanna, maybe I'm not gonna say this as clearly as I would want because I don't, I'm processing out loud, but I think there's something, the marks of apocalypticism that you mentioned earlier are rattling around in my brain as something that I would have grown up with.
And I don't think that this Christian nationalism moment can be divorced from apocalypticism as it is present in a lot of more conservative Christian traditions today. And I mean that in the sense of the dualism. There's the right and the wrong, the sons of light and the sons of darkness, I mean, I think that language is even used in a lot of churches.
The exceptionalism of, we're in the minority, so, sort of, uh, narrow is the way of righteousness, and broad is the path of destruction. We're always the narrow ones, meaning there's very few of us, even if statistically, Christians make up the majority of Americans. We still have to have this exceptionalism almost because we overlay this apocalypticism onto our present moment, you know, talking about angelic beings, that there's a spiritual war happening.
I mean, I grew up in a more charismatic tradition, so that might be more overt, but these concepts are actually, interestingly enough, and that's why I haven't processed, so maybe I'm asking you a question. How do we analyze this that it feels like the apocalypticism actually has been co opted in service of the Christian nationalism, not as a way to combat it?
Greg: Yeah, I mean, I don't even know how you analyze the motives of folks, but that kind of dualism is so prevalent in the Christian nationalism where we're dealing with the United States, where there's this minority that is absolutely right, and because they're absolutely right, they are called to exercise dominion over the rest of society and make it conform to their understanding of God's will.
And the apocalypticism serves that because apocalypticism is the argument that there are only a few of us on the right side who really know the truth. So it's a flexible resource. And there are things about Revelation and apocalyptic literature in general I can be very critical of, but I don't know that they're trying to co opt it. I think that is their native language. And so, you know, the language of having prophetic revelations, where God has revealed to them that, you know, there's a demonic portal over the White House and some listeners will know, I'm not making this up. Prominent figures use that language or that, you know, one political party is possessed by one demon. That's not—yeah. The apocalyptic literature can be used in a lot of ways and it has been used in ways that are violent and oppressive at many points in our history.
Jared: And it feels like the rhetoric oftentimes, because we talked about apocalyptic is in these moments of crisis, it's almost—it's helpful, I don't want to use this word too strongly, but it's almost helpful to manufacture a crisis because then if we're in crisis, it justifies certain behaviors, right? It justifies, in times of peace, there are rules that we follow, but in times of war, we follow other rules. And if we can manufacture that we are in a time of war or a time of crisis, then I think this apocalypticism serves, you know, a different purpose.
Greg: One way you can track that is if you can remember when we had Christian bookstores everywhere and they had these Bible prophecy sections. So, you know, I'm a child of the Cold War, it was Russia and China right in the 60s and 70s and 80s. And then it was the Middle East in the 90s and Saddam Hussein in the Bible prophecy section. And so, well, what is it now in this particular age? You know, what it seems to be now is a pluralistic democratic society where there are many points of view.
Because the folks who analyze Christian Nationalism and movements like it around the world say one of the markers is, yes, Christians are still a majority within the United States, but they feel very threatened in that status. And fundamentalist Christians are a tiny minority in the United States now, so, you know, I'm in, you know, from a more mainline tradition now, and that's an even smaller—
So I'm thinking about Robert Jones 10 years ago, I think, published a book called The End of White Christian America, and it's just a sociological study of how society is changing. That's a dramatic crisis for certain groups of Christians.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, I hope people are hearing what I think we're saying here, and that is mapping apocalypticism onto what we're calling Christian nationalism, and how some of the same properties are there.
It's not the same thing, but the dualism, you know, “they're out to get us. We're right. And they're wrong. This is a war to be fought to the end.” There's more, in other words, there's more to that than, let's say, typical critiques of like, well, they're literalists and inerrantist or something like that. It's more to it's a world view.
Greg: “They're deceiving us,” right? That's part of it that we're being so, you know, covid happens. And well, “you can't believe them. They're just trying to take power. You can't believe the experts can't believe the government–”
Jared: Right?
Pete: Good times.
Jared: So, okay. So to sort of wrap this up, I mean, we went, we went from zero to a hundred real fast from apocalyptic, define it to—
Pete: Covid.
Jared: Covid. Uh, but, so if we can kind of come back to this apocalyptic and people who want to understand not just the genre of apocalypticism, but these themes and how they play through the Bible and how the context of that time period influenced the New Testament. Do you have any ways that people could dive into that a little bit further if they want to understand apocalypticism and its impact and influence on the New Testament?
Greg: Well, I think you're, maybe you're inviting me to talk about a couple of my own books. [Chuckles] One little book I wrote that would be helpful is Apocalyptic Literature in the New Testament. And it's just a little skinny book that tries to lay that out and work it through the New Testament. But also, a little over, I think over 20 years ago, a scholar named Craig Hill wrote a book called In God's Time.
And it is an attempt to take this eschatological material that is so hard to understand in the Bible and make theological sense out of it. So I just recently published a book on eschatology in the Bible called Death, the End of History and Beyond. But I really, I, you know, there are other scholars doing that work. And Craig Hill was especially helpful with his book in helping us make sense out of well, so what? What does that mean for our lives?
Pete: Well, we're not going to solve this today, are we?
Greg: Uh, we're not going to solve the world.
Pete: No, I was hoping we could, but we can't. But anyway, Greg, maybe next time we'll have you on again. We'll solve the world's problems then. But for now, thank you so much. This was wonderful. We appreciate your time and I learned a lot and I think a lot of our listeners learned a lot as well.
Jared: Mmhmm.
Greg: I am so grateful and thank you for this opportunity to talk with you. Thank you.
Jared: Absolutely.
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Outro: You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don't forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O'Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
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