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Preface

In our culture, one of the best ways to understand things is by searching for their origin, or by establishing the function of each of its parts. In this book I follow these paths in search of the purpose that informed the writers and the editors of biblical apocalyptic texts. Anyone reading these texts soon finds out that many of the things they say have been unconfirmed by history. It is also well known that they have been used to lead people to do things that had tragic outcomes. These facts are so well known that they need no demonstration. My purpose in writing this book is to investigate their origin and to establish why in the face of the outcomes just mentioned they were kept for posterity by their first readers. Surely, they considered them worthy of preservation. As biblical documents, they have played a significant role in the history of Christianity, but throughout this time many Christians have been embarrassed by their presence in the canon, and have dismissed them as irrelevant, if not bizarre. My objective has been to clarify their contribution to Christian living.

Some expositors of biblical texts think that their task is to show how everything in Scripture fits together in a harmonious whole. To do this, however, they do not actually take the whole Bible into account. They select texts from different biblical books to construct a doctrine that fits their ideological presuppositions. The texts used to construct their idiosyncratic doctrinal edifices are selected according to their whims and placed according to blueprints found in their imaginations. They leave most of the blocks in the biblical quarry as eyesores on the ground with lots of debris spread about. To pretend that such constructions represent what the Bible teaches is to sell a forgery. The basic premise for the building of such structures is the claim that the Bible is its own interpreter. It allows them to hide their controlling role as architects. They say that when a text is difficult to understand it must be understood in terms of another biblical text that is clear. The characterization of a text as difficult or clear, however, is determined by whether or not they fit with what these interpreters wish to teach. This methodology ensures that what is presented as what the Bible teaches is what fits the ideology of a particular interpreter.

As a student of the Bible, I consider it essential to pay attention to what each author of the books that compose it had to say. All of them had a relevant message for their contemporaries. If an author of the Bible corrects, contradicts, elaborates or applies what a previous author of the Bible said, that is evidence of his humanity, his integrity, and his desire to effectively address a new situation. If these sorts of things are in evidence within a single biblical book, that is evidence that the editors of the text we now possess put together in the text oral traditions of different prophets. My aim has been to understand what the edited texts now in the Bible said to their first readers. I seek answers to these questions: Why were these apocalyptic written texts kept by their intended audiences? Was it because they provided them with a chronology of the future? Was it because what they predicted came to pass?

Why is it that the one thing these apocalyptic trajectories have in common is a Final Judgment?

Those who claim that God wrote or dictated the Bible usually don’t take at face value what each one of the texts now in the Bible actually says. Their method, as I explained above, allows them to choose texts and make them say what they see fit. I read the books of the Bible to discover how the biblical ancestors of my faith in the Creator God expressed their faith in terms of their historical circumstances. Their inspiration did not provide them with information, but with the necessity to proclaim the Word that the world in which humans live is God’s world, and life in it is a gift of God. Thus, in the various biblical books, God reveals himself as the Living God who is the source of life, even as biblical authors affirm this within the limits of their own cultural horizons.

I have written this book, in part, to demonstrate that when reading the Bible as the depository of God’s Word in the twenty-first century it is not only necessary to have faith in God; it is also necessary to be a citizen of one’s own culture and society, just as the authors and editors of the books in the Bible were. One cannot be a fully integrated person and ignore what modern sciences, and the technologies they have made possible, say about the universe and the inner lives of human beings. To affirm that we live in God’s world while ignoring what the study of history, literature, psychology and all modern sciences have contributed to our understanding of ourselves and the universe in which we live only makes whatever one may say totally irrelevant. Just as biblical authors, writing between the tenth century B.C.E. and the second century C.E., were fully alive to their culture and society, so too those of us who believe in God must be alive to our culture and society if we intend to say something significant in the twenty-first century. It is with this end in mind that I have written this book.

This means that I have not read the apocalyptic texts found in the Bible with an apocalyptic hermeneutic because, as I argue in this book, my contemporaries no longer live in the symbolic universe in which the authors of these texts lived. Their hermeneutic was based on two presuppositions:1) the prophets did not write for their contemporaries. They wrote for those living at the time of the end, and 2) we are living at the time of the end. I agree with the authors of apocalyptic texts in that they wrote for the benefit of their own contemporaries. But the authors of the writings they recycle for that purpose also wrote for their contemporaries. Since this is the case, I have examined their texts in their most likely chronological sequence. This becomes necessary because biblical apocalyptic authors and editors used the writings of their predecessors as a foundation on which to build their message for their own contemporaries.

In the writing of this book I have benefited from the generous help of friends and family. As it has been the case for over twenty-five years, my colleague at Saint Mary’s College and good friend, Terence Martin, has read and commented on every one of the chapters of this book. Our lunches, in which we go over what one of us has been writing, have been a steady source of delight and enlightenment over the years, especially lately when both of us are enjoying retirement. Another former colleague and long-standing friend, Edward W. H. Vick, has also given me generous and wise suggestions for the improvement of early drafts. I am also indebted to Christopher Eyre, of Energion Publications, for the professional editing of my manuscript. The dedication expresses my belief that in university classrooms the one who learns the most is the teacher.