Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation

by Michael J. Gorman

The word “apocalyptic” can be used as either an adjective or a noun referring to the worldview expressed in this kind of literature. More than thirty years ago, biblical scholar John Collins famously defined an apocalypse as a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world. 3 Apocalypses appear in various sub-forms, such as visions, otherworldly journeys, and accounts of access to heavenly books. Some other important examples of apocalyptic literature in the Bible are Daniel 7–12 and Mark 13 (parallels in Matthew 24, Luke 21), which is often called “The Little Apocalypse.”4 Examples of apocalyptic literature outside the Bible include Jewish works such as 1 Enoch (a composite of several apocalypses from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.) and 4 Ezra (first century A.D., with many parallels to Revelation5), as well as Christian works such as Apocalypse of Peter and Shepherd of Hermas (both probably from the early second century A.D.). Before the canon of Scripture was finalized, some early Christians even thought that one or the other of these two Christian apocalypses should be included in the Bible. Some biblical scholars have called apocalyptic literature “prophecy in a new idiom.”6 Apocalyptic has ...