Jamie Davies, Theology on the Run: Apocalyptic Pastoral Theology in Paul’s Thessalonian Letters (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2025)

In this work, Davies has two main goals: to read 1–2 Thessalonians apocalyptically and to demonstrate how such a reading contributes to understanding St. Paul as an apocalyptic pastoral theologian then and now. 

His work is divided into four parts: an introduction, one section devoted to “Paul as an Apocalyptic Pastoral Theologian,” another devoted to “Apocalyptic Pastoral Theology in the Thessalonian Letters,” and a conclusion.  

In the introduction (“Introduction,” 1–14), Davies lays the groundwork for his reading and interpretation of 1–2 Thessalonians. He assumes that the apocalyptic urgency of the faith has been present in the movement since Jesus’s ministry, that Christianity is an “apocalyptic faith” from the beginning, that St. Paul composed both 1 and 2 Thessalonians (some scholars doubt that the apostle is responsible for 2 Thessalonians), and that apocalyptic is the center of St. Paul’s theology. Davies locates his work in scholarship, noting that it is the first in-depth study of apocalyptic theology in 1–2 Thessalonians (even though apocalyptic language abounds in the two epistles) and he lays out his goals of examining the apostle’s apocalyptic theology in its historical context and application for the Church today. 

Part 2 consists of two chapters that set the scene for Davies’s apocalyptic reading of 1–2 Thessalonians. The first chapter (“Paul as an Apocalyptic Theologian,” 17–40) introduces 1–2 Thessalonians and how these missives express St. Paul’s apocalyptic theology. Davies contends that the center of the apostle’s coherent theology is apocalyptic, which is understood best in three separate but interrelated strands of apocalyptic DNA: epistemology, eschatology, and cosmology. For the apostle, these strands express and disclose the true nature of reality and thus they are his apocalyptic metaphysics. Davies, then, goes on to introduce them. Epistemology is concerned with sources and modes of knowledge, which for St. Paul is the apocalypse or “unveiling” of God’s plan through Jesus the Messiah. Scholars have tended to understand the apostle’s eschatology in light of a Second Temple Jewish two age schema of the present (evil) age and the (blessed) age to come. Davies nuances this, noting that while St. Paul speaks of “the present age,” he tends to avoid “the age to come.” The reason he does this is because “the apocalypse of Jesus Christ does not merely inaugurate or advance the eschatological timeline but reshapes the notion of time itself . . . For Paul, it is no longer possible to speak simply of an ‘age to come,’ since what has happened is not merely the advance foretaste of another piece of marked-out time but the gift of God’s kind of time in ours in the incarnation of Jesus” (32). Concerning the final strand of St Paul’s apocalyptic DNA, cosmology, it has to do with the shape of the cosmos and the forces that are in it. Aside from his comment that there are three heavens (2 Corinthians 12:2), the apostle does not extrapolate much about the cosmos’s shape. He does, however, speak quite a bit about the forces in it: “Paul views the world as involved in cosmic warfare, invaded by the forces of evil and counter-invaded by the once and future incursion of Jesus . . . The essence of Paul’s apocalyptic cosmology is this: The power of the gospel and of God’s new age has invaded this present world, recapturing it from hostile powers, and so the Christian life is caught up in a cosmic conflict, the reality of which has been revealed in the gospel” (37–38).   

In the second chapter (“Paul as a Pastoral Theologian,” 41–68), Davies considers St. Paul’s application of his apocalyptic DNA to the situation in Thessalonica. The apostle composed these letters shortly after his expulsion from the city (see Acts 17:1–10) to address the suffering in the form of “harassment, oppression, or social ostracism (possibly involving sporadic physical violence) at the hands of the residents of Thessalonica” that his converts were experiencing (45). St. Paul’s response is to call his congregants to stand firm in the Lord (1 Thessalonians 3:8) and he ministers to them as infants and a nursing mother.

The second part of the book consists of Davies’s explication of St. Paul’s apocalyptic pastoral theology in 1–2 Thessalonians, which he divides into three chapters. In chapter 3 (“The Word of the Lord and Christian Formation: Paul’s Apocalyptic and Pastoral Epistemology,” 71–101), Davies explores St. Paul’s apocalyptic epistemology or the source by which he attained knowledge. In the process, he focuses on the apostle’s use of the phrase “the Word of the Lord” and the like in 1–2 Thessalonians, noting that it could mean the gospel message (1 Thessalonians 1:5), a prophetic oracle, or received tradition about Jesus. Davies contends that St. Paul’s knowledge of God is apocalyptic because it stems from God (1 Thessalonians 2:13), consists of his revelation through Jesus (1 Thessalonians 2:13; 4:5), and is not only a verbal message but a “speech-act” that creates and sustains the Christian community through the Holy Spirit (1 Thessalonians 2:13). Consequently, the “church is an apocalyptic, new creation community spoken into being by, daily shaped by, and bearing witness to the revelation of Jesus Christ. It is a community of the word of revelation in its constitution, its formation, and its mission” (91). The apostle’s response, then, to the suffering of the Thessalonian Christians is to preach the word of the Lord “afresh” to them focusing on the gospel’s divine power (93). St. Paul’s apocalyptic theology speaks to us today amid our own problems by calling us back to its “revelatory character” (93), which is the heart of pastoral ministry: “The preaching of the word of God . . . powerfully remakes the ‘real world’ in which pastoral practices takes place” (94). This is clear in our culture’s desire to “self-actualize” or “self-realize.” For Paul, “Human identity and formation . . . cannot be self-made, constructed from the ground up, evaluated or measured according to the criteria of this world” (96). Rather, according to the apostle, “the very nature of identity and formation are driven by christological apocalyptic epistemology. Because human knowledge, including knowledge of ourselves, is established in and dependent upon divine revelation, human identity cannot be a matter of looking ‘within one-self,’ or to any natural law abstracted from that revelation” (98). 

Chapter 4 (“The Coming of the Lord and the Christian Life: Paul’s Apocalyptic and Pastoral Eschatology,” 103–66) probes St. Paul’s apocalyptic eschatology in 1–2 Thessalonians as well as its pastoral implications for the Thessalonian Church and Christians today. Davies begins by noting that one of the key eschatological passages in all St. Paul’s letters, 1 Thessalonians 4:13–5:11, is pastorally minded and the apostle composed it to comfort the Thessalonian Christians who had lost loved ones (1 Thessalonians 4:13). He examines 1 Thessalonians 4:13–5:11, 2 Thessalonians 2:1–2, and the concept of the Parousia in the two letters. He notes that the imminence of the Parousia in 1 Thessalonians and the events that will precede it in 2 Thessalonians are typically explained by St. Paul pushing back the Second Coming to sometime in the distant future. In contrast, Davies argues that one should not reduce Jesus’s return to a “plot on a timeline.” Rather, it is “The Event that plots all others . . . Eschatology is thus concerned not really with the ‘end of a line’ but with the way in which God’s life is made present (hence παρουσία) to this world in Christ” (121). This affects how the apostle ministers to the Thessalonians. In 1 Thessalonians 5:4–8, for example, he reminds his original audience that they are children of light or new creations who belong to the Day, which is the eschatological Day of the Lord that the Old Testament prophets predicted: “They are those who live in the light of the παρουσία, at the boundary between this world and the world to come, at the dawn of the Day that comes from on high, in a world interrupted and cut by the coming of Christ” (142–43). Davies, then, looks at how St. Paul’s apocalyptic pastoral theology speaks into grief, work, and sex. I will focus only on the first. The apostle’s pastoral advice for those who grieve the loss of loved ones is that they grieve but not as those who don’t have hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13, 18). He concludes that St. Paul’s goal “is not the elimination of grief (as a sign of weakness, say) but rather the elimination of hopeless grief and, thus, its eschatological transformation” (148). 

In chapter 5 (“The Triumph of the Lord and the Christian Struggle: Paul’s Apocalyptic and Pastoral Cosmology,” 167–209), Davies examines the third strand of St. Paul’s apocalyptic DNA, cosmology, in the Thessalonian letters. Recall that cosmology is about the shape of the cosmos and the dualistic conflict within it. It is this latter aspect of cosmology that Davies treats in this chapter: “The essence of Paul’s apocalyptic cosmology, interwoven with his epistemology and eschatology, is that the power of the gospel and of God’s new age has invaded this present world, and so the Christian life is caught up in a cosmic conflict, the reality of which has been revealed in the gospel” (169). In the Thessalonian correspondence, the enemy in this conflict is Satan, the tempter (1 Thessalonians 2:17–18; 3:5), and the Lawless one (2 Thessalonians 2:3–12), concluding that the latter is not a “coded reference to one particular Roman ruler but to invoke a broader apocalyptic cosmological trop of a satanically inspired blasphemous king who exalts himself at the ‘time of the end’” (177). Opposing these figures are the archangel Michael, who is the restrainer (2 Thessalonians 2:6–8), and the holy angels (1 Thessalonians 3:13). What is more, the Thessalonian Christians do not wage this war with human weapons and according to a human standard but with divine power mediated to them through St. Paul’s motherly care and self-giving love. One of the apostle’s pastoral methods in 1–2 Thessalonians is to name and identify these enemies and to proclaim God’s eschatological defeat of them, which will allow the Thessalonian congregants “to stand against them in the time that remains” (198). Moreover, St. Paul’s apocalyptic pastoral theology challenges the Church today to “avoid retreating into anthropology and existentialist therapeutic solutions and . . . [to] attend to circumscribing these with an apocalyptic cosmology, naming the complex powers that supervene on human existence and their role in the agonism of the Christian life” (199). For Davies, these complex powers may be the human structures and systems (202).   

In his conclusion (“Conclusion: Paul’s Apocalyptic Theology and Pastoral Ministry in the ‘Real World,’” 211–15), Davies asks, in light of St. Paul’s apocalyptic theology, what is the real world? He concludes that the apostle’s “apocalyptic theologizing teaches us that we must subject our claims of knowledge about the ‘real world’ to the revelation of Jesus Christ and to what God has disclosed about the cosmos and its future” (212). The result is that we cannot “think about the Christian life as if any part of this world remains unaffected by the revelation of Jesus” (213). In particular, St. Paul’s apocalyptic epistemology should cause us to rethink what is real: “Paul’s apocalyptic epistemology reminds us that our theological projects in this world are not about ‘relevance,’ nor are they one set of human truth claims among others, but are ever in the mode of response divine revelation from without—we are the ones who are addressed. And, in particular, it exposes the problems of one of the most dominant narratives of our age, that human life is a project of self-actualization” (213). The apostle’s apocalyptic eschatology “transforms what we know about history and the future” (213). Consequently, we live not only under the cross but also under the Second Coming. This should affect our Christian ethics in that they are not “according to this present age.” Rather, we should live “as signs of the world to come” (214). Finally, St. Paul’s apocalyptic cosmology “transforms how we understand life in this world.” We live amid conflict and must discern the powers at work in the world. We confront all anti-God powers “not with force but with the ‘news’ of the gospel” (214). 

This work is well written, well researched, nuanced, and (unlike some scholarly works!) practical. It is the fruit of years of detailed study of apocalypses and the Apocalyptic Paul. I, who interpret the apostle as an apocalyptic theologian, found myself in agreement with Davies in most of his major conclusions. In particular, aside from Ephesians 1:21; 2:7, I too am bothered by the lack of references in the Pauline corpus to “the coming age,” even though St. Paul refers to the “present age” quite a bit (Romans 12:2; 1 Corinthians 1:20, 2:6, 8; 3:18; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 1:21; 2:2; 1 Timothy 6:17; 2 Timothy 4:10; Titus 2:12). I appreciate his solution to the problem: it is about the type of time, God’s time. However, I am uncertain as to whether this is the case. Nevertheless, Davies’s work has stimulated my own thinking and for that I am appreciative! I highly recommend this work and you can pick it up from Baylor University Press directly by clicking here.

I am grateful to Baylor University Press for this gratis review copy, which in no way influenced my work.