Category Archives: Apocalyptic

Review of Davies Theology on the Run

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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.  

Review of Buster and Walton Daniel Chapters 1-6

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Aubrey E. Buster and John H. Walton, The Book of Daniel Chapters 1–6, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2025)

This work, which is the first of two, covers Buster’s and Walton’s introduction to Daniel and their comments on Daniel 1–6. Later this year, Eerdmans will release the second part, which covers their comments on Daniel 7–12.

Daniel Chapters 1–6 contains a lengthy introduction to Daniel (1–162), comments on Daniel 1:1–6:28 (163–774), an index of authors (775–88), an index of subjects (789–806), and an index of ancient sources, including the Bible (807–35).

The introduction is divided into thirteen sections with some initial introductory comments. In the latter, Buster and Walton inform the reader of their twofold framework for interpreting Daniel: their commitment to Scripture’s authority and the historical-critical method. Therefore, they conclude, “the strongest interpretation [of Daniel] is not the one that is most bound to tradition (whether ancient or modern), but the one that accounts for the most evidence in the strongest way possible” (2).  

Buster and Walton begin by discussing the text of Daniel (“The Text of Daniel,” 3–21) in its various witnesses—the Masoretic text (the Leningrad Codex), the Greek Old Testament versions (the Old Greek and Theodotion), and evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls—as well as the languages in which Daniel was composed (Hebrew in Daniel 1:1–2:4a; 8:1–12:13 and Aramaic in Daniel 2:4b–7:28) and other languages that influenced its composition, Akkadian, Persian, Greek, and Egyptian (3–21).

In the introduction’s second section (“Additions to Daniel,” 21–24), Buster and Walton address three additions to the Hebrew/Aramaic text found in the Old Greek and Theodotion textual traditions: the prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Jews, the story of Susanna, and the story of Bel and the Dragon. 

The third section (“Composition of Daniel,” 25–47) examines how Daniel was composed. Buster and Walton note that external evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QDanc) and 1 Maccabees (1:61) evince that the work was completed by the end of the second century BC. From internal evidence, they propose that Daniel was composed gradually over a process of many years, beginning in the sixth century BC with the court tales (Daniel 1–6) and continuing through the Persian and Hellenistic periods (Daniel 7–12). Therefore, they offer the following model of composition: 

  • Daniel, a historical personage, is exiled to Babylon where he served in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian governments.
  • Stories of his exploits and achievements began to be told among Jews (Daniel 1–6), thereby retaining authentic details of the time and place in which they occurred.
  • In the retelling of these stories, story tellers reshaped them.
  • Next, Daniel 7 was composed in Aramaic in the late fourth-to-early third century BC. 
  • Because Daniel 2:4b–7:28 is a coherent literary unit with the same language (Aramaic) and material (the four-kingdom scheme in Daniel 2 and 7, the miraculous deliverances in Daniel 3–6, and the critique of kings in Daniel 4–5), a version of Daniel with chapters 1–7 may have circulated at this time.
  • Daniel 8–12 was composed in Hebrew during Antiochus IV Epiphanes’s reign.
  • Finally, Daniel 7–12 was placed in Daniel’s mouth (45–46).

To this end, Buster and Walton conclude, “The book of Daniel is a result of a process that began in the Neo-Babylonian period among the Babylonian diaspora and that continued over four hundred years as storytellers, scribal scholars, and the ‘wise’ . . . reflected on and developed their understanding of exile and Israel’s future in light of the prophets” (47). 

Because of their view on the authorship of Daniel, at length they discuss pseudonymity and pseudepigraphy—essentially a writing attributed (falsely by modern standards) to an ancient personage—in the ancient Near East and the Hellenistic world and devote several pages to placing these phenomena in their ancient contexts. They propose that by ancient standards “we must acknowledge the possibility that the attribution to Daniel is not a claim of authorial identification but of rhetorical attribution. If this is the case, the attribution to Daniel functions similarly to the attribution of other vision texts to well-known past figures in contemporary Jewish literature: to highlight the divine source of revelation, to construct analogies between past and present crises in Israel’s communal life, to connect later texts to already existing traditions, and to reinvigorate past texts in a program of progressive revelation” (emphasis theirs, 55).

In the fourth section (“History of the Implied Setting of the Book: The Sixth Century BCE,” 55–70), Buster and Walton describe the history of the ancient Near East as it relates to the Babylonian backdrop of the book, the court tales, and examine some historical difficulties that one encounters such as the dating of the reigns of Jehoiakim and Nebuchadnezzar.  Daniel says that Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem “in the third year of the kingdom of Jehoiakim, king of Judah” (Daniel 1:1), but Jeremiah relates that Nebuchadnezzar came to power in Babylon during “the fourth year of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah” (Jeremiah 25:1). Concerning this issue, Buster and Walton conclude, “it might be better to consider the statement of Dan 1:1 as using conflation or, more specifically, [the ancient Near Eastern literary device of] telescoping,” which means that the verse refers to two separate events that have been conflated (62–63). 

The fifth section (“History of the Implied Audience,” 70–84) describes the history of Palestine from the beginning of the Hellenistic period to the mid-second century BC, the period the implied audience of Daniel 7–12 covers: “Regardless of one’s conclusion regarding composition, however, the implied audience of the visions is situated in the Hellenistic period” (71). Therefore, this part examines the rise of Alexander the Great, the division of his kingdom among his generals, the Seleucid rule of Palestine, the rise of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and the program of the Hellenization of Judaism by some prominent mid-second century BC Jews in Jerusalem. 

In the sixth and seventh sections (“Issues of the Cultural Background,” 84–92; “Hellenistic Polytheism, Religious Assimilation, and Tolerance,” 92–102), Buster and Walton discuss various cultural aspects, in particular what we would call religion, that were operative in the time periods that encompass Daniel’s background: Assyrio-Babylonian paganism, Zoroastrianism, Persian Zoroastrian dualism, Persian religious policy, Hellenistic paganism, its (in)tolerance of other cultic systems, Greek civic religion, and divine honors for humans.

The eighth part (“Genre of Daniel,” 102–32) explores the classification of Daniel (he is not a prophet, but a seer), the literary genre of the court tales, and Daniel as an apocalyptic work. In the latter section of this part, Buster and Walton delve into the genre of apocalyptic, its various backgrounds, its use in the Old Testament, how apocalyptic works differ from prophetic works, and some aspects of apocalyptic. 

In the ninth portion (“Historical Accuracy and the Book of Daniel,” 132–47), Buster and Walton discuss the ways in which Daniel accurately reflects the historical reality over the years in which it was composed: “The [authors of the work] are not fabricating events or people, but they are engaged in selecting, shaping, and focusing the narrative using the rhetorical devices available to them as common in the genre and time that they are writing” (132).  Consequently, one has to understand that Daniel telescopes—or compresses events on a timeline—events, rhetorically attributes words to the historical sixth century BC man Daniel, recontextualizes early material to address later events (such as the recontextualization of the four kingdom scheme in Daniel 2 in Daniel 7), conflates and thus attributes actions that one historical figure accomplishes to another, and describes past events through the prism of a future foretelling of them (vacticinium ex eventu). 

The tenth part (“Structure of the Book,” 148–54) describes the overall structure of Daniel—which places chapter 7 at the pivotal point—and is unified by the figure of Daniel and his friends. In the eleventh portion (“Intertextuality in Daniel,” 154–58), Buster and Walton note that Daniel refers implicitly and explicitly to other parts of Sacred Scripture by adopting the genre of court tales such as found in the story of Joseph in Egypt (Genesis 39–50), by allusions to Ezekiel and God’s heavenly throne, and by referencing other Old Testament books: Jeremiah 25; 29 in Daniel 9. The twelfth part (“Canonicity,” 158–59) probes the place of Daniel in the canon. Buster and Walton point out that portions of all twelve chapters are present among the Dead Sea Scrolls and that the work appears to have been deemed “trustworthy and authoritative” by the mid-second century BC. Therefore, “as long as there has been a canon, it appears that Daniel has been in it” (159). The real question, however, is not whether the work is canonical, but which one is canonical, as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox canons follow the Greek versions containing extra stories not found in the Hebrew/Aramaic text of Daniel, the version that Jews and Protestants have canonized. In the final section (“Theology,” 159–62), Buster and Walton explore some theological aspects of Daniel such as God’s presence with his people even as they are scattered among the Gentiles and his presence and activity throughout Israel’s history, which will culminate in establishment of God’s kingdom in the future.  

The rest of this volume contains a detailed, nuanced, contextualized, philological, and comprehensive engagement with the text(s) of Daniel. Buster and Walton pepper their work with excurses that allow the reader to go deeper into various aspects that are tangential, yet important, to the overall message of Daniel. For me, the great strengths of this volume are its interaction with primary ancient Near Eastern and Classical sources as well as the gamut of scholarship on Daniel, from those who hold to a sixth century BC dating of the book to those who place its composition in the mid-second century BC.

In short, this is a book that any exegete of Daniel, even one who not agree with their conclusions about authorship and composition as well as their exegesis of the text, will want in his or her library. Therefore, I highly recommend you picking up your own copy from Eerdmans forthwith. 

I am grateful to Eerdmans for the gratis copy of this work, which in no way affected my review of it.