A Newer Jerusalem

Another review of the book I edited with Johan Leemans and Anthony Dupont: Revelation’s New Jerusalem in Late Antiquity, History of Biblical Exegesis 6, Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2023, 348 pp., ISBN 9783161623769. This review was written by Prof. Harri Huovinen and was published in the pages of Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity, Vol. 29, Iss. 1. (2025). The entire review is available here: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/zac-2025-0008/html 

A year and a half ago, Régis Burnet (UC Louvain) approached me to solicit an article for the 50th anniversary of the French Edition of Communio , the storied journal of Catholic thought founded in 1972 by Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Henri de Lubac, among others. The topic was to be generally on the topic of 'Communion in the New Testament,' and he gave me a lot of lattitude as to how I'd approach the topic. Eventually, I chose to provide a panoramic essay on the concept of communion (i.e. fellowship) in the New Testament in the Johannine, Pauline, and Petrine corpora in the NT, and especially how the divine-human and human-human communion discussed by these authors entails divine communion in what is proper to us (esp. our humanity) and our communion in what is his (esp. life, love, and glory). The article had a pretty tight word limit (no longer than 6000 words), so in the end I focused mainly on the Pauline and Johannine corpus....

It came to my attention recently that another review has come out of my 2024 book, edited with Johan Leemans and Anthony Dupont (both of KU Leuven). Sometimes book reviews are simply rehashing of the book under review, chapter by chapter. This goes further and engages with some of the core ideas of the book, which I'm pleased that this reviewer, Josh Roach (Point Loma Nazarene University), caught.  Read the whole thing here. 

Last month, we held our first book review session of the Revelation Reception Network. I'm delighted that Ian Boxall, the famed scholar who works on New Testament (and especially Revelation) reception, agreed to review my book, City of Gods: The New Jerusalem of John's Revelation in Early Christianity (Brill, 2025) . That's the book in which contains the research that came before the current DFG-funded Eigene Stelle project that this blog tracks. I must admit that I was on needles and pins before the session, not knowing what to expect. This was especially the case because we'd organized these review sessions so that one scholar would review the book, and then the author of the book would have a chance to respond.  And this was live, of course, and you never know what will happen on LIVE TV! Perhaps I was expecting the Spanish Inquisition, but then again, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. (If you know, you know.)  Anyway, it turned out to be a very kind and inde...

As I related in my last post, last friday I presented a draft of one chapter from my upcoming book to a group of theologians here in Regensburg. It was about how in late antique thought, John's New Jerusalem came to be applied in an unexpected way to physical church buildings (as opposed to the church itself, the people), such as the churches in Tyre and Jerusalem in the early fourth century.  During the talk, my Regensburg colleague Emanuela Valeriani (a wonderful person!), offered three observations and/or questions (a bit of both in each). The were so rich that she and I met up today to discuss them in further depth. Here are my takeaways from the conversation, with her and my thoughts kind of mingled together into these three points:  Amillennial Physicalism? First, in a sense, isn't Eusebius's thinking of the physical church being just another form of the immanentizing and physicalizing interpretation of the early millennialists? Whereas the likes of Papias, Justin,...

As much as I enjoy having written, I don't always enjoy the writing itself.  Like Flannery O'Connor famously said, writing well is "like giving birth to a piano, sideways." I'm the sort of writer that needs incentives to put words on paper. So when an email came into my inbox announcing two seminars--one the Uni Regensburg Post-Graduate Theological Seminar this past week, and another as part of a Göttingen-Regensburg Theological Seminar scheduled for late March--I knew it was time to commit to presenting two chapters--the first two I'll write!  Because promising to colleagues that I'll present on two chapters means that I'll have to actually write those two chapters in order to present them. And that's progress.  The Regensburg seminar happened this past Friday. Via Zoom, it turns out, because of inclement weather--Glatteis, which also cancelled our daughter's school that day.  The paper was called "'The World’s Most Miraculous Place’:...