Calvin Theological Seminary: Guest Lecture


It was an honor give a guest lecture in a graduate level class on Revelation that my former KU Leuven colleague Danny Daley is currently offering at Calvin Theological Seminary, where he's professor of New Testament. He'd asked me a few months ago to present on chapters 21-22 of Revelation and its New Jerusalem from a reception perspective. Since I wrote a big fat book on exactly that, I guess makes me qualified to talk about such things... 

So I took the opportunity to take on them on guided tour of the first 1000 years of reception of the biblical image. The tour started with the text of Revelation itself, and then moved to the two main streams of reception: the literalist understanding of the New Jerusalem (present in Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius, the early Augustine, etc.) and the spiritulist interpretation (present in all of the same authors, but also the likes of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, the Cappadocians, some of the medieval expositors of Revelation, etc.). 

We concluded with the two apse mosaics I mentioned in my previous post, which visual representations have a breathtaking theological depth that rivals that even of the literary representations of it.

After the lecture, the students took the conversation straight to the heart of the matter: Christian notions of deification, which was in part inspired by the fact that Danny, in introducing me, pulled out a copy of this brilliant book on the same topic that was edited by Michael Reardon and Paul Copan (InterVarsity Academic, 2025). 

Given by their questions, it seems a number of them hadn't encountered this idea before, so it was fun territory to introduce them to. Danny told me afterwards that the conversation after I left the presentation continued to be excellent, and it spilled out into the hallway afterwards as well. Which is exactly what I hope my presentations do. If a speaker does their job, they make you change the way you think about something, and plant seeds that start growing and never stop.

Anyway, a huge thanks to Danny and his excellent students for making it such a rich and rewarding time of intellectual, and dare I say spiritual, interchange.

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