What is "Apocalyptic"?

People often talk about something as “apocalyptic” or “the apocalypse.” Whenever they do, I often feel like saying, “You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Now this literature, language, and its sociology is complex and contested by scholars.

However, when we discuss the Book of Revelation, Daniel, Mark 13, or Romans 8, consult writings in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is useful to have a basic idea of all things ‘apocalyptic.’

First, there is what some have called the apocalyptic worldview, the theological map of reality that is disclosed through an unveiling of otherwise concealed mysteries. This reality is known through an ‘unveiling,’ the literal meaning of ‘apocalypse,’ of visions of heaven or ecstatic otherworld experiences led by an angelic guide. The visions, stories, worldview, and literature that goes under the adjective ‘apocalyptic’ highlights what in other Jewish writing is often only implicit: the narrative of a struggle between earthly and heavenly agents, culminating in God’s reversal of the suffering of his people and the retribution meted out on the wicked.

Second, when Jewish groups faced trauma, alienation, persecution, or disempowerment, and were convinced that YHWH would put it right, they imbibed or forged an apocalyptic worldview, and this led to apocalypticism, This led to the creation of a network or community committed to a particular version of the problem (Evil angels, Rome, greed, lawlessness, apostasy, etc.) and who rallied around a particular vision of the solution (God sends a messiah, a time of trial and purgation, judgment, new creation, etc.).

Third, an ‘apocalypse’ is, therefore, the specific literary expression, in the mode of ‘revelation’, of this much larger worldview and social practice. An apocalypse, according to one definition, ‘is 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 … intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world of the future, and to influence both the understanding and the behaviour of the audience by means of divine authority’ (from John Collins). The genre we call ‘apocalypse’ frequently contains extended symbolic reviews of world history (such as the statue with its four metals in Daniel 2) and/or the description of other-worldly journeys. The result is the narration of a God’s-eye view of history, the present, and the future, and also offering ‘a transcendent, usually eschatological perspective on human experiences and values’ (from David Aune).

The people, events, interpretations, and writing we call ‘apocalyptic’ are designed to encode a tacit protest, through narratives freighted with intertextuality and metaphor, against the threatening powers, both cosmic and political. Apocalypses, like the Book of Revelation as well as other Jewish and Christian writings, are earthed in, and designed to strengthen, a community that hopes for the subversion of the current order and its replacement with a new divinely sanctioned one.

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