Carmichael-Walling Lectures

Douce Apocalypse, Bodleian Library, Ms. Douce 180, f. 26

We hope that you will join us for the 25th annual Carmichael-Walling Lectures at Abilene Christian University. The Lectures are free and open to the public. They will be held in room 114 of the Onstead-Packer Biblical Studies Building at ACU at 4:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m on Thursday, November 10, 2011. This year's speaker is Steve J. Friesen, who holds the Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies in the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. His research field is early Christianity, with particular interests in the book of Revelation, poverty in the Roman Empire, and archaeology of religion in the eastern Mediterranean. He has authored and co-edited a number of books, including Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins.

4:00 p.m. - Channeling John: Plot and Persuasion in the Apocalypse

The academic study of Revelation has been characterized by historical-critical analysis for over a century. One of the most important developments in Revelation studies during the last two decades has been an enhanced understanding of Revelation as narrative. But what sort of narrative is John's Apocalypse? This lecture reads John sympathetically and attempts to channel his narrative voice. It argues that Revelation is neither a unified story about God's pilgrim people (Resseguie), nor is it three short stories about God's universal rule through the life and death of Jesus (Barr). Rather, Revelation is a collection of oracles, a collage of stories without coherence as a unified narrative. As a compilation of oracles, Revelation's meaning comes not from our empathy with the characters engaged in a consistent plot, as would be the case in a unified narrative. Its meaning comes instead from the invocation of masterplots (Exodus, judgment, primal monsters, Babylon, New Jerusalem, etc.). These masterplots do not necessarily agree with each other, making Revelation a fundamentally unstable narrative. Thus, the audience of Revelation has the task of trying to align these inherently incongruent masterplots in order to make sense of it as a narrative. The way we channel John into a particular narrative says at least as much about us as it does about his Apocalypse.

7:30 p.m. - Challenging John: Truth, Deception, and the Lake of Fire

One of the fundamental claims of Revelation is that human society is characterized by Satanic deception. Another of its crucial claims is that its own message provides words of truth in the middle of this deception. This lecture shifts the approach from narrative criticism to deconstruction in order to question whether and to what extent John's message is true. John even divulged his own fallibility when he described himself falling down to worship an angel. In order to answer questions about John's reliability, the lecture examines his analysis of the deception in his own world (the eastern Mediterranean under Roman rule) and his claims to authority, concluding that his critique of injustice is stronger than his vision of justice. Thus, the abiding power of his Revelation may be found in its most disturbing image—the Lake of Fire, the place where all deception is consumed, the symbol for the destruction of destruction. This symbol of eternal negation is necessary because, for John, truth ultimately transcends all human formulations, even his own. So John's image of the New Jerusalem cannot exist without the Lake of Fire, and the inseparably entwined pair reflect their challenge back to us. Should we—John's audience—embrace his flawed vision of justice or his vision of unattainable transcendence?

For more information, contact Jeff Childers at ACU's Graduate School of Theology: childersj@acu.edu. 

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