reading log: revealed wisdom

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 ## 2026-04-27
 
+### @{revealed-wisdom}
+
+A collection of nice but mostly irrelevant academic essays on apocalyptic. It
+might be worth checking out Christopher Rowland's book output: he was evidently
+influential.
+
+Andrew Chester brought out the cosmic extent of threat in Revelation which I
+hadn't fully appreciated. He observed that the visions in Revelation unwind
+Creation, ending the separation between the heavens, plucking the stars from
+their place, darkening the sun and moon, destroying the land, threatening a
+complete end to creation. But Jesus shines like the sun and holds seven stars in
+his hand, and in the New Jerusalem, God's permanent light abolishes the light of
+the heavenly bodies. The old world was made chaos by evil, and the new world is
+re-created out of the chaos made of the old. He raised a difficult concern: does
+John's New Jerusalem ending appear like a _deus ex machina_? I wasn't convinced
+by his own solution. This issue bedevils green rhetoric as well: placing hope in
+a distant, improbable salvation over which we have little or no control, taking
+away the urgency for action now and making us feel alienated from the world.
+
+John Barton said that apocalypse encourages the ethics of setting-apart over the
+ethics of fitting in (he used jargon words which I forgot). Apocalyptic ethics
+is distinct from other Jewish ethics because it has a pessimistic view of human
+power and human prospects, but promotes disinterested submission to God anyway.
+I think this is similar to what I've seen described before as 'martyrdom
+ethics.'
+
 ### @{oxford-handbook-apocalyptic}
 
 I finished skimming the chapters today after starting last Friday.