"Hastening the day" when the earth will burn? Global warming, Revelation and 2 Peter 3 (Advent 2, Year B).

Vice President A1 Gore compares the terrifying prospect of global warming's effects on the world to "taking a nature hike through the book of Revelation." Gore's nature hike could also include 2 Peter 3-the epistle text assigned for the Second Sunday of Advent this year in the lectionary. For Christians seeking biblical counsel on the environment, 2 Peter 3 poses particular problems because it consigns the earth to burning up by fire.

We are well on our way to that burning. Three scientific reports from the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in 2007 read more like Revelation's plague sequences than like typical scientific reports--with predictions of higher sea levels, more acidic oceans, fiercer storms, deadlier forest fires, more heat-related deaths, longer dry seasons, declining water supplies, catastrophic floods, and increasing infectious diseases around the world. In an ironic coincidence, one of those reports was released Good Friday--fitting, perhaps, since the report narrates the future passion and suffering, even death, of hundreds of millions of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people, even if temperatures rise only as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 2 degrees Centigrade.

The suffering was underscored for me at a 2007 conference in Tromso, Norway, above the Arctic Circle, launching a United Nations report on "Global Outlook for Ice and Snow." Ice is melting everywhere--whether glaciers, sea ice, ice sheets, or permafrost. The effects of this melting on communities worldwide will be catastrophic. In India and Peru, millions of people who depend upon meltwater from glaciers in the Himalayas or Andes will lose their sole source of drinking water. In Alaska, loss of protective sea ice is forcing numerous native villages, such as the historic Lutheran village of Shishmaref, to relocate inland. News reports that whole islands in Bangladesh have already disappeared due to sea level rise bear eerie resemblance to Rev 16:20, with its description that "every island fled away."

A few fundamentalist Christians may welcome the prospect of calamitous global Warming events as if they were signs of the end-times and Jesus' return. But for most Christians, the urgent question is whether and how the Bible might provide guidance for addressing our new situation of living at the "end."

It is becoming clear that we do face the prospect of some kind of an "end" in the coming years. At the present rate of fossil fuel consumption, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide will double, from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to more than 500 parts per million--by the middle of this century. Moreover, scientists now think the IPCC forecasts of sea level rise are too low, because they do not take into consideration new data regarding the faster-than-expected melting of both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets nor mounting evidence of irreversible feedback loops or "tipping points," such as the "ice-albedo effect," by which melting Arctic sea ice itself accelerates further warming because ice is white and reflects heat back to the sun, whereas sea water is dark in color and absorbs more heat.

America's premier climatologist, James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Space Institute, believes there is still time to avert dangerous sea level rise, but he warns that we have less than ten years to drastically reduce carbon emissions or it will be too late to save the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. He argues for a 90 percent reduction in emissions by the year 2050, with the goal of stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at a level of 350 parts per million. (1) Even the more conservative IPCC says that global carbon emissions must peak and begin declining within the next seven years, by the year 2015, if the world wants to have any chance of limiting the expected temperature rise to 2 degrees Centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). (2) Our best scientists, religions leaders, and world political leaders underscore the urgency of acting now, or we risk losing the ten-year window and will be unable to avert irreversible, catastrophic climate change and suffering.

How can we draw on the Bible publicly to address this crisis, underscoring especially the urgency of that ten-year window?

Many early Christian apocalyptic texts address the sense of an "end," so it might seem logical to turn to these texts to speak to our current situation. We must carefully distinguish among various strands of early Christian apocalyptic, however. The New Testament presents a range of perspectives on the end of the world, not all of which are helpful for this moment.

This essay contrasts two apocalyptic texts, Revelation and the epistle of 2 Peter, in terms of how they might help us address today's crisis of global warming. I argue that 2 Peter's claim that the world is destined to be burned up with fire must be viewed as highly problematic--and that the Advent lectionary gives an occasion to speak out about the dangers of such perspectives. By contrast, Revelation's end-of-empire perspective may be more helpful ecologically, especially for underscoring a sense of urgency of the present moment.

The sense of an end: Revelation versus 2 Peter

A strong sense of an impending "end" pervades much of the apocalyptic discourse of the New Testament. Early Christians definitely believed they were living at the end of the age, the end of the world. But the question is: the end of what world? What was it that early Christian texts view as coming to an end? With the exception of 2 Peter, the "end" that these texts envision is not primarily the destruction of the earth or the created world. Rather, in proclaiming the dawning of a new age in Christ, they envision an end to the Roman imperial world of oppression, sin, and injustice--an end to the oikoumene. (3)

Here I draw a distinction between several different Greek words for "world." Revelation unveils not the end of the physical created world (the Greek words kosmos, ktisis, or ge) but the end of the imperial world, the oikoumene. In my view this distinction can help us navigate the sense of an end today as well.

In Revelation, the earth (ge), the world (kosmos), and the entire creation (ktisis) belong to God. Despite all its imagery of destruction, Revelation continues the biblical tradition of affirming the fundamental goodness of creation as declared by God in Genesis 1. Commands to "worship the one who made the heaven and the earth, the sea and springs of water" (14:7) make clear that it is God who created heaven, earth, springs of water, and the sea. The use of creation-oriented terminology (the Greek root ktiz-) in Revelation is overwhelmingly positive--Rev 3:14, 5:14, and especially the emphatic declaration of 10:6 (see also 4:11) that God "created the heaven and what is in it and the earth and what is in it, and the sea." God does not consign the creation to destruction in Revelation. (4) A key text is Rev 11:18, in which Revelation proclaims not "the time has come to destroy the earth" but "the time has come ... to destroy the destroyers of the earth"--that is, the Roman empire.

This is quite different from the perspective of 2 Peter 3, a chapter that I have come to view as the most ecologically problematic chapter in the entire New Testament. Second Peter makes repeated references to God's plan for a fiery end to the planet, declaring that "The present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire" (3:7) and that when the day of the Lord comes the "heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire" (3:12). This epistle draws an analogy between end-times fire and the Genesis flood: just as the world (kosmos) that existed at the time of Noah and the flood was deluged by water and destroyed, so too the present heavens and earth (ge) are destined for fire and destruction (3:6-7). (5)

Most problematic ecologically is that 2 Peter actually calls on believes to participate in "hastening" (speudontas) the day when the creation will be set ablaze:

Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? (2 Pet 3:11-12)

This call to readers to hasten the day functions rhetorically to bring the future burning into the present, giving an active role to readers.

Throughout Christian history, 2 Peter's scenario of end-times burning has spawned a potent legacy that continues today. A whole trajectory that developed from this text, beginning in the second century, continues to influence Christian understandings of the end. (6) When parents in a Seattle suburb succeed in blocking the showing of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth in their kids' public school on the grounds that "Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up," they are referencing 2 Peter 3. (7) Televangelist Jerry Falwell likewise appealed to the fiery imagery of 2 Peter 3 to debunk global warming in a February 25, 2007, sermon: "The earth will go up in dissolution from severe heat. The environmentalists will be really shook up then, because God is going to blow it all away, and bring down new heavens and new earth." (8) Although Falwell himself did not equate global warming with the end-times fire of 2 Peter, other Christians do. A blog calling itself "The Great Global Warming Debate," discussing whether or not global warming is human-caused or not contains this post: God planned for global warming even before He created this planet .... Please consider with me God's words recorded in the third chapter of Second Peter in verses 10 and 12. Verse 10: "But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burnt up.

I have pondered the challenges posed by ecologically minded Christians asking "What do you do with 2 Peter 3?" Especially since many churches' lectionaries assign this text to be read during the season of Advent, we cannot simply ignore 2 Peter 3 with its apocalyptic imagery of a divinely ignited burning planet. But we must also insist that 2 Peter not become the lens through which the rest of the New Testament eschatology is read.

For preachers and others who grapple with this text I offer these suggestions. First, we should not attempt to harmonize the New Testament's various apocalyptic cosmologies. The idea of a fiery eschatological conflagration that consumes the entire planet at the end of the world is found only in 2 Peter, an epistle written by a pseudonymous author, perhaps as late as 130 C.E. (9) While other biblical texts use the image of fire--whether a refiner's fire or the fire of purification--no other New Testament text speaks of a total world-destroying fire. And certainly no other text exhorts believers to hasten the day of burning. (10)

The most likely source of 2 Peter's cosmic conflagration imagery is the Greco-Roman philosophical notion of ekpyrosis, or world-destroying fire, a much-discussed topic in ancient pagan philosophical debates dating back to Plato's Timaeus. The author of 2 Peter may have transposed the Jewish notion of the burning of the evildoers into the more Stoic Greek notion of the burning of the whole created order as part of his effort to persuade a Gentile audience that God is indeed involved in history. (11) The second-century theologian Justin Martyr, for example, makes reference to the well-known Stoic version of conflagration in delineating his own Christian version of end-times fire. (12)

Later in the second century, however, when the idea of an end-times cosmic conflagration became a favorite notion of the Valentinians and other Gnostics who thought of the created world as evil, Irenaeus and Origen distanced themselves from this tradition. (13) The important point to note is that already in the second century Christians realized that there are different trajectories of apocalyptic speculation and that the trajectory of a world-destroying fire of 2 Peter risked being used in a Gnostic, world-denying way. Cosmic conflagration traditions are not shared by Revelation or any New Testament texts other than 2 Peter.

Second, even within the polemic of 2 Peter it should be noted that cosmic speculation about the burning of creation is secondary to the main point of the letter. Falwell and other fundamentalists may fixate on the chronology of end-times burning, but that is not at all the purpose of 2 Peter. Rather, the letter uses such end-times threats as a tool to exhort individual sinners to repentance. The epistle's references to the coming burning of creation address a situation where "scoffers" have apparently latched onto the continuity of God's care for creation to mean that they can do what ever they want, because there is never going to be a judgment day. (14) It is in response to these scoffers that 2 Peter unleashes threats of burning--in order to warn scoffers that there will be a "day of judgment and destruction of the godless" (3:7) in the future, just as God sent a destructive flood in the past. God's patience in delaying the day of the Lord should be used not as justification for complacency but rather as evidence for God's graciousness. With God, "one day is as a thousand years" (3:8).

There still is the problem of the exhortation to "hasten" the day of the Lord and the burning of the planet. In my view, this verse should not be read uncritically in Advent lectionaries as the "word of the Lord." To be sure, the notion of hastening the day of the Lord does not counsel a cavalier "bring it on" attitude toward the fiery destruction, even if our acceleration of global warming today could be seen to take it that way. Hastening the day of the Lord has rather the sense of "active waiting," as Latin American liberation scholar Raul Humberto Lugo Rodriguez has suggested; it is part of the letter's overall strategy of "resistance." (15) Other scholars emphasize that "hastening" is the corollary to the assertion in verse 9 that God defers the parousia (the coming of Christ) out of a desire for Christians to repent--in which case the sense would be that believers' repentance and good works could hasten the Lord's return. (16) Nevertheless, in order for this to become a liberating text, those who repent would have to be provided with something analogous to the ark that saved Noah and his family from drowning in the flood. But neither Noah nor the ark is mentioned in this chapter of 2 Peter--only a total end-times burning of the earth, the heavens, and all the elements.

All the fiery rhetoric of 2 Peter leads up to the final promise of the new heavens and new earth: "In accordance with this promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home" (2 Pet 3:13). This "new heavens and new earth" reference has led some scholars to argue that 2 Peter shares with Revelation a common notion of the positive transformation or renewal of the planet rather than its total annihilation. (17) In their view, the analogy of the end-times fire to the Genesis flood means that 2 Peter does not have in mind the total obliteration of the creation but only its purification, since the Noachic flood did not completely destroy all plants or sea creatures. But 2 Peter does not develop the new heavens and the earth in any positive way, except as a reward for the righteous after the wicked have been destroyed. As Ernst Kasemann points out in his scathing critique of the theology of 2 Peter, "This eschatology only presents us with a straightforward doctrine of retribution." (18)

Aside from the reference to "new heavens and a new earth," chapter 3 of 2 Peter has little in common with Revelation, despite apparent similarities. Even the exhortations to repentance function quite differently. While 2 Peter shares with Revelation and with most other apocalyptic texts the element of exhortation, 2 Peter focuses much more on individualistic moralism than on the anti-imperial exhortation of Revelation. If we use the distinction that Schussler Fiorenza has developed, that apocalyptic language can function in two ways--either to control the behavior of individuals or to provide an alternative vision and encouragement of new community structures in the face of oppression--the epistle of 2 Peter definitely falls into the category of moralist use of apocalyptic threats to control individual behavior. (19) By contrast, Revelation targets its primary threats of judgment against the system and structures of empire, especially the economic system (Revelation 18). Revelation's New Jerusalem vision (chaps. 21-22) encourages people toward citizenship in God's counter-imperial polis (city). Revelation exhorts God's people to "come out" of empire (18:4) so that they can enter into God's wondrous city of blessing and promise.

To summarize: Within the spectrum of early Christian apocalyptic literature, Revelation and 2 Peter represent two very different eschatological perspectives on the "end." Whereas 2 Peter envisions an end to the earth and the whole created world, Revelation envisions an imminent end to the Roman imperial world.

End of empire, not the end of the created world

This crucial distinction between the end of empire (oikoumene) and the end of the created world (kosmos and ge) is one that I believe can serve us in these next years. Public theologians and religious leaders will need to articulate this distinction much more forcefully in order to equip people of faith to address the crises of "empire" today, manifested in global climate change as well as attendant crises such as "peak oil" (the projected decline of world oil production as supplies become depleted), deforestation, water shortages, and the environmental justice crises being experienced by vulnerable communities throughout the world. What must come to an end today may well be our unsustainable, carbon-addicted way of life that could be defined as the most dangerous manifestation of "empire" today--but not the earth itself. The task of churches will be to lift up New Testament end-of-empire discourses in order to help people envision life beyond this empire, articulating the Bible's joyful and compelling visions for abundant life in local communities as countervisions to imperial violence and exploitation.

From a biblical perspective, end of empire does not have to mean the end of the physical, created world. Indeed, Revelation perhaps more than any other New Testament text helps readers envision concretely this distinction between empire and the created world, with its picture of the millennium in chapter 20, after the destruction of Babylon/Rome in chapters 17-18. Revelation introduces the millennium as a symbolic thousand-year period of time after Satan has been tied up--that is, after the fall of the empire. Such an image is not meant to furnish a literal chronology of linear time. The entire book presents us with "vision time," as Steve Friesen describes--the journeylike experience in which John moves between "different phases of historical time and records them in a disorienting fashion." (20) The millennium of Revelation represents what Friesen calls "vindication time" for the victims of Roman imperial rule, a concrete period of time after the fall of the Roman Empire. Pablo Richard's interpretation of the millennium of Revelation 20 as "not a chronology but a logic" can be helpful. (21) The important point is that Revelation teaches a logic that invites readers to embrace life on earth beyond empire--after the satanic power of empire has been dethroned.

Other New Testament texts share the conviction of Revelation that the old imperial order was passing away and the realm of God was already dawning on earth in Jesus Christ. Apocalyptic New Testament language of the "end" seems often deliberately chosen to counter Rome's imperial and eschatological claims to eternal hegemony, and to underscore the urgent advent of God's new age.

The urgency of the present moment: Time for repentance and public testimony

Time is of the essence in Revelation. But, interestingly, the book's perspective is not simply of time hurtling toward an inevitable end. Rather, Revelation puts great emphasis on the present moment as a moment for decision, repentance, and testimony. Shifts from past tense to present and future, along with calls for repentance and use of deliberative rhetoric, all serve to draw the audience into what Harry Meier calls "an abiding sense of the imminent," extending the urgency of the present moment. (22) Analyzing what he calls Revelation's "games with time," Meier argues that Revelation makes ingenious use of delay in order to open up the present moment as a time for decision on the part of readers: "Like advertising with its urgent appeal to buy 'while quantities last'" the Apocalypse "uses the threat of an imminent end to break open an urgent reconfiguration of the present." Revelation offers a kind of never-ending "not yet" that insists on present action." (23)

The end of the empire is inevitable and axiomatic in Revelation, but the destruction seems to be deliberately "delayed" so that the audience can come out of empire, so that it can repent, and so that it can have the opportunity to give public testimony and witness.

Repentance, or coming out of empire, is the first action that Revelation calls for. The writer of Revelation believes that people can still make the changes necessary to "come out" of empire (18:4). It is not too late for repentance. To be sure, the book's positive calls for repentance (the imperative of metanoeson, "repent") are concentrated in the seven opening letters (for example, Rev 2:5,16; 3:3,19), whereas later references to repentance are phrased negatively ("they did not repent from ...," 9:20-21; 16:9, 11). Yet Schussler Fiorenza has made a persuasive case that even these negative references to repentance in chapter 9 serve as part of the book's rhetorical appeal to the audience to repent. (24) Moreover, in a departure from the book's extensive use of the Exodus story, hearts are never hardened in Revelation. Rather, chapter 11 lifts up a concrete model of successful repentance, with the "rest" of the people who heed the testimony of the two witnesses and "give glory to God" (11:13).

Revelation's plague sequences themselves contribute to the book's call for repentance. The trumpet and bowl plagues (Revelation 8-9, 16) project out into the future the logical consequences of the trajectory that Rome is on, so that people can see in advance where the dangerous imperial path is taking them. The terrible calamities of ecological disaster that are described as befalling the earth, rivers, and oceans are not intended as predictions of future events that God has preordained must happen to the world. The plagues serve rather as warnings, as wake-up calls--like Ebenezer Scrooge's visionary journeys in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge is shown horrifying future scenarios not because they must happen but so that he can alter the course of his life. (25)

We, too, need to alter the course of our life before it is too late.

Even nature itself participates in the warning of the plagues, crying out about the consequences of imperial oppressors' own deadly actions. When waters and springs turn to blood in the third bowl plague, the angel ("messenger") of the waters interprets this through the logic of natural consequences, as a boomerang-like effect: "You are just, O Holy One ... for you have judged these things. Because they shed the blood to drink. It is axiomatic" (axios estin, Rev 16:6). Today, what is axiomatic is that if we continue on our perilous path we will inflict our own demise.

Testimony or witness (martyria) is the second action to which Revelation calls the community, following the model of the testimony of Jesus the Lamb. "Testimony is not just any word, but a public word," Richard notes, drawing on his experience of resistance in Latin America. "In Revelation, testimony always has a power to change history, both in heaven and on earth." (26) Revelation places the Christian community in role of the two witnesses of chapter 11, "calling for a witness of active, nonviolent resistance to Rome's claim of lordship over human history," as Brian Blount argues in Can I Get A Witness? (27) Perhaps the analogy today would be the call for a massive witness of active nonviolent resistance to the claim of carbon-consuming's lordship over human history.

"Can I get a witness?" The question that Blount hears at the heart of Revelation is a question we must ask today. We are called to give witness or testimony to the Bible's counter-imperial message of repentance and hope, and also witness to the stories of people most affected by climate change--people in the island nations of Kirabati or Tuvalu who have done nothing to cause this crisis but who will lose their homes because of our carbon emissions; people in Chicago and other U.S. urban areas where asthma deaths will rise, aggravated by higher and higher summer temperatures; people in the Himalayas who risk being killed from the phenomenon of "Glacial Lake Outburst Floods" because of glaciers melting that have never melted before; people in Africa who will become climate refugees because of severe drought and water shortage. We are called to witness to Revelation's vision for justice and the healing of the world and to its urgent wake-up call.

David Rhoads has authored a very important ecojustice article, with insights from the early church, from which I want to quote in conclusion.

Most early Christians believed that the end of the world as they knew it was imminent and that soon Christ would return for final judgment and salvation. We too are facing a possible end of the world as we humans know it because of drastic changes that may take place in the earth's environment.

So, how did the early Christians act in the face of their expectation of the possible end of the world? What can we learn from them? Here are several characteristic behaviors of some early Christians that were shaped by their expectation of the end of the world.

* There was a deep sense of mission. The early Christians had a tremendous urgency to spread the message from village to village, from city to city--to call people and cities and nations to repentance and change of behavior.

* Like Jesus, the early Christians were truth-tellers. They made penetrating analyses of the destructive dynamics of their culture

* Like Jesus, they did prophetic acts. In a sense, their lives were prophetic symbols, for every act is a prophetic act when done out of a vision of the future. So healing the sick, feeding the hungry, eating with outcasts, forgiving sinners, were all prophetic symbols of a new age impinging on the present.

* They created alternative communities, quite different from the culture around them. They had a vision of the future and sought to live it now in the present. In so far as they lived that vision in the present, the kingdom had come!

* In all of this, they were willing to act unilaterally, as far as they were able, to create a new world without waiting for the leaders of the nation or the rest of the populace to lead the way or even to agree with them. (28)

Today, as in the first century, the church is called to model the behaviors that Rhoads identifies. We are called to offer a compelling, joy-filled, counter-imperial community, grounded in Jesus' vision of abundant life. The season of Advent can be an occasion for truth-telling, repentance, and prophetic public testimony about the urgency of changing our unsustainable way of life--for the sake of the healing of the world.

It is not yet too late for us to "come out" of this empire of fossil-fuel addiction. But scientists tell us today, and I believe them, that we probably have less than ten years to do so.

(1.) James Hansen, "Why We Can't Wait, The Nation (May 7, 2007); see also "Warming Expert Sees 10-year Window," MSNBC News Service (Sept. 14, 2006). Hansen was speaking at a Climate Change Conference in Sacramento, California. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14834318/. For the argument that we must half carbon dioxide emissions at 350 parts per million, see Bill McKibben, "Earth at 350," The Nation (May 12, 2008).

(2.) See Table SPM.5, Working Group III Contribution of the Inter governmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report: Mitigation of Climate Change, Summary for Policymakers, p. 12. http//www.ipee.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-spm.pdf.

(3.) Although oikoumene is often translated "inhabited world" (see definitions 1, 3, and 4 in A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, ed. W. Bauer, F.W. Danker, W.F. Arndt, and F.W. Gingrich (BDAG), 3d ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and in H.G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H.S. Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed with revised supplement (Oxford, 1996), I have argued that oikoumene is more accurately translated "empire" in the New Testament (see, by way of comparison, BDAG definition 2). See Barbara Rossing, "(Re) Claiming Oikoumene? Empire, Ecumenism and the Discipleship of Equals," in Walk In the Ways of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, ed. Shelly Matthews, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, and Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 74-87.

(4.) Rev 21:1, "The first heaven and the first earth had passed away," and 20:11, "Earth and sky fled away," can be read in a number of ways, but certainly not as evidence that God must destroy the first earth before the dawning of the new heavens and the new earth. I have suggested that the "first earth" that passes away is the earth that is captive to Roman imperial power, whereas the new earth of 21:1 is envisioned as the earth free from Roman domination (see Rossing, "Alas for the Earth: and Resistance in Revelation 12, " in The Earth Story in the New Testament, vol. 5, The Earth Bible, ed. Norman Habel and Shirley Wurst [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002], 189). For the argument that Revelation's anti-imperial critique can be a positive resource for ecological reflection see Rossing, "River of Life in God's New Jerusalem: An Eschatological Vision for Earth's Future," in Christianity and Ecology, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Dieter Hessel (Cambridge: Harvard Center for World Religions, 1999), 205-24, and "For the Healing of the World: Reading Revelation Ecologically," in From Every Tribe, Tongue, People, and Nation: The Book of Revelation in Intercultural Perspective, ed. David Rhoads (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 165-82.

(5.) The King James and Revised Standard Versions include an additional reference to fire at the end of verse 10 that has been modified in the New Revised Standard Version on the basis of manuscript evidence--reflecting the text-critical question of whether the earth and the works that are in it "shall be burned up" (katakaesetai, KJV, RSV) or "shall be disclosed" (heurethesetai, NRSV).

(6.) Apoc Pet 5 expands on the fiery imagery of 2 Peter 3, as does 2 Clem 16.3. See discussion of the origins and development of the cosmic conflagration tradition by Carsten Peter Thiede, "A Pagan Reader of 2 Peter: Cosmic Conflagration in 2 Peter 3 and the Octavius of Municius Felix," JSNT 26 (1986): 79-96.

(7.) Robert McClure and Lisa Stiffler, "Federal Way schools restrict Gore film: 'Inconvenient Truth' called too controversial," Seattle Post-Intelligencer ( Jan. 11, 2007), http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/299253_inconvenient 11 .html.

(8.) Jerry Falwell, "The Myth of Global Warming" (sermon, Thomas Road Baptist Church, Lynchburg, VA, February 25, 2007). See also Bob Allen, "Falwell Says Global Warming Tool of Satan," March 1, 2007, EthicsDaily.com, http://ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm? AID=8596.

(9.) Raymond Brown dates 2 Peter to 130 C.E., on the basis of its distance from the apostolic generation and its reference to an established collection of Paul's letters in 2 Pet 3:15--16 (An Introduction to the New Testament, Anchor Bible Reference Library [New York: Doubleday, 1997], 767). Other scholars date 2 Peter somewhat earlier; see, for example, John Elliott, "Peter, Second Epistle of," Anchor Bible Dictionary 5:282-87, and Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, "2 Peter," in Post-colonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, ed. Fernando Segovia and R. S. Sugirtharajah (T & T Clark, 2007).

(10.) 1 Enoch 10-11 envisions the fallen Watchers being consumed by fire, but it is the destruction of the wicked by fire, not the destruction of the world. This is the case also for other Jewish biblical texts often cited as antecedents for the cosmic conflagration imagery of 2 Peter 3.

(11.) For the thesis that 2 Peter is arguing with Greco-Roman converts who are steeped in the Greek idea of ekpyrosis, either through Epicureanism or, simply, Stoicism, see Tord Fornberg, An Early Church in a Pluralistic Society: A Study of 2 Peter, ConB NT 9 (Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup, 1977) 67 n. 7, and Thiede, "A Pagan Reader of 2 Peter."

(12.) Justin Martyr, First Apology 1.20, 1.60; Second Apology 7: "We say there will be the conflagration, but not as the Stoics, according to their doctrine of all things being changed into one another."

(13.) Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.7.1; Origen, Contra Celsus 4.11.79.

(14.) 2 Peter 3:3. Jerome Neyrey situates the polemic of Second Peter in the context of ancient debates between philosophical schools in the Greco-Roman world, noting that the attack upon those who deny divine judgment closely resembles the apology against Epicurean polemics against providence. See Jerome H. Neyrey, "The Form and Background of the Polemic in 2 Peter," Journal of Biblical Literature 99 (1980): 407-31.

(15.) So Raul Humberto Lugo Rodriguez, "Wait for the Day of God's Coming and Do What you Can to Hasten It ..." (2 Pet 3:12): The Non-Pauline Letters as Resistance Literature," in Subversive Scriptures: Revolutionary Readings of the Christian Bible in Latin America, ed. and trans. Leif Vaage (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997), 202.

(16.) So J. N. D. Kelly, A Commentary on the Epistles of Peter and Jude (New York: Harper, 1969), 367; Richard Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 50 (Waco, TX: Word, 1983): 325.

(17.) Gale Z. Heide suggests that 2 Peter might share 2 Clement's notion of a purging fire of judgment rather than an all-consuming one, since 2 Clem 16:3 says that only some of the heavens (tines ton ouranon) will melt at the day of judgment ("What Is New about the New Heaven and the New Earth? A Theology of Creation from Revelation 21 and 2 Peter 3," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40/1 [1997]: 51 n. 42).

(18.) Ernst Kasemann, "An Apologia for Primitive Christian Eschatology," in Essays on New Testament Themes (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 181.

(19.) Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, "The Phenomena of Early Christian Apocalyptic: Some Reflections on Method," in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, Uppsala, 1979, ed. David Hellholm (Tubingen: Mohr, 1989), 313.

(20.) Steven J. Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 158. Other Jewish apocalypses such as 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra similarly depict a time between the destruction of the Roman empire and the final judgment of humanity, although "their handling of the theme is much different" (Friesen, 160).

(21.) Pablo Richard, Apocalypse: A People's Commentary on the Book of Revelation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995), 157.

(22.) Harry Meier, Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation after Christendom (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 147.

(23.) Meier, Apocalypse Recalled, 130-31.

(24.) Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Revelation: Vision of a Just World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991),72.

(25.) Barbara Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 85, 91.

(26.) Richard, Apocalypse: A People's Commentary, 33.

(27.) Brian K. Blount, Can I Get a Witness? Reading Revelation through African American Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 40.

(28.) David M. Rhoads, "Who Will Speak for the Sparrow? Eco-Justice Criticism of the New Testament," in Literary Encounters with the Reign of God, ed. Sharon Ringe and H.C. Paul Kim (New York: T & T Clark, 2004), 83-85.

Ralph Klein is one of the finest preachers on the faculty of The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Through his leadership as editor of Currents in Theology and Mission for thirty years Ralph has brought together excellence in scholarship and excellence in proclamation for the church.

A longer version of this article was published in The Bible in the Public Square: Reading the Signs of the Times (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 25-38. I am grateful to Peter Perry for bibliographic and editorial assistance with 2 Peter 3 and to the Louisville Institute, the Lilly Theological Scholars Grant, and to Thrivent for grant support for research. I am grateful to The Church of Norway, to Olav Fykse Tveit, Freddy Knutsen, and Hans Jurgen Schorre, and to the ELCA Alaska Synod.

Barbara R. Rossing

Professor of New Testament

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago