Echoes of Babylon Podcast

Preterism isn't a modern novelty. Its roots reach back to the earliest generations of the church — and its first full expression came from a Jesuit scholar in sixteenth-century Seville that almost no one has heard of. This episode is the story of where it came from, what it sees, and what questions it leaves open. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers o...

On July 6, 1415, a Czech priest walked into a cathedral knowing he would not walk out alive. What happened that day is the doorway into historicism — the Reformation's way of reading Revelation as a map of church history unfolding in real time. For three centuries it was not a minority position. It was the position. This episode is about where it came from, what it sees, and where it strains. This...

How the Eastern Church Received Revelation In the previous section, we watched Augustine build a cathedral of thought in response to a world that had stopped making sense. The sack of Rome in 410 had shattered assumptions that had held for centuries — that civilization was durable, that Christian empire was progress, that the story was moving somewhere stable. Augustine answered that crisis with a...

How Augustine Reshaped the Way the Church Read Revelation In the previous section, we watched the earliest reading of Revelation encounter a pressure it was never built to absorb. Chiliasm — the early church expectation of a coming earthly millennial reign of Christ — had been shaped by conflict. It knew how to make sense of suffering. It knew how to hold hope in the face of a hostile empire. What...

How the Early Church Held Its Hope In the previous section, we traced how every major way of reading Revelation developed in response to pressure — not as a timeless system handed down intact, but as a living response to a changing world. That raises a question worth sitting with: where does the story begin? Before Augustine, before the Reformation, before Darby — what did the first readers think...

I didn’t know it at the time, but the question I had begun asking had been asked before. The way Revelation has been read—what I had assumed was simply the view—had a history. It developed over time, shaped not only by the text itself, but by the circumstances in which Christians were trying to understand it. And once you begin to see that, the map starts to look different. In the earliest centuri...

In 2021, after years of setting aside questions about biblical prophecy—picking them up occasionally, then putting them back down—a close friend reached out to me. Someone had asked her about the Book of Revelation, and she wanted help thinking it through. I hesitated. I was rusty. And if I’m honest, more than a little reluctant. For years I had lived in that world—tracking signs, watching events,...

Christians have inherited frameworks and systems for reading the Book of Revelation, and most of what we believe about biblical prophecy comes through them--not the text. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit echoesofbabylon.substack.com

Every map is shaped by assumptions. If the compass is off—even slightly—you end up far from where you intended to go. That’s what’s happened with how most of us read Revelation. We inherited a system. A framework. A way of mapping time, prophecy, and God’s future plans. And like all systems, it helps us make sense of the world. That’s not the problem. The problem is that it no longer fits the terr...