Mount Vigil: Recent Episodes
Mount Vigil
Mount Vigil is a Christian discipleship platform for the end of an age. We work to recover the whole story of Jesus, and to read the times we're in through to the story of Jesus. We explore everyday practices that help us experience more of Jesus. That way, we can take on more of his nature and find our role in his story. There is a way to thrive in a significant time. We invite you to join us and find out how.
In this series, Blaine and Anthony have argued that Revelation is the theological capstone of the Bible. Nevertheless, because its method of doing theology draws upon the Jewish (rather than the Greco-Roman) tradition, many of its claims go right over the head of modern readers. In this show, Blaine and Anthony drill down on some of the most notorious elements in Revelation: the 144,000, the Whore, the Beast, the Mark, and more. The actions of Revelation are not a disturbing fever dream. They are instead a profound picture of the world as it really is, and when we learn read our lives in terms of Revelation, we know how to follow Jesus as he establishes heaven on earth.
Get show notes for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-beasts-and-harlots-and-virgins-oh-my-revelation-part-4/
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
“While each church receives a message reflecting its own situation, there is one overarching issue: whether or not to compromise. Specifically, will these churches be faithful witnesses both to Jesus and like Jesus (and John!) by refraining from participation in the cultural norm of pagan religion, including the imperial cult, even if it entails serious consequences: social, economic, and political?” Gorman
In this third part of the series on Revelation, Blaine and Anthony continue their discussion on the major movements of the Apocalypse. In particular, they discuss the messages to the seven churches from 1:9-3:22 and the vision of heaven in 4 and 5.
Get show notes for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-seven-messages-revelation-part-3/.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
In this episode, Anthony and Blaine continue their Story of God series by returning to the book of Revelation. Questions discussed in this conversation: How does John use the Old Testament? What is the structure of John's Apocalypse? Who is/are the seven spirits in 1:4? What is going in in John's prologue? We hope you enjoy.
Get show notes for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/the-capstone-of-the-bible-revelation-part-2.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
“Revelation is not only one of the finest literary works in the New Testament, but also one of the greatest theological achievements of early Christianity.” So says New Testament Scholar Richard Bauckham, and yet few of us experience it that way. In this episode, Blaine and Anthony begin a conversation on the literary and theological marvel that is Revelation, drawing on diverse scholarship to frame its historical and prophetic situation. The thesis of this episode is simple: Revelation is a discipleship manual. It orients the people of God to their situation, and it tells them how they should live in view of Christ's reality.
Sources
We know from experience Revelation is challenging. For all those of you who are looking to grasp the message and the blessing of the Bible's capstone book, here are a few recommended resource:
For a wonderful introduction, check out:
The Bible Project's Two-Part Overview
Part One:
Part Two:
For a good book on the whole of revelation:
Michael Gorman Reading Revelation Responsibly
Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett Revelation for the Rest of Us
For a more scholarly take:
Richard Bauckham The Theology of the Book of Revelation
Richard Baukham The Climax of Prophecy
For a book on key elements and Old Testament allusions:
Brandon Smith The Trinity in the Book of Revelation
Tremper Longman III Revelation Through Old Testament Eyes
In this episode, Blaine and Anthony begin a conversation on the culmination of the Story of God: the bodily return of Jesus and the final marriage of heaven and earth.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
In this episode, Blaine and Anthony discuss the everyday life of the people of God. The Church is a glorious reality; on the ground, it is also a gritty reality. The practice of dying to self is not abstract. It looks like loving real people. It looks like owning our sin. It looks like repenting. It looks like leaving church gatherings and then learning to hang in there. The local gathering is an eternal reality embodied by people in process. In this conversation, Blaine and Anthony share their personal experience of learning to live life in Jesus's Church.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
The Church is the Bride of Christ, and that, more than any other dimension of Church life, is an eschatalogical reality. It is a fact that anchors the purpose of the Church in the bodily return of Jesus and the final union of Heaven and Earth. In this episode, Blaine and Anthony discuss Bridal Theology, sexual ethics, covenant, and the culmination of God's design for His free creatures.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
"If the Church is really supposed to be yours, you'll have to make that much more obvious than it is at present."
Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, paraphrasing the temptations of Christ
The Church is a vital step in the Story of God. It hearkens back to Eden; it picks up the role of Israel. It is military, and it is political. It recalls themes from King David's time. It prophesies the Return of Jesus. In this episode, Blaine and Anthony begin a conversation on God's people, discussing in particular the many names given to the followers of Jesus, names that weave together themes from the story so far.
Get show notes and links for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-16/.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
In this episode, Anthony and Blaine discuss the Ascension and Pentecost, linking those events as two sides of the same coin in the story of God. In the Ascension, Jesus has anchored our humanity in the heavens. At Pentecost, the Sermon on the Mount and the Old Testament promises of covenant renewal have been fulfilled. Also in this episode: ancient representations of the creator God, dating Biblical events, Jewish calendars, the unfulfilled Sermon on the Mount, and events from the Second Jewish Roman War.
Get show notes (including our Ascension Liturgy!) and links for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-15/.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
In this episode, Anthony and Blaine discuss suffering, surrender, and incarnate spirituality as Jesus’s solution to the World and the Flesh. This is the third installment in a three-part series on Jesus as the crescendo of the Story of God.
Also in this conversation: dying to become human, the devil’s counterfeit power, the spiritual life lived in the body, and eros and agape fusing together in the form of the human being.
Get show notes and links for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-14/.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
In this episode, Blaine and Anthony continue their conversation on the work of Jesus: How, exactly, does Jesus deal with the problem of spiritual oppression? Why does it matter that Jesus reigns supreme over the council? Where is the gate of hades, and what would it mean for Jesus to build a church there? The life and work of Jesus specifically overthrows the spiritual powers of this world. Join the Mount Vigil team for a conversation on the faithfulness of Jesus, the recapitulation of the story of Israel, and more.
Get show notes and links for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-13/.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
In this episode, Blaine and Anthony continue their series on the Story of God by arriving, at last, at Jesus. In particular, this show addresses the way in which Jesus deals with sin and death so that the story of Israel, with its law and sacrificial system to manage sin and its prophetic promises to manage death, is brought to its climax.
This show is the first installment in a 3-part conversation on the work of Jesus.
Get show notes and links for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-12/.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
Why did God choose to create the nation of Israel? How was God's decision to create a people where there was no people part of his plan to deal with sin, death, and spiritual oppression? How does the story of YHWH and Israel prepare humanity for the ultimate revelation of Jesus the Anointed? These are the questions we go after in this next installment in our Story of God series.
Get show notes and links for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-11/.
Subscribe to the Mount Vigil Newsletter at https://mountvigil.org/subscribe.
You can make a tax-deductible donation to support the work of Mount Vigil at https://mountvigil.org/donate.
In this special episode, Blaine and Anthony discuss self-examination. Self-examination, or Examen, is a practice that followers of Jesus have used for centuries to see their lives as God sees them, and, therefore, as they really are.
The 5 steps of the Examen:
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Center yourself
Place yourself in God’s presence. Give thanks for the gift of this day and the gift of God’s love for you. -
Ask for light
Pray for the grace to understand how God is acting in your life. Ask for the ability to hear clearly and for covering from warfare. -
Review the day
Let the Holy Spirit guide you as you carefully review the day just completed. Pay attention to specific moments and your feelings at the time. -
Reflect, express gratitude, and confess
For those moments the Spirit highlights, reflect on what you did, said, thought. Were you drawing closer to God or further from him? What is the Spirit saying about these moments? Pay attention to moments of beauty; thank God for his provision. -
Look forward to the new day and seek out spiritual friendship
What is the Spirit prompting you to ask for in the day to come? What is he calling you to do? Who can you seek out to discuss the themes and questions the Spirit is raising?
Get show notes and the links for this episode at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-10/.
In this episode we continue our Story of God series by talking about the the Fall, or more accurately the Falls. The falls of mankind and the falls of the powers. We explore the origins of evil in the world, including the first human sin, the role of depraved spiritual powers, and the descent into darkness that forms the backdrop for Jesus' salvation project.
You can find more information and show notes at mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-9/
We're back from hiatus. In this episode we talk about the big questions: What is the meaning of life? Why did God create us? What are we here for?
We talk about how babies are like rainbow trout, regenerative agriculture, Edens within Edens, the trees at both ends of the scriptures, why people are idols, and fractal geometry. For show notes and more about Mount Vigil go to https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-8/
We're interrupting our series on the story of God to talk about the ongoing war in Ukraine and the Church's response to it.
Some of the things we cover in this episode:
- What our fleshly responses and our repentance of those responses looks like
- How Christians can find solid ground in the midst of a powerful media narrative
- How the concept of the Dialectic is working it's way out in the world
- The typology of empire and nations in the scriptures
- The economics of war
- What it looks like to be a prophetic, called out people who bring the Good News in the midst of the devastation of war
This is the second in our series on the Story of God. In this episode we discuss the spiritual powers found in the Bible: the elohim and the divine counsel, angels and demons. Our aim is to continue developing the foundations worldview this is not selectively supernatural but embraces the story as we have received it in scripture.
This is the first in a series of episodes on the story of God. We've talked about seeing reality as a story, we've talked about Apocalypse or spiritual revelation as to the nature of that story, and in our Endgame episode we talked about what it's like at the end of the story. But exactly what story is it that we're in? Where does it begin and how did we get here?
We argue that the place to begin is with God. In doing so we talk at length about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, we spend some time discussing the hundreds of years the early Church spent developing this doctrine, we discuss what it means practically in our daily lives that God is a Trinitarian God, and we end with a practice that I think you will find helpful in restoring your relationship with the persons of the Trinity.
We are invited not only to form our minds around the doctrine of the Trinity but to encounter the Trinity in an immediate and personal way.
You can find links and more show notes at https://mountvigil.org/mount-vigil-podcast-episode-5/
Grandmaster Jose Raul Capablanca said that to succeed "you must study the endgame before anything else.” In this episode we talk about endgame, an idea from chess that we extrapolate to answer the question, What is it like to be at the end of a great cosmic war?
We begin by following up on the question of apocalypse posed in the previous episode: what exactly is being uncovered?
Moving on we get into a little chess endgame theory as a way of charting the territory of this conversation.
We discuss the strategic environment of endgame and what conflict it is that we're at the end of.
We ask, who are the major players involved and what are their goals?
Finally we end with some words of encouragement for the Christian who is trying to follow Jesus in a world that seems increasingly chaotic.
For show notes, links, and more content, please visit mountvigil.org.
In today's episode we talk about Apocalypse: the word, the genre of literature, the spiritual event. We attempt to develop a nuanced, robust, rounded-out sense of Apocalypse, which means "revelation," a sense that is grounded in the fact that, ultimately, the Good News of Jesus Christ is what is revealed to us in an Apocalypse.
We cut to the chase by answering the question, "If this is an apocalypse should I buy guns and crypto?" and then move on to discuss what apocalypse is in the scriptures and in the mind that has been formed by the story of God, and compare this perspective to the ideas that the broader culture have around apocalypse.
We discuss why it's important to seek spiritual revelation in the ways that have been given by God and at the pace he dictates and why the world's many offers of revelation outside of God's plan are so harmful to us.
We talk about the many challenges facing us when we attempt to have a conversation around the word apocalypse:
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Why does this word stress me out?
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Why does pop culture have a whole movie genre called post-apocalyptic?
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Is there a safe way to talk about this given much of the Church's misguided and harmful approaches to the subject?
We talk about the many senses of the word “apocalypse” in an effort to level-up our ability to think and speak about the subject.
We then look at the book of Revelation, otherwise known as the Apocalypse of Jesus given to John, and examine three key errors that often foul up our attempts to appreciate apocalyptic literature in the scriptures.
We wrap things up by asking the questions:
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What do we do in an apocalypse?
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What is the Good News for us in this time?
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How can we live free from fear?
We hope you find encouragement, comfort, and good counsel in a subject that, when mistreated, can often cause dread, anxiety, and misguided action. Apocalypse is a challenging subject–you may have a lot of baggage associated with it–but with God's help we think we can confidently navigate this terrain toward the goal of union with Christ.
Additional Notes
- The story of Elisha, Gehazi, the Syrian army, and the flaming chariots
- McSweeneys: Your parenting choices have caused the apocalypse
- Barron's: There will be no student loan apocalypse
- New Yorker: Should you have a baby during the global apocalypse? An FAQ
- US Sun: Apocalypse fears with millions lining up for food and water if power grid is hit
- Newsweek: Porkpocalypse
- The Book of Revelation
- Reading Revelation Responsibly by Michael Gorman
- Four Views on the Book of Revelation edited by C. Marvin Pate
- Microsoft Patent WO2020060606 - Cryptocurrency system using body activity data
In this episode, Blaine and Anthony discuss a foundational ability, an ability on which the rest of the Mount Vigil work depends: seeing reality.
It’s never been easy to see reality well. But it’s especially difficult in our time: the fallout of postmodernism and critical theory, the rise of nihilism, the divisive strategies of social media giants, and the advent of post-human and transhuman ideologies have eroded our ability to hold on to a coherent story. We’re taught to doubt our experience. We’re gaslit by the knowledge brokers of our time.
In the first part of this conversation, Blaine and Anthony argue that reality is fundamentally narrative, and that a person’s ability to see reality is linked to the clarity of the story they’re living.
In the second part of this conversation, Blaine and Anthony explore some of the obstacles that stand in the way of a strong sense of reality: an incomplete Gospel, everyday trauma, and technological opposition.
In the third part of this conversation, Blaine and Anthony argue that a true sense of reality is dependent on a vision of Jesus, and then explore tactics to recover a strong sense of reality: engaging the real world, living in the family of God, and leaning on three effective discernment strategies. Those are the testimony of the Bible, the consensus of the Church, and the revelation of the Holy Spirit.
Additional Notes:
The GPT-3 Algorithm
The Social Dilemma
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
The Google Brain Team
The Center for Humane Technology
MIT Tech Review regarding troll farms
Designing For Behavior Change
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
The Race to the Bottom of the Brain Stem
Reality Privilege
Marc Andreessen’s work on the metaverse
The Wim Hoff Breathing Method
In this episode we introduce Mount Vigil and the core themes we'll be unpacking over the course of this project.
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Understanding God's story
What is the nature of the great, cosmic story we're in and where in that story do we think we are? What is missing from our understanding of the story of God that we are being invited to recover? -
Understanding the times we're in
What's going on in the world? How are we to understand the events unfolding around us? How does a knowledge of God's story and a better understanding of the nature of reality help us to be wise and grounded in an age of disorientation and chaos? -
Following the way of Christ
More than ever, we need to be unified with Jesus and to know how to be restored in him. What are the ways and resources he is providing for us?
https://mountvigil.org/mv-podcast-episode-1