The quotes contained in this post are taken directly from the groundbreaking work by NT Wright and Mike Bird, “The New Testament In Its World,” published by Zondervan and SPCK.
INTRODUCTION
Revelation is a strange book, nearly as strange as some of its readers. People have found in Revelation a dramatic account of the cosmic struggle of the church against the satan, a powerful consolation that God will one day end all suffering, a timetable for the end times, a mirror of the tyrants and turmoil of their own day, or—in many cases—a montage of pictures that they simply do not understand. The book is popular in the way that some music is popular: we don’t understand it but it’s an exciting set of tunes! Yet the book is as majestic as it is mysterious and magnetic. According to Richard Bauckham, one of the finest recent scholars in this area, ‘Revelation is a book of profound theology, intense prophetic insight and dazzling literary accomplishment.’ Despite its many eccentric and esoteric interpreters, it has ‘inspired the martyrs, nourished the imagination of visionary artists and hymn-writers, resourced prophetic critiques of oppression and corruption in state and church, and sustained hope and resistance in the most hopeless situations’. So much so that ‘Revelation can be seen to be not only one of the finest literary works in the New Testament, but also one of the greatest theological achievements of early Christianity’. We might not fully understand Revelation—who does?—but nobody can afford to ignore it.
In terms of content, the book is John’s account of the ‘revelation of Jesus Christ’ which he received on the island of Patmos (setting aside for the moment the question of which ‘John’ we are talking about).
To begin with, the genre of ‘revelation’ itself is eclectic, combining features of letter-writing on the one hand and prophecy on the other, while ultimately resembling an ‘apocalypse’, a particular species of Jewish literature in which the Jewish vision of heaven and earth coming together is turned into literary artistry.
The book also uses deliberately coded language about the Roman empire. John piles one metaphor on top of another in order to describe his visions and draw out their significance. Indeed, readers have always struggled to say what in the book is literary art and what is transcription of the author’s visions.
It is certainly fair to say that John struggles to find language, categories, or word-pictures to explain fully what he has seen and heard. We should sympathize with him. His task of explaining his vision of the risen Jesus, heavenly worship, the ongoing war against the dragon, the fall of the Roman empire, and the ultimate consummation of the creator’s purposes for the world, could be likened to our coming across a primitive tribe, deep in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, people living in stone-age conditions, who have never had contact with western civilization—and then trying to explain the Internet to them. Where would you begin?4 The author of Revelation has seen and heard things which probably put him in that position in relation to people of his own day; how much more in relation to us.
The other complicating factor is that John’s vision assumes a deep connection between heaven and earth. George Caird provides a memorable analogy. Imagine, he says, a military headquarters. Flags are clustered together on a map, and then an official gets up to move the flags around. The flags signify either current manoeuvres on the battlefield or else proposed positions for the various units to be deployed.
Caird comments: The strange and complex symbols of John’s vision are, like the flags in this parable, the pictorial counterpart of earthly realities; and these symbols too may be either determinative or descriptive. John sees some things happening in heaven because God has determined that equivalent events should shortly happen on earth, but other heavenly events take place . . . because earthly events have made them possible.
The point is that John is witness to an ‘unveiling’. He has been granted a glimpse of God’s glory, of the divine strategy and plan for the world. He has seen things which, though normally invisible, are radically shaping the world around us. We are given to understand that there is considerably more going on than meets the eye: tyrannical power is neither absolute nor everlasting. God’s purposes for his people and the world will not be thwarted.
John is trying to explain, in fact, how the divine purpose is working itself out to bring about a marriage between heaven and earth, and how, at the centre of it all, is Jesus himself, the ‘lamb’ who was slain, the king who will return to conquer all his adversaries, so that God will in the end dwell fully and finally with his people. John’s pastoral purpose is as much to exhort his hearers to endurance as to assure them of God’s ultimate victory over their adversaries. He therefore provides a God’s-eye view of the plight of the Asian churches, and explains how Jesus’ people are destined to reign with him in the new creation. Along the way there are exhortations and prophecies, warnings and judgments, triumphs mixed with tears, old adversaries and a new world.
For all the (to us) vagueness of John’s vision, and the vagaries of his language, the book of Revelation gives its audience confidence and hope that ‘the lamb’ has triumphed, and will yet triumph, over the evils of the world.
The book of Revelation has always appealed to artists: here, above all, the reader needs a disciplined imagination as well as a praying heart and a reasoning mind. Like a great piece of music that will only yield its secrets to the mature and sensitive player, the New Testament is designed not just to offer information about God, Jesus, the world, and ourselves, but also to urge us, by inviting us to penetrate its innermost core, to become the kind of people for whom, and indeed through whom, it will at last all make sense. That challenge applies to every book in the New Testament, but perhaps to Revelation even more than the others.
Date and provenance
Irenaeus, at the end of the second century, reckoned that Revelation was to be dated towards the final years of the reign of the emperor Domitian (AD 81–96). Domitian was remembered as a megalomaniac, consumed with the promulgation of his own divine status, demanding to be addressed as ‘lord and god’. He was thought to have unleashed a brutal persecution against Christians, and many from early times have supposed that it was his malevolent figure that could be seen looming up in the darker passages of Revelation.
Another important factor in assessing the setting of the book is the extent to which onlookers could see just how expansive and dominant Roman political, military, and economic power had become. Roman power was celebrated in public media like coins and inscriptions, and was venerated through the imperial cult and the famous temple to Mars Ultor (‘the avenger’) in Rome itself. Babylon the Great became for the early church a symbol of Rome, seen as both a luxuriating whore and the seat of Mediterranean military power. John offers a voice from elsewhere, from among the ‘others’ who lived on the margins of the empire, with the boot of Roman power on their throat. Rome’s prosperity and glory was the cause of their poverty and shame; Roman ‘justice’ was often perceived as its opposite. As one subdued chieftain was alleged to have said about the Romans: ‘To violence, rape, and plunder, they give the name “empire”; they create desolation and call it “peace”.’ John’s apocalypse is a theologically loaded critique of Rome’s vaunted greatness and goodness, its self-styled blessedness and benevolence. The book decries Rome’s actual pretentiousness and brutality, offering an alternative perspective on how Rome looks from below. David deSilva puts it elegantly:
John raises his voice alongside those of other protesters like the authors of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch. John was not a solitary, raving lunatic. The asylum was full of people who just couldn’t ‘see things’ in line with the official picture. The multiplicity of voices calling out against Rome’s injustices at the close of the first century, of which John’s voice was one, help us to see that Jews and Christians in Asia Minor were not only concerned about local affairs, internecine strife, or throwing stones at the church or synagogue across the way. The ‘system,’ together with all its local manifestations, was also a major problem. Uniting the practice of exerting control and maintaining peace through violent suppression of dissent, the promotion of an economy arranged for the great benefit of the few, and the prominent use of religious language and ritual to claim sacral legitimation for these arrangements—uniting these is both the genius of Rome and the heap of her sins for which John excoriates her.
Participation in rites and rituals, whether at the dinner of a trade guild, during public games, or before a family shrine featuring the emperor’s image, was the moment to demonstrate one’s loyalty and gratitude towards the imperial family. This is why John singles out Pergamum as the place where ‘Satan has his throne’, since Pergamum was among the first to receive the title ‘temple warden’ of the imperial cult. It had a temple to the goddess Roma and to the Augusti, along with an immense altar to Zeus on top of a nearby mountain. Yet John urges his readers to flee from Babylon the Great, to refuse to worship the beast, and to reject the seduction of prosperity enmeshed in blasphemy. According to John, it was not Rome’s dios (Zeus/Jupiter) but Israel’s theos (God) who was in charge of history; it was not the sebastos (venerable emperor) but the christos (Messiah) who was the agent of salvation; and it was not the Roman people, but the church, that was destined to reign over the earth.
Genre
The book of Revelation is an eclectic mixture of epistle, prophecy, and apocalypse. First, the book is bracketed with an epistolary framework and contains several prophetic oracles couched as letters. Second, Revelation is umbilically connected to biblical prophecy in both form and content, and explicitly presents itself as ‘prophecy’ (see further below). Third, above all, the book is an apocalypse since it is titled as the ‘apocalypse of Jesus Christ’ and exemplifies several devices and themes associated with the slippery category of ‘apocalyptic’. The book of Revelation is, then, a lengthy circular letter, substantively a prophetic apocalypse, that was intended for dissemination among the Asian churches.
First, central to ‘apocalyptic’ is the report of revelatory experiences like visions or dreams. We refer here to someone, the ‘seer’, who experiences a revelation of things not usually perceptible—sometimes seeing, sometimes hearing, sometimes both. We know about this because seers often write down what they remember having seen and heard, which they interpret as an ‘unveiling’ of the true nature, the God’s-eye perspective perhaps, of present reality and/or events yet to come. This kind of experience presupposes that reality is more complex and multi-dimensional than it normally appears, and that, in particular, the sphere of normal human experience is not after all separated from the sphere of the angels and their creator by a great gulf, but rather ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ in fact overlap and interlock in a variety of ways.
Second, this leads us to what some have supposed to be a particular apocalyptic worldview, the theological map of reality that is disclosed through an unveiling of otherwise concealed mysteries. Here we have to be careful, because the literary genre, and the experience which may or may not lie behind it, should not itself be mistaken for a ‘worldview’. ‘Apocalyptic’ texts regularly display a number of binary configurations (present and future, heaven and earth, light and darkness, good and evil).
Third, when Jewish groups throughout the period were faced with a crisis, such as a major threat from pagan powers, their understanding of this crisis and their yearning for their God to act to undo the problem could and sometimes did lead to what some have perhaps misleadingly called apocalypticism. This purported apocalypticism is an entire mood or mode in which a group organizes itself socially, culturally, narratively, and religiously around the perceived crisis, believing that it is playing a central part in the situation and looking for a divine resolution.
Fourth, an ‘apocalypse’ is therefore the specific literary expression, in the mode of ‘revelation’, of this much larger worldview. An apocalypse, according to one definition, is
a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another supernatural world . . . intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of the supernatural world of the future, and to influence both the understanding and the behaviour of the audience by means of divine authority.
Interpretation and purpose
The history of the interpretation of the book of Revelation reveals something of the open nature of the book. It has generated a constellation of interpretative strategies and elicited a wide range of meanings.
From Hippolytus’s Christ and AntiChrist to the Left Behind novels, many have seen it as offering a timetable, a road map towards the ‘end times’. From as early as the second century there has been a steady stream of ‘millennialist’ interpreters who saw the book as prophesying a concrete ‘new world’ very like the present one, only with evil, sin, and death banished. This kind of approach was taken by Papias, Cerinthus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian. The first actual commentary on Revelation, that of Victorinus in the third century, was also millennial (in other words, believing that Jesus would reign on earth for a thousand years).
On the other hand, there have always been interpreters who have understood the book to be figurative, symbolic, and thus inviting allegorical interpretation. Debates about its interpretation go back to at least third-century Egypt, where Nepos argued for a ‘Jewish’ and ‘literal’ interpretation, while in response Dionysius commended what he thought was a deeper and more considered allegorical appropriation. Others again—one thinks here of John Calvin, who wrote commentaries on all the books of the New Testament except Revelation—are honest enough to confess to being straightforwardly confounded as to what the book is about. To look at it positively, the multiple ways the book has been received and interpreted around the world proves just how rich and powerful the text is, and how many ways it can resonate with readers in diverse cultural contexts.
Four major approaches to the interpretation of the book of Revelation have emerged down the years.
First, there are preterist perspectives. These look for a specific fulfilment of the prophecies of the book in actual events that have now already happened, with some fixing on the events leading up to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and others supposing that fulfilment came in the fourth-century collapse of the pagan Roman empire and its Christianization under Constantine. This view certainly appears to make Revelation relevant to the immediate circumstances of its early readers, but it appears to make it much less relevant to subsequent generations, including our own. And, as many have noted, even Constantine’s Christian empire does not look exactly like the new heavens and new earth promised in Revelation 21—22.
Second, there are historicist approaches. By this scholars have meant that Revelation was predicting the entire course of subsequent world history, including things like the rise of the Goths, the Arabs, the Mongols, the medieval papacy, Napoleon, Hitler, and the Soviet Union. This has the opposite problem to the preterist interpretation: instead of the book being relevant to early readers but to nobody else, these readings make it sporadically relevant from time to time in subsequent history while making it hard to see what its first readers were supposed to think of it. Such readings have proved a happy hunting-ground for various small groups who have managed to interpret this or that passage in specific reference to their own localized situation.
Third, there are futurist perspectives. This is like the ‘historicist’ reading, with Revelation predicting long-range future events, except that the ‘history’ in question only begins in what, for us, is the ‘modern’ period. Revelation is thus seen as primarily predicting distant future events, usually transpiring in the twentieth or twenty-first century, such as the rise of the European Union, the establishment of the modern state of Israel, the United Nations, and the World Council of Churches, and the emergence of Saddam Hussein, or even Al Qaeda and ISIS. Interpreters of this type usually understand the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2—3 allegorically, as temptations faced by the church in every age, and then treat the visions of Revelation 6—19 as a literal and linear series of events, complete with the ‘rapture’, the ‘tribulation’, and the ‘millennium’ that is to take place on the eve of the world’s end. The problem here is that interpreters fail to grasp the rhetorical and symbolic nature of apocalyptic discourse, and frequently display a highly parochial and provincial interpretative strategy, supposing that world history is all about themselves.
Fourth, there are idealist interpretations. These regard Revelation as a multi-layered symbolic portrayal of the conflict taking place between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world in the time between the victory of Jesus on the cross and his final return. This generalized account leaves room for various kinds of allegorical and symbolic understandings of the theological, spiritual, and political realities of the whole period. What can be lost with this approach, however, is the sense of imminence. John insists that he is talking about things that will happen ‘soon’.
The best course seems to be an eclectic approach to the interpretation of Revelation. We must insist that the book would have been highly relevant to its first readers (who lived in a culture where this kind of book was much better known than it has been in the modern period). There were specific challenges and Revelation was written to meet them; we should not regard the problems facing the seven churches, or the letters addressed to them, as other than specific words to specific situations (though of course with multiple subsequent resonances).
John the Seer’s apocalypse is designed to be highly affective, not just by stirring the emotions, but in challenging and reshaping the audience’s imagination. The book is designed to inspire its readers to reaffirm their allegiance to God and his Messiah, and in that light to praise the faithful, shame the wicked, and steel the resolve of the churches to resist the monstrous and idolatrous Roman power. John intends to call out lukewarm faith and acculturation, and above all to urge his hearers to persevere in the faith despite suffering. It is those who ‘overcome’ who will receive the crown of life. To achieve this end, Revelation uses vivid imagery to describe a cosmic conflict, layered with symbolism, dripping with biblical allusions, and replete with local knowledge. A. D. Callahan writes:
The auditors who came together to hear the Apocalypse were summoned to a transformative experience. Those first ancient auditors of the Apocalypse came together not merely to be informed, but to be transformed, to undergo a collective change in consciousness, an aspiration that makes modern individual and group reading practices trivial by comparison, with the possible exception of the reading of wills. Reading the Apocalypse aloud, and hearing the Apocalypse read aloud, was effectual: through exhortations and exclamations, threat and thunder, the reading of the Apocalypse moved its hearers, affected them; the text did something to them.
The author is not trying to console his audience with the truth that all is well in heaven and one day all will be blissful on earth. Rather, he is calling them to believe and behave in the light of the triumph of the ‘lamb’ and the coming redemptive judgment of God. He reassures readers, but also calls them to repent if they have compromised with false teaching or consorted with the beast and its agents. John’s descriptions of his own visions are designed to recast the church’s vision of God and the world by seeing them in the light of the ‘divine actions above, within, and beneath the surface of history’s tapestry’.
