I’ve been reading through the Apocalypse of John lately, popularly known as Revelation. I’ve always loved the book, even as much as it confuses the hell out of me. I’m now ashamed to admit this, but I grew up devouring the Left Behind series, and learned everything I could about this take on the end times. Imagine my dismay years later as I had the rude awakening to the extent that this was, as N.T. Wright puts it in Surprised By Hope, an almost “cartoonish” version of end things, which has come to be so popular primarily in 20th century North American Evangelicalism (much as we seem totally unaware of how fast and loose we became with our theology by giving ourselves so unquestioningly to this perspective). By the way, N.T. Wright is a genius and if you are at all interested in the ancient doctrines of resurrection (being that heaven is a place on Earth) and ancient thoughts on end times (which are hard to come by in religion today), I would highly recommend his work. Now, with my book plug out of the way, on to a few reflections.
Revelation is about a God that comes down and fixes the world in the end. I know it’s become quite popular to read it as a book about God coming to rapture a lot of people and blow the rest of the world up, and it seems so odd that a book about restoration can be turned into a book about evacuation and destruction. I understand it, I suppose (being as it is the perspective I totally bought into for quite a while), but I don’t think I ever really wrestled with the last few chapters. The chapters after Tribulation and Millennial Reign. The chapters where God comes to make his home with man and fixes things. It’s a beautiful thing, where we find completion in our call to steward the earth with great care, to foster peace and understanding rather than divisiveness and destruction and war, where the gods reconcile with the men rather than continuing the cycle of exclusion and tribalism.
When I read Revelation I cannot help but think of the style we see coming out of the French Revolution. The popular term for this is “plausible deniability.” You see it coming out of any oppressive system, really. We saw great works of literature coming from that time in France, and if you know anything about what was going on at the time, you understand fully well that this author was not just writing a novel about nothing; he was writing about the State, but with just enough vague verbiage that should an official approach him about his rebellious rhetoric, he could look stunned and insist the official was mistaken. Under first century Roman rule, this style was everywhere. Scholars label it the Jewish Apocalyptic, the writing with it’s sites aimed at the destructive nature of Rome, but with the vague and fantastic stories necessary for that plausible deniability to hold water should they be questioned. In a twist of irony, the imagery an apostle like John used to cloak his message so that it could remain in circulation for the benefit of the church has become, in time, the very thing that the church takes so literally as to deceive themselves of the rather historical, grounded anti-Christ issues of the day that he was pleading with people to understand.
And to get why that happens, it is critical that we understand that the Bible is written from the people we don’t care to understand, not then, not today, and I fear not for a very long time. The Bible was written by people on the underside of power. God inevitably veers toward those on the underside of power, to the poor and the oppressed, to the weak. It’s written by people who were always being oppressed by the current military superpower of the day; Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Rome. It presents an interesting issue when we read it as participants in the largest, most powerful economic and military superpower the world has ever seen. It’s uncomfortable, and easy to miss the profoundly anti-Empire rhetoric found in the Scriptures, particularly in Revelation. We tend to miss the metaphor of “Babylon,” (used in John’s plausible deniability structure to refer to Rome) being both a nation in history and also a euphemism for empire. All empires. And we are called to “come out” of the whore of Babylon/empire. I have heard that the Greek for “Come out” has etymological connections to the sexual technique for birth control. That is the imagery John intends when he pleads for us to “come out” of the whore of empire. We do not give allegiance to any nation, and to forsake this command will cause us to have to readjust our whole Biblical text in order to accommodate our dual masters of the faux-gods and the State
Tony Campolo once said, “America is a great Babylon. But she is still my Babylon, and I am called to come out of her.”
So what happens when we read anti-empire text as part of an empire? We spiritualize it. We take it out of the soil and meaning it had and we, without ever meaning to, make it about something else. Something somewhere else or in some other time. From what little I understand of the matter, Jewish prophesy was never first and foremost an exercise in predictive words about the situation at hand. To think Revelation, or any work of Jewish prophesy for that matter, is first and foremost about the future represents a profound misunderstanding of the way that Jewish prophecy works. Prophecy was always about the time at hand, a call to the people of God then and there. Now, there were future (as well as past) implications (doesn’t history tend to repeat itself?), but the story was the story now. The plot seen in Revelation is as old as time. When have tribes not tried to gain power? When have leaders not usurped the religious leaders to garner support? When have people not loved their tribe and thought the gods where on their side over and above anyone else? When has a nation with a lot ever not wanted more power/arms/riches/honors? The story we find in Revelation is about Rome. But it is as old as the first tribes that skirmished with each other, and it will continue until the hopes and dreams of God are realized in the world.
And until that very thing happens, I’m afraid we will continue to see Christians participating in the very things He came to deliver a death knell to.
And so Revelation is a book about believers and demons and white horses and anti-christs. It’s about Rome, but also about Babylon and America and whatever nation will come after we wither away, and it’s about the nation after that too. Is Revelation about the future? Certainly, just as much as it is about the past. Was Revelation meant by the apostle John to be a literal account of people flying into the air, bizarre and creatively awful punishments from God, and the Prince of Peace coming with a bloodthirsty vengeance? I suspect not, but it became incredibly popular in late 20th century North American culture to believe so. A lot of us came to completely buy into the popular view of this generation being the last generation (just as so many generations have believed before), complete with our end-of-the-world rhetoric. And sadly, it became all too easy to completely ignore the end of the Bible, the last two chapters of Revelation, the verses after an millennium reign, when God comes to the world to heal and fix, putting to end our destructive cycles.
Growing up, I never heard a sermon on the end of the story. The tail end of Revelation, the consummation of the epic Biblical narrative, was made the smallest of side notes. And if we marginalize the end painted in Revelation, we are free to continue our ingrouping and outgrouping, our overly spiritualized rhetoric, and our destructive cycle.
We should probably cut it out. Or else, God may have to come save us from ourselves.
——-
And on a less profound note, check out this odd piece from Weird Al’s UHF. In it, Gandhi comes back to earth, looking for revenge. If you know anything about Gandhi, you see the irony of a pacifist being portayed as totally opposite to all he stood for. And if you are a Christian, you may see the sad truth in how closely this correlates to the mythic expectation of a Jesus that comes back with a sword to kill his enemies…
Posted by taddelay 
