The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

by Richard B. Hays

“Revelation constructs a world of vision that challenges the symbolic discourse of Rome’s hegemonic colonizing power.”30 No one can enter imaginatively into the world narrated by this book and remain complacent about things as they are in an unjust world. This means that Revelation can be read rightly only by those who are actively struggling against injustice. If Revelation is a resistance document, its significance will become clear only to those who are engaged in resistance. It is no coincidence that the most powerful modern readings of Revelation have come from interpreters in socially marginalized positions who were seeking to call the church to countercultural resistance movements: for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., William Stringfellow, and Alan Boesak.31 Something very strange happens when this text is appropriated by readers in a comfortable, powerful, majority community: it becomes a gold mine for paranoid fantasies and for those who want to preach revenge and destruction. Thus, as Schüssler Fiorenza insists, “Revelation will elicit a fitting theo-ethical response only in those sociopolitical situations that cry out for justice.”