Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation

by Michael J. Gorman

I recalled the Hal Lindsey era of my own 1970s youth. As a teen with a recently invigorated Christian faith, I too was briefly captivated by the hopes—and fears—outlined in The Late Great Planet Earth and similar books, the predecessors to the “Left Behind” phenomenon. Fortunately, our youth group was blessed with one leader who offered a different way of reading Revelation. My fears alleviated, I was able to put Revelation on the back burner through most of college, despite having a resident assistant who regularly camped out in the college woods to hone his survivalist skills before the Great Tribulation. (His preoccupation did, however, cause me considerable distress for a short period of time.) My interest in Revelation resurfaced at Princeton Seminary, where I took a course on the book with the late, great professor Bruce Metzger, whose lectures became the basis for a popular book called Breaking the Code. Later, as a Ph.D. student, I helped him teach the same course. Thanks to Dr. Metzger, I developed a strong interest, not only in the book of Revelation itself, but also in the many ways it has been interpreted. When I in turn became a New Testament professor, I began regularly teaching a course called “The Book of Revelation and its Interpreters.” I also started giving talks on Revelation to church groups, college and seminary students, and others. And I began leading study tours called “The Cities of Paul and John” that include most of the seven cities—all located ...

Testament at another seminary, asking for his perspective on this question, the book of Revelation, and the “last things” more generally.3 He graciously responded in a way that was quite consonant with this book. More recently, a well-known radio Bible teacher, Harold Camping, once again predicted the date of Jesus’ second coming—May 21, 2011—and the end of the world as we know it. Despite the clear words of Jesus that no one except God the Father knows that date, not even the Son himself (Mark 13:32; Matt 24:36), and despite Mr. Camping’s earlier erroneous prediction—September 6, 1994—both he and his followers ardently believe(d) that the Scriptures, when properly interpreted, clearly indicate this date. Such predictions are normally coupled with an escapist eschatology and a mentality, similar to what my college resident assistant manifested, that can have significant effects on oneself and others. A colleague had a family physician in the 1990s who was such a devout follower of Harold Camping, and was therefore so convinced that Jesus would return in 1994, that he talked ceaselessly about it with his patients, spent his free time getting ready for the end, and eventually let his entire staff go, since they clearly would have no work to do after September 1994. The times during which I have written this book have felt quite “apocalyptic” (a term we will need to define later) to many people. There have been wars and rumors of wars. There was the great economic crash of Oc...

of the earth’s destruction. Immediately after the quake, some women ran around, tearing their clothing and screaming, “The Apocalypse is here.” Not long afterwards, the Gulf Coast oil disaster occurred, leaving an impression on some that the death of a third of the living creatures in the sea (Rev 8:9) was not a far-fetched fantasy. Another sign of the End? Finally, though far more trivially, a slip of the finger at the keyboard while trying to order a movie led me to a website called nexflix.com, one of thousands predicting the fulfillment of Bible prophecy, the imminent rapture (another term—and even concept—absent from Revelation), the appearance of the antichrist, and the unfolding of Revelation’s “script.” The site was meant to inculcate fear and repentance. Had I been a nonbeliever, however, I would have found the whole thing ridiculous, adding its strange perspective to my list of reasons not to take Christianity seriously. All this is to say the following: How one reads, teaches, and preaches Revelation can have a powerful impact on one’s own—and other people’s—emotional, spiritual, and even physical and economic well-being. Therefore, interpreting the book of Revelation...

and practice, and its potential to help or harm people in their life of faith. As a biblical scholar who strives to interpret Scripture theologically and missionally, I do not find it appropriate to separate exegesis (analysis of the historical and literary aspects of the text) from theological reflection or application.4 This is not a license for sloppy scholarship, but an invitation to lively and life-giving engagement. Otherwise, as Mitchell Reddish warns about the symbolism in Revelation, “[o]ne may dissect the text to such an extent that one ends up with a cadaver rather than a living text that continues to inspire, challenge, and embrace the reader.”5 Perhaps more than any other biblical book, reading Revelation responsibly is greatly aided by knowledge of how people in other times and places have interpreted, and do interpret, the Apocalypse: in sermons and books, yes, but also in paintings, music, films, and other media. (However, we can only reveal the tip of the iceberg in this book.6) Responsible reading builds on the strengths of other readings of the book while seeking to avoid others’ weaknesses and errors. Responsible engagement with Revelation ultimately pays att...

not about a rapture out of this world but about faithful discipleship in this world. That is, like every other New Testament book, Revelation is about Jesus Christ—“A revelation of Jesus Christ” (Rev 1:1)—and about following him in obedience and love. “If anyone asks, ‘Why read the Apocalypse?’, the unhesitating answer must be, ‘To know Christ better.’”7 In this last book of the Christian Bible, Jesus is portrayed especially as the Faithful Witness, who remained true to God despite tribulation; the Present One, who walks among the communities of his followers, speaking words of comfort and challenge through the Spirit; the Lamb that was slain and now reigns with God the Creator, sharing in the devotion and worship due God alone; and the Coming One, who will bring God’s purpose to fulfillment and reign with God among the people of God in the new heaven and earth....

harmful. Another teenager read Revelation from beginning to end at school one day. He writes about the experience: The funny thing is I am quite sure I didn’t understand what on earth it was all about, but I can still remember the explosive power and beauty of it, the sense that the New Testament I held in my hands had a thunderstorm hidden inside it that nobody had warned me about. Some years later, that young man became an Anglican bishop and the world’s most prominent contemporary biblical scholar: N. T. (Tom) Wright.10

The word (singular and the plural) appears only in 1 John 2:18 (twice), 22; 4:3; 2 John 1:7.

Eugene Peterson rightly notes, “The Bible warns against a neurotic interest in the future and escapist fantasy into the future” (Reversed Thunder,

As John Wesley said, “The Revelation was not written without tears; neither without tears will it be understood” (Explanatory Notes, on Rev 5:4).

Interestingly, two of the words in this list most associated with Revelation—rapture and antichrist—do not even appear in Revelation. Some of the most important words in Revelation, such as witness, throne, and lamb, do not come to mind as quickly, yet they are central to Revelation and will be central to this book, too. Others words that often come to mind reflect emotional reactions to the book: scary . . . alarming . . . confusing. Revelation can indeed be a perplexing and difficult book; some would even call it dangerous. Here are some characterizations of it from a variety of critical perspectives:

Revelation barely made it into the Christian canon (more on this later). And today, while Revelation remains in the canon, it seldom appears in the lectionary (list or collection of readings for worship) of the Roman Catholic Church or the Protestant churches that use one. Lectionaries tend to avoid the hard passages and omit certain verses of the passages they use to make Revelation “a more acceptable

is the only New Testament book on which Calvin did not write a commentary.

in part, at least, because from the beginning Revelation has been used and abused—we

might say “hyper-canonized”—by people on the fringes of the Christian church and by

Luke Timothy Johnson, says this about Revelation: Few writings in all of literature have been so obsessively read with such generally disastrous results as the Book of Revelation (= the Apocalypse). Its history of interpretation is largely a story of tragic misinterpretation, resulting from a fundamental misapprehension of the work’s literary form and purpose. Insofar as its arcane symbols have fed the treasury of prayer and poetry, its influence has been benign. More often, these same symbols have nurtured delusionary systems, both private and public, to the destruction of their fashioners and to the discredit of the writing.12

That is to say, there have been many irresponsible readings of Revelation.

there no vision that can open our eyes to the abundant life of redemption in which we are immersed by Christ’s covenant? Is there no trumpet that can wake us to the intricacies of grace, the profundities of peace, the repeated and unrepeatable instances of love that are under and around and over us? For me, and for many, St. John’s Revelation has done it.17

Revelation invites us to imagine and then practice what we will call uncivil worship and witness, which means following the Lamb (Christ) into the new creation.

The title for Revelation I actually prefer above all the candidates is what I chose as the second part of this book’s subtitle: “Following the Lamb into the New Creation.” This subtitle attempts to express my conviction that Revelation is fundamentally a book about Christ, worship and discipleship, and final hope for the world. But it is such in contrast to a kind of false religion and allegiance. The first part of the subtitle, “Uncivil Worship and Witness,” is a thus a play on words; Revelation is “uncivil” in its rejection of civil religion, whether of the first or the twenty-first century.

So, to return to the either-or questions, Revelation is (primarily) good news about Christ, the Lamb of

God—who shares God’s throne and who is the key to the past, present, and future—and therefore also about uncompromising faithfulness leading to undying hope, even in the m...

suffice because there are various types of literature in the Bible, and we read and interpret different types (genres) in different ways. This principle is true for reading in general;

we would be foolish to read a science-fiction fantasy in the same we read an academic history of the Roman Empire. So too with Scripture. For instance, we do not interpret the poetic writings of the Psalms in precisely the same way we interpret the narratives in the Acts of the Apostles, and we do not interpret Acts in the same way we interpret the rhetorical argumentation of the Pauline letters.

The question of genre is absolutely critical for proper interpret...

but especially a work like Revelation. If we get this question seriously wrong, we are likely to misinterpret the text in major ways; if we get it right, we will at least avoid the most fundamental error and ...

Most scholars agree that Revelation is simultaneously an apocalypse, a prophecy, and a letter, “an apocalyptic prophecy in the form of a circular letter.”1 Revelation also seems to be a liturgical (or worship, or theopoetic) text and a political (or theopolitical) text. As Eugene Peterson observes in commenting on Revelation as a political work, “The gospel of Jesus Christ is more political than anyone imagines, but in a way that no one guesses.”2

The word “apocalyptic” can be used as either an adjective or a noun referring to the worldview expressed in this kind of literature. More than thirty years ago, biblical scholar John Collins famously defined an apocalypse as 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. 3 Apocalypses appear in various sub-forms, such as visions, otherworldly journeys, and accounts of access to heavenly books. Some other important examples of apocalyptic literature in the Bible are Daniel 7–12 and Mark 13 (parallels in Matthew 24, Luke 21), which is often called “The Little Apocalypse.”4 Examples of apocalyptic literature outside the Bible include Jewish works such as 1 Enoch (a composite of several apocalypses from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.) and 4 Ezra (first century A.D., with many parallels to Revelation5), as well as Christian works such as Apocalypse of Peter and Shepherd of Hermas (both probably from the early second century A.D.). Before the canon of Scripture was finalized, some early Christians even thought that one or the other of these two Christian apocalypses should be included in the Bible. Some biblical scholars have called apocalyptic literature “prophecy in a new idiom.”6 Apocalyptic has ...

sustain the people of God, especially in times of crisis, particularly evil and oppression. Apocalyptic literature both expresses and creates hope by offering scathing critique of the oppressors, passionate exhortations to defiance (and sometimes even preparation for confrontation), and unfailing confidence in God’s ultimate defeat of the present evil. Usually articulated in symbolic, even cryptic, language, this hope means that apocalyptic is also the language and literature of resistance. Richard Horsley contends that “[f]ar from looking for the end of the world, they [Jewish apocalyptic writers] were looking for the end of empire. And far from living under the shadow of an anticipated cosmic dissolution, they looked for the renewal of the earth on which a humane societal life could be renewed.” 7 Apocalyptic literature enables such hope and resistance by revealing the truth about unseen present realities, such as God, heaven, and hell, and about unknown future realities, such as judgment and salvation. An apocalypse can therefore be a vertical, or spatial, revelation about the present, or it can be a horizontal, or temporal, revelation about the future. Sometimes, as in the case of Revelation, an apocalypse is both. In the last book of the Bible, visions of God, Christ, and believers and martyrs in heaven (spatial, vertical) are intermingled with visions of coming persecution, judgment, and salvation within a new heaven and earth (temporal, horizontal). Sometimes an apo...

demons) and one for good (usually God and the angels). This cosmic dualism gets embodied in real-life struggles between good and evil on earth, resulting in a more historical dualism of conflict between the children of God or light and the children of Satan or darkness. The reality of this cosmic and historical struggle means that every human must choose sides; one is either on the side of good and God or of evil and Satan. We might label this ethical dualism. Apocalyptic theology includes another kind of dualism, a temporal dualism. It divides history into two ages, this age and the age to come. The present age is characterized by evil, injustice, oppression, and persecution, while the coming age will be a time of goodness, justice, and peace. Since these two ages are so antithetical, and since the current age is so completely infested with the power of Satan and evil, apocalyptic theology is marked by pessimism; there is no hope for a human solution to the crisis of this age. Only God can—and will!—intervene to set things right. Therefore, apocalyptic pessimism does not have the final word; it gives way to optimism. This is not optimism based on human activity, but confidence ...

[It] uses visions, symbols, and ancient myths to convey its message. The language of the book is primarily pictorial, symbolic language. It is not the language of science or logic. Rather, it is evocative, powerful, emotive language, at times more akin to poetry than to prose. Like the language of poetry, the language of Revelation sometimes is mysterious and slippery, teasing its reader to make connections and see possibilities that one has never made or seen before. The language of Revelation “works” not by imparting information, but by helping the reader to experience what John experienced.10 Animals, colors, numbers, and other everyday entities take on symbolic value as apocalyptic seers attempt to express the nearly inexpressible. Among the most frequent and important aspects of the symbolism in Revelation are certain colors and numbers.11 Th...

theopolitical in nature, a point to which we will return in the next chapter. In Revelation, the cosmic struggle of God and the Lamb versus Satan (the dragon of ch. 12) manifests itself in the earthly struggle between God’s people redeemed by the Lamb and Satan’s agents, the beasts from the sea and the land—probably meant to signify the emperor and those who promote his cult.

non-literal but real world.”17

Understanding the book of Revelation as apocalyptic literature will encourage us to try to understand the real-world situations, depicted in cosmic terms, that it reflects and addresses. It will also encourage us not to take the symbolism “literally,” that is, to think of actual pale-green horses or multi-headed beasts or thousand-year periods. These are all symbolic, but that does not make the realities to which

Like a good political cartoon or poem, an apocalypse appeals to the imagination to address the most profound realities that God’s people can experience or hope for. As Peterson suggests: The task of the apocalyptic imagination is to provide images that show us what is going on in our lives. “If there are

mysterious powers around,” a character in a Saul Bellow novel says, “only exaggeration can help us see them. We all sense that there are powers that make the world—we see that when we look at it—and other powers that unmake it.” . . . Flannery O’Connor, in answer to a question about why she created such bizarre characters in her stories, replied that for the near-blind you have to draw very large, simple caricatures.21

this regard Peterson quotes yet another writer, Wendell Berry: “The imagination is our way into the divine imagination, permitting us to see wholly—as whole and holy—what we perceive as scattered, as order what we perceive as random.”22

“[t]he power to wake us up is the most obvious use of the Revelation.”24

an apocalypse, Revelation is intended to reveal, not conceal. At the same time, like biblical prophecy, “its goal is not speculative foresight, but theological insight.”25 This similarity between the prophets and John the Seer exists because John was himself a prophet.

On five occasions (1:3; 22:7, 10, 18, 19), Revelation explicitly calls itself a work of prophecy, and it also characterizes the activity of John as prophecy (10:11; 19:10; 22:6, 9). Many people assume that Revelation is a prophetic book in the sense of predicting, in rather explicit detail, “the way the world will end.” The most popular approach to Revelation, dispensationalism, both creates and reinforces this assumption. A

theological movement that began in the 19th century, dispensationalism holds that history is divided into various ages, or dispensations, each characterized by different ways in which God deals with humanity. With respect to eschatology, it includes the doctrine of the rapture, or the removal of true believers to heaven before the return of Christ, an idea unknown in Christian teaching before

the 19th century.26 Popular dispensationalism, disseminated by such best-selling sources as the Scofield Reference Bible, Hal Lindsey’s writings (e.g., The Late, Great Planet Earth), and most recently the “Left Behind” series of books and movies by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, interprets Revelation as portraying, in literal and linear fashion, the course of historical events.27 Dispensational readers view Revelation as depicting the resurrection of Christ (ch. 1); the church age from the apostles to today (chs. 2–3); the rapture of the true church from the earth and out of history (4:1); the church in heaven (beginning with chs. 4–5); the seven-year tribulation on earth (chs. 6–18); the second coming of Christ, his literal thousand-year reign, and the last judgment (chs. 19–2...

Rather, prophecy is speaking words of comfort and/or challenge, on behalf of God, to the people of Go...

situation. Old Testament prophets were called by God, sometimes in the context of a visionary experience (see Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1), to proclaim the message that God gave them, usually in the form of various oracles that were later written down, but als...

Whatever the form, the message was one of judgment (on them or on their oppressors) or s...

Since Revelation is a word of prophecy in the biblical tradition, we must take care to understand that its primary purpose is to give words of comfort and challenge to God’s people then and now, not to predict the future, and much less to do so with precise detail. Visions of the

Prophets comfort God’s people in crisis because they need assurance that, despite all signs to the contrary, God is God and will one day bring an end to all evil and oppression. On the other hand, prophets warn the people about the coming judgment because the people may be participating in, or be tempted to participate in, the very evil for which the oppressive system and its perpetrators will be judged. In fact, in the case of Revelation, we have clear evidence that John believes some in the churches to which he writes were engaging in forms of idolatry and immorality, the general categories for sins against God and sins against neighbor, that the human forces of evil were practicing. This is part of the fundamental and perpetual message of both Old and New Testament prophets: Flee idolatry! Flee immorality!29 Or, in Revelation’s version of this message, “Come out” (18:4).

probably be understood as anti-assimilationist, or anti-accommodationist, literature. It is also in this sense that

Revelation is resistance literature—“a thorough-going prophetic critique of the system of Roman power” and “the most powerful piece of political resistance literature from the period of the early Empire.”30

Calling Revelation “resistance literature” is appropriate because one of the primary prophetic purposes of Revelation is to remind the church, both then and now, not to give in to the demands or practices of a system that is already judged by God and is about to come to its demise. But Revelation

But who is this “John,” the author of this multifaceted writing?