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

by Michael J. Gorman

including our own—which leads to the next principle. Abandon so-called literal, linear approaches to the book as if it were history written in advance, and use an interpretive strategy of analogy rather than correlation. Revelation is image, metaphor, poetry, political cartooning. Revelation imaginatively reveals the nature of any and all systems that oppose the ways of God in the world, especially as revealed in Christ the Lamb who was slaughtered. Those systems are not limited to particular future powers but are found in all places and times. We should therefore be examining our ideologies and -isms for manifestations of idolatry and immorality as expressed in imperialism, militarism, nationalism, racism, classism (the worship of the corporate...

even Christian systems and values, not some putative one-world government, for evidences of that which is antichrist. Focus on the book’s call to public worship and discipleship. Revelation calls Christians to a difficult discipleship of discernment—a nonconformist cruciform faithfulness—that may lead to marginalization or even persecution now, but ultimately to a place in God’s new heaven and new earth. Revelation calls believers to nonretaliation and nonviolence, and not to a literal war of any sort, present or future. By its very nature as resistance, faithful nonconformity is not absolute withdrawal but rather critical engagement on very different terms from those of the status quo. This is all birthed and nurtured in worship. But we need to be diligent, because, as Harry Maier contends, we in the West are now largely like the Laodiceans, and many of us need to read Revelation as such.30 If he is correct, we are in very bad shape but do not know it, so conversion to true worship and discipleship will be a difficult journey. Place the images of death and destruction in Revelation within the larger framework of hope. The death and destruction in Revelation are symbolic of the ...

may not be sufficient to convince dispensationalists (or others) that that kind of approach to Revelation is misguided and irresponsible. After all, Revelation, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, right? At that moment, we may draw on the wisdom of Christopher Rowland: The nature of Revelation’s polyvalent imagery means that there is at the end of the day no refuting of readings like this [escapist dispensationalism]. One can only appeal to consistency with the wider demand of the gospel and its application by generations of men and women in lives of service and involvement with the suffering and the marginalized to counter such world-denying and dehumanizing appropriations of Revelation and other biblical books.31