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

by Michael J. Gorman

This is part of the fundamental and perpetual message of both Old and New Testament prophets: Flee idolatry! Flee immorality!

#predi

“the most powerful piece of political resistance literature from the period of the early Empire.”

Put more positively, then, Revelation is a summons to first-commandment faithfulness,32 a call to faithful witness and worship in word and deed.

Furthermore, the target of Revelation’s critique is not limited to Rome. “Babylon” means Rome, but it also means something more than Rome. Indeed, the absence of the word “Rome” from Revelation is significant, even if Rome is in view. The absence of the word forbids us, so to speak, from limiting Revelation’s significance to the first century. “Any society whom Babylon’s cap fits must wear it.”

and for destroying those who destroy the earth.

(15:3b–4, called “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb”)

No matter what anyone says, Caesar is not Lord or God or Kings of Kings and Lord of Lords. Songs of worship reinforce and celebrate the visions of God, and of God’s judgment and salvation. Such visionary worship can empower people in faithfulness and resistance.

Craig Koester notes that the empire addressed in Revelation consists of three inseparable components, all of which are challenged by the book: political domination, religion in which the political order is identified with the divine, and economic networks that favored the elite and permitted human exploitation.32 Revelation is therefore a “visionary critique” of “the beastly side of empire,” the “deification of human power,” and “the seamy side of commerce.”

It is more important for us to see Revelation as a critique of secular power wherever and however it expresses itself oppressively, and especially as a critique of such power that is deemed sacred and granted devotion and allegiance.

When secular power is deemed sacred and worthy of devotion and allegiance, the result is the phenomenon of civil religion, which may be defined as follows: The attribution of sacred status to secular power (normally the state and/or its head) as the source of divine blessing, requiring devotion and allegiance of heart, mind, and body to the sacred-secular power and its values, all expressed in various narratives, other texts, rituals, and media that reinforce both the secular power’s sacred status and the beneficiaries’ sacred duty of devotion and allegiance, even to the point of death.

More broadly, then, Revelation is a critique of civil religion (first of all, but not only, Roman civil religion), that is, the sacralization of secular political, economic, and military power through various mythologies and practices—creeds and liturgies, we might say—and the corollary demand for allegiance to that power.

Human beings seem to have a need to attribute a sacred, or at least quasi-sacred, character to their political bodies, their rulers, and the actions of those entities. One tragic but frequent result is the sacralization of one’s own people, whether nation, race, or tribe, and the demonization of the other.

Greatness is defined especially as financial, political, and/or military strength, and this definition carries with it the conviction that both America and Americans should always enjoy and operate from a position of strength and security. Weakness is un-American; Americans want to be number one. For many, these kinds of secular strengths are seen as manifestations of power from God.

A corollary myth is a form of secularized Calvinism, the notion that hard work mixed with a degree of generosity toward others will inevitably result in greater and greater freedom and prosperity, often understood as a sign of God’s blessing.

Secular calvinism hub

“Every version of the kingdom of the world defends itself and advances its cause by rallying the self-interest of its citizens into a collective tribal force that makes each citizen willing to kill and be killed for what it believes to be the good of the society.”

I would contend, in fact, that the most alluring and dangerous deity in the United States is the omnipresent, syncretistic god of nationalism mixed with Christianity lite: religious beliefs, language, and practices that are superficially Christian but infused with national myths and habits.

“History is littered with failed attempts to use Revelation to predict history.”

It should be noted that this approach can be very political. Not only have people sought to correlate Revelation’s characters and events with political figures and situations, but at times the approach has directly influenced political strategy, as in the case of U.S. relations with countries in the Middle East.

Revelation, we might say, provides us with a vivid, imaginative, and prophetic call to an “anti-assimilationist” and life-giving Christian witness to, against, and within an immoral and idolatrous imperial culture of death.

Revelation provides this vision of “uncivil” worship and vision, centered on the throne of the eternal holy God and the faithful slaughtered Lamb, and on the coming new creation.

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.

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.

This is unintentionally but not inappropriately reminiscent of the subtitle of John Howard Yoder’s classic The Politics of Jesus, which is Vicit Agnus Noster. These three words are the first half of an old Moravian creed: Vicit Agnus Noster, Eum Sequamur, or “Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow him.”

Harry Maier proposes that privileged Christians in the West need to read Revelation “as a Laodicean.”

Based on our analysis, we might say that Christ desires a church characterized by the fullness of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, faithfulness and fearlessness, devotion to Jesus but not to the state, and a preference for the poor rather than the rich.

Both John and we, as readers, await the unveiling and identification of this powerful, conquering messianic Lion; perhaps both John and we suspect that the elder is directing our attention to Jesus, Lion of Judah and Son of David—and he is. But in “perhaps the most mind-wrenching ‘rebirth of images’ in literature,”10 the vision John receives and describes for us is not what anyone would expect. It is the vision of a slaughtered Lamb, not a ferocious Lion.

This is the consistent witness of the New Testament: that the exalted Lord remains the crucified Jesus.20 And this one is “the true face of God.”

Babylon, the city of oppression and death, is replaced by the new Jerusalem, the new heaven and earth, the new culture of wholeness and life (chs. 21–22). It is a place where pain and sorrow are absent, a time when oppression and death are gone.

The image of the throne is an implicit challenge to any and all imperial thrones with occupants who may think they govern the world and deserve worship or other forms of ultimate allegiance.

At the same time, however, God the judge in Revelation acts—even in judgment—in a way that does not disallow repentance, though humans repeatedly refuse that mercy

Satan is the source of the deified, idol-ized human political power depicted in chapter

The function of propaganda is to make evil look good, the demonic divine, violence like peacemaking, tyranny and oppression like liberation. It makes blind, unquestioning allegiance appear to be freely chosen, religiously appropriate devotion. The grand lie does not appear to start as deception, but only as rhetorical exaggeration.

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Babylon is allegorical of the idolatry that any nation commits when it elevates material abundance, military prowess, technological sophistication, imperial grandeur, racial pride, and any other glorification of the creature over the Creator . . . . The message of the book of Revelation concerns . . . God’s judgments not only of persons, but also of nations and, in fact, of all principalities and powers—which is to say, all authorities, corporations, institutions, structures, bureaucracies, and the like.

The task of a witness is to speak courageously in word and deed, testifying to the truth of God and prophesying against all falsehood that distorts and parodies divine truth.

Contemporary Christian faith, if inspired by the vision in Revelation 7, would no longer be split between those who want to convert the lost and those who work for peace. Participating in the missio Dei did not, and does not, accord well with cafeteria-style Christianity.

If Christians around the globe truly understood themselves as part of this international community, and fully embraced that membership as their primary source of identity, mission, and allegiance, it is doubtful that so many Christians could maintain their deep-seated national allegiances, or their suspicions of foreigners.

For what, we may ask, is Babylon, or Empire, judged? Essentially, for multiple forms of idolatry and injustice, the two fundamental charges brought against humanity throughout the Bible, from the prophets to Jesus to Paul through to Revelation. Babylon is guilty of sins against God, people, and the earth.

The final inevitable result is the destruction of the earth without fear of consequences, temporal or eternal

John calls a spade, a spade, as the British chieftain Calgacus also famously did, labeling the Romans “robbers of the world.” “To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire; they make a desolation and they call it ‘peace.’”

Do our ways of spending benefit the least, the last, and the lost?

Finally, in the book of Revelation, divine judgment is not an end in itself. It is God’s “Plan B” when humanity persists in evil rather than repenting. It then becomes a means—a necessary means, to be sure, but still only a means—to the fulfillment of God’s plan to heal the nations and create a space for all people to flourish in harmony with one another before God.

Yes, the slaughtered Lamb fights for God and will act on behalf of God to rid the world of evil, but he does so with only his own blood and a sword in his mouth (19:15), not with a sword in his hand to literally shed the blood of his enemies.

Perhaps what the Christian church in the West today needs is more anger, not less. We may need Revelation to jolt us out of our slumber, to open our eyes to see the idolatry and injustice that pervade globalization and empire today. Something beastly is at work, for example, in a world where people starve to death or die of preventable disease while nations spend billions on weapons and leisure.37

N. T. Wright concurs, rightly calling Revelation 21–22 “the marriage of heaven and earth . . . the ultimate rejection of all types of Gnosticism, of every worldview that . . . [separates] the physical from the spiritual. . . . It is the final answer to the Lord’s Prayer [thy kingdom come].”

God’s eschatological reality is ultimately about reconciliation among peoples—the “healing of the nations” (Rev 22:2)—and not just individual salvation.

This is not an invitation to a superficial private spirituality but to a deeply rooted public discipleship of faithfulness, hope, and love in the middle of a sometimes hostile world that follows after other lords and gods. The stakes in this endeavor are high, but the rewards are greater still.

Christian churches and individuals are called to bear witness to God’s present transcendent reality and reign, as well as God’s future eschatological renewal and final victorious rule in which there will be true life, peace, and justice for all.

For example, a God who plans on the healing of the nations and who “passionately wants the nations to stop learning war can never be at home in a world where livings are made from war and destruction . . .”17 Neither can we.

The hope of a beautiful city here on earth is not an opiate for the poor, or an irresponsible middle-class reduction of the gospel to a ticket to heaven. Rather, it is the legitimate hope for liberation from poverty and oppression, and for the fullness of life as God intended it to be.