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Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Followingthe Lamb into the New Creation
the Apocalypse, as Revelation is also known. This term is the English form of the first Greek word in the book, apokalypsis, meaning “revelation.” It does not mean “destruction,” “end of the world,” or anything similar.
the “special genius of apocalyptic” literature, according to David Aune, is “its ability to universalize the harsh realities of particular historical situations by transposing them into a new key using archaic symbols of conflict and victory, suffering and vindication. Thus the beast from the sea [in Rev. 13] represents Rome—yet more than Rome.”
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 future, that is, are not an end in themselves but rather a means—both to warn and to comfort.
John did not write Revelation “to manufacture a crisis” for people complacent about empire, claim Howard-Brook and Gwyther. Rather, “complacency about Rome was the crisis.”
“Worship is so important in the book of Revelation,” writes Mitchell Reddish, “because John rightly understood that worship is a political act. Through worship one declares one’s allegiance, one’s loyalty. . . . [Public worship] is a statement to the world that the church will bow to no other gods.”
nationalism, the belief that one’s nation state, in this case the U.S., is superior to all other nation states. “Nationalism” (as I am using it here) is extreme devotion to one’s country as “the greatest nation on earth” and therefore worthy of nearly unqualified—and sometimes thoroughly unqualified—allegiance.
What are the idols that we are tempted to accommodate? The pantheon of the first century included, among many others, Aphrodite, Asclepius, Dionysius, Mars, and Caesar. Today we have different names for their counterparts: Sex, Health/Fitness, Pleasure, War, and Power/Security, among others. Like the ancients, who had temples, statues, and inscriptions to represent their deities, we find our idols represented in the media as well: in magazines and books, in our movies and our music, on TV and online. Each and all of these can be inappropriately valued as something to live, die, and kill for.
“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.”55 It has often been said that the most common idols in the West are Power, Sex, and Money; with this I am not in any profound disagreement. However, inasmuch as these idols are connected to a larger vision of life, such as the American dream, or the inalienable rights of free people, they become part of a nation’s civil religion. I would contend, in fact, that the most alluring and dangerous deity in the United States is the omnipresent,
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This non-linear movement means that an outline of the book is more like a spiral, a series of connected circles that moves forward.
K. Chesterton’s comment is apt: “though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”
For the NT, the “end times” is the period between the first and second coming of Jesus.
In Revelation, Christ dies for our sins, but he dies also, even primarily, as the incarnation and paradigm of faithfulness to God in the face of anti-God powers. Christ is Lord, Christ is victorious, and Christ conquers by cruciform faithful resistance: not by inflicting but by absorbing violence; not by actually killing but by speaking his powerful word.28 Revelation is counter-imperial,
the vision of the slaughtered Lamb is now the definitive divine self-revelation of God’s being and rule.
The slaughtered Lamb is now not only our central and centering vision, but also the interpretive lens through which we read the remainder of the book. Divine judgment and salvation must be understood in light of—indeed defined by—the reality of the slaughtered Lamb who is worthy of divine worship.
Some forms of love for home and country may be appropriate and benign, especially when balanced by appreciation of other cultures.
when humans reject Lamb power they experience it as imperial disaster—disordered desire, death, and destruction.
The destiny of the world and even of the church is beyond human control. But people can discern the outlines of that destiny and ally themselves with it. They can avoid working against it. And they can embody its values in witness to the world.
