Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple

by Scot McKnight

I was on the edge of my seat, pondering where to go to college, so I asked my youth pastor if I should even bother. He said, “Go, prepare yourself just in case the (visiting revivalist) preacher is wrong.” He was. I did. We’re still here. Being here means many preachers and authors were just plain wrong. And that for me grew into a very serious problem with how these preachers, pastors, and authors interpreted the book of Revelation.

A year later he said, “I’m revising my figures. Last year in Los Angeles I thought we had at least five years, now it looks like just two years—and then the end.” Graham fed the hysteria of post-World War II fear of the final war, a global holocaust called “Armageddon,” and America has never been the same sense.

Many were also overcome by the books-become-movies like A Thief in the Night. There was an experience to be created, and not a little money to be made, so a few more movies were produced, like The Rapture, and then Left Behind with Nicolas Cage.

They induce fear, and such movies were used by youth leaders to motivate young unbelievers to give themselves to Jesus before time runs out.

I came to see that approach as dangerous for the church. The speculation readings of Revelation teach escapism and fail to disciple the church in the moral dissidence that shapes everything in the amazing book of Revelation. Escapism is as far from Revelation as Babylon is from new Jerusalem.

For sketches of major interpretive approaches, see the various views of evangelicals in Kenneth L. Gentry, Sam Hamstra, C. Marvin Pate, and Robert L. Thomas, Four Views on the Book of Revelation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998); for a broader approach to studies, see Michael Thompson, “The Book of Revelation,”

In the middle of it all was one’s politics, and you don’t have to be a cynic to track the correlation of Revelation’s popularity with American political parties.

Did you notice that the election of the Democrat Bill Clinton went hand in hand with multimillion sales of the Left Behind series? Let’s not just poke conservatives in the eye.

In 1971 in Sacramento, Ronald Reagan commented that the coup in Libya was “a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off. . . . Everything is falling into place. It can’t be long now. Ezekiel says that the fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons.” He was not the only president shaped by such speculations.

this is not how the church throughout its history has read the apocalyptic texts of the Bible. What was apocalyptic and metaphorical and fictional over time became rigidly literal for too many readers.

Gorski really helps us all when he zooms in on what these kinds of readings do to people. “First, it leads to hubris. It seduces its followers into claiming to know things that no human being can possibly know.” Such persons consider themselves elect and special and insiders, and such confidence tends toward condescension.

Gorski’s second point stuns. This way of reading the Bible “leads to demonization of others. Our [the USA’s] enemies be...

“All that matters” for this view of Revelation “is to be found as part of the elect, who will enjoy the escape of the rapture.” That is, the reading leads to either withdrawal from society or resignation to the evil arc of history.

Hidden deep in the Left Behind plot is a conservative perception of American politics in an international context. Have you read any of the Left Behind books from a different location, like South Korea, South Africa, or South America? The language comes off as so profoundly American to them. Again, Gorski’s project reveals that this approach to Revelation partakes far too often in nothing less than American Christian nationalism!

Dispensationalism’s reading of Revelation breeds confidence in America and not dissidence about Babylon (more on this later).

when these speculations and predictions and expectations turn out wrong, “cognitive dissonance goes on overdrive, and they merely recalibrate.” There’s got to be another way.

expectations unfulfilled lead to frustrations.

The timelessness of history, and its rather cyclical nature, gives Revelation’s sketch of Babylon a constant relevance.

Predictive specifics—the pope is the antichrist, Russia (or the European Union) is Gog and Magog, Israel’s rebirth as a nation—stifle the book’s proclamation of how to be discerning, dissident disciples in the face of Babylon in our world.

“To allow the interpretation of Revelation to be controlled by a particular group of Christians is to throw away one of the church’s most powerful tools for inculcating and sustaining countercultural discipleship.”

Babylon loses and new Jerusalem wins.

It takes imagination to believe this is true. It was a stretch for a first-century imprisoned dissident, tucked away on a remote island, to imagine the mighty empire of Rome losing out to a presently captive Jerusalem. But that’s the message of Revelation then with implications for us now.

It’s someone who speaks to promote that better, future vision and against what is wrong in the present.

In prison dissidents plot revolutions, write books and newspaper essays that rock the world, and correspond with the outside world in ways that unmask the lies of those in power.

By imprisoning them, the powers in charge hoped to render these dissidents powerless, hoping to marginalize them and render them incapable of influencing others. But history tells a different story, one where dissidents thrive in imprisonment. Leave one alone, and over time she will develop a vision that might change the world.

Not all dissidents are imprisoned. Some write books at home or at the office or in libraries that give others an imagination for a new way of life— the way Harriet Beecher Stowe did in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the way Alan Paton did in Cry, the Beloved Country, the way Dee Brown did in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and the way Ralph Ellison did in The Invisible Man . . . some make Marvel movies . . . . . . and you may add others to the list.

Dissidents tap into the mind of God and return with a vision that sees the powers of this world differently. Some dissidents have the gift of discernment, and we ignore their warnings at our own peril. Perhaps the twist of terms by Martin Luther King Jr. says it best. He once referred to Christians as “transformed nonconformists”—a perfect definition of a dissident disciple of Christ.

John was exiled to the island to remove him from any position of influence in western Asia Minor.1 And his critical eye was not only turned toward Rome, but to the church as well.

The final verse of his prophetic writings spells out the tragedy: “All who hear the news about you clap their hands at your fall” (3:19).

“Revelation symbolically transforms the world into a battlefield in which the forces of the dragon are arrayed against the forces of God.” He warns us of flipping the images into flat propositions: “Turning poetry into prose, however, destroys its power.” And sadly, that is what has happened time and time again in interpreting the book.

Looks like the Lamb, acts like the dragon.

When John’s original listeners would have heard this read in their churches, they would have heard the throne-room scene as “a parody of the Roman court scene” because it “counter[s] imperial claims.” Today, we miss this parody because of our distance from that culture and time and our own comfortable political positions in the West, but this was clear to those early churches.

But from that time onward they had their eyes open for the presence of the next Babylon and other Babylons to follow. Whenever they saw an oppressing nation or an enslaving power, they saw Babylon all over again. Whenever they saw their country besieged and their city (Jerusalem) attacked or exploited, they remembered Babylon. Babylon was more than a one-time event—it was timeless for Jews.

each state and city and—yes, church institutions and churches—has the potential to release the powers of Babylon.

the anxious insistence that America be ‘number one’ among the nations are all versions of Babylon’s idolatry.”

Babylon is as present to John as Patmos. Babylon was not some future city for him.

“Absolute power on earth is satanic in inspiration, destructive in its effects, idolatrous in its claims to ultimate loyalty.”

Yes, we see Babylon in the evil slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the systemic degradation of a people based on skin color and race, in the corrupted systemic residues of slavery, and in the hideous displays of privilege, power, and attempts at supremacy in the monstrous culture war in the USA. Many of those reading Revelation speculatively point their fingers at Russia or Iran or Iraq and fail to see Babylon in their own country.

Dissident disciples have their eyes trained to discern the signs of Babylon, and they recognize the sinister symptoms of something disordered.

What is life like inside Babylon’s circle? A straightforward reading of Revelation 17–18 reveals the following seven signs of Babylon. These seven signs manifest idolatries and injustices, but if one wants to reduce them to their core they express a corrupted, corrupting civil religion and spiritualized politics.

To become a dissident living against the grain of the Babylons of our world, Christians need to have eyes to detect the presence of anti-God systems and institutions.

Dissidents rightly perceive opulence for what it really is: showy disdain for the normal way of life, followed by the rest of the population.

What Rome called pax Romana, or the peace of Rome, was really the subjugation of enemies through violent conquer or surrender.

“To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire” and they call it “solitude” and “peace.”

is what the Jewish historian Josephus said about Vespasian after his victory over Jews along the Sea of Galilee. Some wanted the whole lot of Jews killed on the spot.

Could Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee be a prophecy of this event?

The previous six signs of Babylon could all be rolled up into this one. Rome turned its arrogance into a virtue.

Arrogance begins at the top of the empire, or rather, the system rewards the arrogant and lines up everyone else in a hierarchy of status.

This boasting falls directly opposite the cross of Jesus and his way of life. Jesus’s victory came by means of a hideous crucifixion—the way of the Lamb. Augustus exposes for all to see the way of the dragon—self-adulation, human accomplishment, and false humility. His rule and way of life exist through power, through violence, through murder, and through the exploitation of others for the sake of indulgence and opulence.

Dissident disciples will learn to discern all forms of narcissistic arrogance.

Dissident disciples are the first to realize they are in a battle—not with flesh and blood, but with the principalities and powers that snake their way into the seven churches.