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

by Scot McKnight

I changed my mind not only because every one of the certain predictions I heard from preachers and youth pastors and read in books were wrong. Not just slightly off but totally wrong.

Speculation is the biggest problem in reading Revelation today. Many treat it as a databank of predictive prophecy—what one Revelation scholar, Christopher Rowland, calls “a repository of prophecies concerning the future.” Readers want to know if now is the time of fulfillment for that symbol, figure, or event. Speculations about who is doing what, sometimes standing on stilts, has ruined Revelation for many.

Before getting to those speculative readings of Revelation, a quick sketch of four basic readings of Revelation:

Preterists read Revelation as written to first-century churches about first-century topics.

Historicists read Revelation as a sketch of the history of the church from the first century until the end.

Futurists think Revelation is totally, or nearly entirely, about the future. This approach is p...

Idealists read Revelation as timeless images and truths about God, the church, the state, and...

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.

“Many Christians in the West have shut out the book of Revelation after seeing it exploited by cult leaders, pop eschatologists, and end-time fiction writers.”

We’ve been using the term “speculation,” so let’s explain it a bit more. This reading of Revelation obsesses about predictions about the future. That is, one narrows down an image in Daniel or Ezekiel or Revelation to such-and-such leader or to some specific nation.

The USA fits into the predictions, and that means we (mostly Protestant, evangelical, white) Christians are the safe ones since we are the saved.

Countless students and friends and people have told us this. They’ve had their excitations about the imminent rapture, they’ve heard the predictions, and they’ve seen that every one of them was wrong. Every. One. No. Exceptions.

But for people who are fed up with such bland fare, the Revelation is a gift—a work of intense imagination that pulls its reader into a world of sky battles between angels and beasts, lurid punishments and glorious salvations, kaleidoscopic vision and cosmic song. It is a world in which children are instinctively at home and in which adults, by becoming as little children, recapture an elemental involvement in the basic conflicts and struggles that permeate moral existence, and then go on to discover again the soaring adoration and primal affirmations for which God made us.

The clue is that Revelation is timeless theology not specific prediction, and the moment it turns to specific predictions it loses its timeless message.

The Apocalypse is not about prediction of the future but perception and interrogation of the present. It provides readers with a new lens to view our contemporary world. What if Revelation is what another scholar on Revelation, Greg Carey, thinks it is? “Monsters characterize imperial brutality; cosmic portents reflect social injustice; heavenly glories display the rule of the transcendent over the ordinary.”

As Nelson Kraybill, in his exceptional study of this book, says it, “The last book of the Bible is not a catalog of predictions about events that would take place two thousand years later. Rather, it is a projector that casts archetypal images of good and evil onto a cosmic screen.” Wow, that line leads us to a fresh reading of Revelation.

The book of Revelation, when read well, forms us into dissident disciples who discern corruptions in the world and church. Conformity to the world is the problem. Discipleship requires dissidence when one lives in Babylon.

Revelation records a timeless battle between two cities: Babylon and new Jerusalem. It’s a battle between two lords: The Lord of lords, Jesus, and the lord of the empire, the emperors of Rome. It’s a battle between hidden forces: angels and those in heaven against the dragon and his many-headed beasts (or wild things), and armies on both sides.

Whatever we wish to call it, the book of Revelation is an orchestral arrangement of images, some of which are difficult to understand and interpret. Yet John must have believed his listeners, those who heard the reading of this book, would comprehend what he had written.

One Sunday, John was caught up in a vision. We don’t know that this man named John was the apostle John, and we also don’t know the exact date when John’s response, our book of Revelation, was written, but it likely happened sometime after Rome’s heartless, cruel destruction of the city of Jerusalem in 70 CE. As a consequence of that destruction, Rome became for Jews what Martin Goodman calls the “epitome of evil.”

In the book of Revelation John instructs the seven churches of western Asia Minor on how to live as Christian dissidents in an empire racked by violence, power, exploitation, and arrogance. “Follow the Way of the Lamb” thumps the drumbeat of this book. Yet many discussions of Revelation completely miss this key message. Michael Gorman is right: Revelation “is not about a rapture out of this world but about faithful discipleship in this world.”

Those listening to the performance of this book were summoned to an imaginative, sensory-laden, alternative world designed to reveal deep truths about God, the church, and the Roman Empire.

The key idea here is that the book of Revelation doesn’t simply transcribe what John saw. We asked two world-class experts on the book of Revelation the same question: What does “saw” mean when we read that John saw something? Both of them immediately told us that “saw” refers to more than a visionary experience. It can mean he saw something with his “mind’s eye,” as in a dream, and then his “seeing” involved mentally pondering what was seen and interpreting it with the aid of the Bible’s own language.

Our point is that good readers of Revelation will read it more like The Lord of the Rings than Paul’s letter to the Romans.

We should let the bowls empty out and the trumpets blast; we should visualize the fall of Babylon and the woman of Revelation zooming and leaping and spinning and twirling—if you want to read this book well. The writer John used his imagination to see what he saw, and it takes an imagination to engage his. Too many readings of Revelation are flat-footed and literal.

First-century folks loved to sit in rooms and on hillsides to hear someone reading from a book. But those readers didn’t read the way we typically read Scripture passages in church, mispronunciations and all. Readers of that day performed a poem or a book or a story, and that’s what happened with Revelation—someone performed it.

Think again about the opening words of this book and what they might have meant to those first-century hearers: “God’s blessing for the reader and the hearers of the prophecy’s words, and observing the matters written in it . . .” (1:3, author’s translation).

Again, we want to emphasize that imagination does not equal fiction. It is not opposed to truth or reality. No, images convey truth and speak God’s deeper reality.

With imagination we brush up against the Other Side, we enter (like the Pevensie children of Lewis’s Narnia) through the wardrobe door and discover we are next to John in God’s throne room.

Reading Revelation with imagination is like the experience of Tolkien’s character in his short story “Leaf by Niggle.”

Imagination ignites the mundane.

Imagination also comforts the oppressed, the discouraged, the seeker, and the wanderer.

Many of the fantasy novels mentioned earlier discerned the real presence of evil in the world and created characters who overcame that evil through a dissident hope. They rejected the stupefaction of social lethargy and perceived two ways in the world, two teams. One was for good and one for bad, one stood for evil and the other for justice.

John operates with two opposing sides as well. On one side is God and the Lamb and the Seven Spirits, the woman, the seven churches, allegiant witnesses, the four living things, the twenty-four elders, and the good angels—all of whom are marching toward the kingdom of God or the new Jerusalem. On the other side is the dragon, the wild things, and their demonic and human servants—all of whom are embodied in Babylon. To read Revelation well, we will need to get to know John’s characters as our companions.

Three principles for reading Revelation well are now on the table: 1. It’s not written for speculators—for those looking for a decoder ring to interpret newspaper headlines. 2. It is written for dissidents—for followers of Christ ready to challenge the powers of world and empire. 3. And it requires imagination—engaging our senses and minds with the performance that is Revelation, with all of its rich images and intriguing characters.

Now, we turn to a fourth principle, which brings all three principles together: we must understand the Playbill, or the Cast of Characters, of Revelation. The Book of Revelation puts a number of characters on the stage, each becoming a “character” in the drama. Each deserves to be understood for their role. To understand Revelation, one must grasp what John means—to take the first example of a character in the Playbill—with “Babylon.”

Following the messages to the seven churches in chapters 2 and 3, there is an abrupt shift as we open chapters 4 and 5. We are ushered into the presence of God on the throne, and this glorious God is surrounded by worshiping elders and lightning flashes and four living creatures singing 24–7 “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come” (4:8).

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.

Those who read this as literal, physical beings that will be alive at some future time in history are making a colossal mistake.

Labelling Rome as “Babylon” was also resistance language. It named the problem, Rome, and it gave that problem a label—systemic sinfulness and injustice and idolatry and opposition to God. To use “Babylon” to refer to the reigning powers of the world was very, very Jewish.

Babylon was more than a one-time event—it was timeless for Jews. And because John grabbed that timeless trope in his message to the churches . . . Each century has its Babylons, each country has its Babylons, and each state and city and—yes, church institutions and churches—has the potential to release the powers of Babylon.

There is nothing in the description of Babylon in Revelation 17–18 to make one think he is referring to some future empire. Babylon for John was very present and very now. He feels it in his feet because where he stands and writes and prays is a location determined by Babylon.

When we turn later in this book to the story at work in the book of Revelation and look at its timeline, we will need to depict Babylon as timeless.

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.

The biggest problem facing the seven churches was Babylon. And the biggest problem we still face in our churches today is Babylon. Babylon is past and it is now; it is tomorrow and it is future as well. But it is only the future because Babylon is always.

When we read Revelation well, we develop our ability to discern the presence of Babylon in our world and in our own churches, and then we learn to resist its creeping powers. But for us to develop this ability, we need to go one step further and sketch the “character” of Babylon.

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.

For Rome, pietas or piety ran straight from the family hearth into the public piazza and to the shrines and temples and all the way to Rome itself. There was no distinction made between military might, political rulers and emperors, politics, and religion. Empire and religion were woven together into a seamless whole. 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. It is a showcase of rampant indulgence, with lustful desire and conspicuous consumerism on full display. And running right through the heart of it all is a sense of superior status.

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