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March 2 - August 26, 2023
The most common virtue prescribed for followers of Jesus is that they become faithful or allegiant to Jesus. If he is their Lord, they should be allegiant witnesses to his lordship in both their word and works.
Faithful allegiance involves walking in the way of the Lamb by engaging in good works with love, serving others with resilience, and by generally trying to do the right thing.
The ways of reading Revelation that spend time speculating about the questions When will all this happen? and Who is the antichrist? fail the church in discipleship. Instead of a discipleship that teaches us to discern Babylon among us and shows us how to live in Babylon as dissidents instead of conformists, these speculative questions teach Christians how to wait for the escape from Babylon.
So, what are the marks of national arrogance that Revelation teaches dissident disciples to discern? First, there is a sense of grandiosity, thinking you live in the world’s greatest nation. Second, there is competition with other nations in a vain quest to dominate. Third, there is the exercise of power by cutting off relationships with other nations who desire their own autonomy and sovereignty. What America wants for itself, in other words, is too often not what it wants for other nations, a denial of the principle of the Golden Rule. Fourth, there is an irredeemable inability to empathize,
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There’s too much Babylonian arrogance in the United States of America. Babylon is closer to home than many of us realize.
Arrogant Babylon also economically exploits others for its own prosperity. Money and status are power and the love language of Babylon, what we might call a “meritocracy.” In America’s meritocracy, the wealthy are considered wealthy by virtue of their work ethic while those in poverty are poor because of their lack of a work ethic. The “virtuous wealthy” look down on the “unvirtuous poor.” The wealthy lack gratitude for their achievements and grow proud and arrogant, while the poor are shamed as “deplorables” and resent the “elites.” Money means power, status, and virtue in the Babylons of
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Economic exploitation, as we find in the mind-boggling disparity of income in the USA, is a sign of Babylon.
There is no reason a nation with as many Christians as the USA has (or claims to have) should have such disparity in income, in housing, in wages, in healthcare, and in community social capital.
Perhaps a new generation filled with character, with the moral tendons and ligaments of justice, equity, and generosity, might lead America away from its dragon-based Babylonian economics toward the economics of new Jerusalem. We need a moral revolution in the economic sector. Babylon has made its home in the American economy. The church can lead the way out of this by forming a culture of economic justice for the common good.
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020),
Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.
The Apocalypse teaches us that the dragon loves racism because it brings death, the wild things enforce racism because it coerces into conformity, and Babylon embodies racism.
too many interpretations of Revelation miss its message of discipleship because those interpretations are obsessed with speculations about who and where and what.
Our goal in this book, however, is to learn to read Revelation through the lens of Babylon’s timeless presence in the world to understand how Christians are to be allegiant witnesses to Jesus amid Babylons. This is a message of discipleship that turns hot lights on every Babylon in the world—including the USA and the complicity of American Christians in the ways of Babylon. American evangelicalism has lost its way and is suffocating in its own urp.
In brief, we believe evangelicals in the USA have been seduced into partisan politics in such a way that they have effectively abandoned the way of the Lamb.
In their book Taking America Back for God, a book about how Christian nationalism is at work among evangelicals, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry make this stunning observation: “Holding to beliefs most associated with premillennial eschatology is one of the leading predictors of Americans’ adhering to Christian nationalism.” If you ask those most associated with premillennialism—from Billy Graham on—what their politics are, you will find a clear correlation with conservative politics that often veers into American Christian nationalism.
Those who don’t recognize Babylon in Christian nationalism need a new reading of Revelation.
Yet repeated failed readings of Revelation have today led to a failure to discern Babylon. These leaders and those who follow them have been duped by the promise of political power as redemption. American evangelicalism is what it is today because of a tragic decision in the 1970s and 80s—a decision to become more like Babylon. We are now living with the long-term fruit of those decisions.
It is not our aim to take sides among the two major approaches to Christian engagement in politics (conservative and progressive). Rather, we are urging Christians to comprehend what is happening in this cultural moment and find ways to discern the good and the bad on both sides.
Christians differed on the time and nearness of the end of history, the nature of the resurrection body, the extent of redemption for all, the possibility of continued transformation after death, and the possibility of purgation after death.
Christian eschatology turns us away from both progressivism and pessimism, not by denying progress or working to improve life, and not by pretending harsh realities don’t exist, but by trusting the God of promise who broke the power of death in the resurrection of the Lamb and who also promises that someday new Jerusalem will descend, and justice will finally arrive on the earth.
The Barmen Declaration was written by Karl Barth and ratified on May 31, 1934. It was a statement by the only resisting branch of the German Church in response to the growing encroachment of Germany’s radical nationalism, its National Socialism, in the church.
Today, however, the Barmen Declaration is a paradigm for dissident disciples in how we can speak up and speak out whenever politics or government begin to encroach on our Christian faith.
First the Word of God
God has spoken. God’s speech is the Logos, Word. That Word is Jesus, and in Jesus we see the essence of God.
Jesus Is the One True Lord
We are to walk in this Light that liberates us from the way of the dragon and empowers us to be faithful witnesses to the Lamb. Too many settle for the way of the dragon, justifying it as the “way the world works,” and others hide behind the difference between our public and our spiritual/private life.
American Christians, made stunningly clear in the trajectory of the last forty years, have compromised the lordship of the one true Lord by diminishing their first love and allegiance. Instead of a deep and rich dissident discipleship, we have a split discipleship. We have surrendered some parts of life to Babylon and other parts to New Jerusalem.
Thinking proximity to power will make the church more influential is as likely as the corner shop thinking Amazon will be the source of that business’s flourishing again. Babylon tolerates no rivals.
church is universal—politics and parties are local and national. Any allegiance to Caesar is nothing more than idolatrous worship of the wild things that will create division.
Babylon has seized the church’s heart. Its grip is so tight many can no longer distinguish their politics from the gospel.
Power for Jesus was power for the other and not power over the other. The way of the dragon aches for power over, and the wild things wield the dragon’s power over and climb their way into high places where they exert power over others. A dissident disciple does not grasp for power over others.
Our churches have not discipled people in the last forty years in Christoform power but have instead discipled them into playing Babylon’s power games.
The mission of the church is not nation-centric, but cosmic.
A noticeable theme in Revelation, already shown in this book, is that the worship of God is from all nations and tribes and tongues.
In our partisan nation the gospel, the lordship of Jesus, and the mission have become so entwined with politics that one’s party has become the kingdom! This is something to repent for, not something to tolerate.
We are better not assigning the word “antichrist” exclusively to one specific person who will rise into world leadership in the future, but rather we should see in the term, and terms connected to it like “wild things” and “Belial” and “the little horn” of Daniel 7, those who oppose God. Rather than looking for one antichrist, we should discern the presence of antichrists among us.
In his book The Indelible Image, New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III reiterates a common piece of interpretive wisdom: “A text without a context is just a pretext for what we want it to mean.” In other words, when we isolate and divorce particular sections of any text from the surrounding literary, historical, and theological contexts, we cultivate the conditions for importing our own meaning.
Fantasy, which departs from reality and creates a world of its own, permits the hearer to imagine a different world than one’s own and challenge the hearer to hope and action.
Some of my younger students think of this book as mythic or mythical, not in the sense of “that’s nothing but a myth” but in the sense of Marvel movies and Harry Potter stories.
As Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza says, Revelation is not “predictive-descriptive language but . . . mythological-imaginative language.” That is, it “is mythological-fantastic language—stars fall from heaven . . . animals speak, dragons spit fire, a lion is a lamb, and angels or demons engage in warfare” (Revelation: Vision of a Just World, 25).
