The Theology of the Book of Revelation Quotes

“When the slaughtered Lamb is seen `in the midst of' the divine throne in heaven (5:6; cf. 7:17), the meaning is that Christ's sacrificial death belongs to the way God rules the world.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“But they are sufficiently few to make the reapplication of the images to comparable situations easy. Any society whom Babylon’s cap fits must wear it. Any society which absolutizes its own economic prosperity at the expense of others comes under Babylon’s condemnation.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“In its daring hope for the conversion of all the nations to the worship of the true God it develops the most universalistic features of the biblical prophetic tradition. In its conception of the church’s prophetic witness as standing for the true God and his righteousness against the political and economic idolatries of Rome it is faithful to the prophetic tradition’s conviction that the true worship of the true God is inseparable from justice and truth in all aspects of life. It is in the public, political world that Christians are to witness for the sake of God’s kingdom.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The alternative vision of the world which Revelation claims to be orientated to the truth is strongly theocentric”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Moreover, it unmasks this dominant construction of the world as an ideology of the powerful which serves to maintain their power. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Whether they were Jews or Gentiles, most of John’s readers were used to belonging to a city. Most citizens of the great cities of the province of Asia would have thought it possible to be fully human only in the public life of a city. For those of John’s readers who had the social status and affluence sufficient to participate in this public life – and probably many of them did – the most difficult and alien aspect of Christianity would have been the extent to which it required them to dissociate and to distance themselves from this public life, because of the idolatry and immorality bound up with it. There is plenty of evidence in the seven messages to the churches to show how disinclined many of them were to do this. Not only a comfortable life, participating in the prosperity of the cities’ economic life, was at stake, though this was a major factor. There was also the need to belong to the civic community, with its rituals of identity and civic pride. And in the first century AD this was inseparable from the public and official enthusiasm for their connexion with Rome which the cities of Asia displayed. Of course, for the poor among John’s readers belonging to a city and to the Roman Empire would have had more ambivalent, though not always merely negative, connotations.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“While rejecting the apocalyptic militancy that called for literal holy war against Rome, John’s message is not, ‘Do not resist!’ It is, ‘Resist! – but by witness and martyrdom, not by violence.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Hence perhaps the most important contrast between the forces of evil and the army of the Lamb is the contrast between deceit and truth.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Thus it is a serious mistake to suppose that Revelation opposes the Roman Empire solely because of its persecution of Christians. Rather Revelation advances a thorough-going prophetic critique of the system of Roman power. It is a critique which makes Revelation the most powerful piece of political resistance literature from the period of the early Empire. It is not simply because Rome persecutes Christians that Christians must oppose Rome. Rather it is because Christians must dissociate themselves from the evil of the Roman system that they are likely to suffer persecution.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“It is worth noticing how far from anthropocentric is this vision of worship. Humanity is radically displaced from the centre of things where human beings naturally tend to place themselves. At its heart and in its eschatological goal the creation is theocentric, orientated in worship towards its Creator. But even among the worshippers human beings are not pre-eminent. The four living creatures who lead the worship of the whole creation are not portrayed as anthropomorphic beings, as angelic beings often are. Only the third has a face resembling a human face. The others resemble a lion, an ox and an eagle, and with their six wings and myriad eyes all have a heavenly superiority to all earthly creatures (4:6–8). Their representative function is to worship on behalf of all creatures, and therefore it is fulfilled when the circle of worship expands to include not only humans, but ‘every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea’ (5:13).”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“All this – with much more in these chapters – makes up a wonderfully varied but coherent evocation of the biblical and theological meaning of the divine judgment John’s prophecy pronounces on Rome; but if we try to read it as prediction of how that judgment will occur we turn it into a confused muddle and miss its real point.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The proportion of visual symbolism in Revelation is greater than in almost any comparable apocalypse. But there are further differences beside the proportion. Symbolic visions in the apocalypses commonly have to be interpreted by an angel who explains their meaning to the seer (e.g. 4 Ezra 10:38–54; 12:10–36; 13:21–56; 2 Bar. 56–74). Such interpretations are rare in Revelation (7:13–14; 17:6–18), whose visual symbols are so described as to convey their own meaning. The symbols can thus retain a surplus of meaning which any translation into literal terms runs the risk of reducing.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“False worship, such as John portrays in the worship of the beast, is false precisely because its object is not the transcendent mystery, but only the mystification of something finite.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The whole of Revelation could be regarded as a vision of the fulfilment of the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6:9–10). John and his readers lived in a world in which God’s name was not hallowed, his will was not done, and evil ruled through the oppression and exploitation of the Roman system of power.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Theological meaning is thus written into the detail of John’s meticulous literary composition.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that the imagery of Revelation requires close and appropriate study if modern readers are to grasp much of its theological meaning. Misunderstandings of the nature of the imagery and the way it conveys meaning account for many misinterpretations of Revelation, even by careful and learned modern scholars.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The method and conceptuality of the theology of Revelation are relatively different from the rest of the New Testament, but once they are appreciated in their own right, Revelation can be seen to be not only one of the finest literary works in the New Testament, but also one of the greatest theological achievements of early Christianity. Moreover, the literary and theological greatness are not separable.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“if we try to read it as prediction of how that judgment will occur we turn it into a confused muddle and miss its real point.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The point is not to predict a sequence of events. The point is to evoke and to explore the meaning of the divine judgment which is impending on the sinful world.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Thus it would be a serious mistake to understand the images of Revelation as timeless symbols. Their character conforms to the contextuality of Revelation as a letter to the seven churches of Asia. Their resonances in the specific social, political, cultural and religious world of their first readers need to be understood if their meaning is to be appropriated today. They do not create a purely self-contained aesthetic world with no reference outside itself, but intend to relate to the world in which the readers live in order to reform and to redirect the readers’ response to that world. However, if the images are not timeless symbols, but relate to the ‘real’ world, we need also to avoid the opposite mistake of taking them too literally as descriptive of the ‘real’ world and of predicted events in the ‘real’ world. They are not just a system of codes waiting to be translated into matter-of-fact references to people and events. Once we begin to appreciate their sources and their rich symbolic associations, we realize that they cannot be read either as literal descriptions or as encoded literal descriptions, but must be read for their theological meaning and their power to evoke response.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“As well as their pervasive allusion to the Old Testament, the images of Revelation also echo mythological images from its contemporary world.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The Old Testament allusions frequently presuppose their Old Testament context and a range of connexions between Old Testament texts which are not made explicit but lie beneath the surface of the text of Revelation. If we wonder what the average Christian in the churches of Asia could make of this, we should remember that the strongly Jewish character of most of these churches made the Old Testament much more familiar than it is even to well-educated modern Christians. But we should also remember the circle of Christian prophets in the churches (cf. 22:9, 16) who would probably have studied, interpreted and expounded John’s prophecy with the same kind of learned attention they gave to the Old Testament prophecies.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Secondly, as we have already noticed, Revelation is saturated with verbal allusions to the Old Testament. These are not incidental but essential to the way meaning is conveyed. Without noticing some of the key allusions, little if anything of the meaning of the images will be understood.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“the images of Revelation are symbols with evocative power inviting imaginative participation in the book’s symbolic world. But they do not work merely by painting verbal pictures. Their precise literary composition is always essential to their meaning. In the first place, the astonishingly meticulous composition of the book creates a complex network of literary cross-references, parallels, contrasts, which inform the meaning of the parts and the whole.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The range of different situations in these seven churches is sufficient for any Christian church in the late first century to find analogies to its own situation in one or more of the messages and therefore to find the whole book relevant to itself. Churches in later periods have been able to do the same, allowing for a necessary degree of adjustment to changing historical contexts.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“Once we have fully recognized the specificity of the seven messages to the churches, it is possible to ask whether John also envisaged other readers. Why does he write to seven churches? These were by no means the only Christian churches in the province of Asia, and John must surely have expected his work to be passed on from these seven to other churches in the area and even farther afield. The definitiveness with which he seems to envisage his prophecy as the final culmination of the whole biblical prophetic tradition suggests a relevance for all Christian churches. This is what the number seven must indicate. We shall observe quite often in this book the symbolic significance which attaches to numbers in Revelation. Seven is the number of completeness.11 By addressing seven churches John indicates that his message is addressed to specific churches as representative of all the churches.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The fact that John explicitly and carefully contextualizes his prophetic message in seven specific contexts makes it possible for us to resist a common generalization about Revelation: that it is a book written for the consolation and encouragement of Christians suffering persecution, in order to assure them that their oppressors will be judged and they will be vindicated in the end. The common, uncritical acceptance of this generalization probably has to do with the fact that it is a generalization often made about apocalyptic literature as a whole.10 We need not discuss here how far apocalyptic literature in general functions as consolation for the oppressed, because in the case of Revelation it is quite clear from the seven messages that encouragement in the face of oppression was only one of the needs of the seven churches. The messages show that John addresses a variety of situations which he perceives as very different. By no means all of his readers were poor and persecuted by an oppressive system: many were affluent and compromising with the oppressive system. The latter are offered not consolation and encouragement, but severe warnings and calls to repent. For these Christians, the judgments which are so vividly described in the rest of the book should appear not as judgments on their enemies so much as judgments they themselves were in danger of incurring, since worshipping the beast was not something only their pagan neighbours did. Worshipping the beast was something many of John’s Christian readers were tempted to do or were actually doing or even (if they listened, for example, to the prophet ‘Jezebel’ at Thyatira) justified. Whether the visions bring consolation and encouragement or warning and painful challenge depends on which of the groups of Christians depicted in the seven messages a reader belongs to. Moreover, as we shall see in chapter 4 of this book, the call to ‘conquer’ which is addressed to all the churches in the seven messages, transcends both consolation and warning. It calls Christians to a task of witnessing to God and his righteousness for which the consolations and warnings of the seven messages are designed to prepare them.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The device of the seven messages enables John to engage appropriately with seven different contexts in which his book would be read and also to integrate those contexts into the broader perspective of the rest of the book, in which John is concerned with the worldwide tyranny of Rome and, even more broadly, with the cosmic conflict of God and evil and the eschatological purpose of God for his whole creation. In this way he shows the Christians of each of the seven churches how the issues in their local context belong to, and must be understood in the light of, God’s cosmic battle against evil and his eschatological purpose of establishing his kingdom.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“The whole book of Revelation is a circular letter addressed to seven specific churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea (1:11; cf. 1:4; 22:16). They are probably named in the order in which they would be visited by a messenger starting from Patmos and travelling on a circular route around the province of Asia. But many misreadings of Revelation, especially those which assume that much of the book was not addressed to its first-century readers and could only be understood by later generations, have resulted from neglecting the fact that it is a letter.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

“A second formal, literary difference between Revelation and the Jewish apocalypses is that, unlike the latter, Revelation is not pseudepigraphal.”
― Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation