The book of Revelation often conjures up feelings, opinions, and sometimes even fear. And that’s before anyone has ever even read the book! Frederick Nietzsche once called it the most vindictive book in all of human history. I’m guessing that means he wasn’t a fan. If you read it and didn’t know any better, you might think it was something out of StephenThe first Christian martyr. King’s imagination, maybe a chapter from The Stand. But the truth is both simpler and far more complex. This blog post focuses on things to un/learn when reading Revelation with a liberation perspective in service to resisting empire.
1. Imprisoned Pastor Writes to Small Minority Faith Community Seeking to Resist Empire
Revelation is a letter sent from an imprisoned pastor located on the Island of Patmos, an Alcatraz-like prison for criminals from the Roman EmpireThe region we today call Palestine and Israel was under Roman rule during the time of Jesus and the early church. The Roman Empire was in its ascendancy during the first century, making it the most powerful political and military force on earth.. John was not some member of the elite ruling class. He is a member of the resistance and is treated as such by those in power. We don’t know precisely why John, the assumed author of this letter we call “The Book of Revelation” (there is no “s” at the end) was imprisoned. Still, we can imagine John’s calling Rome “Babylon” and “the Beast,” saying that it has “become a dwelling place of demons,” and that “the kings of the earth will weep and wail over Babylon when they see the smoke from it burning,” would not go over well with the local authorities. Add to this the tension and suspicion already around the early church because of their refusal to worship Caesar as the Son of God and participate in the Roman imperial religion.
Thus, from prison, John starts his letter:
I, John, your brother who shares with you in JesusJesus is the Messiah whose life, death, and resurrection are God's saving act for humanity. the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance … because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
John writes to share in the suffering of his people, even while he is far away. This recognition of shared suffering, empathy, and desire to share hope with his communities shapes the letter’s direction. What he shares through the rest of these pages is essentially a pair of spiritual eyeglasses to see through and name the wickedness of empire so that in their suffering, they do not succumb to empire’s siren song. Therefore, his letter is meant to be circulated and read aloud in the small ekklesias gathered in the cities within ancient Western Asia, modern day Turkey.
His message is a clear one: do not give into the religion of empire. Resist empire!
I am helped by imagining Rev. Dr. Martin Luther, Jr.’s much more recent letter smuggled out of a prison in Birmingham, Alabama. Written in the margins of newspapers and sent to white clergy and their churches, his famous letter urged them to not stay in the middle of the issues but to make a stand against systemic racism and clearly join the movement of resistance. It is as if he was saying, “You are neither hot nor cold…” In facing the injustices of empire, John, and King knew that it was too easy to get comfortable and stop pushing for a more just society. As King wrote:
Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of [people] willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation (“Why We Can’t Wait,” 86).
John’s letter to the communities under his care is a clear-eyed look not at the struggle between “pious Christians” and “vicious unbelievers” who dislike prayer in schools or want businesses closed on Sunday, as it is sometimes characterized, but at something far more real and significant: the struggle between the God of love, graceGrace is the unmerited gift of God's love and acceptance. In Martin Luther's favorite expression from the Apostle Paul, we are saved by grace through faith, which means that God showers grace upon us even though we do not deserve it., and peace, appearing as a slain lamb, and the god of empire, appearing in various monstrous forms: dragons, beasts, serpents, fire breathing horses, blood, and more.
2. We Align Ourselves With One of Two Projects: Exploitation for the Benefit of a Few or Fullness of Life and Abundance for All. Revelation Calls Us to Align With the Latter.
This conflict in Revelation takes on many forms, but I find it easiest to think of it in the terms that Dorothee Soelle once said: “We are participants in one of these two projects: exploitation or fullness of life.” (The Window of Vulnerability, 14). There are many ways that Revelation names these two projects. The lamb is the fullness of life that stands in the face of injustice and empire and shows that even death cannot stop love.
On the other hand, systemic exploitation is also called out throughout Revelation, and is signified by “Babylon,” “the dragon,” and “the beast:” which are all stand-ins for the wickedness of empire (see also Revelation 12, 13 and 18). Revelation is not concerned with the nuances of these things. Apocalyptic literature is fine with drawing hard and fast boundaries. The goal is to help his readers see. The goal is to unmask the powers and show them for what they are.
In John’s prophetic imagination the most stark binary is between the Lamb and the Beast. He calls his readers to remain on the side of the Lamb and resist participation with empire. Helpfully, Revelation offers glimpses of what resistance to empire looks like. The multitude (Revelation 7) and those who “conquer” are not people who have the Apostles’ Creed memorized or who have all the right beliefs; resistance to empire is a way of life and commitment to stand up against the systemic evils of this world.
What are some of those evils?
According to Biblical scholar, Wes Howard-Brook, Revelation 9:20-21 shows us the “cardinal sins of empire,” which all begin with a refusal to repentRepentance is a central biblical teaching. All people are sinful and God desires that all people repent of their sins. The Hebrew word for repent means to "turn away" from sin. The Greek word for repentance means to "change on'e mind," more specifically, it means...: from worshiping gold and idols; to murdering (imagine who John has in mind here knowing that he is writing to the poor and occupied of empire); to sorcery, not as in Harry Potter, but as in trickery, disseminating misleading information and imperial propaganda (see also the enchanters and divinersDiviners, like soothsayers, were regarded as persons who could tell the future. In Israel these fortune tellers were seen as pagans. They were not to be consulted nor was their message to be believed. in DanielAn interpreter of dreams who was delivered from the lions' den. 5.7); to pornos as in sex with empire through intercourse with sex workers at the imperial temples; and imperial theft which empire used to amass its wealth. Consider, for example, the wage theft and threats to the people who refuse to participate in “beastly economics” of empire in Revelation 13 and 18.
3. Revelation is Not About Predicting the Future. It is About Unmasking the Present Patterns of Empire.
John’s purpose is to unmask the evils of the empire they are occupied by, that is the “Revelation”). Revelation seeks to reveal the unseen. It is also important that this is not actually John’s Revelation. Jesus, from his more cosmic and timeless perspective, is the one unveiling all of this to John. If we had a better grasp of the historical, cultural, and political context of Revelation and its first readers, reading it ourselves would be kind of like putting on the glasses in the movie, They Live. When Roddy Piper’s character puts on a special pair of sunglasses it unveils all kinds of propaganda and subliminal messages surrounding him in his world. However, we don’t get this effect from Revelation. At least not at first. The challenges and communities of the first century are so far removed from our own and the faster we realize that the better. ElizabethMother of John the Baptist. Schüssler Fiorenza warns,
“Something very strange happens when this text is appropriated by readers in a comfortable, powerful, majority community: it becomes a gold mine for paranoid fantasies and for those who want to preach revenge and destruction.” (Revelation: Visions of a Just World, 1992)
Schüssler Fiorenza is right that we must exercise caution when trying to interpret Revelation for ourselves. A professor in seminary once put it this way: Revelation is like a political cartoon, unless you know all the subtleties, nuances, and references it is using to communicate, the joke is lost on you. This gets to one of my major theses for understanding Revelation today: We are not the intended audience of Revelation.
While American Christians, at least since the publication of C.I. Scofield’s Bible in 1909, packed full with its dispensationalist interpretations of Revelation leading to its many misinterpretations, misuses, and million dollar Left Behind industry of today, contended that it was essentially addressed to us and speaks to our specific dispensation. In reality, this futurist reading of Revelation only goes back to about the early 1800s with the Millerites who believed that Jesus was coming sometime around 1843–1844.
However, Revelation is not predictive. There has been a zero percent success rate of anyone who has tried to use it for those ends. Instead of continuing to recalibrate, we could just see it for what it is. Revelation isn’t directed at us, because Revelation has nothing to do with predicting the end of the world. It is about a vision of patient endurance and the unveiling of the powers meant to help small minority faith communities resist the Roman imperial system. To put it more poignantly, John was not pretending to write to his actual parishioners, while secretly knowing he was really writing to us in the twenty-first century (or nineteenth or twentieth or whatever). That suggests a lack of basic integrity that no pastor worth their salt would ever dabble in emotionally. John was writing to actual people whom he knew, cared about, and loved. People he was concerned for. People whose own tears of injustice needed to be wiped away. Whose own hope was fading at the incessant barrage of empire at every turn. Revelation is a letter meant to lead to a refreshed vision, a new strategy that re-imagines the people of God resisting empire as a multinational, multicultural, multilingual and even multispecies coalition (see also Revelation 12:16).
But this is where it gets fun. Because once we understand this, once we accept that we are not the intended audience, and therefore we do the work of understanding how the first readers were to understand and respond to John’s call, then we can begin to see how it is indeed a text for us as well. If Revelation is unveiling empire, and laying out a new vision for not just resistance, but for a new hope, than we can begin to see what patterns of empire, hope, and resistance are true for us in our day, and what our “traditions of resistance” have been saying about these things all along.
I rarely encourage anyone to read Revelation and especially not alone because Revelation is such a difficult book to understand. It’s hard for us in part because of our historical and cultural distance to it, in part because of the many ways it has been misused and misread in the past, and partially because of its apocalyptic genreA genre is a type or category of something, often literature. Form criticism (see) begins with sorting biblical literature into various genres., which is unfamiliar to our modern ways of writing and reading. However, it shouldn’t scare us away from seeking to understand what it is trying to do within the church. Remembering that it is a letter written on the margins to those on the margins is of utmost importance. It is a letter meant to call the church to nonviolent faithfulness against empire for people who already had little to no power. When we read it carefully and in community with this lens today it has the power to reshape our imaginations. What can Revelation teach us about how and what it means to resist empire?
Notes:
Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler. Revelation: Vision of a Just World. Edited by Gerhard Krodel. Revised, Subsequent edition. Minneapolis/Minn: Fortress Press, 1992.
King, Martin Luther. Why We Can’t Wait. New York: New American Library, a division of Penguin Group, 1963.
Sölle, Dorothee. The Window of Vulnerability : A Political Spirituality. 1st English-language ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.
