The Theology of the Book of Revelation Read online

REVELATION AS A CIRCULAR LETTER

  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.

  The special character of a letter as a literary genre is that it enables the writer to specify those to whom he or she is writing and to address their situation as specifically as he or she may wish. Writings in most other literary genres are in principle addressed to a much less clearly defined audience: anyone who might plausibly be expected to read the work. Letters may, of course, prove of interest and value to readers beyond the circle of the specified addressees. This is how some apostolic letters, such as Paul’s, came to circulate to churches other than those to which they were originally sent and eventually became part of the New Testament canon. A letter-writer such as Paul might even expect his letter to be passed on to readers other than those he addresses (cf. Col. 4:16). But it remains the case that such readers are not actually addressed. The more specifically the content of the letter relates to the concerns and situation of its addressees, the more other readers have to read it as a letter not to themselves, but to other people. This need not diminish its value to readers other than the addressees. 1 Corinthians, for example, deals very specifically with problems in the church at Corinth at the time of writing, but it has proved valuable to very many other readers. Such readers read it appropriately when they take account of the fact that it was written to the Corinthian church. It can speak to them, but only when something of the context of its original addressees becomes part of the way it speaks to them.

  A circular letter could not usually be as specific as a letter to a single group of addressees could be. One need only compare Paul’s letters to specific churches with Ephesians (probably originally a circular letter to a number of churches) or 1 Peter, to realize the difference. In Revelation, however, John has employed an apparently original method of writing a circular letter which speaks as specifically as could be desired to each particular church. While most of his work is intended for all the churches indiscriminately, he introduces it with a series of seven specific messages from Christ to the seven churches (chapters 2–3). Each message is specifically relevant to the situation of the church addressed, which John knew well. These seven messages show us that the seven churches were very different, facing different problems and reacting very differently to common problems. Christ speaks individually to each church. But the messages are not self-contained. Each is an introduction to the rest of the book.

  That the seven messages are introductory to the rest of the book can be seen especially from the promises to the conquerors which complete each message: Christ makes a promise of eschatological salvation (specified in terms which usually have some special appropriateness to the church addressed) to ‘the one who conquers’ (2: 7, 11, 17, 26–8; 3:5, 12, 21). In each of the very different church situations, the call is to be victorious. But the meaning of victory is unexplained. What it is to conquer becomes clear only from the rest of the book, in which the conquerors appear and it is revealed what they conquer and in what their victory consists. Then the formula of the promises to the conquerors, used in each of the seven messages, reappears just once, in the vision of the new Jerusalem (21:7). Thus the call to conquer, addressed to the Christians in each of the seven churches in chapters 2–3, is a call to engage in the eschatological battle described in the central chapters of the book, in order to reach the eschatological destiny described at the end of the book. In a sense the whole book is about the way the Christians of the seven churches may, by being victorious within the specific situations of their own churches, enter the new Jerusalem. While the book as a whole explains what the war is about and how it must be won, the message to each church alerts that church to what is specific about its section of the battlefield.

  So the seven messages provide seven different introductions to the rest of the book. John has designed a book which, very unusually, is intended to be read from seven explicitly different perspectives, though of course these are perspectives within a broader common situation which all seven churches share. Although Revelation after chapters 2–3 is not specific to the situation of any one church, it is specific to their common situation as Christian churches in the Roman Empire towards the end of the first century AD. 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.

  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.

  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 indicate
s that his message is addressed to specific churches as representative of all the churches. This conclusion is confirmed by the refrain – a summons to attend to a prophetic oracle – which occurs in each of the seven messages: ‘Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches’ (2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22). This seems to invite all readers to listen to the message addressed to each of the seven churches. It does not diminish the specificity of what is said to each church, as peculiarly relevant to that particular church. It means that precisely by addressing very specifically a variety of actual church situations, Revelation addresses a representative variety of contexts. 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.

  UNDERSTANDING THE IMAGERY

  We have already noticed the unusual profusion of visual imagery in Revelation and its capacity to create a symbolic world which its readers can enter and thereby have their perception of the world in which they lived transformed. To appreciate the importance of this we should remember that Revelation’s readers in the great cities of the province of Asia were constantly confronted with powerful images of the Roman vision of the world. Civic and religious architecture, iconography, statues, rituals and festivals, even the visual wonder of cleverly engineered ‘miracles’ (cf. Rev. 13:13–14) in the temples12 – all provided powerful visual impressions of Roman imperial power and of the splendour of pagan religion.13 In this context, Revelation provides a set of Christian prophetic counter-images which impress on its readers a different vision of the world: how it looks from the heaven to which John is caught up in chapter 4. The visual power of the book effects a kind of purging of the Christian imagination, refurbishing it with alternative visions of how the world is and will be. For example, in chapter 17 John’s readers share his vision of a woman. At first glance, she might seem to be the goddess Roma, in all her glory, a stunning personification of the civilization of Rome, as she was worshipped in many a temple in the cities of Asia.14 But as John sees her, she is a Roman prostitute, a seductive whore and a scheming witch, and her wealth and splendour represent the profits of her disreputable trade. For good measure there are biblical overtones of the harlot queen Jezebel to reinforce the impression. In this way, John’s readers are able to perceive something of Rome’s true character – her moral corruption behind the enticing propagandist illusions of Rome which they constantly encountered in their cities.

  It should be clear that 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. Naturally, not all of these will be noticed on first or seventh or seventieth reading. They are one of the ways in which the book is designed to yield its rich store of meaning progressively through intensive study. 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. But like the literary patterning, John’s very precise and subtle use of Old Testament allusions creates a reservoir of meaning which can be progressively tapped. 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.

  As well as their pervasive allusion to the Old Testament, the images of Revelation also echo mythological images from its contemporary world. The serpent or the dragon, Revelation’s symbol for the primeval source of evil in the world, the devil (12:3–9), is a good example of a symbol with strong biblical roots (Gen. 3:14–15; Isa. 27:1) which Revelation evokes, but also with wide cultural resonances in the minds of contemporary readers, owing to its prominence in pagan mythology and religion.15 Another type of contemporary allusion is the idea of invasion from the East (9:13–19; 16:12). Here John takes up a very real political fear in the Roman Empire in the first century AD, since the threat of invasion from the Parthian Empire was widely felt. It had the same kind of overtones of conquest by a cruel and alien civilization which the threat of Russian invasion had for many western Europeans in the period of the Cold War, though for some of Rome’s eastern subjects it offered the prospect of liberation from Roman oppression. When Revelation pictures the kings of the East invading the Empire in alliance with ‘the beast who was and is not and is about to ascend from the bottomless pit’ (17:8), it is echoing the contemporary myth which pictured the emperor Nero – remembered by some as a villainous tyrant, transfigured by others into a saviour-figure – returning one day at the head of the Parthian hordes to conquer the Roman Empire.16 In ways such as these, John’s images echo and play on the facts, the fears, the hopes, the imaginings and the myths of his contemporaries, in order to transmute them into elements of his own Christian prophetic meaning.

  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.

  Consider, for example, the descriptions of the plagues of the seven trumpets (8:6–9:21) and the seven bowls (16:1–21). These form a highly schematized literary pattern which itself conveys meaning. Their content suggests, among many other things, the plagues of Egypt which accompanied the exodus, the fall of Jericho to the army of Joshua, the army of locusts depicted in the prophecy of Joel, the Sinai theophany, the contemporary fear of invasion by Parthian cavalry, the earthquakes to which the cities of Asia Minor were rather frequently subject, and very possibly the eruption of Vesuvius which had recently terrified the Mediterranean world.17 John has taken some of his contemporaries’ worst experiences and worst fears of wars and natural disasters, blown them up to apocalyptic proportions, and cast them in biblically allusive terms. 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.

  The last of the seven bowls results in the fall of Babylon in an earthquake of
unprecedented proportions (16:17–21). If we took this as literal prediction, we should soon find it contradicted by later images of the downfall of Babylon. In 17:16, Babylon, now portrayed as a harlot, is stripped, devoured and burned by the beast and the ten kings. The traditional punishment of a harlot is here superimposed on the image of a city sacked and razed to the ground by an army. Chapter 18 extends the image of a city besieged and burned to the ground (cf. especially 18:8: ‘pestilence … famine … burned with fire’), but we are also told both that the site of the city becomes the haunt of the desert creatures (18:2) and that the smoke from her burning continues to ascend for ever (19:3). On the literal level, these images are quite inconsistent with each other, but on the level of theological meaning, conveyed by the allusions to the Old Testament and to contemporary myth, they offer complementary perspectives on the meaning of Babylon’s fall. The earthquake of 16:17–21 is that which accompanies the theophany of the holy God coming to final judgment. The sacking of Babylon by the beast and his allies alludes to the contemporary myth of the return of Nero to destroy Rome. It is an image of the self-destructive nature of evil, which on the level of theological meaning is not inconsistent with the idea of the destruction of evil by divine judgment but presents it under another aspect. The fire of 17:16 becomes in chapter 18 the fire of divine judgment, of which the paradigmatic Old Testament instance was the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Like an apocalyptic Sodom sunk in the eternal lake of fire and sulphur, Babylon’s smoke ascends for ever (cf. Gen. 19:28; Rev. 14:10–11; 19:20). The desolation of Babylon as a haunt of desert creatures evokes Old Testament prophetic pictures of the fate of both Edom and Babylon, the two great enemies of the people of God in much of Old Testament prophecy. 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.