The Theology of the Book of Revelation Read online

  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. In this book, we need especially to stress the way John has developed his literary use of imagery into a distinctive mode of theological thought and communication. Because Revelation does not contain theological discourse or argument of the kind with which readers of the New Testament are familiar in, for example, the Pauline letters, it should not be thought to be any less a product of profound theological reflection. Its images are by no means a vaguer or more impressionistic means of expression than the relatively more abstract conceptual argument of a Pauline letter. They are capable both of considerable precision of meaning and of compressing a wealth of meaning into a brief space by evoking a range of associations. 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.

  * * *

  1 Babylon: Isa. 13:1–14:23; 21:1–10; 47; Jer 25:12–38; 50–1. Tyre: Isa. 23; Ezek. 26–28. For this point, as with many other aspects of Revelation’s use of the Old Testament, I am indebted to the important work of J. Fekkes III, ‘Isaiah and Prophetic Traditions in the Book of Revelation: Visionary Antecedents and their Development’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 1988).

  2 J.J. Collins, ‘Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre’, Semeia 14 (1979), 9.

  3 See especially C. Rowland, The Open Heaven (London: SPCK, 1982).

  4 For examples of Jewish apocalyptic traditions in Revelation, see R. Bauckham, ‘Resurrection as Giving Back the Dead: A Traditional Image of Resurrection in the Pseudepigrapha and the Apocalypse of John’, forthcoming in J. H. Charlesworth and C. A. Evans, eds., The Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament: Comparative Studies (to appear in the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series; Sheffield Academic Press, 1992); and chapters 2 (‘The Use of Apocalyptic Traditions’) in R. Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies in the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992).

  5 See D. L. Barr, ‘The Apocalypse as a Symbolic Transformation of the World: A Literary Analysis’, Int. 38 (1984), 39–50.

  6 See, e.g., R. Bauckham, ‘The Rise of Apocalyptic’, Them. 3/2 (1978), 10–23; Rowland, Open Heaven, 126–35.

  7 See D. L. Barr, ‘The Apocalypse of John as Oral Enactment’, Int. 40 (1986) 243–56.

  8 See, e.g., D. S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic (London: SCM Press, 1964), 127–39; Rowland, Open Heaven, 240–5; D. G. Meade, Pseudonymity and Canon (WUNT 39; Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1986), chapter 4.

  9 G. K. Beale, The Use of Daniel in Jewish Apocalyptic Literature and in the Revelation of St John (Lanham, New York and London: University of America Press, 1984).

  10 E.g. Russell, Method and Message, 17.

  11 Note the way that the Muratorian Canon claims that both John (in Revelation) and Paul actually wrote to all churches by writing to seven.

  12 S.J. Scherrer, ‘Signs and Wonders in the Imperial Cult: A New Look at a Roman Religious Institution in the Light of Rev 13:13–15’, JBL 103 (1984), 599–610.

  13 See P.J.J. Botha, ‘God, Emperor Worship and Society: Contemporary Experiences and the Book of Revelation’, Neot. 22 (1988), 87–102.

  14 Cf. D. Magie, Roman Rule in Asia Minor to the End of the Third Century after Christ (Princeton University Press, 1950), 1613–14; S. R. F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 40–3, 252, 254; R. Mellor, ΘEA PωMH: The Worship of the Goddess Roma in the Greek World (Hypomnemata 42; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), 79–82.

  15 R. Bauckham, ‘The Figurae of John of Patmos’, in Ann Williams, ed., Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves (London: Longman, 1980), 116–21; in revised form: chapter 6 (‘The Lion, the Lamb and the Dragon’) in Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy.

  16 See chapter 11 (‘Nero and the Beast’) in Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy.

  17 For these allusions, see, as well as the commentaries, J. M. Court, Myth and History in the Book of Revelation (London: SPCK, 1979), chapter 3; R. Bauckham, ‘The Eschatological Earthquake in the Apocalypse of John’, Novum Testamentum 19 (1977), 224–33, which becomes chapter 7 (‘The Eschatological Earthquake’) in Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy.

  CHAPTER 2

  The One who is and who was and who is to come

  The theology of Revelation is highly theocentric. This, along with its distinctive doctrine of God, is its greatest contribution to New Testament theology. Our study of it must begin with God and will both constantly and finally return to God.

  THE DIVINE TRINITY

  Almost from the outset of his work John depicts the divine in threefold terms:

  Grace to you and peace

  from him who is and who was and who is to come,

  and from the seven Spirits who are before his throne,

  and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from

  the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

  (1:4b–5a)

  These words are a formal part of the form of letter-opening which is used in verses 4–5. Following the statement of writer and addressees, ancient letters gave a ‘salutation’, which in Jewish letters took the form of desiring blessings from God for the addressees. Early Christian practice often gave a specifically Christian character to this form by specifying the divine source of blessings as God and Jesus Christ. The standard form in the Pauline letters is: ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’ (e.g. Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:3; 2 Cor. 1:2; Gal. 1:3; Eph. 1:2). This form is of considerable theological significance. It places Jesus Christ with God on the divine side of the distinction between the divine Giver of blessings and the creaturely recipients of blessings. It shows how naturally early Christians implicitly included Jesus in the divine, because he was the source of the salvation that comes from God to humans, even if they had no way of conceptualizing in ontological terms this relation of Jesus to God.

  Among early Christian letter-openings, John’s is unique in giving the standard form of salutation a ‘trinitarian’ character. There are ‘trinitarian’ formulae elsewhere in early Christian literature, even in letter-openings (e.g. 1 Pet. 1:2), but the ‘trinitarian’ form of John’s salutation is unique. It is highly probable that it is his own original adaptation of the standard form: ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.’ This is supported by the fact that he also adapts the form by substituting for ‘God our Father’ and ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ descriptions of God and Jesus which are highly distinctive of his own usage elsewhere in Revelation. All this suggests, as much else in the book will confirm, that John has reflected creatively on the Christian understanding of the divine. Far from taking over unreflectively conventional early Christian ways of speaking of God, Christ and the Spirit, he has forged his own distinctive forms of God-language, not, of course, de novo, but by creative use of the resources of Jewish and Jewish Christian tradition. His book is the product of a highly reflective consciousness of God. Any account of its theology must give priority, as it does, to its distinctive ways of speaking of the divine.

  John’s original variation of the salutation in 1:4b–5a strongly suggests that his understanding of the divine is deliberately ‘trinitarian’. I put the word in inverted commas only to warn us that, of course, we must not attribute to John the particular conceptuality of the patristic doctrine of the Trinity which became the norm for the later
Christian tradition. As we shall see in the next two chapters, the theological concern that gives John’s understanding of the divine a trinitarian character is fundamentally the same as that which led to the patristic development of trinitarian doctrine: a concern to include Jesus, as well as the Spirit, in Jewish monotheistic faith in God. But we must understand his response to this concern in its own terms. Of course, it is hardly possible to describe and analyse John’s understanding of God without using language he himself does not use. I have spoken of his ‘trinitarian’ understanding of ‘the divine’, rather than ‘of God’, because he himself, like most early Christian writers, restricts the word ‘God’ to God the Father of Jesus Christ, the One he here calls ‘the One who is and who was and who is to come’. But ‘the divine’ is hardly more satisfactory. John has no vocabulary equivalent to later trinitarian talk of the divine nature which three divine persons share. But it is impossible for us to do justice to what he does say without speaking somehow of a divine reality in which Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit (here symbolized by ‘the seven Spirits’)1 are included.

  The prominence John gives to a ‘trinitarian’ understanding of the divine in 1:4b–5a may justify our use of a trinitarian structure for the major part of our account of the theology of Revelation (in our chapters 2–5). No such structure could be wholly satisfactory, but this one at least corresponds to a major feature of the theology of Revelation. However, for ease of exposition we shall follow the order: God, Christ, Spirit (rather than that of 1:4b–5).

  THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA

  The prologue to Revelation ends with a divine self-declaration:

  ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

  (1:8)

  This strategically placed verse incorporates three of the four most important designations for God in Revelation: ‘the Alpha and the Omega’, ‘the Lord God Almighty’ and ‘the One who is and who was and who is to come’. It stands out not only by its position immediately preceding the beginning of John’s account of his vision (1:9–22:6), but also because it is one of only two occasions in Revelation on which God himself speaks. The second occasion (21:5–8) includes a similar divine self-declaration: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end’ (21:6).

  But these two divine self-declarations correspond to two self-declarations by Jesus Christ. The pattern is as follows:

  God:

  I am the Alpha and the Omega.

  (1:8)

  Christ:

  I am the first and the last.

  (1:17)

  God:

  I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

  (21:6)

  Christ:

  I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

  (22:13)

  We leave to the next chapter a discussion of the full significance of this pattern and the remarkable fact that the one designation of God which appears in Revelation as a self-designation by God also appears as a self-designation by Christ. Here we shall confine ourselves to the designation as applied to God. But comparison of the four passages shows that the three phrases – the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end – are very probably to be considered equivalent. Since Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, it is not difficult to see that ‘the Alpha and the Omega’ is equivalent in meaning to ‘the first and the last’ and ‘the beginning and the end’. The pattern also shows that, if the three phrases are treated as equivalent, then Revelation contains seven occurrences of them in self-declarations by God and Christ (not counting the additional occurrence of ‘the first and the last’ in 2:8, where it echoes the use in 1:17). The number is not likely to be accidental, since, as we shall see, two of the other three most important designations for God in Revelation also occur seven times. Numerical patterns have theological significance in Revelation. Seven is the number of completeness. Just as the seven beatitudes scattered through the book (1:3; 14:13; 16:15; 19:9; 20:6; 22:7; 14) indicate the fullness of blessing to be bestowed on the reader or hearer who faithfully obeys the message of Revelation, so the sevenfold occurrence of a significant divine title indicates the fullness of the divine being to which that title points. Theological meaning is thus written into the detail of John’s meticulous literary composition.

  In the form, ‘the first and the last’, the designation derives from Isaiah, where it occurs, as in Revelation, as a divine self-designation: ‘I am the first and the last; besides me there is no god’ (44:6); ‘I am he; I am the first, and I am the last’ (48:12; cf. also 41:4). In those chapters of Isaiah (now known as Deutero-Isaiah) the designation encapsulates the understanding of the God of Israel as the sole Creator of all things and sovereign Lord of history, which Deutero-Isaiah so magnificently expounds and asserts polemically against the idols of Babylon. Unlike human-made gods, this God is the utterly incomparable One, to whom all nations are subject, whose purpose none can frustrate (cf. Isa. 40:12–26). It is precisely this exclusive monotheistic faith that determines the prophetic outlook of Revelation. Hence the unique importance of the designation: ‘the Alpha and the Omega’. God precedes all things, as their Creator, and he will bring all things to eschatological fulfilment. He is the origin and goal of all history. He has the first word, in creation, and the last word, in new creation. Therefore, within John’s literary structure, he speaks twice, declaring himself Alpha and Omega first, before the outset of John’s vision (1:8), and last, in declaring the eschatological accomplishment of his purpose for his whole creation: ‘it is done!’ (21:6).

  The form, ‘the beginning and the end’, had been used in the Greek philosophical tradition to indicate the eternity of the supreme God, and was taken over by Jewish writers, such as Josephus, who calls God ‘the beginning and the end of all things’ (Ant. 8.280; cf. Philo, Plant. 93). That John gives priority to the phrase ‘the Alpha and the Omega’ over both of its two equivalents may be because he connects the former with the divine name. The biblical name of God YHWH was sometimes vocalized Yāhôh and so transliterated into Greek (which has no consonant ‘h’) as IAω (Iota, Alpha, Omega).2 In the context of Jewish theological speculation about the divine name, the occurrence of the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet in this Greek form of the name could have suggested that the name itself contains the implication that God is the first and the last. A connexion with the divine name is the more likely in that the next divine designation we shall consider, which also occurs in 1:8, is certainly intended as an interpretation of the meaning of the name.

  THE ONE WHO IS AND WHO WAS AND WHO IS TO COME

  This designation of God occurs, with variation, five times:

  1:4:

  the One who is and who was and who is to come.

  1:8:

  the One who is and who was and who is to come.

  4:8:

  the One who was and who is and who is to come.

  11:17:

  the One who is and who was.

  16:5:

  the One who is and who was.

  Again there is a numerical pattern here, which is likely to be deliberate: the form with three tenses is used three times, the form with two tenses twice.

  This designation is an interpretation of the divine name YHWH. In the Old Testament itself, the only interpretation of the name is found in Exodus 3:14, which associates it with the verb ‘to be’, and interprets it first by the enigmatic phrase ‘I am who I am’ (or: ‘I will be who I will be’: ’ehyeh ’ašer ’ehyeh), and then simply as ‘I am’ (’ehyeh). Later Jewish interpretation understood these interpretations as statements of the divine eternity. Thus Philo(Mos. 1.75) understands the divine name to be ‘the one who is’ (ho ōn), which expresses the divine eternity in hellenistic philosophical fashion as timeless being. Alternatively, the meaning could be unpacked in terms of past, present and future existence. This is how
the Palestinian Targum (Pseudo-Jonathan) paraphrased the divine name: ‘I am who I was and will be’ (Exod. 3:14) or ‘I am who is and who was, and I am who I will be’ (Deut. 32:29; cf. also Sibylline Oracle 3:16). Formulae asserting existence in three tenses were also used of Greek gods or the supreme God of philosophy,3 and this usage may well have influenced the Jewish interpretation of the divine name. But it must be on the latter that Revelation is directly dependent.

  In the form John uses in 1:4, 8 (ho ōn kai ho ēn kai ho erchomenos) he agrees with the Targum in giving priority to God’s present existence, but he significantly departs from all other instances, Jewish or Greek, of this threefold formula in that the third term is not the future of the verb ‘to be’ but the present participle of the verb ‘to come’ (‘the one who is coming’). It is true that, as also in English, this can mean virtually ‘future’. Thus, for example, ‘the age to come’ or ‘the coming age’ (ho aiōn ho erchomenos) means ‘the future age’. But John has taken advantage of this usage to depict the future of God not as his mere future existence, but as his coming to the world in salvation and judgment. He no doubt has in mind those many Old Testament prophetic passages which announce that God will ‘come’ to save and judge (e.g. Ps. 96:13; 98:9; Isa. 40:10; 66:15; Zech. 14:5) and which early Christians understood to refer to his eschatological coming to fulfil his final purpose for the world, a coming they identified with the parousia of Jesus Christ.

  This interpretation is confirmed by the use, in 11:17; 16:5, of the abbreviated form of the designation: ‘the One who is and who was’. At these points in the vision the eschatological coming of God is taking place. It is no longer future, and the hymns which use the designation praise God for the occurrence of this eschatological fulfilment of his purpose. Especially clear is 11:17: ‘We give you thanks, Lord God Almighty, who are and who were, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.’ The achievement of God’s eschatological rule over the world is his coming. Necessarily the future element in the designation of God is replaced by the thanksgiving that his role has begun.