The Theology of the Book of Revelation Read online

  The derivation of the title, ‘the first and the last’, from Deutero-Isaiah, and the way it is used in 22:13, make this interpretation of 1:17–18 the preferable one. That a reference to Christ’s participation in God’s creation of all things is not out of place in the context of his address to the churches is clear from 3:14, where the beginning of the message to the church at Laodicea calls him: ‘the origin (archē) of God’s creation’. This does not mean that he was the first created being or that in his resurrection he was the beginning of God’s new creation. It must have the same sense as the first part of the title, ‘the beginning (archē) and the end’, as used of both God (21:6) and Christ (22:13). Christ preceded all things as their source. In this belief in Christ’s role in creation, Revelation is at one with the Pauline literature (1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:15–17), Hebrews (1:2) and the Fourth Gospel (1:1–3). The belief came about through an identification of Christ with the Word or the Wisdom of God through which God created the world, and this identification can be clearly seen in the way Christ’s role in creation is expressed in the references outside Revelation just given.1 In Revelation it has been brought together with another, probably even earlier, christological development of the early church: the identification of God’s eschatological coming with the expected parousia of Jesus Christ. These two developments have the effect, then, of including Christ as divine agent both in God’s creation of all things and in God’s eschatological fulfilment of all things. Thus Christ is ‘the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’. As a way of stating unambiguously that Jesus Christ belongs to the fullness of the eternal being of God, this surpasses anything in the New Testament.

  The point can be reinforced by a closer consideration of the pattern formed by the four passages (1:8, 17; 21:6; 22:13) in which these three titles are used as self-designations by God and Christ. In the structure of the book, John’s vision (1:9–22:9) is framed by a prologue (1:1–8) and an epilogue (22:6–21: the end of the vision and the beginning of the epilogue overlap, so that 22:6–9 belongs to both). There are a number of literary ways in which the prologue and the epilogue correspond. One of these is that the divine self-designation at the end of the prologue (1:8) corresponds to the self-designation by Christ near the beginning of the epilogue (22:13). These two verses correspond further in that each is preceded by an announcement of the parousia (1:7: ‘Behold, he is coming … ’; 22:12: ‘Behold, I am coming…’). If 1:8 and 22:13 correspond in this way, 1:17 and 21:6, placed respectively towards the beginning and towards the end of the vision, also correspond, so that the four texts form a chiastic arrangement (A–B–B1–A1). There is, further, a certain thematic resemblance between 1:17 and 21:6 in that in both cases the one who declares himself ‘the first and the last’ or ‘the Alpha and the Omega’ also declares himself the source of new, eschatological life: Christ through his resurrection (1:18), God through his new creation of all things and his gift of the water of life (21:1–6).

  The chiastic pattern can be set out as follows:

  This pattern underlines the identification of Christ with God which the use of the titles themselves expresses. It also shows how, as we might expect, it is with the eschatological thrust of the titles that John is predominantly concerned. It is in Christ’s parousia that God who is the beginning of all things will also become the end of all things. It is the eschatological life that Christ entered at his resurrection which all the redeemed creation will share in God’s new creation. But if the eschatological aspect of the titles shared by God and Christ is the primary concern of John’s work, the protological aspect is also christologically important. It shows that the identification of Christ with God implied by the titles is not the result of an adoptionist Christology, in which the mere man Jesus is exalted at his resurrection to divine status. Important as the resurrection is for Christ’s participation in God’s lordship (cf. 2:28; 3:21), these titles he shares with God indicate that he shared the eternal being of God from before creation.

  In Deutero-Isaiah, the title ‘the first and the last’ is closely connected with the exclusive monotheism characteristic of that prophet’s message. Yahweh declares: ‘I am the first and the last; besides me there is no god’ (Isa. 44:6). It is therefore the more remarkable that precisely this title is the one by which Christ declares his identity in Revelation 1:17. It does not designate him a second god, but includes him in the eternal being of the one God of Israel who is the only source and goal of all things. We shall see that John is careful also in other ways to preserve Jewish monotheistic faith while also including Jesus in the deity of the one God.

  THE WORSHIP OF JESUS

  In our last chapter we have seen how important worship is in Revelation. It has very precise theological meaning. For Jewish monotheism it marks the distinction between the one God the Creator of all things, who must be worshipped, and his creatures, to worship whom is idolatry. Since it marks this distinction in religious practice it is a more important indication of the real meaning of Jewish and early Christian monotheism than are more speculative reflections on the unity of God. The tendency of some modern writers to suppose that what is expressed in worship cannot be taken theologically seriously should be rejected, at least in this context in which the restriction of worship to the one God and the doctrine of creation to which it was closely linked were precisely the points Jewish and Christian writers emphasized in opposing their monotheism to pagan idolatry. The polemical significance of worship is clear in Revelation, which sees the root of the evil of the Roman Empire to lie in the idolatrous worship of merely human power, and therefore draws the lines of conflict between the worshippers of the beast and the worshippers of the one true God. John’s high consciousness of the issue of monotheistic worship is further expressed, in the closing chapters of the book, in an incident, included twice for strategic effect, in which John prostrates himself before the angel who mediates the revelation to him.2 The angel protests that he is no more than a fellow-servant of God and directs John to worship God (19:10; 22:8–9). These passages employ a traditional motif found elsewhere in apocalyptic literature.3 The heavenly glory and supernatural authority of the angelic beings encountered by apocalyptic visionaries not unnaturally provoke a response bordering on worship, but the principle of monotheistic worship is strongly asserted when even the most exalted heavenly beings reject worship and insist that only God should be worshipped. In the passages in Revelation, the point is that the angel who shows the visions to John is not the source of revelation, but only the instrument for communicating it to John. Jesus, however, is represented as the source of revelation (22:16). The implication would seem to be that he is not, like the angel, excluded from monotheistic worship, but included in it. This implication is confirmed by the explicit worship of Jesus elsewhere in Revelation.

  Since the issue of monotheistic worship is so clear in Revelation, it cannot be that the worship of Jesus is represented in Revelation through neglect of this issue. It seems rather that the worship of Jesus must be understood as indicating the inclusion of Jesus in the being of the one God defined by monotheistic worship. The point becomes clear in the scene of worship in heaven in chapters 4–5. We have seen in our last chapter how the worship of God by the heavenly court in chapter 4 is connected with the acknowledgment of God as the Creator of all things (4:11). In chapter 5 the Lamb, Christ, who has triumphed through his death and resurrection and who is seen standing on the divine throne (the probable meaning of 5:6; cf. 7:17), now becomes in turn the centre of the circle of worship in heaven, receiving the obeisance of the living creatures and the elders (5:8). Then the circle expands and the myriads of angels join the living creatures and the elders in a form of worship (5:12) clearly parallel to that offered to God (4:11). Finally, the circle expands to include the whole of creation in a doxology addressed to God and the Lamb together (5:13). It is important to notice how the scene is so structured that the worship of the Lamb (5:8–12) leads to the worship of God
and the Lamb together (5:13). John does not wish to represent Jesus as an alternative object of worship alongside God, but as one who shares in the glory due to God. He is worthy of divine worship because his worship can be included in the worship of the one God.

  Probably connected with this concern to include Jesus in monotheistic worship is a peculiar grammatical usage elsewhere in Revelation, where mention of God and Christ together is followed by a singular verb (11:15) or singular pronouns (22:3–4; and 6:17, where the singular pronoun autou is the better reading). It is not clear whether the singular in these cases refers to God alone or to God and Christ together as a unity. John, who is very sensitive to the theological implications of language and even prepared to defy grammar for the sake of theology (cf. 1:4), may well intend the latter. But in either case, he is evidently reluctant to speak of God and Christ together as a plurality. He never makes them the subjects of a plural verb or uses a plural pronoun to refer to them both. The reason is surely clear: he places Christ on the divine side of the distinction between God and creation, but he wishes to avoid ways of speaking which sound to him polytheistic. The consistency of his usage shows that he has reflected carefully on the relation of Christology to monotheism. It is significant that one of the passages in question (22:3–4) again concerns worship.

  In 5:8–14 and 22:3–4 the worship is heavenly and eschatological. The doxology addressed to Christ alone in 1:5b-6, one of three such doxologies in the New Testament (along with 2 Tim. 4:18; 2 Pet. 3:18), shows that John and his churches themselves practised the worship of Jesus. Doxologies, with their confession that glory belongs eternally to the One who is addressed, were a Jewish form of praise to the one God. There could be no clearer way of ascribing to Jesus the worship due to God.

  There is good evidence, besides that of Revelation, that the worship of Jesus was part of early Christian religious practice from a relatively early date and that it developed within Jewish Christianity where consciousness of the connexion between monotheism and worship was high.4 It cannot be attributed to Gentile Christian carelessness of the requirement of monotheistic worship. It must be regarded as a development internal to the tradition of Jewish monotheism, by which Jewish Christians implicitly included Jesus in the reality of the one God. The author of Revelation stands within this Jewish Christian tradition and, still within a thoroughly Jewish framework of thought, has reflected deliberately on the relation of Christology to monotheism. Both in the last section and this, we have seen evidence that he has made a rather sophisticated attempt to use language that includes Jesus in the eternal being of God without stepping outside the Jewish monotheism which for him was axiomatic, not least as part of the prophetic and apocalyptic tradition in which as a prophet he very consciously stands. He does not use the abstract conceptuality with which later Christian theologians, drawing on Greek philosophy, were able to say that the Son of God shares the divine nature of his Father. He does not even use the Jewish concept of the Wisdom of God, with which some other Jewish Christians were able to include Christ in the one divine being. His theological idiom is very different, involving the apocalyptic image of the divine throne, the practice of worship, the careful use of grammar and the literary connexions and structures into which, as a literary artist rather than a philosopher, he has put much of his theological expression. It is probably because his idiom is so different from that of later patristic reflection on Christology that the significance of his work in this respect has rarely been recognized.

  In the language of the doxology to Christ (1:5b–6) and of the heavenly hymn to the Lamb, which closely resembles it (5:9–10), we can recognize at least part of the impetus that must originally have led to the worship of Jesus. He is there praised for his work of redemption. It was because Christians owed salvation to Jesus Christ that he was worshipped. An overwhelming religious debt to one who was regarded as living in heaven and indeed an experienced presence in the Christian community was naturally expressed in worship. The salvation was too closely connected with Jesus himself for Jesus to be bypassed in worship offered to God for it, but at the same time it was salvation from God that Jesus gave and so Jesus was not treated as an alternative object of worship alongside God. He was included in worship of God. More generally, we could say that it was because Jesus functioned as God in early Christian religion that he was worshipped. All the divine functions in relation to the world – as Saviour, Lord and Judge – were exercised by Jesus, of course on God’s behalf. The one who functions as God naturally receives divine worship. Thus it is true that worship of Jesus was connected with the functional divinity which is often said to be the only kind of divinity Jewish Christianity attributed to Jesus. But it is doubtful whether, once Jesus was worshipped, Jewish monotheists could for long be content with merely functional divinity. The one who is worthy of the worship due only to God must somehow belong to the reality of the one God.

  Certainly the author of Revelation has reached this thought. Although his account of the relation of Jesus to God remains close to the primary religious concern with God’s and Jesus’ relation to the world and does not speculate on the being of God apart from the world, the evidence we have studied in the last section and the present section must amount to a statement of Jesus’ ontic divinity (i.e. his divine being, rather than merely divine function). The reason why John does not use the word ‘God’ of Jesus will be the same reason that accounts for the general slowness of this usage in becoming established Christian practice. He wants neither to say that Jesus simply is, without any distinction, the God Jesus called God and Father (a usage John reflects in 1:6; 2:28; 3:5, 12, 21), nor to seem to speak of two gods. But it is also notable that many times when he is talking most deliberately about God he does not call God ‘God’ either. He says far more about the deity of God by calling him ‘the Alpha and the Omega’ than he does by calling him ‘God’, and he also calls Jesus ‘the Alpha and the Omega’.

  WHAT CHRIST DOES, GOD DOES

  The importance of John’s extraordinarily high Christology for the message of Revelation is that it makes absolutely clear that what Christ does, God does. Since Christ shares the one eternal being of God, what Christ is said to do, in salvation and judgment, is no less truly and directly divine than what is said to be done by ‘the One who sits on the throne’.

  This is readily seen in relation to the parousia. In our last chapter, we have noticed that, in the designation of God as eternal in three tenses – ‘the One who is and who was and who is to come’ (1:4, 8; cf. 4:8) – the future of God is deliberately expressed by using the verb ‘to come’ (ho erchomenos), because God’s future is conceived as his eschatological coming to the world in salvation and judgment. But this ‘coming’ of God to bring his purposes for his creation to fulfilment is the coming of Christ. For this future coming of Christ in glory, Revelation does not use the word parousia, which is common elsewhere in the New Testament, but it does regularly use the verb ‘to come’. The hope and the warning of Christ’s imminent coming dominate the book (1:7; 2:5, 16; 3:3, 11; 16:15; 22:7, 12, 20). Seven times in Revelation, Christ himself declares ‘I am coming’ (erchomai: 2:5, 16; 3:11; 16:15; 22:6, 12, 20).

  His judgment at his coming is emphatically God’s. For example, Revelation 22:12 follows common early Christian practice in quoting an Old Testament prophecy of God’s coming to judgment (Isa. 40:10; 62:11) with reference to the parousia of Christ, and expands it with the well-known principle of divine judgment (‘to repay according to everyone’s work’), drawn here from Proverbs 24:12 (cf. Matt. 16:27; 1 Clem. 34:3; 2 Clem. 17:4). But if Christ’s judgment at the parousia is the divine judgment, the same also must be said of his sacrificial death, which we shall see is also central to the theology of Revelation. 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. The symbol of the Lamb is no less a divine symbol than the symbol of ‘the One who s
its on the throne’. In the last chapter we noticed the remoteness of‘the One who sits on the throne’ in heaven from the world dominated by the powers of evil. While evil rules on earth, God as ‘the One who sits on the throne’ must be depicted only in heaven. Even the judgments, which issue from his holy presence in heaven and aim to bring about his rule on earth by destroying evil, derive from him only indirectly, through angelic intermediaries. But if God is not present in the world as ‘the One who sits on the throne’, he is present as the Lamb who conquers by suffering. Christ’s suffering witness and sacrificial death are, in fact, as we shall see, the key event in God’s conquest of evil and establishment of his kingdom on earth. Even more than the judgments which issue from the throne in heaven they constitute God’s rule on earth. Moreover, Christ’s presence (walking among the lampstands: 1:13; 2:1) with his people who continue his witness and sacrifice is also God’s presence.

  It follows that Revelation’s Christology must be incorporated in our account of its understanding of God, supplementing our previous chapter. God is related to the world not only as the transcendent holy One, but also as the slaughtered Lamb.

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