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THE RELEVANCE OF REVELATION

Revelation in Its Original Context
Revelation is the Bible’s climactic and concluding prophecy. Writing deliberately in the tradition of the Hebrew prophet, the prophet John gathers up and completes their contributions to the overall theme of biblical prophecy: the coming of God’s kingdom in all the world. His own prophetic revelation discloses the way in which the universal kingdom of God is finally to come, through Jesus the Messiah and his people.

In order to read Revelation appropriately, we need to recognize equally the way it relates to its original context and the way it transcends that context and continues to address the church in all periods. Like all biblical prophecy, Revelation addressed a concrete historical situation— that of Christians in the Roman province of Asia at the end of the first century CE— with the purpose of enabling them to discern the purpose of God in that situation and to respond in an appropriate way. So although the prophecy concerns the final victory of God’s rule over all evil and the final completion of God’s purpose in the new creation of all things, it portrays the coming of God’s kingdom in direct relation to the situation of its first readers. The eschatological future is envisaged in terms of its impact on the present, so that the first readers might see how to live in their own situation in the light of the coming kingdom. This means that we cannot ignore the situation of the first readers if we are to perceive correctly the continuing relevance of Revelation to later readers.

Revelation makes sure that attentive readers do not ignore the first-century context to which it is addressed by itself presenting that situation in the seven messages to the churches (chs. 2-3). Revelation as a whole is a circular letter to the seven churches (1:4), and the seven messages supply each church’s introduction to the rest of the prophecy. Each is a prophetic analysis of the state of that church, designed to enable that church to hear the message of the whole book in a way appropriate to its own context and condition. The local situations addressed in the seven messages are a variety of local instantiations of the broader context depicted in later visions. Their variety is important to interpretation. They clearly refute, for example, the common generalization: the Revelation was meant for the encouragement and consolation of Christians suffering persecution. Some of John’s first readers were suffering, but many were avoiding suffering by compromising with pagan society and Roman power.

If the seven messages reveal the situations addressed by Revelation, John’s vision of heaven in chs. 4-5 is the key to the way these situations are addressed. John is taken up into heaven in order to see the world from the heavenly perspective. He is given a glimpse behind the scenes of history so that he can see what is really going on in his readers’ world. He is also transported in vision into the final future, so that he can see the present from the perspective of God’s final purpose for the world. The effect is to open his readers’ world to transcendence. The symbolic world they enter imaginatively in the visions of the book is their own day-to-day world seen from God’s heavenly perspective. They are given an alternative to the world as constructed by the dominant ideological perspective of their culture, the Roman imperial view of the world. The visionary imagery has the effect of purging their imagination of ways of seeing their world derived from the dominant ideology, reshaping their perception of the world by means of alternative images, and so helping them bear witness to God’s truth in the context in which they actually live. By re-visioning the world from the heavenly perspective, they are enabled to resist the dominant vision of the world, and to live for God and his kingdom rather than for the beast and his kingdom. The clash of perspectives—heavenly and earthly, God’s and the beast’s—on reality is thematized in Revelation by constant reference to truth and deceit. The visions enable God’s people to see the truth of God, to see through the lies of the beast, and so to witness to God in the world.

In heaven and from the perspective of heaven John sees what is ultimately the truth of reality: who God really is, what God’s purpose for his whole creation is, and how God is accomplishing that purpose through Jesus, the Spirit, and the church. From a merely earthly perspective, the military and political might of imperial Rome (the beast) and the economic dominance of the city of Rome (Babylon) seem irresistible, even divine. But from the perspective of heaven the ultimacy Roman propaganda claimed for Rome is seen to be illusory. The reign of the evil powers who appear to contest God’s sovereignty on earth so successfully is neither ultimate (in heaven God reigns over all) nor eternal (God’s rule must come on earth as it already is in heaven). But how will evil be defeated and God’s kingdom come? This is the question whose answer is the “revelation” John writes to convey. God’s rule comes about through the victory of the slaughtered Lamb, who bore witness to the truth of God to the point of death, a victory given universal effect through the suffering witness of the Lamb’s followers. In the great conflict with the beast which is inevitable if Christians are faithful to the truth, their witness to the truth of God even at the cost of their lives will make that truth plain to the world, exposing the lies of the beast. This participation of the church in Christ’s victory will give the nations of the world the opportunity to turn to God. Clearly this “revelation” is very far from being mere information about the future. It is a call to Christians to play their part in the coming of God’s kingdom.

Revelation in Our Context
Recognizing that the whole book of Revelation addresses the situation of its first readers does not make it irrelevant to us. By its very nature Revelation’s message about the coming of God’s kingdom in all the world transcends its first-century context and speaks to all Christians in all subsequent contexts. Its first-century contextuality inspires later contextualization in other contexts. Paradoxically, the more we see how precisely it impacts on the concrete realities of the late first-century world, the better we appreciate its message for ourselves. We see that it demands costly witness to the truth of God in the face of whatever the idolatries specific to our time and place may be. We realize we must find the counterparts of Babylon and the two beasts in today’s oppressive and exploitative economic systems, today’s absolutizings of political and military power, and today’s religious ideologies which mask, instead of exposing, the truth of things. Such an approach contextualizes for us Revelation’s call to Christians to participate in the coming of God’s universal kingdom, whereas reading Revelation as esoteric information about the future signally fails to do this.

The following points highlight some of the respects in which Revelation can prove relevant today:

(1) As we have seen, one purpose of Revelation is to purge and to refurbish the Christian imagination. It tackles people’s imaginative response to the world, which is at least as deep and as influential as their intellectual convictions. It recognizes the way a dominant culture, with its images and ideals, constructs the world for us, so that we perceive and respond to the world in its terms. Moreover, it unmasks this dominant ideology as one which serves the interest of the powerful. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which enables people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology. In other words, it enables the church to play a counter-cultural role. Though the form this takes will differ in different societies, it is always necessary for the church to witness to values not held by the dominant culture, and to be prepared for the cost of doing so.

(2) The alternative vision of the world which Revelation offers is strongly theocentric. It shows the power of a theocentric vision to confront oppression, injustice, and inhumanity. In the end it is only a purified vision of the transcendence of God that can effectively resist the human tendency to idolatry, that is, to absolutize aspects of the world. The worship of the true God is the power of resistance to the deification of military and political power (the beast) and of economic prosperity (Babylon). In the modern age we may add that it is what can prevent movements of resistance to injustice from dangerously absolutizing themselves.

(3) Revelation resists the dominant ideology not only by its reference to the transcendent God (heaven) but also by its reference to an alternative future (the New Jerusalem and the new creation). It sees the world as open to divine transformation into God’s kingdom. This vision effectively relativizes the dominant power structures which seem inevitable and makes it possible to envisage a future different from the one they project.

(4) As well as Revelation’s perspective from above (heaven) and from the eschatological future, there is also a sense in which it adopts a perspective from below, that is, from the standpoint of the victims of history. Its first readers did not necessarily belong to the underside of society by virtue of their social and economic status, but the result of standing for God’s kingdom against the idolatries of the powerful would be to bring them into solidarity with the victims of the socio-political system. In this sense, insofar as Revelation’s theology could be called a theology of liberation, it speaks to the affluent and the powerful as much as to the poor and the oppressed.

(5) Revelation does not respond to the dominant ideology by promoting Christian withdrawal into a sectarian enclave that leaves the world to its judgment while consoling itself with millennial dreams. On the contrary, Revelation is orientated to the coming of God’s kingdom in the whole world and calls Christians to active participation in this coming of the kingdom. It requires them to stand for the truth of God in the public, political world. The worship of God, which is so prominent in the book, has nothing to do with pietistic retreat from the public world, but is the source of resistance to the idolatries of the public world. Revelation’s bold hope for the conversion of all the nations to the worship of the true God and its insistence that God’s kingdom impacts on the social, political, and economic life of its time contrast with the narrowness of so much contemporary Christian vision. Revelation has an important function to perform in widening our horizons to match the scope of God’s universal kingdom.

(6) Revelation’s prophetic critique is of the churches as much as of the world. It recognizes that there is a false religion not only in the blatant idolatries of power and prosperity, but also in the constant danger that true religion falsify itself in compromise with such idolatries. Again, this is the relevance of Revelation’s theocentric emphasis on the worship of God and the truth of God. To resist idolatry in the world by faithful witness to the truth, the church must continuously purify its own perception of truth by its vision of who God is and what God’s purposes are.

(7) Christian participation in God’s purpose of establishing his kingdom is portrayed in Revelation as a matter of witness, primarily verbal, but substantiated by life—and death. It should not surprise us that possibilities of changing society by the use of power and influence in accordance with the values of God’s kingdom are not envisaged. The realistic situation of Christians in the first-century Roman Empire precluded them. In other situations, different possibilities of serving God’s kingdom in the world open up. But Revelation’s reminder that Christian participation in the coming of God’s kingdom is by no means dependent on power and influence remains important. The essential form of Christian witness, which cannot be replaced by any other, is consistent loyalty to God’s kingdom. In this powerless witness the power of truth to defeat lies comes into its own. The martyrs are still the paradigm of Christian witness. Legitimate power and influence should not be despised, but the temptations of power are best resisted when the priority of faithful witness is maintained.

(8) In Revelation’s universal perspective, the doctrines of creation, redemption, and eschatology are very closely linked. It is God the Creator of all reality who, in faithfulness to his creation, acts in Jesus Christ to reclaim and to renew his whole creation. Because he is creation’s Alpha he will also be its Omega. The scope of his new creation is as universal as the scope of creation. It is as Creator that he claims his universal kingdom. It is as Creator that he can renew his creation, taking it beyond the threat of evil and nothingness into the eternity of his own presence. An important contribution of Revelation to restoring the full Christian vision of reality is that it puts the NT’s central theme of salvation in Christ into its total biblical-theological context -of the Creator’s purpose for his whole creation. At a time when the global implications of individual actions have never been more obvious, this is a perspective the church cannot afford to do without. The vision of reality opened up by Revelation is fully capable of engaging the widest and most urgent concerns of our time and situating them where they belong: in the context of the conflict of idolatry and truth and the church’s prayer for the coming of the Lord Jesus.

By Richard Bauckham, Professor of NewTestament Studies, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. His books include The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge University, 1993) and The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (T? & T. Clark, 1993).