The final book in the Christian Testament is a problem generally, and especially in the context of the English-speaking United States, where white Christian nationalists view its violence as a literal game plan.
Among the problems, for example, is the name. It is often called “Revelations” or “The Book of Revelations,” when it is actually the revelation, singular, “to or of” John, the “to or of” being unclear in the ancient manuscripts and Koine Greek, and maybe not really that important.
The English translation revelation is itself a problem, for in Koine Greek it is “apocalypse,” and the English cognates have diverged, with apocalypse no longer meaning what is revealed, but instead referring specifically to this vision of destructive re-ordering, of catastrophe. These days, a revelation, say that a politician is corrupt, is not an apocalypse. Its just Tuesday.
And which John? We almost all know more than one person by that name in real life, but when it comes to the Bible story, we engage in a sometimes absurd reductionism. It doesn’t help that it was accepted practice at that time to write and publish fraudulently in the name of someone with authority, the reason new texts were produced in the prophet Isaiah’s name centuries after the son of Amoz was dead, the reason we have texts written in the name of Peter and Paul that were definitely not written by Peter or Paul. There are multiple Marys in the gospels, but somehow fundamentalists insist on only one John.
The Gospel traditionally attributed to the actual disciple John, the brother of James, the three letters attributed to John, and this “revelation” to or of John are not from the same author, nor from the same decade or region. It is unlikely that the fisherman from Galilee actually wrote any of them, though the gospel at least seems to have come from a community associated with him.
It is best to refer to the author of this text, the revelation, as John of Patmos, the Greek island off the coast of modern-day Turkey that the author identifies as the site of his visions.
And all of that before we even get to the content of the revelation, this fever-dream of a great battle between good and evil, good being the followers of Jesus, of course, evil being both Rome and Jews. The text has helped fuel centuries of Christian antisemitism, and plays rather well with the greatly exaggerated narrative of Christian victimization, especially popular with America’s white Christian nationalists who believe having to compete on an equal footing with others makes them victims.
In reality, persecution of Christians in the first two centuries was sporadic, usually local, and often had as much to do with personal animosity and economics as it did with actual belief. Even in the earliest reference we have documenting the systematic persecution of Christians, a letter from the governor Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan in 112 C.E., he concedes that the Christians are law-abiding citizens who pay their debts.
Now, it would be easy to think that my complaints about the Apocalypse of John of Patmos are the sort of smug, overly-scholastic posturing of a modern-day liberal at odds with white Christian nationalist ideology, with “Left Behind” theology, but doubts about the text have been around since the very beginning. The Revelation’s status was debated for several centuries before it was finally accepted into the Christian canon, a decision, remember, made by those with power about which texts would be considered authoritative.
Unlike Fundamentalists, we understand that humans wrote the Bible, that humans decided what was in, what was out, and that the Word of God is Jesus, not some ancient text.
The two great Protestant Reformers, Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, expressed doubts about the status of the Revelation, and did not use it at all in the development of Lutheran and Reform theology. John Calvin ignored it completely, aggressively even. It rarely shows up in the Roman or Protestant lectionary, and not at all in the Orthodox lectionary. For most of Christian history, it has been suspect and marginal.
Yet somehow we have this death cult of Christians seeking the end of the world, invoking it from their pulpits, in fiction and in film. Go figure.
So what are we to do with it? Is there anything to learn from John’s fiction? Anything we can make of this?
Maybe there is. For while persecution of Christians may have been mostly local, mostly sporadic, it seems likely that John’s letter to the seven churches was written during an actual time of duress. And the world had changed radically since Jesus had walked the dusty roads of Galilee and Judea. It was a time of what we call discontinuous change, when old rules and structures no longer worked, were not even possibilities.
Remember, Jesus led a reform movement within a Hebrew religion still centered on the Second Temple and the priesthood. He boldly predicted that the Temple would fall, something that seemed unimaginable, but even when Paul was writing his epistles, two decades later, the Temple was still there, as it had been for centuries. But between the time of those authentic Pauline epistles, in the 50’s and 60’s, and John’s revelation on Patmos, sometime around 95 C.E., there had been the First Jewish War, resulting in the destruction of the Temple, and the complete re-structuring of Jewish life. Both the Temple and the priesthood were gone, and the Pharisaic movement that was evolving into Rabbinic Judaism was pursuing orthodoxy, or at least orthopraxis, by driving all other sects, including the Christians, out of the Synagogue.
We can look at the text as crazy, as surreal, and honestly, it sort of is, but we can also look at it and say that John of Patmos imagined, and instead of imagining a restoration of what was, he imagined what might be. A little hallucinogenic, to be sure. But hey, better than sitting around moping and reminiscing.
They could never go back to the old system, the system before the onslaught of discontinuous change, but wasn’t working for everyone anyways. That is exactly what Jesus said again and again. A system based on greed and deception, on doing one thing in private and another in public, on collusion and corruption, wasn’t in line with that divine mystery we name as God and he named Abba, the creative force behind the eruption and evolution of life, the thin places of art and song, of wonder and love.
The system wasn’t working in late Second Temple Galilee and Judea when Jesus preached and healed and was brutally murdered. The system wasn’t working in late 1st century Asia Minor where Christians suffered an outburst of persecution and were struggling to understand their place in relation to the Hebrew tradition that was itself adrift and adapting. The system isn’t working today, in late neo-liberal tech capitalism where more and more wealth is in fewer and fewer hands, where so much wealth is as fictional as the emperor’s new clothes, and as our greed pushes the planet closer and closer to destruction, where civil society has broken down with flight attendants assaulted and privileged white men gluing their hand to the Starbucks counter.
We don’t need to restore what was. It might have worked for you, but for a lot of folks, it sucked.
John of Patmos offered the members of the seven churches a vision of what might be, though it was shaped by what he knew, authoritarian systems of human community, an age of violence, for that is all there was, all he had experienced in his lifetime, all that had existed in the Ancient Near East for the previous thousand years. But at least it was a vision of good rule, of a New Jerusalem where justice, love, and alignment with a good God mattered.
And though some Christians today long for the same sort of authoritarian system, a dictatorial male god who hates who they hate, long for a violent apocalypse convinced in their hubris that they will be among the redeemed, we do not understand God that way and we are not quite so cocky about our redemption.
That doesn’t mean we can’t still offer a vision, one based on the God we know, the God of freedom and creativity, the God of love. In fact, our failure to offer an alternative vision to the status quo may be our greatest failure. Because if we are totally honest, we are only half in on change, since the current system is mostly working for most of us.
What would it look like if we were as well versed, as articulate in describing a Christian faith that is loving, progressive, and constructive as fundamentalists are at articulating their version of the faith, hateful, reactionary, destructive? What would it look like if the public definition of Christianity was ours because we had a working definition like the Phoenix Affirmations?
What would it look like if we could articulate some vision for an economic system that wasn’t based on a binary betweenAmerican and global oligarchy with unchecked accumulation of wealth and power, and Soviet-style communism? What would it look like if we actually offered a vision, of say a free-market social democracy, one based on rewards for hard work and ingenuity rather than the accident of birth?
It was not enough for Jesus to denounce the evil of Rome and the Hebrew elite. He had to offer a vision of the kingdom.
It is not enough for us to say the system is broken. We have to offer some vision of how a new system might work. It doesn’t have to be perfect. After all, this nonsensical and slightly terrifying book, this revelation, offered people the might be of a New Jerusalem during a pretty awful time. We can certainly do better. Amen.