The Urgency of Attending to the Presence in the Present
As Peterson himself concedes in the preface, the intrinsic limitation of this book is that it is not for an in-depth study of the book, which might disappoint readers who look to such study. As for me, I was deeply impressed by Peterson’s attention to close details in 1:12-20 (even though I was immediately disillusioned by his subsequent exposition of chapters 2-3, which did not go deep enough, in my judgment.). In chapter 3, Peterson gives an easy enough account of John’s encounter with Jesus as he pays close attention to the metaphorical and literary devices embedded in each verse, such as the Son of Man in 1:13, which alludes to Daniel 7:14-15’s Son of Man. Peterson goes on to say that in the book of Enoch written in between Daniel and Revelation, people living in the times of Enoch had a higher expectation of the identity of the Son of Man, who is a cosmic being ruling and filling in the universe. (John’s description of the Son of Man in 1:13—clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest is alluding to Aaron’s outfit as the high priest in Exodus 29:5, while his hair being white and his eyes like flames of fire are referring to his identity as a prophet) Other than these, Peterson also explains what John meant by his right hand holding seven stars and the seven lampstands behind him. I highly recommend that you get the book to find out more about these.)
Even so, Peterson never fails to mention that Revelation’s audience experienced their expectation of Jesus as the Son of Man falling apart at the seams, for Jesus as they saw fit was never such a humongous figure, but just one more rabbi among so many others, albeit that he did work out some miracles and healings. His death was not only such a petty one, but also that of a political criminal. Ironically enough, the subsequent Christians had the opposite trouble of experiencing Jesus, i.e., Jesus as a human person, for through many teachings and witnesses of Jesus’ immediate disciples and followers, they had come to see Jesus as a divine figure, yet the harsh and unfavorable social and political realities that they were placed in had made it difficult for them to believe in the power of Christ as the ruler of the universe. This is the immediate social setting of which John wrote the book of Revelation. Peterson argues that the rationale for composing Revelation did not consist in predicting and soothsaying what will occur in the future as the history of the world unfolds its way toward the end, but in helping the early Christians of John’s times to be able to see through the essence of their ages and fortify themselves in the light of what God was at pains, lifting up their heads to focus on the presence of Christ all through their persecution and struggles. Therefore, for Peterson and for that matter John, Revelation is not a book about casting lots for the future based on current political events. Rather, the urgency of Revelation’s message lies in our need to attend to God’s presence. The keywords here are attending to the presence. That is, just as in the original context, and equally as well in the contemporary context, attending to the present and the presence of God in it is what matters. At this point, Peterson quotes part of Walker Percy’s book, which I deem very apposite for a full quote.
In his novel the Second Coming, Walker Percy posed the question, “Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane?” The answer is yes, if all we know is chronos, which refers to a conception of time as duration. Percy describes such a life: “Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream” (192).
It is in this regard that Peterson was persuaded to approach Revelation pastorally, which means, Revelation is not a codified book to be broken in order to figure out what will happen in the future, but a book that leads us to concentrate on the present to see the presence of God at work here and now. Thus, Peterson’s theologizing in this book is wholly for pastoral ministry, which Peterson judges to be equally true for John, as the pastor to the seven churches in Asia Minor. John wrote this mysterious book in order for the seven churches to endure through the painful reality of oppression and persecution. As a pastor, Peterson is doing the same as John, organizing Revelation around 11 important topics (Scripture, Christ, Church, Worship, Evil, Prayer, Witness, Politics, Judgment, Salvation, and Heaven) for contemporary Christians. While it may seem difficult to bring all these disparate topics to coherence, Peterson brilliantly does the task around prayer, imagination, and the presence of Christ through worship. In the remainder of this review, I will discuss how each of these three themes ties together the whole book of Revelation in Peterson’s perspective.
Reversed Thunder, and the Politics of the Lamb through Worship
The original title of this book, unlike its Korean one, is coming from Revelation 8:5’s “peals of thunder” referring to the saints’ prayer reaching up to the throne of God and being poured out back to the earth through an angel. Coined by George Herbert, this phrase Reversed Thunder thus refers to the saints’ prayer. This tells that Peterson sees prayers of the saints as the central theme in Revelation. Why is that?
It is because prayer orients us to God in the midst of excruciating realities of which we are part of. Such function of prayer naturally involves our imagination, for the act of imagining is always beyond our five senses, to say nothing of going beyond the dominant ways of conceiving and perceiving the world at whatever given times. Such imagination is far from evading from reality, nor from passively coping with it, for no one can perfectly isolate oneself, except that one is a kind of essene monk. Thus, what John is conveying through this book is a word of encouragement for the saints not only to penetrate into the heart of the haves and the powerful, as they have their own ways in the world, but also to live out different realities presented to them, i.e., the realities of God, here and now. In order for us to live out this reality of God, we should be able to see and hear such reality. According to Peterson, Revelation is completely caught up in dealing with the issues of equipping the saints with the faculty of seeing and hearing God who’s at work behind such grim reality, who never fails to respond to their prayers as outcry toward heaven, which requires a new sort of imagination, i.e., praying imagination. And it is in this regard that the phrase reversed thunder is meaningful. God’s thunder working through the reversed thunder of the saints is leading up to the scenes of worship for the slain lamb sitting on the throne, namely, the kingdom of God, and to the times of God’s people rejoicing in the slain lamb. However, there is a big chasm between the politics of the Lamb and the politics of the Dragon in Revelation 12. Politics always constitutes two elements: exercising of power and the means of such exercise, which is even more so in this case. Peterson shows how markedly different each kind of politics is from the other.
It is the difference, politically, between wanting to use the people around us to become powerful (or, if unskillful, getting used by them), and entering into covenants with the people around us so that the power of salvation extends into every part of the neighborhood, the society, and the world that God loves (132-33).
As a matter of fact, this difference is not that of one’s calling oneself Christian or not. There are so many pastors following the politics of the Dragon, while there are so many persons of obscurity faithfully following the Lamb. Whether one is a follower of the Dragon or of the Lamb is not an issue of one’s being a pastor or a seminarian, or working for Christian-related companies. Neither is it relevant to whether that person is passionately participating in church’s worship service. For that matter, it is nothing about one’s praying fervently or working hard for church. There are numerous followers of the Dragon who are doing all the foregoing, still securing their positions within the official Christian circles, while there are still many who stay in the periphery of the Christian world, taking their steps for Christ. Peterson incorporates all these things into worship. According to Peterson, worship centers, gathers, reveals, sings, and affirms. We are instinctively inclined to making ourselves the center of everything. Worship goes directly against such instinct of ours, giving away the center of our lives to the slain Lamb of God, whose death was caused by the Lamb’s own opposing such self-centered tendency within humanity. Worship decenters my own self-centeredness, prioritizing His ways and His will over my own, and worship gathers those who are willing to live in such manner, reveals who the slain Lamb is to them, leading them to sing before the slain Lamb. Lastly, the Lamb of God affirms the meaning and destiny of the lives of worshippers, which Peterson puts this way: “Scripture read and preached discovers that Christ (the Lamb) reveals the meaning of my life and fulfills my destiny” (65). After all, only when each person begins to dethrone oneself and make Christ the center of one’s life do Christ begin to affirm the desire of each person for recognition. Moreover, Christ leads each person to the way much holier than that which one sets out to walk in the first place. Worship is the field of all these things being unfolded. Revelation is summarily expressive of all these realities: individual, community, political, economic, and social realities, historical circumstances, selfish pursuits of the rulers, the dragon and the sea and land beasts controlling the rulers, God’s revealing through Christ the cosmic meaning of Revelation, struggling with evil, and church. All of these are in the drama of Revelation, in which the saint and her faith community is faithfully guided into the ways of Christ. Doubtless such way forward is not visible to a naked eye, which is why we need prayer, which in turn requires the praying imagination, by which we worship God so that we could see another realities behind the external ones. I believe that Peterson does a beautiful job of delineating this complicated picture of Revelation both pastorally and theologically. Next week I will do a review of Michael Gorman’s Reading Revelation Responsibly. Thank you.