Five Characteristics of the Book of Revelation
Revelation is an inciting and exciting book at the same time. It contains stories about mysterious unveiling of the end of everything, the subject of which is called the apocalypse. No wonder many have attempted to read Revelation throughout history. Meanwhile, the great reformer John Calvin had chosen not to write a commentary on Revelation, perhaps due to its overwhelming mystery. In this book, Bauckham probes into the book of Revelation with such care and fastidiousness. To begin with, the genre of Revelation is threefold: a letter in the sense that John had a specific audience in mind (especially the seven churches in chapters 2-3 and more broadly churches coming after the book’s composition with all their problems); a prophetic book in the sense that it discerns what is, on the basis of which John speaks of the coming Kingdom of God through conflicts and struggles between God’s people and the powers of darkness at work in the world; an apocalypse in the sense that the book of Revelation is written on a vision with John’s idiosyncratic yet profound analyses and insights. Revelation is the only such book throughout the Scripture.
Before reading Bacukham’s book, I have sat down to read Revelation from the Scripture in one sitting. The translation version was from Korean Catholic church. This version translates in easy, contemporary Korean, making my reading experiences pleasant and forward-looking. I have come to see the following five characteristics of the book of Revelation.
- Revelation is a very Jewish book. Throughout his book, Bauckham works out his best to show how grounded all the visual imageries in Revelation are in the Hebrew Bible. For example, in chapter 10, it is written that eating a little scroll will be bitter to his stomach, yet sweet to his mouth, which is supposed to remind his audience of chapters 2-3 in the book of Ezekiel, where a similar scene is recorded. Moreover, the locusts from chapter 9 are naturally reminded of the book of Exodus, particularly its ten plagues and the one with locusts. Besides this, Revelation is fraught with many visual imageries from the book of Daniel, a representative apocalyptic book in the Hebrew Bible. One thing that can be known to readers through such literary device is that Revelation is a thoroughly Jewish book. Thus, Bauckham cogently makes a case against reading Revelation as a sort of series of predictions for what is going to happen in the future of the world, entirely neglecting such Jewish context.
- A logical corollary from 1 is that Revelation is deeply contextual. Considering that the subject of Revelation is the coming of Jesus and the end of the world, and the pertinent vision of John’s, as well as its interpretation, readers might be tempted to look at it as a book of transcendental, heavenly stories dealing with timeless truth. However, Bauckham argues that the literary purpose of Revelation was to encourage the persecuted Christians in the early church, without which no one can even begin to understand the ABCs of Revelation. This is another blow coming from Bauckham against a dispensationalist reading of Revelation, trying to correspond the book’s events to contemporary political affairs.
- Revelation is also theologically very enriching (and Christ-centered at the same time!). Bacukahm organizes his book around those regarded as traditionally systematic theology’s, from Trinity to Christology to Soteriology to Ecclesiology and Eschatology, all the way to show how theologically prolific the book is. What I particularly took note of is that through the imagery of the slain lamb, and the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures, the book drops a significant hint at negative theology (a theology claiming that God is to be expressed through only what God is not). I sincerely believe that the paradox of God’s rule shown through God’s death and weakness provides a powerful imagery of who God is.
- As a corollary to 2, Revelation does a theology from the underside, for the perspective of Revelation is not only coming from the heaven, but also from the margins and corners of the persecuted Christians, which leaves a great room for theologizing for liberation theology.
- Lastly, Revelation is a book of political theology. Bauckham demonstrates that the liturgy for the slain lamb in chapters 4 and 5 in the book is both cultic and political, which corresponds to the ruling principles of the Roman Empire. Bauckham understands the harlot in Babylon from chapters 17 and 18 (the spiritual forces that make its subjects only worship the Roman Empire), riding on the red beast (the military-political power of the Empire) to be symbolic of the union of the cultic forces and the political-military forces, which tells much to contemporary theology. In other words, as far as theology is concerned with worshipping the one and only God, such theology is inevitably political. On the other hand, if politics is about who to serve and to whom we should be loyal to, then it is also a question of theology. It is in this regard a glad tiding to see the emergence of political theology, yet we need to fathom more of this vital relationship between the cultic and the political.
Afterwards, I will discuss the historical examination of the absence and resurgence of political theology through the University of Chicago’s political theorist Mark Lilla’s book The Stillborn God, and you are welcome to peek at the book in advance if you care to do so.
Two Interpretive Keys to Reading Revelation
In the remaining spaces I will suggest two interpretive keys to reading Revelation. These two keys which I garnered from reading Bauckham’s book comes from my own problematics, the first of which is if Revelation is such a contextual book, how do we hear the message of Revelation for contemporary audience, without relying on the dispensational inclination of matching its records to contemporary political events? The second problematic is how Bauckham’s unique Christological approach of divine identity could be of service to suggesting the gospel in the context of modern society.
First, given the contextual nature of Revelation, I examine how to understand the prophetic and apocalyptic messages of the book. As I mentioned above, dispensationalist did their best in understanding what’s written in Revelation to be direct prophecies of the future. Perhaps partly because of such endeavor, many dramas and shows of similar stripes were produced, such as The Left Behind, Battlestar Galactica, and so on. Even so, Bauckham severely criticizes such approach to the prophetic apocalypse inherent in Revelation. Prophetic apocalypse in the Bible is composed of three elements: 1) an accurate understanding of what is happening. Revelation is debunking what lies behind the prevailing of the evil forces; 2) a prediction of the future, which is not like soothsaying, but in terms of the coming Kingdom of God; 3) any prophetic apocalypse demands response from its readers, both primary and subsequent ones. Therefore, Bauckam strongly contends that the prophetic apocalypse in Revelation is never fatalistic, for the prophetic apocalypse in Revelation always has some space for human response. This is like in the book of Jonah, in where Jonah preached the doom of Nineveh, in response to which the people of Ninveh turned back from their ways and Jonah’s prophecy did not happen. Never fatalistic, yet what must unconditionally happen is the fact that the Kingdom of God must come, and that all God’s creation will be eschatologically restored (149).
On the other hand, Bauckham makes an important case of seeing no distinction between the Babylon in Revelation and whatever forces hindering the coming Kingdom of God. In other words, the message of Revelation is to encourage the persecuted through the good news of God’s Kingdom eventually winning victory over the strenuous resistance coming from the Roman Empire or whatever is akin to it. For, according to Bauckham, any society whom Babylon’s cap fits must wear it (159). Personally speaking, I am reminded of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s going over the classic authorial-intent hermeneutics, switching the focus from the author to the reader without bringing about a kind of hermeneutical anarchy, for according to Gadamer, as with Bauckham, the original intent of the author is not neglected in such hermeneutical innovation, but expanded from the authorial intent without necessarily contradicting it, because the horizons of the author and the horizons of contemporary readers coming together produce a new dimension of the text not even imaginable to the original author. Thus, we need to read Revelation afresh not only by reimagining the author’s horizons, but also by giving our horizons a new look, by means of which we faithfully and creatively read what messages Revelation is getting across. This issue will be delved into more through reading Michael Gorman and Craig Koester’s books.
Secondly, I will look into the potentials of Bauckham’s divine identity approach in his reconstructing of high Christology, producing a fecund reading of Revelation turned into reading contemporary culture and challenging it through the gospel. First off, Bauckham’s divine identity approach is to buttress his high Christology (a Christology claiming that Christ was from the early Church regarded as equal to God), focusing upon the fact that the referential phrases of God and Christ are identical. For example,
God: I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God (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)
Bauckham grounds his claims of the divinity of Christ on such identity of reference between God and Christ (the identity of referential phrase in ancient society means much more than what it is in contemporary society). This dismisses the two traditional approaches to this claim. The first is from strict monotheism, arguing for no room for the divinity of Christ, and the second is from the perspective of revisionist history, saying that while the divinity of Christ is not exactly the same as that of God, but there is still justifiable space for the divinity of Christ, not as equal to God, but as some inferior deity to God. Rejecting both approaches, Bauckham does a comprehensive examination of the case for Christ’s equal divinity with God in his book God Crucified. Tracing through the process of Bauckham’s arguments in the book is beyond the scope of this review, so I will put it aside for later. What matters to us now is, there seems to be numerous points of contact between the divine identity of Christ and the hot topics of modernity, such as authenticity, recognition, and identity. Every one of us has questions about who we are, and always in search of people’s recognition to find the answer for it. Thus, identity is a very important issue in modern society, and Bauckham’s Christology constructed through the identity of Christ will be very resounding for many of us who call ourselves Christ followers. I personally think that the doctrine of participation is the linking factor between the identity of Christ and those of his followers. That is to say, participating in God’s Kingdom work means first of all participating in the loving communion of the Triune God. Therefore, this identity approach will greatly challenge the ground of identity and recognition of Christ followers.
This is just a bare bone structure of what I would like to construct eventually. Especially in the forthcoming reviews, I will try to do the work as best as I can. Next week, I will review Eugene Peterson’s Reversed Thunder. Thank you!