The Theology of the Book of Revelation

by Richard Bauckham

  GOD THE CREATOR

  We have considered at length the sovereignty of God portrayed in chapter 4. Equally important, and closely connected, is the confession of God as Creator, expressed in the hymn of the twenty-four elders:

  You are worthy, our Lord and God,

  to receive glory and honour and power,

  for you created all things,

  and by your will they existed and were created.

  This is the understanding of God as Creator which was characteristic of Judaism and which early Christianity shared without question. The one God is defined as the One who brought all things into existence. As Creator, he alone has ultimate power over everything. As Creator, to whom all creatures owe their very being, he alone is to be worshipped. As this chapter of Revelation itself illustrates, Jewish monotheism was not compromised by the common belief in a multitude of other heavenly beings, because, as the elders here confess, they are emphatically creatures, owing their existence to God. Jewish monotheism in New Testament times was defined by the doctrine of creation and by the practice of worship. The one Creator of all things is God and he alone may be worshipped.

  Consequently, when an angel proclaims the ‘eternal gospel’ to all people on earth, calling them to repentance in view of the imminent final judgment, the substance of this gospel is a call to recognize their Creator by worshipping him: ‘Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come; and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water’ (14:7). The worship which the whole earth is giving to the beast (13:8) is really due to God, because he, not the beast, is the Creator of all things.

  The understanding of God as Creator was not only integral to Jewish and Christian monotheism; it was also essential to the development of Jewish and Christian eschatology. If God was the transcendent source of all things, he could also be the source of quite new possibilities for his creation in the future. Creation is not confined for ever to its own immanent possibilities. It is open to the fresh creative possibilities of its Creator. This is how the hope of resurrection was possible. The Jewish hope of resurrection was not based on belief in the inherent capacity of human nature to survive death (although some kind of survival was often assumed). It was fundamentally a form of trust in God the Creator, who, as he gave the life that ends in death, can also give life back to the dead. More than that, he can give new life – eschatologically new life raised forever beyond the threat of death. Whereas mortal life, cut off from its source, ends in death, God can give new life which is so united to his own eternal life that it can share his own eternity.12

  But Jewish eschatological hope was not just for the resurrection of individuals. It was hope for the future of God’s whole creation. It was hope for new creation (cf. 1 Enoch 72:1; 91:16; 2 Bar. 44:12; L.A.B. 3:10; 2 Pet. 3:13, all inspired by Isa. 65:17; 66:22). This did not mean the replacement of this creation by another, as we can see from parallel references to the renewal of the creation (Jub. 1:29; 2 Bar. 32:6; 4 Ezra 7:75; cf. 1 Enoch 45:5). Revelation 21:1, which directly echoes the language of Isaiah (43:18–19; 65:17), belongs among those passages which might at first sight be thought to suggest the replacement of this creation by a wholly different one:

  Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away …

  The words ‘first’ and ‘new’ here carry their almost technical apocalyptic reference to the contrast between, on the one hand, the creation of the present age which is passing away, and, on the other hand, the eschatologically new, that is, the qualitatively quite different life of the eternal age to come. The discontinuity is parallel, on a cosmic scale, to the discontinuity, in the case of human persons, between this mortal life and the eschatologically new life of resurrection. The first creation, by its nature, lapses back into nothing. It requires a fresh creative act of God to give it, as it were, a quite new form of existence, taken beyond all threat of evil and destruction, indwelt by his own glory, participating in his own eternity. As 21:4 makes clear, it is the end of suffering and mortality that is in mind when Revelation speaks of the ‘passing away’ of ‘the first things’. That the contrast between ‘the first heaven and the first earth’, on the one hand, and ‘the new heaven and the new earth’, on the other, refers to the eschatological renewal of this creation, not its replacement by another, is further confirmed by the observation that Jewish and Christian writers could speak rather similarly of the earth that perished in the Flood and the new world that emerged from the Flood (cf. 2 Pet. 3:6), understanding the Flood as a reversion of creation to the chaos from which it was first created. We shall return to the parallel with the Flood shortly.

  In 21:5, for the first and only time since 1:8, the One who sits on the throne speaks directly. He makes the solemn declaration, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ The key significance of the words, which echo Isaiah 65:17 (cf. 43:19), is underlined by God’s own command to John to write them, which follows. They correspond to 4:11: ‘you created all things’. The universality of the eschatological new beginning corresponds to the derivation of all things from God’s original creative act. This connection between creation and new creation highlights the cosmic scope of John’s theological horizon, within which his primary concern with the human world is set.

  The full meaning of the biblical understanding of creation, that the whole of finite reality exists only by God the Creator’s gift of existence, has become suspect within the same currents of contemporary theology as are critical of the image of sovereignty.13 In part, this represents a distaste for the wholly asymmetrical relationship of the absolute dependence of the creation on the will of the Creator, in favour of some kind of mutuality between God and creation. But the theology of Revelation may help us to recognize two inevitable effects of such tendencies. In the first place, they betray one of the roots of the religious apprehension of the uniqueness of God: the awareness that beyond all the interdependence of creation, there is One to whom alone all things owe even existence (and therefore everything). This awareness is inseparable from monotheistic worship, in which worship is acknowledgment of the ultimacy and incomparability of this Creator and is therefore not given to any finite beings, which in the last resort are fellow-creatures of the same Creator (cf. Rev. 19:9–10; 22:8–9). Such awareness and worship (expressed in 4:11) by no means contradict or diminish the relative independence and significant creativity of creatures themselves, nor relationships of real mutuality between God and creation, but they go behind these things to acknowledge that they too are given by the Creator.

  Secondly, reducing the real transcendence of the Creator reduces the openness of his creation to the eschatologically new. A God who is not the transcendent origin of all things but a way of speaking of the immanent creative possibilities of the universe itself cannot be the ground of ultimate hope for the future of creation. Where faith in God the Creator wanes, so inevitably does hope for resurrection, let alone the new creation of all things. It is the God who is the Alpha who will also be the Omega.

  THE CREATOR’S FAITHFULNESS TO CREATION

  The eschatological hope of Revelation actually has its basis, not only in the understanding of God as Creator, but also in the belief in the Creator’s faithfulness to his creation. If faith in God as Creator raises the possibility of new creation, it is trust in his faithfulness to his creation which gives hope for new creation. This faithfulness of the Creator to his creation is the theological subject of the Flood narrative in Genesis and was expressed in the covenant with Noah (usually so called, but actually, according to Genesis, God’s covenant with Noah and all creation). There is probably an allusion to the Noahic covenant in Revelation 4:3. Although the rainbow round the throne was certainly suggested by Ezekiel’s vision of the divine throne, in which the splendour of the figure on the throne was said to be like a rainbow (Ezek. 1:28), it is likely that, just as John found a hint of the Sinai theophany in the lightning of Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek. 1:13
; Rev. 455), so he saw in Ezekiel’s allusion to the rainbow the sign of the covenant with Noah. Thus, whereas Ezekiel described the divine splendour as ‘like the appearance of a rainbow’, John sees around the throne ‘a rainbow like an emerald in appearance’. The rainbow moves from simile to reality as it becomes the bow that God set in the heavens after the Flood as a sign of his covenant with the earth (Gen. 9:13–17).

  The extent to which the Creator’s faithfulness to his creation is the theme of Revelation can be appreciated if we notice a significant allusion to the Genesis Flood story in Revelation 11:18. The time of the end – the judgment and the inauguration of God’s kingdom – is there said to be, among other things, the time ‘for destroying the destroyers of the earth’. This is an example of the eschatological jus talionis, a way of speaking of God’s eschatological judgment in which the description of the punishment matches verbally the description of the sin (cf. other examples in 16:6; 18:6; 22:18–19). It was a literary way of indicating the absolute justice of God’s judgment: the punishment matches the crime. In this case, the verbal correspondence is achieved by the use of a Greek verb (diaphtheirō) which can mean both ‘destroy’, in the sense of causing to perish, and ‘ruin’, in the sense of corrupting with evil.14 The ‘destroyers of the earth’ are the powers of evil: the dragon, the beast, and the harlot of Babylon (who in 19:2 is said to have ‘corrupted – or destroyed – the earth with her fornication’). With their violence, oppression and idolatrous religion they are ruining God’s creation. His faithfulness to his creation requires that he destroy them in order to preserve and to deliver it from evil.

  However, the phrase – ‘for destroying the destroyers of the earth’ – also alludes to the equivalent wordplay in Genesis 6:11–13, 17, where the Hebrew verb šāat has the same double meaning. God there determines to destroy, along with the earth itself, those who are corrupting the earth with their evil ways. This he did in the Flood, which was a divine judgment aimed at delivering God’s creation from the ruinous violence of its inhabitants.

  At first sight, this parallel between the Flood and the eschatological judgment to which Revelation 11:18 refers might seem to contradict the covenant with Noah, rather than indicating God’s faithfulness to it. In that covenant, God promised that ‘never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth’ (Gen. 9:11). However, we should remember the way in which the earth was destroyed in the Flood. The waters of the flood are understood as the primeval waters of chaos or the waters of the abyss (Gen. 1:2; 7:11), which God in creation had restrained and held at bay, but had not abolished (Gen. 1:6–7). They symbolize the power of nothingness to undo creation, a destructive potential which remains to threaten the created universe with reversion to chaos. In the narrative of the Flood, God is represented as allowing the waters of the abyss to flood the world, returning it to chaos (cf. 1 Enoch 83:4).

  These waters of chaos are the sea from which the beast, with his destructive violence, arises (Rev. 13:1; cf. Dan. 7:2–3). At the parousia the beast himself is removed (19:20), but not yet the potentiality for evil. Following the destruction of the devil, death and Hades (20:10, 14) – the last of the destroyers of the earth – the new creation is characterized by one feature that makes it really, eschatologically new: ‘the sea was no more’ (21:1). The waters of the primeval abyss, that represent the source of destructive evil, the possibility of the reversion of creation to chaos, are finally no more. So the judgment of the old creation and the inauguration of the new is not so much a second Flood as the final removal of the threat of another Flood. In new creation God makes his creation eternally secure from any threat of destructive evil. In this way Revelation portrays God as faithful to the Noahic covenant and indeed surpassing it in his faithfulness to his creation: first by destroying the destroyers of the earth, finally by taking creation beyond the threat of evil. Only then does it become the home he indwells with the splendour of his divine glory (21:3, 22, 23).

  * * *

  1 See chapter 5 below.

  2 E.g. the Hadrumetum magical text, quoted in E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, revised and ed. G. Vermes, F. Millar, M. Goodman, vol. III: 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), 358.

  3 TDNT 2.399; D. E. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 280–1.

  4 Cf. Dan. 7:9–10; 1 Enoch 14; 60:1–6; 71; 2 Enoch 20–1; Ap. Abr. 15–18.

  5 Cf. K. Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ (London: SCM Press, 1987), part 1.

  6 On this paragraph, see R. Bauckham, ‘The Economic Critique of Rome in Revelation 18’, in L. Alexander, ed., Images of Empire (JSOTSS 122; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 47–90, which becomes chapter 10 in Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy.

  7 See Chapter 11 (‘Nero and the Beast’) in Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy.

  8 Apophaticism (or negative theology) radically distinguishes God from all creaturely being by conceiving him in negative terms: he is not what creatures are.

  9 E.g. D. Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 151–3.

  10 D. Nicholls, Deity and Domination (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 236. (This book is an excellent treatment of this issue in nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious and political thought.)

  11 E.g. S. McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (London: SCM Press, 1987), 63–9.

  12 On this paragraph, see R. Bauckham, ‘God Who Raises the Dead: The Resurrection of Jesus in Relation to Early Christian Faith in God’, forthcoming in P. Avis, ed., The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark).

  13 E.g. D. Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 131–2; S. McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (London: SCM Press, 1987), 109–10.

  14 Cf. a similar use of phtheirō in another sentence of eschatological jus talionis: 1 Cor. 3:17.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Lamb on the throne

  Christian dogmatics has traditionally distinguished, as two doctrinal topics, the person of Christ and the work of Christ. Although the two are, of course, closely connected, we shall make use of the distinction, in order to study, in the present chapter, Revelation’s identification of Jesus Christ with God, and in the next chapter, its understanding of Jesus Christ’s work of establishing God’s kingdom on earth.

  THE FIRST AND THE LAST

  John’s vision begins with a Christophany. The risen Christ appears as a glorious heavenly being (1:12–16), and declares his identity thus:

  I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and Hades.

  (1:17–18)

  In the last chapter we have already noticed that the self-declaration, ‘I am the first and the last’, corresponds to the divine self-declaration, ‘I am the Alpha and Omega’ (1:8), and that in Revelation as a whole there is the following pattern of two self-declarations by God and two by Christ:

  God:

  I am the Alpha and the Omega.

  (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)

  A close study of this pattern can reveal the remarkable extent to which Revelation identifies Jesus Christ with God.

  As we have seen, the two titles, ‘the Alpha and the Omega’, ‘the beginning and the end’, used of God, designate God as eternal in relation to the world. He precedes and originates all things, as their Creator, and he will bring all things to their eschatological fulfilment. The titles cannot mean anything else when they are used of Christ in 22:13. Although it might initially seem that God and Christ are in some way distinguished by the two different
self-declarations in 1:8 and 1:17, in 22:13 the placing of the title which is used only of Christ (‘the first and the last’) between those which have hitherto been used only of God seems deliberately to align all three as equivalent. Moreover, since the title, ‘the first and the last’, is the one that occurs in divine self-declarations in Deutero-Isaiah (Isa. 44:6; 48:12), with very much the significance that the other two titles have in Revelation, it would be very odd if precisely this one meant something different from the others in Revelation.

  It has sometimes been argued that its meaning is different. Its context in the first part of John’s vision, which concerns Christ’s relationship with the seven churches, and its connexion with the resurrection in 1:17–18, a connexion repeated in 2:8, could suggest that it refers to Christ, not as first and last in relation to all creation, but as first and last in relation to the church. As ‘firstborn from the dead’ (1:5), the risen Christ is the origin of the church, which he will also bring to fulfilment in his parousia. However, this is not the only way to read 1:17–18. The declaration begins by asserting Christ’s participation in the eternal being of God, the origin and goal of all things (‘I am the first and the last’), and then continues by asserting the particular – indeed, extraordinary – way in which he, as ‘the living one’ (1:18), shares God’s eternal livingness. Whereas of God it is said that he is ‘the One who is and who was and who is to come’ (1:8) or that he is ‘the One who lives forever and ever’ (4:9, 10; 10:6; 15:7), Christ says: ‘I was dead, and behold, I am alive forever and ever’ (1:18). His eternal livingness was interrupted by the experience of a human death, and he shares the eternal life of God through triumph over death. Therefore also, whereas the divine self-declaration in 1:8 states the divine lordship as his power over all things, the corresponding statement of Christ’s participation in the divine lordship in 1:18 refers to the authority over death and Hades which he has won through his death and resurrection: ‘I have the keys of Death and Hades.’