He sees the unity of Old Testament prophecy in its hope for the coming of God’s universal kingdom on earth. He reads it in the light of the beginning of the fulfilment of that hope in the life, death and resurrection of jesus, and in the consequent transformation of the people of God into a people drawn from all nations. He reads the Old Testament in the light of jesus and his church, but he also interprets Jesus and his church by means of Old Testament prophecy. The latter gives him the expectation that God’s universal kingdom must come. His Christian faith gives him the conviction that it is through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection that it will come. But he is also a prophet himself, with a fresh revelation to communicate. This is that the church is called to participate in Jesus’ victory over evil by following the same path that he trod: the path of faithful witness to the truth even to the point of death. This will be the final conflict of God’s people against the powers of this world that oppose God’s rule. By this means truth will prevail over the lies by which evil rules. In this way the nations may be won to the worship of the one true God. In this way Jesus will prove to be the one who fulfils all the promises of God. In this way the universal kingdom of God, to which the whole biblical prophetic tradition finally points, will come on earth.
Thus John’s own prophetic revelation of the divine purpose, which he claims was revealed to him by Jesus Christ who received it from God, is the focal point around which he is able to draw together a rich variety of images and expectations from the whole prophetic tradition before his time. The process of interpreting Jesus Christ in the light of the Old Testament and the Old Testament in the light of jesus Christ, which had been going on in the early church from its beginning, and had to go on if the church were not to break Jesus’ own complete continuity with the religious tradition of his people, comes to a climax in relation to John’s new prophetic revelation. Of course, this is only relatively new. It gives new clarity to those indications in the Old Testament and early Christian tradition which John himself is able to interpret in line with his revelation. Above all, it gives new life to a vision of the future drawn from the prophetic tradition but now envisioned afresh. Small groups of Christians in hostile surroundings, naturally tempted either to assimilate or to turn in on themselves, are challenged to realize that vision by taking on the whole might of the Roman Empire and winning the nations to God by their faithful witness to his truth. From our twentieth-century perspective we need imagination to grasp the full prophetic daring of John’s vision.
Given its character and its relation to the rest of the Christian canon of Scripture, the place which Revelation now occupies at the close of the whole canon could not be more appropriate. No other biblical book gathers up so comprehensively the whole biblical tradition in its direction towards the eschatological future. It draws out the sense in which the biblical history, not least its climax in the Christ event, points towards the universal kingdom of God, and it gives the whole canon the character of the book which enables us to live towards that future.
TRUE PROPHECY?
The church’s acceptance of Revelation into the New Testament canon was a recognition of it as true prophecy. However, both in the early church and again in the sixteenth century, when questions of canonicity were to some extent reopened, there were those who rejected Revelation. Admittedly, those who doubted its value rarely engaged with more than superficial aspects of the book. But in more recent Christian history a sense that its status as Christian Scripture is problematic has been more widespread. We cannot avoid the question: is it true prophecy? An appropriate response will recognize that this question cannot be answered by the judgment of individuals or groups. It is the use of Scripture as Scripture by the church as a whole over the many centuries of its history in a wide variety of historical contexts which vindicates its capacity to convey the Word of God to God’s people. Space precludes a survey of the many ways in which Revelation has been used and misused in the history of the church. But such a survey would show that the popular impression of it as the special preserve of sectarian groups carried away by millenarian fantasy is highly misleading. Of course, there have been and are such groups. But Revelation has persistently inspired the whole church’s vision of God and his purpose for history and the eschatological future, perhaps especially in its liturgy, hymns and art.1 It has been the book both of martyrs2 and of visionaries: the two groups which have so often saved the church from betraying its witness in compromised conformity to the world. It has been a recurrent source of prophetic critique both of the church itself and of the state and society.3
However, it is worthwhile to raise the question of Revelation’s status as true prophecy as a way of confronting some of the issues which affect its interpretation as the Word of God for the church today. We may begin by noticing that Revelation’s continuity with the Old Testament, which our last section stressed, is precisely what offends some modern critics. Rudolf Bultmann, in a famous phrase, condemned it as ‘weakly Christianised Judaism’.4 But the phrase betrays the influence of the tendency of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Christianity to deny its Jewish roots. It makes the extraordinary suggestion that only what is not Jewish is really Christian and that Christianity somehow came into being by negating Judaism. We should now be able to recognize not only the unconscious tendency to anti-Semitism in this approach, but also how aberrant it is, judged by the standard of the whole Christian tradition which consistently claimed the strongest continuity with the Old Testament. It is also historically implausible. As we can now recognize, not only Revelation but all the New Testament documents are the products of a movement best described as a form of first-century Judaism, distinguished from other forms of Judaism not by what it denied in the Jewish religious tradition, but by what it asserted about the way that tradition’s hopes for the kingdom of God were being fulfilled by Jesus the Messiah.5 It was only Christian Gnosticism which tried to deny the continuity. In developing so pervasively the continuity between the faith and hope Christians placed in Jesus and the Old Testament tradition of faith and hope in God, Revelation merely affirms in a rather remarkable way what all early Christians believed. Moreover, it is worth recalling that no other New Testament book can match the astonishing universalism of Revelation’s hope for the conversion of the nations and also that this is firmly rooted in the universal hope of the Old Testament prophetic tradition. In becoming a universal religion Christianity did not break but developed its continuity with the Jewish religious tradition.
This means that Revelation’s claim to be prophecy must be understood in relation to its claim to continuity with the whole biblical prophetic tradition. It must be understood in terms of the nature of biblical prophecy in general, about which it is worth repeating the platitude that biblical prophecy is much more than prediction. Like biblical prophecy in general, Revelation as prophecy may be said to comprise three closely related elements. First, there is discernment of the contemporary situation by prophetic insight into God’s nature and purpose. We have noticed Revelation’s dominant prophetic concern for exposing the truth of things – both in the churches and in the world – and for revealing how things look from the perspective of God’s heavenly rule. In this way the deceitful ideology of Roman power is exposed and the churches are alerted to the truth of the situation in which they are called to witness. Secondly, there is prediction. In John’s vision he sees not only ‘what is’, but also ‘what must take place after this’ (1:19; cf. 4:1; 1:1). Essentially, the prediction consists in seeing how God’s ultimate purpose for the coming of his universal kingdom relates to the contemporary situation as it is perceived by the prophet. What must take place is the coming of God’s kingdom – or God would not be God. Prophecy as prediction reveals how the contemporary situation must change if God’s kingdom is to come. Thirdly, prophecy demands of its hearers an appropriate response to its perception of the truth of the contemporary world and its prediction of what the working-out of God’s purpose must mean for the
contemporary world. It is this third element that ensures that the predictive element in biblical prophecy is not fatalistic. It leaves room for human freedom, for human response to God’s will and human participation in his purpose for the world. Jonah’s threat of judgment on Nineveh is not fulfilled because Nineveh responds to his prophecy by repenting. God’s kingdom must come – or God would not be God – but the predicted manner of its coming is conditional on human response and on God’s freedom to embrace human freedom in his purpose. It is true that Jewish apocalyptic tended to a more deterministic view of history than was characteristic of Old Testament prophecy, but we have observed how, in this respect, John is closer to the older prophetic outlook. His prophecy does not predetermine the outcome of the church’s calling to witness to the nations. All that is unconditional is that God’s kingdom must come and his eschatological renewal of his creation take place. But alongside the hope of the conversion of all the nations to the worship of the true God stands the threat of judgment on the world in its final refusal to acknowledge God’s rule.
We have in this book observed several times that Revelation does not predict a sequence of events, as though it were history written in advance. Such a misunderstanding of the book6 cannot survive a serious and sensitive study of its imagery. What is specifically predicted as occurring between its own present and the parousia, the final arrival of the kingdom, is a period of conflict between the church and the beast, in which the church will bear its prophetic witness to the nations by persevering in its loyalty to the true God even to the point of death. In this period the powers of evil will do all they can to suppress the church’s witness, but their very success in putting Christians to death will be the opportunity for the truth of the church’s witness to prove its power to convince and to convert the nations. This ‘short’ period before the end (cf. 12:12) is symbolized by the apocalyptic period of three and a half years, already a traditional symbol for the period of the final onslaught by the enemies of God against God’s people before the End. It ends with the End itself: the coming of Christ to gather the converted nations into his kingdom and to end all opposition to his rule. This is described in a wide range of symbolic images, as is the eschatological consummation of creation in the immediate presence of God which follows.
Thus what John foresees of history before the End itself is that there will be the great conflict, the life-and-death struggle between the beast and the church, in which God’s secret strategy for the followers of the Lamb to participate in the coming of God’s kingdom is to take effect. Of course, even this is less a prediction than a call to the church to provoke and to win the conflict by persevering in faithful witness. But certainly no sequence of events within this final period of history is predicted. The kaleidoscope of images with which John depicts it are concerned with its nature and meaning. They explore the character of the beast’s power and deceit, the ineffectiveness of mere judgments to bring about repentance, the power of suffering witness to convince of truth, the relationship of the church’s witness to that of Jesus, and so on. Above all, they give the church the heavenly perspective on the meaning of the conflict and the nature of victory in it that the church will need in order to persevere in its costly witness throughout.
To anyone who accepts the perceptive element in John’s prophecy it is obvious in what a remarkable sense the predictive element proved true in the two centuries after it was written. By the end of the period of the persecutions, on the eve of the Constantinian revolution which dramatically changed the church’s relation to the Empire, Christians, though still a minority, had become a sizeable minority to be reckoned with. Persecution for much of the period was local and sporadic, but in the third century the growth of Christianity provoked the series of great persecutions which were determined attempts to stamp it out. Christianity was not perceived as just another degenerate eastern cult, but as in conflict with the whole pagan view of the world and in particular with the absolutist claims of the Roman imperial ideology. Throughout the period martyrdom played a major role in the success of the Christian Gospel. Of course, the historical evidence is not available to weigh it against other factors. But it is clear that not only was martyrdom frequently the way in which the claims of the Christian God were brought to inescapable public attention, but also that the fact of the martyrs’ willingness to die and the way in which they died were seen to cohere with the nature of the religious message they believed. Moreover, John’s own prophecy played a role, as it was intended to do, in providing the church with the vision that made martyrdom possible and meaningful.7
The nature of Christianity’s eventual historical victory over the pagan Empire is, of course, far more ambivalent. In the Christian empire and its successors the beast constantly reappeared in ever new Christian disguises. The reader of Revelation need not be surprised, since the beast and Babylon have their counterparts and agents already within the seven churches of Asia. But clearly the conversion of the Empire was not the coming of the eschatological kingdom. History, with all its ambivalence as the scene of struggle between truth and deceit, in which God’s kingdom is present only in hiddenness and contradiction and the devil’s power to deceive the nations with the idolatries of power and prosperity is by no means abolished, continued and continues. Moreover, the history we have sketched is a small, though significant, part of world history. Even for John, who must have known of many nations, not only the Parthians, far beyond the boundaries of the Empire, the statements that the beast rules all the nations of the world (13:7–8) and that all nations have drunk Babylon’s wine (14:8; 18:3, cf. 23–34; cf. 17:18) must have been deliberately hyperbolic, but for us they seem very much more so. The church’s struggle with the Roman Empire not only was not, but could not have been the last stage, short of the parousia, in the achievement of God’s universal kingdom on earth.
Thus John’s prophecy was remarkably fulfilled, but not by the coming of the kingdom. It retains, as it were, an unfulfilled, eschatological excess. Here it is important to revert to the nature of biblical prophecy in general. Biblical prophecy always both addressed the prophet’s contemporaries about their own present and the future immediately impending for them and raised hopes which proved able to transcend their immediate relevance to the prophet’s contemporaries and to continue to direct later readers to God’s purpose for their future. Historicizing modern scholarship has sometimes stressed the former to the total exclusion of the latter, forgetting that most biblical prophecy was only preserved in the canon of Scripture because its relevance was not exhausted by its reference to its original context. Conversely, fundamentalist interpretation, which finds in biblical prophecy coded predictions of specific events many centuries later than the prophet, misunderstands prophecy’s continuing relevance by neglecting to ask what it meant to its first hearers. It is important, as we have done in this book, to understand how John’s prophecy addressed his contemporaries, since they are the only readers it explicitly addresses. This does not prevent us from appreciating but helps us to understand how it may also transcend its original context and speak to us.
Two features of the way biblical prophecy proved to have continuing relevance to later readers are relevant. In the first place, in the biblical tradition God’s purposes in history were understood to be consistent, and therefore his great acts of salvation and judgment in the past could be understood as models for what he would do in the future. This is why, for example, the imagery of the exodus came to play so important a part, not least in Revelation, in depicting the eschatological events of salvation and judgment. But it also meant that prophecies which had been fulfilled could be reinterpreted and reapplied to new situations. When John echoed the Old Testament prophecies of the doom of Babylon and the doom of Tyre, using them to compose his own prophecy of the fall of Babylon, he was not ignorant of their original reference to the great pagan powers contemporary with the prophets who pronounced those oracles. But he saw Rome as the successor to Tyre in its econo
mic empire and the successor to Babylon in its political oppression. Since the evil of these cities was echoed and surpassed by Rome, how much more must God’s judgment on them fall also on Rome. The city which the prophetic cap fits must wear it. Such a principle allows prophetic oracles to transcend their original reference, without supposing that somehow when Jeremiah referred to Babylon he really meant Rome. The same principle validates the way in which Revelation has inspired prophetic critiques of later systems of political and economic oppression throughout the church’s history and still does so today.
Secondly, prophetic promise frequently exceeded fulfilment. For example, the restoration of Israel after the Babylonian exile did not match up to the terms in which the great prophets of the exile foresaw it. In one sense their prophecies were vindicated, but in another sense they continued to inspire hopes for a much greater salvation event in which God would be vindicated universally as the God both of his people and of the nations of the world. In this excess of promise over fulfilment lay the roots of much apocalyptic eschatology. John’s own vision of the New Jerusalem has developed from the visions of the prophets of the exile which the actual rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple after the exile fell far short of realizing. There is a sense in which much of the biblical prophetic tradition has an eschatological tendency. That is, the contemporary situation is brought into direct relationship with a final resolution of history in the coming of God’s kingdom. Isaiah already envisages the paradisal rule of universal peace and justice by the messianic shoot from the stump of Jesse as the critique and imminent replacement of the militaristic oppression of the Assyrian empire, just as John expects the victory of the martyrs and God’s judgment of the Roman system of power to mean the arrival of the universal kingdom of God at the parousia of jesus Christ. In the later prophets and the apocalyptic tradition this eschatological tendency only becomes more explicit and defined. It seems to be intrinsic to the biblical prophetic tradition of perceiving God’s will for the immediate situation in terms of his ultimate purposes of righteousness and grace for his whole creation. That it was a non-problematic feature of the tradition is shown by the way such prophecy was not rejected as false but taken up into the tradition of Jewish and Christian hope. Fulfilments of prophecy were real and recognized, but fell short of the eschatological excess of expectation which the prophecies raised and which could be satisfied only by God’s final victory over all evil. The delay of this final victory was problematic for the same reason that the problem of evil itself is necessarily problematic for all theistic believers. But the prophecies themselves were evidently not problematic. Their provisional fulfilments, within the ambiguities of history, sustained hope for the coming of the eschatological kingdom itself.
The Theology of the Book of Revelation Page 18