The Theology of the Book of Revelation

by Richard Bauckham

  There is a sense in which Revelation, as the culmination of the biblical prophetic tradition, is peculiarly able to transcend its original context of relevance. It gathers up and re-envisions many of the strands of biblical prophecy which had most clearly surpassed their own original contexts and inspired the continuing hopes of God’s people. Moreover, in doing so it combines a contextual specificity of relevance to its first readers with a kind of eschatological hyperbole that intrinsically transcends their context. As we have already observed, it constantly uses emphatically universal language both about the power and dominion and worship of the beast and about the mission and witness of the church. The church is drawn from every nation (5:9) and constitutes an innumerable multitude (7:9). Its witness, symbolized by the angel’s proclamation of the eternal gospel, goes out to all nations (14:6). The expected period of trial under the rule of the beast is coming on the whole world (3:10). The beast has authority over every nation and is worshipped by all the inhabitants of the earth (13:7–8). The second beast enforces his worship by a system of totalitarian control of economic life (13:12–17) which, though it fulfils the logic of the beast’s kind of power, far exceeds not merely the realities, but the possibilities of the first century. The dragon, the beast and the false prophet assemble the kings of the whole world for the final battle at Armageddon (16:14). Babylon deceives all the nations (14:8; 18:3, 23) and is guilty of the blood of all who have been slaughtered on earth (18:24). Even allowing for the limitations of the geographical horizon of first-century people, all this must be deliberately hyperbolic. It depicts the impending conflict between the church and the beast in terms which are eschatologically universal rather than historically realistic. It superimposes the vision of the coming of God’s universal kingdom on the immediate future which John and his readers confront.

  This does not mean that John predicts, in some distant future, centuries later than the Roman Empire, a truly universal, totalitarian, anti-Christian state. The hyperbole is of the same kind as another we have noticed in chapter 4 above: the way John writes as though all Christians are to suffer martyrdom. The hyperbole makes clear what is at stake in the conflict between the church and the Empire. That conflict truly concerns the coming of God’s universal kingdom. But the hyper bole also shows that what is at stake in the conflict of that time is what is always at stake in the church’s history. The beast as the Roman Empire never held truly universal power, but what the beast represents, in a thousand other historical forms, contests the control of God’s world until the coming of his eschatological kingdom. Therefore also the street of the great city, in which the witnesses to God’s truth lie dead at the hands of the beast, need be neither in Jerusalem nor in Rome nor even in the cities of Asia. It may also be wherever the unprecedented numbers of Christian martyrs in our own century have died. The eschatological hyperbole gives these symbols intrinsic power to reach as far as the parousia. Furthermore, it is not only the hyperbole that gives the images this power. Because John’s images are images designed to penetrate the essential character of the forces at work in his contemporary world and the ultimate issues at stake in it, to a remarkable extent they leave aside the merely incidental historical features of his world. There are enough of them to make the reference unmistakable: Babylon is built on seven hills (17:9) and trades in a very accurate list of the imports to first-century Rome from all over the known world (18:11–13).8 But they are sufficiently few to make the reapplication of the images to comparable situations easy. Any society whom Babylon’s cap fits must wear it. Any society which absolutizes its own economic prosperity at the expense of others comes under Babylon’s condemnation.

  Thus Revelation, in its predictive element, found fulfilment in its own immediate future and also finds a continuing relevance that transcends its original context and may still inspire and inform hope for the coming of God’s kingdom. In this combination of fulfilment and eschatological excess, John’s prophecy proves true to the tradition of biblical prophecy, and for those who find that tradition’s vision of the world convincing it proves true.

  IMMINENCE AND DELAY

  The same issue which we have discussed in the last section has a further aspect which is worth noticing, if only because modern readers frequently find it problematic. This is the imminent expectation, which Revelation shares with most of the New Testament documents. John’s prophecy is a revelation of ‘what must soon take place’ (1:1; cf. 1:3; 22:10: ‘the time is near’). This cannot mean only that the great conflict of the church and the Empire is soon to begin, for the parousia itself is also said to be soon. Three times in the epilogue, Jesus himself promises, ‘I am coming soon’ (22:7, 12, 20; cf. 2:16; 3:11). Many have thought early Christianity’s eschatological expectation itself to be invalidated by this sense of temporal imminence. Such a conclusion renders much of the New Testament problematic, but none more so than this book which is so dominated by the eschatological expectation.

  However, eschatological delay is as much a feature of Revelation as eschatological imminence. It is written into the structure of the book. From the moment the martyrs cry, ‘How long?’ and are told to wait a little while longer (6:10–11), the reader – and more especially, the hearer of an oral performance of Revelation – becomes conscious of the tension of imminence and delay, as the End is constantly approached but not definitively reached. Disappointingly moderate series of warning judgments progress rather slowly towards the expected climax in the final judgment. The interludes between the sixth and seventh seal-openings and between the sixth and seventh trumpet-blasts both symbolize and explain the delay. In the crucial chapters 10–11, we learn that there is to be no more delay for the sake of further warning judgments (10:3–6) and that there is to be a delay, lasting the symbolic period of three-and-a-half years (11:3), for the sake of the church’s prophetic witness to the world. John here creates his own version of the tension between eschatological imminence and eschatological delay that runs through the whole apocalyptic tradition. The logic of imminence is that God’s kingdom must come. Evil is triumphant and the righteous suffer: surely this contradiction to God’s purpose cannot continue indefinitely? If God is the righteous God he must soon put all wrongs to right. But the logic of delay is that of God’s patience and grace. He gives people time to repent. John’s revelation of the role of the church’s suffering witness deepens this logic. That very suffering of the righteous which, for the apocalyptic tradition, demands God’s imminent intervention to establish his kingdom, is actually God’s strategy for establishing his kingdom.

  The three-and-a-half year period is, of course, symbolic. (Anyone who doubts that Revelation’s time-periods are all symbolic should consider 2:10; 17:12.) It is also characterized as ‘a little while’ (6:11; 12:12; 17:10), a phrase which, like the period of three and a half years, has an exegetical basis and a traditional role in consideration of the eschatological delay (Ps. 37:10; Isa. 26:20; Heb. 10:37). It assures the church that her time of trial is not indefinite. In God’s purpose it has a limit and the kingdom will finally come. It is consistent with Jesus’ promise to come ‘soon’, but in a way that removes the possibility of chronological calculation. The church which prays for the coming of the kingdom and hopes for the conversion of the nations lives in the tension of imminence and delay. That the tension is theological rather than merely chronological explains why the delay of the parousia was not the kind of problem for the early church that it became for modern New Testament scholars.9

  The really important effect of the imminent expectation in Revelation is that it enables John to bring his prophetic vision of the final outcome of history to bear on his understanding of the contemporary situation. It is as he sees God’s purpose of finally establishing his universal kingdom impinging on the present that John is able to perceive God’s purpose in the present situation and the role that Christians are called to play in that purpose with a view to the coming of the kingdom. In this prophetic process of confronting the pres
ent with God’s final purpose for history there is the implicit recognition that the End of history bears a unique relationship to the whole of history. It is not just the last thing to happen, coming after the penultimate historical event. It is the point at which the truth of all history comes to light. It is the divine judgment on the value and meaning of all history. In that sense, the imminent expectation of the early Christians was a way of living in the light of what history is finally, in God’s purpose, all about. It sees every moment of life in relation to the coming of God’s kingdom. We cannot artificially reproduce this sense of imminence in the temporal form it took for many earlier generations of Christians. But we need a kind of second naivety in which, beyond the superficial obstacle of the delay of the parousia, we can share the early Christian sense of the relation of meaning between the present and the eschatological kingdom of God.

  REVELATION’S RELEVANCE TODAY

  This final section is far from exhaustive. It does not attempt to pre-empt the ways in which readers may find their own routes from engaging with Revelation’s theology to contextualizing it in a contemporary situation. It merely highlights briefly some points which have emerged in this study as offering theological directions for contemporary reflection:

  (1) We have suggested that one of the functions of Revelation was to purge and to refurbish the Christian imagination. It tackles people’s imaginative response to the world, which is at least as deep and influential as their intellectual convictions. It recognizes the way a dominant culture, with its images and ideals, constructs the world for us, so that we perceive and respond to the world in its terms. Moreover, it unmasks this dominant construction of the world as an ideology of the powerful which serves to maintain their power. In its place, Revelation offers a different way of perceiving the world which leads people to resist and to challenge the effects of the dominant ideology. Moreover, since this different way of perceiving the world is fundamentally to open it to transcendence it resists any absolutizing of power or structures or ideals within this world. This is the most fundamental way in which the church is called always to be counter-cultural. The necessary purging and refurbishing of the Christian imagination must, of course, always be as contextual as Revelation was in its original context, but Revelation can help to inform and to inspire it.

  (2) It needs to be added at once that Revelation is overwhelmingly concerned with the truth of God. So we should not construe the notion of different imaginative ways of perceiving the world in the vulgarly postmodern way that reduces all significant truth to matters of personal preference and ends in nihilism. Revelation gives us no warrant for mistaking images for truth itself, but it seeks images that conform to truth and seeks to use images in a way that conforms to truth. It reminds us that the church’s witness to the world is authentic only as primarily a witness to truth – to the one true God and the truth of his righteousness and grace. In western societies today this witness to the truth does not confront a totalitarian ideology which claims sole truth and seeks to suppress the Gospel. Instead it faces a relativistic despair of the possibility of truth and, even more, a consumerist neglect of the relevance of truth. The church’s witness will be of value only if it knows truth worth dying for.

  (3) The alternative vision of the world which Revelation claims to be orientated to the truth is strongly theocentric. In this it shows the power of a theocentric vision to confront oppression, injustice and inhumanity. In the end it is only a purified vision of the transcendence of God that can effectively resist the human tendency to idolatry which consists in absolutizing aspects of this world. The worship of the true God is the power of resistance to the deification of military and political power (the beast) and economic prosperity (Babylon). In the modern age we may add that it is what can prevent movements of resistance to injustice and oppression from dangerously absolutizing themselves.

  (4) Revelation resists the dominant ideology not only by its reference to the transcendent God (heaven) but also by its reference to an alternative future (the new creation and the New Jerusalem). By seeing the world as open to divine transcendence it opens the world to the coming of God’s kingdom. It is this which makes possible both the full recognition of injustice and oppression and the relativizing of the structures, however powerful, which presently maintain them.

  (5) As well as Revelation’s perspective from above (the divine transcendence in heaven) and from the eschatological future, it also in some sense adopts a perspective from below, that is, from the standpoint of the victims of history. This is a standpoint taken in solidarity, rather than necessarily where John and his readers are by social and economic status. But it is the result of standing for God and his kingdom against the idolatries of the powerful. Insofar as Revelation’s theology might be called a liberation theology, it speaks to the affluent and the powerful as much as to the poor and oppressed.

  (6) Revelation does not respond to the dominant ideology by promoting Christian withdrawal into a sectarian enclave that leaves the world to its judgment while consoling itself with millennial dreams. Since this is the standard caricature of the apocalyptic mentality, it must be strongly emphasized that it is the opposite of Revelation’s outlook, which is orientated to the coming of God’s kingdom in the whole world and calls Christians to active participation in this coming of the kingdom. In its daring hope for the conversion of all the nations to the worship of the true God it develops the most universalistic features of the biblical prophetic tradition. In its conception of the church’s prophetic witness as standing for the true God and his righteousness against the political and economic idolatries of Rome it is faithful to the prophetic tradition’s conviction that the true worship of the true God is inseparable from justice and truth in all aspects of life. It is in the public, political world that Christians are to witness for the sake of God’s kingdom. Worship, which is so prominent in the theocentric vision of Revelation, has nothing to do with pietistic retreat from the public world. It is the source of resistance to the idolatries of the public world. It points representatively to the acknowledgment of the true God by all the nations, in the universal worship for which the whole creation is destined.

  (7) It is Revelation’s orientation towards God’s universal kingdom which accounts for its emphasis on future eschatology. The critics, already mentioned, who see Revelation as an insufficiently Christianized form of Judaism, often have this in mind, contrasting Revelation with the greater emphasis on realized eschatology in some other New Testament writings. But merely to contrast relative emphases is to miss the point. In the theology of Revelation it is foundational that the eschatological victory of Jesus Christ has already been won, and its immediate result, in constituting a people of God drawn from all nations, is a kind of realization of God’s kingdom in the sense that this people already acknowledges God’s rule. The emphasis on future eschatology comes from the recognition that this is not the goal of God’s purpose. The sense in which God’s kingdom has not yet come is that the powers which dominate the world do so in defiance of God and his righteousness. The church does not exist for itself, but in order to participate in the coming of God’s universal kingdom. The victory the Messiah has already won is the decisive eschatological event, but it cannot have reached its goal until all evil is abolished from God’s world and all the nations are gathered into the Messiah’s kingdom. This is indeed a Jewish apocalyptic perspective on the Christian salvation-event, but it is an entirely necessary counterweight to a kind of realized eschatology which so spiritualizes the kingdom of God as to forget the unredeemed nature of the world. Revelation’s future eschatology serves to keep the church orientated towards God’s world and God’s future for the world.

  (8) Revelation’s prophetic critique is of the churches as much as of the world. It recognizes that there is a false religion not only in the blatant idolatries of power and prosperity, but also in the constant danger that true religion falsify itself in compromise with such idolatries and betrayal
of the truth of God. Again, this is the relevance of Revelation’s theocentric emphasis on worship and truth. The truth of God is known in genuine worship of God. To resist idolatry in the world by faithful witness to the truth, the church must continuously purify its own perception of truth by the vision of the utterly Holy One, the sovereign Creator, who shares his throne with the slaughtered Lamb.