The online Wednesday Night Small Group Bible Study at the Anglican Church of St Thomas, Kefalas, Crete, recently spent some ten sessions going through the twenty-two chapters of the Book of Revelation. We approached the text with an open mind, keeping in mind some of the past interpretations, but also some of the scholarship done in the last half century (some of which is noted in a previous Advent blog series which you can find here). We did not look for an authoritative interpretation, but asked ourselves how God was speaking to us and to our current 21st Century concerns.

In general, we approached the book from a historico-critical perspective: we noted that the book was written by a man named John who was exiled on the island of Patmos, and most likely composed late in the first century, perhaps around the year 90. We did not identify this John with the anonymous author of the Gospel according to John, nor with the the author of the three short Johannine epistles, although we did note that all these texts do seem to be related, perhaps emerging from a community or a set of churches in western Anatolia at different stages in the second half of the first century. When John speaks of visions of Babylon and various evil beasts we understood these as veiled references to the Roman Empire and its leadership – the same imperial power that killed Jesus, which continued to persecute his disciples, and exiled John to a little island.

We found some parts of Revelation challenging and disturbing. Here is a short list of some of the issues which are still very open for us. We will be discussing these at our next session.

The Wrath of God

A persistent theme in Revelation is the punishment of sinners both spiritual and human. The physical world suffers significantly in all of this. In the Hebrew Bible the wrath of God was aimed at Adam and Eve because of their disobedience, and against the people of Babel for their presumption at becoming like God. God was angry with those who worshipped idols, and so he cleared Canaan of the nations who blindly followed Baal and the other competing deities. Israelites who worshiped idols and did not trust in his promises also were deserving of his wrath, as were corrupt judges and those who oppressed the orphans, widows, and strangers among them. The books of Samuel and Kings deal with how the leadership turned away from God’s ways and how the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were punished by God through the nations of Assyria and Babylon. How do we understand this punishment?

This continues in the New Testament. The early church understood Gentiles as being idol worshippers and consequently utterly depraved in any number of ways (see Romans 1), and deserving of the coming wrath of God. It was subsequently underlined by the antagonism between Jews and the Empire that erupted in the Jewish War of 66-70, in which hundreds of thousands died and during which Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. It continued in the strong reaction to the demands that Gentile Christians observe the rituals of the Imperial cult, such as offering a sacrifice to the genius of the Emperor, or acknowledging the divinity of the Imperial succession. There seemed to be a clear division between the depraved idol-worshipers on the one hand and the holy followers of the Israelite God and those who found the fulfillment of the Torah in Jesus.

The early church followed in the passive resistance of Jesus, not failing to speak truth to power, but not reacting in defense with violence. Thus, they saw their vindication as something that would come later and would be done by God: Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, as it is written in Deuteronomy. When Christ came again, they believed, he would judge the living and the dead. This shows up in the letters of Paul and in the gospels. Revelation is another understanding of what that might look like, in the form of a series of vision seen by John of Patmos.

Within the group we struggled to understand this. Yes, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but are people to be condemned simply because they happened to be born in an ethnic group that worships the wrong gods? Are subject peoples to be condemned for the failings of their leaders? How do we square this with the generous forgiveness of God as shown in Jesus?

Punishment

How do we understand the punishments that are meted out in Revelation? Does God get angry and then bring about various kinds of pain and suffering upon the wicked, such as famine, war, and plague?

Or do we see these punishments as a kind of “what goes around comes around”, as if it is hard-baked into the world that those who do evil will eventually have evil done to them? One thinks of how slave-owners in the southern United States suffered economic disaster during and after the US Civil War, or how the Nazi Germans were defeated in the Second World War, and many of those who survived were then tried and punished with death or imprisonment.

On the other hand, the wicked frequently in this life go unpunished – Stalin and Mao died in their beds, despite their murderous actions. Will they be raised to judgement and then be flung into the lake of fire?

Prophecy and Time

How are we to understand the series of visions contained in Revelation? They are highly structured, yet seem to repeat themselves. Are they to be understood as different versions of the same thing, or discrete events?

As well, given that the victory has already been won by Christ upon the cross and in his resurrection, is Revelation really just the consequences of that victory delayed for a time, during which the gospel may be preached to all peoples?

And to what extent do we see these prophecies realised in our own time? Is climate change and the environmental degradation not a kind of fulfillment of the woes described in Revelation?

Assuming that John was indeed talking about the Roman Empire and its leaders when he wrote about Babylon and the world, how do we see this applying to our situation 1930 years later? Is there a strict correspondence between what John describes and the present day, or do we take his predictions more typologically?

Do we too often take literally that which should be read metaphorically and spiritually, and take metaphorically that which we should take literally? Given the way in which the heavens are described in a pre-scientific way, how do we read these disasters?

Christology

The Jesus in the Book of Revelation is both in continuity with the Jesus described in the letters of Paul and the Gospels and also different, because he is presented as coming to judge the living and the dead. He is the Son of Man as described in Daniel, and in the vision of heaven he is pictured as the Ancient of Days, one seated on a throne, and as a wounded lamb. How does this add or detract from how we normally understand Jesus, and how we are to follow Christ? What difference does this make to our understanding of the Kingdom of God?