The Christological Subersion of the Theme of Violence in the Book of Revelation (Part Three)
This is incorrect on at least two
accounts, one theological, the other biblical.
First, briefly, any theological account of Christ must not erase the
distinction between the death and resurrection of Christ by allowing the
resurrection to cancel out the harshness of the cross, or to see the cross as
salvific apart from the resurrection. We
must affirm that the identity of Christ is understood as an “identity in,” but not “above and beyond [the]
cross and resurrection.” This identity
must “remain bound up with the dialectic of cross and resurrection.”[1] Formally, this dialectical identity arises
because in the confirmation of Jesus Christ as the Son of the Father through
the vindication brought about by the resurrection, the logic of the matter
forces us to retroactively consider the identity of the pre-Easter Jesus.[2] This dialectic must be the case, “for who else
is the Resurrected One but he who has
been crucified?”[3] The corollary of this is that Christ remains
forever, even in His glory, the Living
One who has been dead.[4] This, the death of Jesus,
opens a new relationship to God
because it discloses the being of God in
its divine vitality, on the basis of
the death of Jesus. The deity of the living God—the divinity of
his life and thus the vitality of God—is compatible in a very precise sense
with the death of this human life. God’s
life is compatible with the death of Jesus in that it bears it. And by taking
death on himself, he conquers it. As the
victor over death, God discloses himself as God. In that the living God in his deity bears the
death of Jesus, in that he burdens the eternity of his being with the
crucifixion of Jesus, he demonstrates his divine being as a living unity of life and death.[5]
Christ
is the man-for-others, who gives himself away to serve His Father and the
coming Kingdom of God. “Let the Messiah,
the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and
believe,” mocks the crowd (Mk. 15:32 and parallels). But He resists this last temptation: His
death solidifies the natural motion of his life as a life of self-giving service
to the Father and His kingdom.[6] “By
his death,” notes Arthur C. McGill, “Jesus does not represent the enormity of
the power of death.” On the contrary he
chooses to die. “He lays his life down
freely and deliberately, and he does so in accord with God’s own will…Far from
proclaiming the mutilating power of death, Jesus’ death takes death out of the
realm of the demonic.”[7] Christ shows with finality that his very
being is ek-static, that is, located
outside of Himself in the Father, constantly open and receptive to the Father’s
communion with Him.
In much the same way that
Christ overturned the tables of the money-changers and purified the temple,
through his death and resurrection He ultimately overturns our very notions of
being and existence. In the pericope of
the Fall, the primordial temptation is to “become like God.” This is expressed through the disobedience of
eating the forbidden fruit to gain knowledge of Good and Evil. But ultimately the sin is not knowledge, but
the autarchic self-possesion of knowledge, unmediated through the dependence
upon the Creator. The ontology of the
Fall is the attempt of beings towards existence as independent
self-reference. “Every single being
acquires an ontological status, so to speak, on its own merit,” comments John
Zizioulas. “In other words, viewed…from
ontology, the fall consists in the refusal to make being dependant upon
communion,” with God.[8] In this sense “identity is determined by
drawing a boundary. Everything outside
the boundary is not-me, while all the content within the boundary is taken as
constituting me—my property, my books, my children, my body, my memory.”[9] Cogito
ergo Sum. I think, therefore I am. The self is the immediate reference before
the world is known. “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7)
to which fallen mankind replies “my self, my riches.” Thus
death, which deprives us of being by violating the boundary of self-definition,
is the worst possible thing. Death, in this “lapsarian” ontology, threatens our
possession of ourselves and unsettles all of our having-to-be.[10] This anxiety towards death sets up a
continuous cycle of attempting-to-possess, which circumvents neediness or the
exterior reference of faith in God. This
is tragedy in the classical sense.
Oedipus, as it were, opens himself to fate precisely by attempting to
avoid it.
In
Jesus, on the other hand, being is no longer viewed as a possession that we are
ever able to have, but is thoroughly ek-static,
it is something we passively receive
from God. Jesus does not possess himself or his being, he is the ultimate “sign
of the manna.”[11] His life is wholly constituted by the Father;[12]
His being is from beginning to end a pure gift.
Moltmann in this manner connects the resurrection of Christ to the
traditional Christian doctrine of creation ex
nihilo [out of nothing]: “In the act of raising by God Jesus is identified
as the crucified one who is raised. In
that case the point of identification lies not in the person of Jesus but extra se [outside of himself] in the God
who creates life and new being out of nothing.”[13]
Thus, there can be no “having” of being. For if the primordial
ontological reality is un-possessed being, then the attempt to possess it can
only be understood as seeking after non-being.
Being, like the manna, rots and decays as it is isolated from the
constant ecstatic dependence upon God
which it implies. “Jesus frees us from
ourselves, that is, from finding our being and our identity by holding onto
some bit of reality as our own.”[14]
Because
being is a constant state of receiving, Jesus can give his life away without
the fear that he will somehow cease to be. The only way that one could cease to
have life by dying would be if life were a possession we must hold on to. What
Jesus and the resurrection show is that by dying we most truly live because
true being is expending ourselves for
the sake of others. Jesus’ conquering of
death is not then the powerful obduracy of that which cannot-but-live. Rather it consists precisely in the atoning
sacrifice of self-giving, the reliance upon the Father and His will. “[Christ’s] purpose in dying for all was that
[people], while still in life, should cease to live for themselves, and should
live for him who for their sake died and was raised to life.” (2 Cor.
5:15-16). In Moltmann’s words:
Dehumanized man, who must
exalt himself, because he cannot ensure himself as he is, in practice uses
religious…insights only in the interest of self-deification. As a result they do not help him achieve
humanity, but only give greater force to his inhumanity. The knowledge of the cross is the knowledge
of God in the suffering caused to him by dehumanized man, that is, in the
contrary of everything which dehumanized man seeks and tries to attain as the
deity in him. Consequently, this
knowledge does not confirm him as what he is, but destroys him. It destroys the god, miserable in his pride,
which we would like to be, and restores to us our abandoned and despised
humanity. The knowledge of the cross
brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man, and man who
wishes to become God. It destroys the
destruction of man. It alienates
alienated man. And in this way it restores
the humanity of dehumanized man. It
shows his essential weakness without God.[15]
Paralleling
Moltmann’s analysis, John is somewhat more epigrammatic when he records God’s
words to the Laodiceans: “Because you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy,
and am in need of nothing,’ you do not realize that you are wretched and
miserable and poor and blind and naked.
I advise you, buy from Me gold
refined in fire so that you may become
rich, and white garments so you may clothe yourselves, and that the shame of
your nakedness will not be revealed, and eye salve to anoint your eyes so that
you may see,” (Rev. 4:17-18).
The
second point, not unrelated to the first, is found within Revelation
itself. Here we find specific examples
of the particular Christology just outlined.
John wept
because he believed there were none found worthy to open or look inside the
scroll with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals (Rev.
5:1-4). Straightaway he was told not to
weep, the reason being, "The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of
David, has triumphed. He is able to open
the scroll and its seven seals," (Rev. 5:5). At this, Christ appears, as a Lamb which had
been slain (Rev. 5:6) and who was worthy of great praise and worship (Rev.
5:9-14).[16]
He has triumphed through His death and resurrection and is seen standing on the
divine throne (the probable meaning of 5:6; cf. 7:17).[17] In turn He becomes the center of the circle
of worship, moving outward from the living creatures and the elders (5:8) to
the myriads of angels (5:12, paralleling that offered to God in 4:11), and
finally to the whole of creation in a doxology addressed to God and the Lamb
together (5:13). The worship of the Lamb
(5:8-12) leads to the worship of God and the Lamb together (5:13). Richard Bauckham states,
John does not
wish to represent Jesus as an alternative object of worship alongside God, but
as one who shares in the glory due to God.
He is worthy of divine worship because his worship can be included in
the worship of the one God.[18]
The interaction of this
symbolism indicates that God is related to the world not only as the transcendent
holy One, but also as the slaughtered Lamb.
This sacrifice of the Lamb cannot be written off as parallel to the
pagan concept of the sacrifice as an efficiently mechanical appeasement. Revelation 5:9-10 clearly identifies Jesus
with the Old Testament Passover lamb where the worship song given to Him states
that He has ransomed a people—echoing the Sinaitic covenant whereby God through
the grace of his election made for Himself a people, “a nation of priests,”
(Ex. 19:6). Hence the Lamb, rather than
a “fetishized,” apotropaic symbol mystically imbued with the power to repel
evil, is intrinsically tied to the ideas of obedience and faith in God, and
self-giving submission. Hart notes that this “sacrifice [of the Lamb] which
Christianity upholds is inseparable from the [concept of the] gift: it
underwrites not the stabilizing regime of prudential violence, but
the…extravagance of giving and giving again, of declaring love and delight in
the exchange of signs of peace, outside of every [necessary] calculation of
debt or power.”[19] Furthermore, Revelation 5 builds this
association and portrays the conviction that in his death and resurrection
Christ has already won His decisive victory over evil, which Bauckham sees as
being fundamental to Revelation's whole understanding of the way in which
Christ establishes God's kingdom on earth.[20] This is reinforced by Skaggs and Doyle, who
cite a recent grammatical study by W. Klassen:
By studying the terms nikao (to achieve victory) and polemeo
(to make war), he [Klassen] shows some significant distinctions about who does
violence in the Apocalypse. God is never described as going out to war (polemeo),
although Christ goes to war (polemeo)
twice (Rev. 2.16; 19.11). In both cases, however, he does not fight with
weapons of warfare, but with the two-edged sword—the
Word—in his mouth. Klassen states, ‘To be sure, the element of struggle between
God and evil remains, and victory is achieved, but it is not a victory fought
with literal weapons. The sword which the Lamb uses, which protrudes from his
mouth, is the Word of God’ (308). Polemeo
(to prepare or make war) is more often used to describe Satanic activity (Rev. 11.7; 12.17; 13.7) or in a
neutral sense (Rev. 2.7; 16.14; 19.19; 20.8)
(305-306)…In contrast, the author uses the term nikao (to achieve victory). While the verb
is used only twice in regards to Christ (5.5; 17.14) and twice as regards the
beast (Rev. 11.7; 13.7), most of the time it is used to describe the faithful
followers of the Lamb (Rev. 2.7, 11, 17, 26; 3.5, 12, 21; 21.7). In these cases victory comes not by armed
battle, but by ‘refusing to love one’s own life so much that one resists
martyrdom and through consistent patterning of one’s life upon the Lamb’s
sacrifice’ (306). Indeed, the followers of the Lamb never engage in battle
under the Lamb’s leadership; for example, in Rev. 17.14 when the ten kings
confront the Lamb, the Lamb triumphs not by his superior weapons or force, but
because of who he is, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. His followers, the
called, chosen and faithful are with him and thus also share his triumph.[21]
Hermeneutically, the violence of the images and
Christ's qualifications as the only one able to open the scroll, are best
interpreted, explains Bauckham, in the contrast between what John hears (Rev.
5:5) and what he sees (Rev. 5:6). Jesus
is the Lion of the tribe of Judah and the root of David who has conquered. These two messianic titles evoke a strongly
militaristic and nationalistic image of the Messiah as a conqueror of the
nations, destroying God's enemies.[22] Nevertheless, this image of the Lion is
deconstructed in its original semantic association with conquering force, by
that which John actually sees: the Lamb whose sacrificial death (5:6) has
redeemed people from all nations (5:9-10). Bauckham’s analysis notes that
John has
forged a new symbol of conquest by sacrificial death. The messianic hopes evoked in 5:5 are not
repudiated: Jesus really is the expected Messiah of David (22:16). But insofar as the latter was associated with
military violence and narrow nationalism, it is reinterpreted by the image of
the Lamb. The Messiah has certainly won
a victory, but he has done so by sacrifice and for the benefit of people from
all nations (5:9). Thus the means by
which the Davidic Messiah has won his victory is explained by the image of the
Lamb, while the significance of the image of the Lamb is now seen to lie in the
fact that his sacrificial death was a victory over evil.[23]
John sees in heaven the absolute holiness,
righteousness and sovereignty of God (Rev. 4).
From "this vision of God's name hallowed and God's will done on
heaven, it follows that his kingdom must come on earth.”[24] It is this which makes chapter 4, and its
Christological continuation in chapter 5, foundational for all that which
follows, namely the catastrophic multitude of plagues and judgments which
strike the earth until Christ's return.
In all of these things, terrible as they are, Christ is revealed as a
divine judge (Rev. 19:11). It is His wrath
which is being outpoured. During the
time of the Tribulation people shall cry to the mountains and the rocks,
"Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and
from the wrath of the Lamb! For the
great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?" (Rev.
6:16-17). Surely the day of the
Lord will be terrible (Mal. 4:5) as Christ treads the winepress of the
fury of the wrath of God Almighty (Rev. 19:15).
Nevertheless, it is here again important to note the
intrinsic, ontological relationship between the correct and truthful obedience
of Christ as the Lamb to the Father, and hence, in antithesis, the
judgments—whose criteria is the Christ-Lamb himself—are the logical working out
of those who separate themselves from the Living One, the very ground of Life
itself.[25] “The ‘last battle,’ is not between Good and
Evil abstractly conceived,” writes Francesca Aran Murphy, “but between the
worshippers of the beast and the worshippers of God. The leitmotif of the Apocalypse is worship combined
with judgment…the ‘true witnesses’ who participate in this triumphal paean are
those who have ‘conquered [the Devil] by the blood of the lamb and by the word
of testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.’ (Rev. 12:11 RSV) The
judgment of the world is the sacrifice of the Lamb.”[26] G. B. Caird, perhaps overemphasizing the
difference between the volitional action of God and the natural relationship
between creatures and God, explains that the
wrath of God
in the Revelation, as elsewhere in the Old and New Testaments, represents not
the personal attitude of God towards sinners, but an impersonal process of
retribution working itself out in the course of history; that the Lamb is at
all times a symbol to be understood with reference to the Cross, so that the
Cross itself is both the victory of God and the judgment of the world; and that
therefore the wrath of the Lamb must be interpreted as 'the working out in
history of the consequences of the rejection and crucifixion of the Messiah'.[27]
Judgment
What then of the
violence of the judgments? Understood
against the background of the hermeneutical key of the image of the Lamb and
the inner ontological relationship between the wanton disobedience of the world
and the corresponding judgment, we can understand Christ’s words in Revelation
4:1 that these judgments are “what must
take place after this.” Moreover, rather
than being arbitrary penalties extracted upon the world for its sin, the
pictorial representations are the physical manifestations of the intrinsic
logic of the judgments as they reveal the inner contradictions of mankind’s
existence in conscious separation from the Creator and Redeemer, and their
active and systematic persecution of the Church.[28] As they oppose the will and decree of
God—expressed in terms of the Lamb symbol in which the self-giving obedience of
Christ is the ultimate heuristic to base all correct relations to God—the world believes in its own self
sufficiency, its own law of injustice, its own understanding, its own polis, and its own governments. They, in fact, cling to them; “they did not repent,” (Rev. 16:9,11). These things, precisely in their hubris and vaunted self-sufficiency, are
ontologically deficient (their names are not recorded in the Book of Life) and
unholy in view of Christ’s sacrifice and the Most Holy Father. “You are just in these judgments,” cries the
Angel in charge of the waters, “for they have shed the blood of your saints and
your prophets,” (Rev. 16:5-6).
In addition, precisely
as it is Christ’s obedience to the will of the Father which is expressed—and
not, as it were, the grotesque emphasis of self-negation for its own sake—the
Father’s will, quintessentially embodied in the paradigm of the coming “Kingdom
of God,” is the explicit service rendered by the work of Christ. The purpose of the Lamb in His victory, and
the many judgments—seal, trumpet, and bowl—manifest the exigencies of the
fusion of heaven and earth. The descent
of New Jerusalem recalls the opening statements of Jesus in the book of
Matthew, “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” (Mt. 3:2) and hence the
denouement of salvation history. The
eschatological tension present in the proclamations of the New
Testament—between the “now,” and the “not yet,” of ultimate salvation—stands
immediately to be broken by the earthward movement of the Heavenlies in the
form of the cubic Jerusalem. The release
of the dialectical tension between “already,” and “not yet,” also requisites
the judgment of man and the final exposure and purification of the inner
contradictions of human existence which, up to the point of Judgment, stood
more or less hidden in their teleological significance. The violence of the judgments, viewed in
light of the standard of Christ, are the outworking not of merely extrinsic
punishment, but of the inner ontological nullity of the attempt on the part of
the world to decry God and achieve absolute independence.
In the end though, God
is a God of peace, not violence, “He
will wipe every tear,” from the eyes of His people (Rev. 21:4). It is those, not who are worthy in the sense
of earning their salvation, but precisely those who understand themselves as unworthy of it, and in thanksgiving bath
in the gracious gift of the Son, who find their existence fulfilled by
God. In the words of Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment
He will say, 'Come forth, you drunkards; come forth you weaklings; come
forth, you shameless ones!' And we will come forth unashamed. And we will stand
before Him and He will say: 'You are swine, made in the image of the Beast,
with his seal upon you: but you too, come unto me!' And the wise and the clever
will cry out: 'Lord! why dost thou receive these men?' And He will say: 'I
receive them, O wise and clever ones, because not one among them considered
himself worthy of this....' And He will stretch out His hands unto us, and we
will fall down before Him and weep... and we will understand everything...O
Lord, Thy Kingdom come!
[1] Moltmann Theology of Hope p.200
[2] Pannenberg Jesus pp.133-141
[3] Alan Lewis Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology
of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2001) p.75
[5] Eberhard Jungel. God as
the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified
One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism. Trans. Darrel L. Guder. (Grand Rapids, Eerdman’s Publishing Co. 1983)
pp.343-344 Emphasis in the orgiginal.
[6] Jenson ST vol.1 p.181
[7] Arthur C. McGill Death and Life: An American Theology
(Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1973) p.46
[8] John Zizioulas Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood
and the Church (New York: St. Valdimir’s Press, 1985) p.102
[9] McGill, Death and Life p.50
[12] Pannenberg Jesus p.334ff; c.f. the statements by
Moltmann Hope pp.200ff
[13] Moltmann Hope p.200
[14] McGill Death and Life p.64
[15] Jurgen Moltmann The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as
the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology trans. R. A. Wilson and
John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993 ed.) p.71; c.f also Jungel Mystery p.94-95: “God became man in
Jesus Christ in order to distinguish definitively between God and man
forever…it would be important here to recognize the human God in the Crucified
One, who is both divine and human in that he prevents man from becoming God and
liberates him to be man and nothing other than man.”
[16] Interestingly, this interpolation
of the image of the Lion and the Lamb is vaguely reminiscent of Isaiah 11:6
where the lion and the calf will lie together.
Here the two images merge into each other.
[17] Richard Bauckham The Theology of the Book of Revelation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p.60
[19] Hart Beauty of the Infinite p.350
[20] Bauckham Theology p.73
[21] Skaggs and Doyle “Violence,” p.227.
Italics added for emphasis.
However, Klassen’s distinction between real “weapons of warfare,” and
the “Word,” of Christ’s mouth as a device to alleviate any connotations of
violence in Christ’s victory is unconvincing, as the “Word,” still causes the
destruction and judgment of those who are opposed to Christ and God the Father.
[22] Bauckham Theology p.74
[25] Pannenberg ST vol.2 p.266: “The inner logic of the link between sin and
death…arises on the presupposition that all life comes from God. Since sin is turning away from God, sinners
separate themselves not only from the commanding will of God but also from the
source of their own lives. Death, then,
is not just a penalty that an external authority imposes on them but lies in
the nature of sin as its consequence.”
[26] Murphy “Revelation,” p.687.
Emphasis added.
[27] G. B. Caird. A Commentary on the Revelation of St.John
the Divine, (London: Adam and
Charles Black, 1969) p.91 Caird’s
comment that the wrath is not the personal attitude of God towards sinners is
unconvincing, given the overwhelming data that indicates God’s enmity towards
those who violate His holiness.
Nonetheless Caird’s comments are helpful insofar as they emphasize the
necessary relationship between deed and consequence, so that the consequence is
not merely an arbitrary stipulation or randomized act of retribution, but plays
out the logic that in sinning those who sin separate themselves from the very
ground of blessing and existence.
[28] In this manner they are
reminiscent of the plagues put upon Egypt, each of which appears to be an
assertion of the power of YWHW against the various gods of the Egyptians.
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