The Christological Subversion of the Theme of Violence in the Book of Revelation (Part One)
[This is the first "term-paper" I ever wrote for my undergrad, about six (!) years ago. It has many (many!) revisions and additions that would need to be made to it. Nevertheless I thought in its bare bones it was an interesting read whatever its faults. At any rate, enjoy!]
“From first to last,” writes
Jurgen Moltmann, “Christianity is eschatology, is hope forward looking and
forward moving… revolutionizing and transforming the present…eschatology…is the
medium of the Christian faith as such.”[1] Against the myriad of religions who venerated
in the celebration of the cultus an
epiphany of the eternal, mythical past, Judaism, and Christianity after it,
have always been fundamentally driven by hope towards the future which stems
from the free, eschatologically definitive action of its God.[2]
“Because God is the Creator of the world, where he reigns his creatures attain
to the goal of the destiny that is constitutive of their nature.”[3] God’s acts in the reconciliation and
eschatological consummation of the world are oriented to nothing other than the
fulfilling of his purpose in creation. Indeed, “the kingdom of God, the Gospels
assert, is advantageous to history…in the light of an eschaton that has
already, in the resurrection of Christ, been made visible within history, the
eschatological interruption of time…is seen to press upon each moment within
time, an ironic syncopation that unsettles the stern and steady beat of
history, a word of judgment falling across all of our immanent ‘Truths,’
whether of power, privilege, or destiny.”[4] Of the utterly pragmatic nature of the eschata on our present lives, John can
write in the book of Revelation: “Blessed is the one who reads the words of
this prophecy, and blessed are they who hear the words of this prophecy, and
keep the things which have been written in it, for the time is near.” (Rev.
1:3).
The paradox of John’s exhortation, however, is evident when
one contrasts the concept that our immediate praxis should be oriented to the
imminence of “the things which have been
written [in the prophecy],” to the fact that what has been written in John’s prophecy appears to be veiled by
the lattice of an abstruse and arcane symbolism, and so often remains occult
even to the most diligent interpreter. Due to the constant importance of
eschatology for the Christian faith, and the apparent obfuscation of the
essential content of John’s Apocalypse within an opaque symbolism, it is understandable
that “of the sixty-six books in
the Christian Bible none has provoked more controversy, esoteric speculation,
or misunderstanding than [the Apocalypse].”[5]
The
urgency of John’s message, combined with the complex and fantastic cryptography
of dragons and many-headed beasts, has led to an amalgamation of both rejection
and reinterpretation of the book traditionally attributed to John throughout
Christian history. “What good does the Apocalypse do me,” writes the 3rd
century Roman curator Gaius, “when it tells me of seven angels and seven
trumpets, or of four angels who are to be let loose at the river Euphrates?”[6] In the fourth century
notable scholars like Chrysostom and Eusebius hesitated to include Revelation
in the canon.[7]
The Protestant reformer Martin Luther described it as "neither apostolic
nor prophetic. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. I stick to the
books which present Christ to me clearly and purely."[8]
John Calvin wrote commentaries on every book in the New Testament except
Revelation. Seventeen hundred years later, Rudolf Bultmann, speaking not
just of prophecy and apocalyptic but in regards to the entirety of the
perceived New Testament Weltanschauung,[9]
famously remarked “it is impossible to use the electric light, and the
wireless, and to avail ourselves of modern…discoveries, and at the same time
believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”[10] They must, according to Bultmann, be
demythologized,[11] and new
symbols created to rediscover their power, here hidden in cryptic iconography,
superstitious accretion, and a pre-Copernican cosmology of various rarified
tiers of heaven. The alienation of
apocalyptic symbolism from modern man even drove Albert Schweitzer so far as to
declare that Christ, insofar as his message is inseparable from the radically
apocalyptic concept of the coming kingdom of God, had nothing to say to modern
man.[12] The kingdom did not come. The wheel of history which Christ had
attempted to so magnanimously unhinge kept turning, and Christ was crushed upon
it, dismembering the power of apocalypticism, and, according to Schweitzer,
freeing history from eschatology.[13] Today, among Eastern
Orthodox believers Revelation remains the only book that they do not read in
their public liturgy.
The
current aversion to apocalyptic has taken a different flavor, however. Over
the years, scholars have wrestled with the apparent emphasis on violence[14]
in the Apocalypse of John, even to question whether it should be considered
Christian at all.[15] Recently, with the advent of hermeneutical
schools such as Reader-Response theory and Deconstructionism[16]—both
of which emphasize the indeterminacy and multiplicity of all meaning, not just
apocalyptic symbolism—there is now an exuberance over the bizarre and ambiguous,
a rejoicing over the surplus of interpretations and relevancies stemming from
the perceived plasticity of all language. In the void left by the shift away
from decrying the amphibolous nature of apocalyptic imagery, a renewed
awareness of the violence of the
series of events employed in the Apocalypse has come to the forefront of the
so-called “post-holocaust” consciousness.[17] In fact violence seems to be one of the
constants in and among the various mystifying images. Revelation seems to be, as Gerd Ludemann puts
it, “the dark side of the bible.”[18] Horseman are given unimaginable powers and
responsibilities. Men who long for death
but are not allowed to die are tormented by locusts with teeth like lions. A great star falling from the heavens, desolating
a third of the earth. The series of
seemingly fantastical judgments of fire and plague and death upon those who
oppose God are, despite whatever referents or ideals with which we might
correlate them, unambiguously violent and terrifying. “Only Christians could make it an act of
piety to destroy the world,” writes Friedrich Nietzsche.[19] Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov
rejects salvation itself, as far as he understands it, due to his aversion to
the grotesque scene of the final harmony of heaven revealing to children the
necessity of their endured torments.[21] We are, as students of the Bible and
followers of the risen Christ, forced then to ask of the book of Revelation,
“what is the significance of these violent images? Does God in fact have a dark side which
negates his ‘loving side?’”[22]
Judaism and
Christianity have always, to be sure, affirmed that God is wrathful. But this wrathfulness is not basic to His
personality.[23] Rather, fundamentally, God is a God of love,
compassion, and forgiveness, who imposes wrath not for the sake of an abstract
and arbitrary penalty, but to protect
that which He loves, to guard the holy, to sanctify the poor and oppressed, to
uphold justice, to redeem. “For God’s
sake I appeal against God,” writes the poet Goethe. It is precisely the Christian understanding of God’s primal goodness which make the
seemingly capricious and wanton judgments and destruction in the book of
Revelation suspicious, and not merely, as has been claimed,[24]
the “Liberalization,” of the Gospel through an outright denial of the wrath of
God. The violence, prima facie, appears in Revelation as egregious, superfluous, and
worst of all, God-ordained. Writing of
the Old Testament in particular, Walter Brueggemann raises a point of general
consensus that “the question [of the existence of violence in the
text]
reflects a sense that these texts of violence
are at least an
embarrassment, are morally
repulsive, and are theologically problematic
in the
Bible, not because they are violent, but
because this is violence either in the
name of,
or at the hand of, Yahweh.”[25]
Unable
to deal with the broader question of theodicy, or of God’s relation to violence
in general due to space constraints, this essay has a more modest goal: to
analyze how the violence of God’s
judgments are used in relationship to the image of Christ as the lamb
“slaughtered from the foundations of the world,” (Rev. 13:8) and to analyze why these violent images are used, and how
they may be functioning rhetorically and theologically in the book of
Revelation. In the course of this
analysis, it is hoped that we will come to understand this violence not as
arbitrary,[26]
gratuitous,[27] or,
most of all, logically unrelated to Christ’s victory of sacrifice on the
cross. Rather it will be contended that
the violence used is both necessary, but above all, it is not the same kind of violence employed by those who
oppose God, so that God’s victory is simply because of His greater power, or
greater violence. Rather, through the
image of Christ as the self-sacrificing Lamb, the punishment images are
reappropriated as rhetorical devices to expose not only the fundamental sin of
those who oppose God—revealing the inner incoherence of the world’s attempt at
self-sufficiency, idolatry, and injustice—but also the power and truth of
Christ’s self-giving as the model of the correct relation of the world, par excellance, to God the Father.
[3] Wolfhart Pannenberg Systematic Theology vol. 3 trans.
Geoffery W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Eerdman;s Publishing, 1998) p.580
[4] David Bentley Hart The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics
of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Eerdman’s Publishing, 2003) pp.396-397
[5] Elias McIntyre “American
Eden: How Post-9/11 American Nationalism Has Secularized Christian Soteriology”
in Epitome vol.12 No.3 2003
pp.43-59. In McIntyre’s opinion, no one
who influences popular opinion on the book of Revelation have misunderstood it
more than Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, authors of the Left Behind series: “By my reading, the Left Behind books succumb precisely to the thing Revelation is
written to warn us of, namely, being seduced by the riches and power of an
earthly kingdom. In the same Morely Safer interview, they [Jenkings and Lahaye]
confess that they ‘bleed red, white, and blue.’ Their books celebrate the
United States -- in my view, as an idolatrous substitute for God's Kingdom in
Jesus Christ.”
[6] Quote cited by Francesca
Aran Murpy, “Revelation, Book of,” in Dictionary
for Theological Interpretation of the Bible ed. Kevin Vanhoozer (Grand
Rapids, Baker Academic, 2005) p.681
[7] James Orr “Revelation of
John,” in The International Standard
Bible Encyclopedia vol.IV ed. James Orr (Grand Rapids, Eerdman’s
Publishing, 1939) p.2587. It should be
noted however that despite Eusebius’ hesitation, when pressed he nonetheless
considered Revelation to be among the accepted books (homologoumena). Moreover it
was included in the early Muratorian Canon (c. 200) and, of course, was
included in the finally ratified canon at the Third Council of Carthage in 397
A.D.. C.f Norman Geisler and William E.
Nix A General Introduction to the Bible
(Chicago: Moody Press, 1968) Geisler and
Nix note that “it is a curious thing that Revelation was one of the first books
to be recognized in existing writings of the Apostolic Fathers, and one of the
last to be questioned. Evidence for its
immediate reception in the first century is probably since the “seven
churches,” to which it was addressed would naturally want to preserve a work
that is related to them so directly.” (p.199).
[8] Orr Ibid p.2587
[9] Rudolf Bultmann “New
Testament and Mythology,” in Kerygma and
Myth ed. Hans Werner Bartsch (New York, Harper and Row, 1953) p.1: “The
cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three storied
structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld
beneath…History does not follow a smooth unbroken course; it is set in motion
and controlled by…supernatural powers.”
[12] Hans Schwarz Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s
Publishing, 2000) p.111
[13] Ibid
p.112; C.f. Bultmann “New Testament and Mythology,” p.5 who essentially follows Schweitzer’s
conclusion: “The mythical eschatology
is untenable for the simple reason that the parousia
of Christ never took place as the New Testament expected. History did not come to an end.” Italics in original.
[14] The definition of
“violence,” itself is somewhat ambiguous and hard to define precisely. For the sake of this study a definition of
violence as “any act which causes damage or injury to the life, property, or
person of a human being (even those actions which are potentially morally
acceptable),” as violent. For this
definition see: Hans Boersma Violence,
Hospitality, and the Cross: Reapropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand
Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004) p.44, 47.
[15] This is of course not a
question that is unique to the Apocalypse, but rather spans the entire Old and
New Testaments. Nonetheless the goals of
this essay are modest insofar as they are dealing specifically with the book of
Revelation, and specifically how the theme of violence in God’s judgments are
deconstructed in relation to the image of Christ as the slaughtered lamb.
[16] See: Anthony Thistleton New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and
Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1992. The following parenthetical
citations refer to this work). Reader Response, loosely speaking, calls
attention to the active role of communities of readers in constructing what
counts for them as “what the text means,” instead of meaning being based upon
the intention of the original author (pp.516-557). Deconstructionism, on the other hand,
purports that we can never reach and final or definitive point in the
interpretation of meaning because of the “arbitrariness of the sign,” namely
words to not refer to extra-linguistic entities, but simply to other
words. Hence there is an endless
deferral of meaning, as words refer to other words and so on, all of which
gains modified significance within a broad variety of uncontrollable contexts
(pp.80-141).
[17] It must be noted that
unfortunately the idea that Revelation is a book full of God’s violence and
wrath stems in no small portion from the popular Left Behind series, which is not only unashamed of the concept of
divine violence, but is also grossly obtuse about its interpretation and
presentation of the material. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins are not shy about what
Jesus does when he appears at the end of the seven years of tribulation in Glorious Appearing (Carol Stream:
Tyndale Publishers, 2004. The following
parenthetical citations are from this book). They explain that the sword coming
from Jesus’ mouth is not to be taken literally; it is symbolic. Jesus will not
literally turn his head and slice bodies with a sword-like tongue. Instead,
when Jesus speaks, unbelievers will
die all over the place. Flesh will melt off their bones. “Tens of thousands
fell dead, simply dropping where they stood, their bodies ripped open, blood
pooling in great masses” (12:204). And with every word from the mouth of Jesus,
“more and more enemies of God dropped dead, torn to pieces. The living screamed
in terror and ran about like madmen” (12:205). “For miles lay the carcasses”
(12:205).Jesus’ word “continued to slice through the air, reaping the wrath of
God’s final judgment” (12:208). “Splayed and filleted bodies of men and women
and horses” lay everywhere in front of Jesus, who “appeared—shining,
magnificent, powerful, victorious” (12:208). “Rayford watched as men and women,
soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very
words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through
their veins and skin” (12:225). “Tens of thousands grabbed their heads or their
chests, fell to their knees, and writhed as they were invisibly sliced asunder.
Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, their blood pooling and
rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ” (12:226). “Their
flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated” (12:273).
They “screamed and fell, their bodies bursting open from head to toe at every
word that proceeded out of the mouth of the Lord” (12:286). “And Jesus had
killed them all, with mere words” (12:258).
Startlingly, Loren L. Johns (“Conceiving Violence: The Apocalypse of
John and the Left Behind Series” in Direction
Vol.34 No.2 2005 pp.194-214).in a scathing critique of the Left Behind series
and the pseudo-exegesis of its authors writes of the series that
“interestingly, the Antichrist is a pacifist. LaHaye and Jenkins apparently
have no knowledge or appreciation of consistent nonviolence as a respected
historical model for understanding the morality of warfare and violence.
Instead, it is synonymous with evil and deception. The Antichrist is the kind
of person who accepts diversity and brings people together (5:104). Tolerance,
peace, and understanding are all part of the liberal agenda associated with the
Antichrist. True believers are not tolerant nor do they engage in ecumenical
dialogue.” Christian Ettier,
(“Re-Sacralizing Violence in the Left Behind Series,” in Direction vol.34 No.2 2005 pp.215-222) even more radical in his
critique of the series—which is based upon Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic
violence as the root of all culture and religion—writes “From the perspective
of mimetic theory, the most serious problem with the Left Behind series of novels, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins is
their re-sacralization of violence. Their version of Jesus is no longer the
Lamb slain but the same beastly violence of the Roman empire that John of
Patmos is trying to portray. Jesus, when he comes again, will simply wield a
vastly superior firepower, the epitome of righteous, sacred violence…these
books are a splendid example of a re-mythologizing anti-Gospel.” While I agree with both critics that the Left
Behind series has probably been one of the most destructive things recently to
a proper understanding of the book of Revelation, I do not believe that one can
simply dismiss God or Jesus’ association with violence, nor can one reject all violence
for, as Johns put it, “consistent non-violence.” Nevertheless, as we shall see, all the
violence in the book of revelation is radically reinterpreted as being a
function of the so-called Lamb Christology.
[18] Gerd Ludemann The Unholy in Scriptures: The Dark Side of
the Bible (Louisville: Westminster/ Jon Knox Press, 1997) pp.36-54
[19] Friedrich Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ Trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(London: Penguin Books, 1990) p.192
[20] Gilles Deleuze Nietsche und die Philosophie trans.
Bernd Schwibs (Hamburg: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1991). Deleuze’s critique is, of course, little more
than bombastic rhetoric that has no appreciation for any exegetical subtlety
regarding Revelation. It does, however,
do a pretty good job of pointing out the violence contained even in the images
of Christian salvation.
[21] Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov trans. Richard
Pevear (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990) Ivan’s conversation with
Alyosha appears in part Two, book V, chs. 3-5.
[22] Rebecca Skaggs and Thomas
Doyle “Violence in the Apocalypse of John,” in Currents in Biblical Research 2007, vol.5, p.228. We must be careful, of course, not to
formulate the question in such a way that violence and love are, a priori, in a negative or inverse
correlation to one another.
[23] Some strains of
High-Calvinism, however, who follow a strong supralapsarian predestination model as set forth by John Calvin’s
successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza and his followers, however, seem to limit
God’s essential love and hospitality from eternity, inscribing wrath into the
essential character of God, and invite suspicions that this God is—due to the
fact that his decisions of election and rebrobation are not based upon merit
but the inscrutable will of God—wholly arbitrary and the result of a violent
and voluntaristic caprice. For this
critique of High-Calvinism and the Right-Wing of the Augustinian tradition,
see: Boersma Violence pp.53-73
[24] In a “60 minutes II”
segment, Lahaye and Jenkens were interviewed by Morely Safer who states that
the image of the avenging and wrathful Jesus is one that many evangelicals
believe is long overdue. Jenkins,
responding first, notes, “Unfortunately, we've gone through a
time when liberalism has so twisted the real meaning of scripture that they've
manufactured a loving, wimpy Jesus that would never do anything in judgment.
And that's not the God of the Bible. That's not the way Jesus reads in the
Scripture." Of course Jenkins point
is well taken if we are rightly to take sides against those who appear to
remove all hints of violence and judgement from Christ. Nonetheless (leaving aside for the moment how
ill-defined and broad Jenkin’s
pejorative use of “liberal,” is) one remains incredulous at Jenkins’ and
LaHaye’s myopic affirmation that Divine violence is unproblematic and
apparently is unrelated in its exercise to the gracious self-giving of Christ
upon the cross.
[25] Walter Bruegemann Revelation and Violence: A Study in
Contextualization (Marquette: Marquette University Press, 1986) p.7
[26] In the sense that, e.g. the
content of the judgments of God—such as a star hitting the earth, or locusts
tormenting men—do not seem to have a just, or logical, connection, either to
the saving power of Christ, or to the transgressions of those punished, and
hence are randomly imposed in relation to the perpetrator.
[27] In the sense that it seems
God, being all-powerful, could have just willed all those who oppose him into
non-existence, so that any lengthy or complex method of disposal seems both
unnecessary and vindictive.
Comments