“Can anyone see where this is going? No?
Does nobody go to Sunday School any more? It’s basically a
Four-Horsemen-of-the-Apocalypse thing, but I’m doing it on my own. Cutbacks.”
Being Human S5 E6, ‘The Last Broadcast’ (2013)
During the first half of this academic term,
my early-morning women’s Bible study group (we call it WBS for short,
pronounced ‘wibs’, the vowel being supplied by the sound produced by the ‘o’ in
‘women’ – funny old language, English) worked its way through chapters 4-11 of
the book of Revelation.1 I was a fan of that as a decision, because
I’m pretty confident that previously, the only bits of Revelation that I’d ever
heard teaching on in mainstream/institutionalised church had been the letters
to the churches in chapters 2-3, and the new-heavens-and-new-earth bit in
chapter 21. So I was raring to go in terms of getting stuck into the
throne-room visions and the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the seven
trumpets and so forth in a small-group study setting. But then again, I was
also kind of apprehensive. See, I know that my views on eschatology are not
very similar to those preached in Sunday services at the church with which my
WBS group is associated. On the contrary, they’re often directly at odds;
indeed, I hold some views which I have heard members of the leadership team at
that church go out of their way to specifically refute. So I could anticipate
without doubt that moments were going to occur where voicing what I believed to
be true would oblige me to make trouble, as it were – to derail the study and
make life difficult for the one leading it; to foster discord in the group; to
potentially leave people confused and uncertain because I wouldn’t have enough
time to explain myself properly; and also, I feared, to fling myself open to
the temptation to pride in my own theological correctness over against my
sisters in Christ, which seems to assail my soul at every opportunity it gets.
But it should be obvious to me that keeping my mouth shut on points of
theological contention doesn’t neutralise that temptation; in fact, it
nourishes it, as I sit there in smug self-righteousness, internally reaffirming
the rightness of my views while refusing to let them be scrutinised by my
fellow-believers for the sake of both their edification and mine. Better to
speak, I resolved. Better to speak, with as much love and humility as I could
manage, praying that God would use my words to bring clarity rather than
confusion, discernment rather than discord.
 |
| This is apparently a monastery on Patmos, where John was when he experienced the titular revelation. |
For the first session of the series, as is
the practice at WBS, one of the church’s ordained ministers was wheeled in to
give an overview of the material to be covered. This time it was the rector,
the big cheese himself. He’s a good bloke, I want to make clear from the start;
just because I disagree with him pretty vehemently on a number of theological
issues, doesn’t mean I don’t respect him as a brother in Christ: he’s really
serious about following Jesus, he really cares about his congregation, he determinedly
upholds the authority of scripture in settings where it’s hard to do so, and he
preaches a lot of really edifying and convicting stuff. It’s kind of a shame
that the longest conversation I’ve ever had with him was the one we had after
the overview that morning at WBS. But I’m getting ahead of myself: let me tell
you about the overview itself first. Having made the usual noises about how
Revelation seemed like a weird and intimidating book but was actually totally
fine once you actually started to study it properly, the rector made three key
points. First, he said, Revelation is not linear. And I thought, yeah, I agree,
it’s not; there’s a good deal of doubling back over stuff. Second, he said,
Revelation is not some sort of ‘magic code’. I didn’t know quite what he meant
by that, but then he added, the strange-seeming imagery isn’t random; it pretty
much all comes straight out of the Old Testament, and is to be understood based
on its meaning there. And I thought, yeah, I agree with that too; I think that’s
a really important thing to realise, pretty much the key to understanding the
whole book. Third, he finished, Revelation is not irrelevant, either to those
to whom it was originally addressed or to us now. And I thought, well, yeah; I
mean, duh; it’s the Bible, innit? None of it’s irrelevant to us. So far,
then, all was well. No need for any disagreement yet.
And then he began to unpack those three
points, and our areas of disagreement suddenly sprang into view, like in a film
where the camera angle suddenly shifts to give a more three-dimensional
perspective and you realise the scene isn’t what it initially looked like at all.
Revelation is not linear, the rector said; chapters 4-11 mostly refer to the same
period of time as chapters 2-3. Oh yikes, I thought, I don’t agree with that at
all. Then, Revelation is not some sort of ‘magic code’, he said; for instance,
when you look at where the concept of chapter 11’s ‘two witnesses’ comes from,
in Zechariah 4,2 it’s clear that they are to be interpreted as
symbolic of the Church; and based on a pattern of hearing-followed-by-seeing
that John goes through several times, the 144,000 of chapter 7 are to be
interpreted as symbolic of the Church as well. Oh yikes, I thought, I don’t
agree with those things at all either. And finally, Revelation is not
irrelevant, he said; these chapters describe events that have been taking place
continually ever since it was written, not the contents of what would have
been, for the original audience, a far-flung future thousands of years away; the
latter would surely have been of no value to them in encouraging them to stand
firm in the faith under the persecution they were suffering. Oh yikes, I
thought, I really don’t agree with that at all. Since when has it been
our job to decide what is or isn’t relevant for Christians to know and meditate
on? and since when, moreover, has God been averse to inspiring scriptures that
predict, centuries in advance, events which don’t seem to be of any direct
significance to the current situation of those to whom the message is given?
So at the end of the overview, when the
rector asked if there were any questions, I braced myself for a disagreement – better
to speak – and asked him what he made of the first verse of chapter 4,
particularly in light of the nineteenth of chapter 1, where John is told that
he will see both things that are, and things that are to take place after this.
Chapters 2-3 consist of stuff that definitely comes under the category of ‘things
that are’, being letters to seven churches in Asia Minor (a Roman province,
modern Turkey); chapter 4 then begins with a voice exhorting John to come up
here, and be shown what must take place after this. Does that not suggest a
distinction, I asked, whereby the letters to the churches are the ‘things that
are’, and from then onwards, we’re dealing primarily with ‘things that are to
take place after this’?
 |
| All right, technically chapter 4 begins with a door standing open in heaven, but I’m trying to stick to what’s actually relevant to my point here. |
The rector’s reply to that, as I recall,
consisted primarily of affirming a distinction between the two sections in
terms of perspective rather than timing: chapters 2-3 were the view from
the ground, he said – they described what the Christian life looks like from a
human perspective – whereas chapter 4 onwards presented the ‘big picture’, the
spiritual reality behind the material one, the situation from God’s
perspective. (I remember the words ‘big picture’ specifically because he said
them quite a few times.) I didn’t really feel as if that answer accounted
satisfactorily for the wording of the text, so you know, I asked for further
clarification, and long story short, the thing turned into a bit of a debate.
There are various reasons why it isn’t a
very good idea for me to go into the particulars of said debate here, so
suffice it to say that, after a few minutes of back-and-forth-ing, when it was
time for the session to draw to a close, the rector left me with two suggestions
– or pieces of homework, shall we say – that he seemed to think stood the best
chance of bringing me round to his way of thinking. The first was to reread
Revelation 20, think hard about the timings specified in it, and see whether
they really fitted with the chronological schema of the end times that I was
proposing. Well, I did that, and being perfectly honest, I haven’t any idea
what spanner in the works he was hoping I’d find, because Revelation 20 strikes
me as just about the most chronologically straightforward chapter in the
whole book. So that was kind of a dead end. The second suggestion, meanwhile, was
based on the premise that Revelation was written quite late – close to the end
of the first century CE.3 By the time John received all those
visions on the island of Patmos, therefore, the Church had existed for decades,
and had presumably been talking about eschatology during that time, and
developing views on it based on the information they already had. Could my
eschatology stand, the rector challenged me, if not for the book of Revelation?
Would it have been recognisable to believers living in those first few decades
after Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension? Does it make sense based
only on what they had: the Old Testament, the teachings of Jesus, and the
apostles’ epistles?
I thought that was a really good point,
actually: if my eschatological views aren’t logical or forthcoming based on the
sum total of scripture apart from Revelation, then, since scripture is
consistent with itself, fair enough, that’s pretty good grounds that they need
some reconsidering. Still, my inclination is actually to try to go one better
than the rector suggested. There was, after all, a time in the Church’s history
– however short it may have been – before any of the gospel accounts were
written down, and even before the epistles were circulating; certainly before
there was a consensus as to which of them were canonically inspired (we know
Paul wrote more letters to churches than are included in scripture; check out 1
Corinthians 5:9, for instance, and Colossians 4:16). Would my eschatology have
been recognisable to believers at that stage? Is it logical and
forthcoming based on the information they were working from – based on the information
Jesus was working from when he taught his disciples? Can my eschatology
stand, in other words, based purely on the Old Testament?
Hence what I call The Old Testament Eschatology
Project. The thing does what it says on the tin: it’s basically just a case of
me trying to work out what we learn about the end of the age from the Hebrew
Bible, which is really no more than, you know, reading scripture and trying to
work out what it says, which we all do anyway. Still, this requirement to form
conclusions without relying on the New Testament gives it a bit of a
unique character, I think. You might be thinking that it sounds pretty dodge to
deliberately disregard the New Testament when attempting to develop a strand of
systematic theology, and as a general rule, that’s fair enough, but that’s why I’m
distinguishing this endeavour as a particular project, rather than my normal
personal Bible study. If scripture is consistent with itself, then a correct
view of eschatology shouldn’t seem foreign or random or unjustifiable when it’s
held against what the Old Testament says. Right?
So this is the first of a little series on
that. Obviously I’m not going to be able to deal with every relevant passage,
and as I say, the thing isn’t going to be finished and polished and tied up
with a bow, but I hope, as I hope with regard to everything that I attempt to
articulate on my humble little blog, that you my dear and precious readers
might find it in some measure helpful and edifying. And God be praised if so.
Footnotes
1
Here’s chapter 4 to kick you off: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+4&version=ESVUK.
Keep it open; it’ll keep coming up.
2
A super fun chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=zech+4&version=ESVUK.
Also quite hilarious: “Do you not know what these are?”
3
As stands the scholarly consensus: https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/1552-when-was-the-book-of-revelation-written.
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