Whenever I Read Through The Bible, I am always glad to have Revelation in my rearview mirror. Fascinating though it may be, it is one of my least favorite books of the Bible.
I have an ongoing joke with my Sunday School class that I'll cheerfully teach any book of the Bible they want--except Revelation. When I was in seminary, our history professor told us that the book just barely made it into the canon. "The early church fathers were scared to death about it," he said. "They didn't know how to interpret it, and they were afraid they'd get it wrong." There's so much violence in Revelation, that one would definitely fear getting on the wrong side of the interpretation.
Several years ago, I led a class through a study of Revelation prepared by our wonderful, brainy pastor. The only problem was that the study stopped at the end of chapter 3. There is a big conceptual break there. The first three chapters are the letters to the seven New Testament churches. They are hard enough to interpret, but with a good commentary they come alive. Their message, in brief, was warning and encouraging those churches to stay faithful to Christ, to flee from any heresy, to live righteous lives and to endure any persecution that might come their way. Good advice, both then and now.
As for the rest of Revelation, Ugh. It is obscure and hard to interpret because--it was written to be obscure and hard to interpret. It is the very definition of Apocalyptic literature.
That hasn't stopped scholars for two thousand years from trying to figure out what it all means (or meant). So with each new age, there is a different theory of how to interpret Revelation. Just for starters, some scholars believe it was written to the readers of the time and the symbols were to be strictly interpreted in their milieu. Others believe it is strictly prophetic, that all the symbols refer to things that would happen in the future at the end of time, whenever that might be. And there are theories in between. If one is trying to teach through the book of Revelation, one needs to do justice to each of these viewpoints. That takes a ton of time and a ton of study.
Bible scholars, both educated and dimwitted, have then gone on to build elaborate theories about exactly what all the symbols mean. For example, there's this "beast of the sea" character in chapter 13. It's supposed to be some sort of a "personal anti-Christ." Some thought it was Nero. Some thought it was Domitian. Centuries later, some thought it was Napoleon. Hitler was thought to be the anti-Christ in the 20th century. During the past presidential election, one might think this beast of the sea was Obama. Or Romney; I never could tell which side had the more compelling argument.
When I studied Revelation in seminary, I got a kick out of the beast from the earth, also in chapter 13. It seems that this character was sort of the advance man, the public relations guru for the beast of the sea.
The apocalyptic literature just begs to be reinterpreted in every age. That's why the "Left Behind" series of the end of the 20th century was such a hit. It was a rather clunky and slavish imagining of the images in Revelation, updated to the (then) here and now. Perfectly apt for the paranoia surrounding the end of the second Millennium.
I do not know how to interpret Revelation. I do know that pretty much every interpretation ends up at the conclusion that God emerges as the victor over Satan in the cosmic contest between Good and Evil. Or as that brainy pastor used to say, "We win."
I also know that I'm very suspicious of the motivation and the hermeneutical methodology of anyone who thinks he or she knows for sure the meaning of all the details of Revelation.
No comments:
Post a Comment