Rethinking Revelation

One of the ironies about being raised in a churched environment is the impact of this on our engagement with the Bible.  Regular church goers who have always been regular church goers often think that they read the Bible objectively, rather than subjectively.  That is, that they are drawing their conclusions about its meaning from the words themselves and the words alone, rather than reading the text through interpretations of meaning that have been taught to them.  In fact, by the time that most church goers hit puberty, they have already been told what they are going to find when they read the Bible, the meaning and significance of the words that they are going to read, and even more dangerously, that there are particular texts that have greater meaning and significance than other texts.

An important task in our engagement with the Bible is to try to be aware of our subjectivity--the traditions of meaning that we have been taught, and to challenge these traditions of meaning when we read the text.  Most importantly, our discipleship requires that traditions of meaning be abandoned when we don't see any support for these traditions in the text.  Its not a problem to draw upon the resources of commentators who give advice about what a text means.  Its only a problem when we think that a particular way of reading a text is the only way to read a text simply because we have been taught to read the text in this way.

The season of Easter has a lot of lectionary readings in the Book of Revelation.  Churched Christians in America have been taught all sorts of things about the nature and significance of Revelation.  In particular, they have been taught that the primary focus of Revelation is about the end of the world, and a description of what will happen in the last generation.  Commentators have, generation after generation, saw in Revelation signs of things that they thought were happening in their own generation, and their commentary consisted of a theological connect the dots of current events to the symbols and images in the book.  Every generation, it goes without saying, has been wrong.

There is another way to read Revelation.  Rather than being about one single generation, it is a description of the nature of human society from the beginning.  The word revelation literally means an "unveiling".  It uses symbols and images to bring into focus who God is, the nature of the "principalities and powers" that have run the world from the beginning, and God's vision for what this world can become if we turn to God.  It is a scathing indictment of the kingdoms of this world, because it shows that while the principalities and powers of this world present themselves as being aligned with God and might even believe that they are, they are actually the source of the violence and suffering in this world.  It applies to every generation, and so every commentator who has believed that Revelation applied only to their generation has been both right and wrong.  However, Revelation is also a book of hope in the sense that God's vision for the world is to wipe away every tear and eradicate suffering and violence. 

Here is a suggestion for Easter: read Revelation for yourself and try to draw your own conclusions.  Draw upon commentary, but in the end, make up your own mind.  Recognize that any commentary is just that: its an interpretation of the text and not the text itself.