Revelation: Theopolitical Worship & Witness

One of the most insightful and timely books I have read is Michael Gorman’s Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness. This widely misunderstood document — The Apocalypse of John — was written to encourage Christians living in politically charged times when it was easy to get caught up in the idolatrous influences of a super-empire. Revelation is not so much a road map for the ‘End Times’ as it is a pastoral admonition to the churches to remain faithful to the Politics of the Lamb in a world that worships power and dominance. Here’s an excerpt from Gorman:

Revelation’s visions of worship and its sense of the ongoing voice of Jesus speaking to the churches is first of all about forming Christians for faithful life in an idolatrous political and social environment. This means, in a profound sense, that Christian worship and spirituality are always and everywhere forms of political activity; indeed, we might say, theopolitical activity. It is a question of God’s politics. Revelation reminds us that there are entities, both divine (God, the Lamb, and the Spirit: 1.4–5) and demonic (the dragon [Satan] and the beasts: chapters 12—13), competing for the allegiance of our minds and bodies. Speaking of Christian spirituality as a form of ‘politics’ or ‘theopolitics’ is simply a way of saying that this is the case; spirituality is about our public life, says Revelation, not merely our private thoughts or personal, closely held beliefs.

The book of Revelation, then, calls the Church to ‘come out’ (18.4) of Babylon, of Rome, of any power that opposes God and the Lamb, whether explicitly or implicitly; the entire book is a call to what one scholar has called ‘first-commandment faithfulness’. This coming out does not mean literally leaving but, rather, a departure from the anti-God and anti-Lamb values and practices that shape the Church’s host culture. Thus the Church must leave the world in order to enter the world, to engage the world, on God’s terms instead of the world’s own terms. Accordingly, the flip side—or perhaps, better, the public side – of faithfulness is witness …

The book of Revelation suggests at two related activities: prophetic witness and evangelical witness. Revelation 11 tells us about two prophetic witnesses. Whatever biblical figures serve as models for these witnesses, in Revelation they symbolize, at least in part, the Church’s mission of continuing the voice of God’s prophets, from those of the Old Testament to John the Baptist, Jesus, and the apostles. This witness must be faithful even when it is opposed, even when the prophet is threatened and persecuted. Furthermore, this witness must always bear the shape of the Lamb that was slain; that is, it is a non-violent witness, even in the face of opposition: ‘If you are to be taken captive, into captivity you go; if you kill with the sword, with the sword you must be killed. Here is the endurance and faithfulness of the saints’ (13.10, alt.). Ultimately, then, Christian witness is witness to the Faithful Witness, Jesus the Lamb who was slain (1.5; 3.14).

For that reason, Christian witness cannot simply be reactive, or critical of its culture. Rather, the Church is also the bearer of good news. It shares in the angelic mission of proclaiming the ‘eternal gospel … to those who live on the earth—to every nation and tribe and language and people’ (14.6). Since the Church itself is drawn from every nation, tribe, language, and people, it wants to share that good news with all, the good news that Jesus Christ is ‘the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth’, the one who ‘loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father’ (1.5–6). That is good news indeed!

I hope to teach or preach through Revelation in the near future, but one wonders if its possible to undo all the damage the Left Behind novels have done. Will folks welcome a reading of Revelation that lacks the imaginative guesswork about the future: a bloody showdown in the Middle East (Armageddon), one-world government conspiracy theories, detailed guesses at the identify of the Beast or “pin the tail on the anti-christ” (D. deSilva), and so on? Here’s another piece on Revelation I wrote last year after a lecture on it.